and I'm your moderator today for this session, John Hagan. And so we're going to hear from John Feudrow from the University of Pittsburgh Library System who's going to talk about standardizing chaos, ETD support service changes before and after the pandemic. And so this will be kind of an extension to the panel discussion we heard earlier and we have some nitty gritty details. So without further ado, please help me to welcome John. Okay, I'm just going to get my slides up there. Looks like we're good to go. So yes, thank you for having me here today. I wanted to try and give a little brief history of our program. We often think of ourselves as somewhat of an outlier and some of the way we have things set up in terms we have a decentralized approval system set up at Pitt and a lot of the history came before I took on this position. So I have to speak through what I know of the process and the history of the program. So let's see here. ETD's University of Pittsburgh, it was in 2004 that the formalized program came about that required an A degree granting school to have an ETD for their graduate students. And to do that, the libraries were involved as of last week, we have a 10,102 ETDs deposited in our system. ETDB was the local instance. So there was the original repository system, if you will, that we used to consolidate the ETDs that were submitted. But in 2009, we switched over to e-prints and that's the current iteration which is de-scholarship at Pitt. The overall process and how it was set up was managed by the Office of the Provost. They had a ETD process group that was made up of people from the registrar, different units, different departments within the school and some university library system staff members who participated in the construction of the process and develop the policies and the templates and such. Every school that would be required to have a ETDs in the system had at least one main ETD contact. They were responsible for doing the reviews of the formatting, communicating with the students, approving the forms and so on and so forth. But more team members were added as they needed. For instance, our Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences graduates the most students per semester and they have two people right now but they often other schools have had graduate student assistants and so forth, even if they needed to, depending on the variety of requirements needed to how they deal with their students. And at the onset, the library was responsible for the repository set up in management. So it's had the ETDB to ePrince but they were there to set up the metadata fields, the workflows that we used in ePrince to facilitate which again, the student creates the record in ePrince. They is then submitted for review and is partitioned off by their schools. So each school's contact is basically an ETD admin in our system that they can then go through and give feedback via that system. I'll talk a little bit about that in a bit. But we are also there to help with any changes that need to be made. If there was a new school, school name change, things of that nature. The libraries were facilitating that role. The creation of the Word and LaTeX templates were also part of the library's purview at that time or they volunteered to do that. And so they created that with their knowledge at that time for what was needed. And we actually use a student to create the LaTeX template that had been in use and still is technically since 2004. Also, any formatting technical support in workshops that would be given to the students were facilitated by the libraries. So the student experience though, it was they were taken to a provost site, the ETD site that used to be out there. And the information, however, wasn't always easy to find. There was a lot of the wall of text problem I tend to see in websites from the early 2000s. There weren't a lot of particular guides. And for instance, one of the things that I noticed when I first came onto this position and looked at the website at the time, they had video tutorials that were PDFs, which is one of those sort of the issues that I wanted to try and fix when we came aboard. The updates to support documentation, they were quite infrequent. And it was a chain of who would make the approvals, who would make the changes and the people in charge of the site had to ask their IT representatives to make the changes to the site. So there was a breakdown in the process of how to get timely information, especially if we would have the same website in the same situation set up then and had a pandemic happen, I would wager that it would take a lot longer for them to see the sort of changes that be made. So also schools would sometimes alter handouts for specific requirements, which is not necessarily a horrible thing, but it could sometimes lead to having a version of a form in a particular department website that wasn't up to date with changes that had been made. So there was a lack of consistency across the documentation that was being given out to students. So there was a lot of confusion there and we were seeing that coming through some of the EQ support tickets that we could read through in the past. As I said, the Word template and Lottec template, at least the Word template in this instance, was heavily customized because we took it upon ourselves at that time, from my understanding, to make sure that a lot of accessibility standards that we thought would be needed were incorporated. So the creation of the bookmarks for the PDFs version of each ETD or something we used a word to facilitate, but it required a lot of education on the students of how to make that happen and consistency within the styles and formatting and creating the guidelines. So the students that we find often lacked experience using Word templates. Yes, they could create a Word document, but understanding how to use styles and how those styles could be altered if you're just cutting and pasting in from another document you were working in, there was a large gap there and the understanding of how that was working. Also, our guidelines that were created for the ETDs were based upon print manuscripts. In essence, instead of looking, and this is more particular for Lottec, they were trying to mimic how the type setting was done on the original print manuscripts. And that may seem, you know, amenable to most concepts of document creation, but there were certain conventions in Word that you had to work around to make sure that would work and facilitate them and visually look the same. And in instance, the original template that I started the renovations from had a lot of text boxes for the preliminary pages. So a lot of students would accidentally shift the text boxes on the main pages so they would be off center and they wouldn't understand how to center them because they didn't know that that was a convention that was made. So basic things on a manuscript format and typeset sounds good in practice, but sometimes lead to problems if you don't understand the limitations of the actual device or application you're using to create them. Similarly, the Lottec template was very heavily customized because it was drawn up in 2004. A lot of changes had happened for the modern era. We came in in 2017, 2018 with a transition, which we'll talk about in a second here, but if I hadn't been updated a number of years, there were many different packages that now were in conflict, some things had deprecated in terms of Lottec. So trying to understand that we weren't the ones that actually created it and the student who had created it had moved on. We ran into some roadblocks there and there was a lot of disgruntled students who couldn't get to the work they wanted to. So I've heard this in several other presentations today, but the required forms that were all analogs, everything had to be printed out and initialed with signatures from the committee members and advisors. And so there was an interesting roadblock there for a lot of students in the timelines for approval because they didn't know they had to get these forms physically signed and maybe they couldn't get them physically signed because the advisor or faculty member wasn't in town. They weren't available, but they couldn't get something improved within the repository by this ET admin because they were still winning on a paper form and couldn't get that communication line straightened out. Graduation fees were also paid in person at the student payment center on campus. And that could create a problem too, as well if they were trying to get something done on the weekend and they maybe couldn't get intimate payments or had other outstanding fees or something of that nature. So there was a lot of confusion of where to go to pay, especially as things progressed in terms of online payment via the different modules on campus. We had the UMI and ProQuest forms that we had up on the website. They were quite outdated. And then this was not a slight to ProQuest, this was a slight to how we administered the documentation, but there was also an open access publishing section to those documentation that the ETD contacts in the schools weren't really aware how to answer that question to the students and the advisors didn't know either because via our de-scholarship ePrint repository, we were providing open access content via the deposits, but we also had to copy in ProQuest and the student didn't understand whether they had to pay an extra fee just to get it in the repository. And it was confusion and it was always a stumbling block for trying to educate everybody what that actually means. What they are actually paying for, what the services mean. And there also was an ETD processing fee that was above and beyond that. So there was a lot of fees and forms that nobody understood a lot of the particular details on. And the largest problem that I noticed when I first came aboard was that knowing who to ask a particular question was quite unclear. We had a distribution list that was entitled ETD support which was meant to answer the particular formatting issues that were coming about and how to correct things in the submission process. There was ETD feedback distribution list that we created which was more or less about the process in general. There was also the scholarship distribution list which was answering questions about the repository and the process there. But then you also have the direct line to each of these ETD contacts within the particular schools that created the problem though who do I ask this particular question? I have a question about copyright. Well, do I ask the person in the school? Do I ask the scholarship? Do I ask ETD feedback or support? And there was just too many places to ask a question and that became to me a problem. So as I mentioned in 2017, the original setup of our office, the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing was under the IT department in the university library system. We split off just in terms of how would the view manager was new supervisor and we were put into a different responsibility center within the libraries. And this allowed us to then reconfigure what we were going to do for ETD support because that was given to us as part of our responsibilities and in particular, I was given that responsibility for ETD support which had been in another staff member or faculty members responsibility center. So I'm coming on doing, I did repository management in the scholarship and worked with some of the ETD support people there. But now I had to relearn and figure out what we could do with the process and how this was being run. And it had been, again, about almost 15 years at that point for most of this process. So we had to take a look and see what we could do. So the initial changes I decided to work with with my supervisor, Lauren Callister, we sat down and we started talking about how these different processes could be envisioned in the future. And the ETD process group who had not been meeting in a most regular basis, were given a new charge. We sat together, down together and said, listen, maybe we, and Jonah, it's on chat, it's also putting some notes there about the initial abstracts. The new charge was to actually start meeting in a more regular fashion and set up a project, in essence a project management setup that we could have responsibilities for certain aspects of this and codify things in a way that made sense. And we could actually see some progress rather than waiting for it being reactionary, we're gonna be a little more proactive. So I took it upon myself as well to look at how to do a process audit, looking at what had been done, getting all the information I could about how things were set up, what we could do to make those changes because coming in from just doing repository management, having a background in reference librarianship, I understood that there may be some ways that we could work on the process and the workflow for ETD support. If I treated it more like a technical support as well, because it's not necessarily reference. This isn't, in essence, we're not teaching them how to do research. We're trying to solve a known solution to a problem they're probably having just because they didn't see this particular aspect of the guidelines or this particular tutorial that didn't go to a workshop. So knowing where there were breaking points in the process was a way that I could facilitate making these larger changes. Obviously we needed the templates need to be updated. So I took that upon the phase one of the process and realized what do they actually need to see? What are the guidelines really say? And where are the guidelines out of touch with what's actually needed? That was part of the project management application that I was looking at to say, ask why five times? Because there's probably a reason why something was decided upon in 2004 that's not necessarily required now. And it may be a problem with the application, say Word or LaTeX, that we can just change the guidelines. If this is the group that makes the rules, let's see if we can change the rules. And that sounds pithy in some way, but I decided it might be a solution. Then why do we have to try and break an application to fit a particular guideline if we can just make the guideline change? At the same time, we were also doing a website reset. So we were able to take the website out of the hands of the Office of the Provost, even though they still were there to give approval to the website and the content that's there. It was now under the responsibility of the University Libraries and we created in Drupal and we re-envisioned it. We can take a look at that later and there's a link here, I believe in the slides, but we tried to set up more or less a journey, a process of like, okay, now we're writing our document, we're formatting it and then we're submitting it and what happens after I submit it? So we tried to make it into a three-step process with all the different iterations of what could be useful for the students at this time. And that allowed us to then also look and see what is really out of date? What areas can we change to make sure that it actually helps the student rather than just confuse them? At the same time, the E.T.D. support services perhaps needed a bit of an update as well. At the time, the services were this staff member, faculty member, I guess he's a librarian, I apologize. He would be in one office, but he had moved office several times. They had an E.T.D. support students that were assisting, but they could often be in different locations. There was no set location in the library so you had to kind of look for them and find them, which I thought was quite odd. Why have a service point that's moving across the library? It didn't really, to me, facilitate actual consistent support. Nobody knew where to find you, and they're not gonna come to find you. So we also looked at making a E.T.D. queue and our LibAnswers from SpringShare. Originally, the libraries had a basic, just one queue for all answers to come for reference librarians, or any questions to the library, but we had made a particular queue for the archives, special collections, and we made one for E.T.D. support at that time. And using that system, I was able to not only make sure we had a particular queue for E.T.Ds, but we were using the LibChat functionality, as we'll see in a bit here, and the FAQs and things of that nature to sort of make sure everything consistently says the same thing, and we're giving the same message in different venues. So we also, then, from the E.T.D. process group, and I'm gonna speed through these. I don't wanna go too much into the details. There's a lot here. We had three different phases we're working on. We're right now in phase three, but in phase one of the process groups plan for making sure this workflow goes well. We were looking to get out of the paper forms as much as we could. The first thing to go was the ProQuest paper forms that were always giving out in packets to the students. So we started using E.T.D. administrator form. However, the problem with that is we don't use the E.T.D. administrator form to actually deliver the content that was just to get the metadata and to make sure they understood that we were going to be delivering their E.T.Ds to ProQuest at some point. So there was, again, more confusion there from a lot of the staff members, and what this really means. They don't see the submissions there. So it was a stopgap solution at the time, but it was, again, trying to get out of making sure there's all these paper forms floating around. We don't really need those. We can do things electronically and have the same end result. We also set apart in the office of scholarly communication and publishing to reduce the embargo length. We had a maximum of five years that students could ask for right out of the gate. We decided to take that down to two. Maximum of two years at the initial, they could request an extension of another two, up to another two years. So maybe a maximum of four if they were as proactive to do that, but we were trying to limit the amount of time that they were sitting within the University of Pittsburgh only access because we wanted to promote open access publishing and get the E.T.Ds out to the world. And we haven't had a lot of negative feedback on that. So we do believe that's been a positive and it helps us to reach out and educate not only the students, but the advisors and faculty members and staff members in each of the schools, about what open access really means and what the positives are for open access. The E.T.D. proof of form was also made into a fillable PDF. Not an online form, we didn't really get into docusign at that time, but at least giving the students the ability to create this form easier than having to get Adobe Pro and things of that nature. It helped a little and we're still working on that as we go forward. The E.T.D. site featured a lot more updates and training and best practices in the back end. So we were able to create those as a sort of suite to get onboarding as we incorporated that into our annual meetings where we would sit down and talk with the new E.T.D. contacts was we had the number of schools that had some turnover and their approvers. So we had to train new people each year and it became problematic if they didn't have this sort of wealth of knowledge from doing it for 10 years, how do you get them up to speed and know all the resources that have in front of them? So we started trying to have annual meetings where we could talk about the problems they see coming up, making sure that you're aware of all the options they have for support and where to get answers. And again, I was working through trying to make sure that E.T.D. support was simplified. It was a one channel. We got rid of the E.T.D. feedback distribution list and all those other distribution lists made it into the form that we have on our site and we also started to incorporate ways to schedule meetings with the specialist, myself and Jonah McAllister-Eriksson who works more or less in copyright and also with a lot of the formatting that we do for E.T.D.s. And it was very helpful for the students to have names that they could put to the support and request one-on-one consultations with us even at our office physical locations. Phase two, we were working to integrate the program. This was started in fiscal year 2019. So this would have been the end of last year, integrating the ProQuest Agreement into our de-scholarship workflows. So instead of having to go to E.T.D. administrator, we were working to put it directly into de-scholarship to eliminate even another form. It was, this would just be another, right before the license agreement in de-scholarship, you would see an agreement saying you were, we will also be submitting your work to ProQuest and giving them a link to create an account there to facilitate any other of the services they wanted to acquire via ProQuest. We're also working to adjust the thesis and dissertation processing fee which hadn't changed, or had changed slightly but didn't really factor in the amount of processing that was required for different types of E.T.D.s and different schools and what the money was actually going towards for E.T.D. support. So we're working on that, integrating that was also looking at what the costs were for microfilm because our theses were sent to one vendor and dissertations were sent to another. So trying to figure out how we could balance out some of those costs and get the services we actually needed. We were looking at doing online payment and how that could be done through the Student Payment Center and that had been working as something more or less that the registrar and the provost were working on. The libraries weren't as involved in that but we were there to help lend any possible tech solutions we had heard of we had used for our own purchasing within the libraries for things like our archival collections and purchasing copies and things like that. The Graduate Myelso forms were made standardized across the schools. That was again a backend solution of how to keep track of where students were in the process. We were again making sure that E.T.D. approval forms could be managed and docusigned where we're going to IT departments to try and figure out what would be the best way to do that and each of the schools had to be amenable to that as well. Which again, decentralization has its pluses and minuses and that's one of them is make sure everybody's doing it the same way. The provost also wanted to push exit survey changes so that had to be pulled into the process and figured out how we can make sure we could just change one out for the next one next year. And we were looking at alternative preservation options meaning that we didn't want to keep collecting microfilm if possible but there was still a longstanding tradition of keeping microfilm and we didn't have a secondary digital solution ready. Although our repository is a great digital solution for preservation and dissemination of these E.T.D.s we needed to find a secondary solution that archival, the archives and special collections unit would support and we're still getting that. So on the phase three here and this is where we're going soon we're gonna be starting at this semester looking at the docusigned milestones things of that nature. Developing a process for a RADM request which is already technically there but we're gonna make sure that gets codified in the right way and that we have that process ready to go much the same way for crossing embargoes and how that works. That was always kind of hidden behind the scenes so we're making sure that's gonna be in the forefront of our site that people that they need that question answered they can get there. Looking at how we do quality assurance data for the process we're gonna do another process audit and we're gonna enlist some third party entities in university if you will not involved in the process to look at it and give us feedback on things we can do to improve in all aspects of the process for E.T.D.s. And also review and I heard this in several other presentations I released one of the presentation or require a recall that looking at how committee members can do remote participation which is already happening before COVID but making sure that we have that standardized and everybody's in agreement and understands the process and it gets all the forms in order because it definitely is something we worry about because it had happened before we had to make special consolidations for doing that previously. We also wanted to review and recommend changes to the university regulations governing graduate study. And so we had to make sure the university was gonna allow us even though the provost office is the one who controls the larger process of the E.T.D.s. There are issues about these changes and making sure that they fit into the university's role as a whole and rules and regulations if you will. So again, making sure all the forms are in order and working properly for everybody who's involved and we get the output we need and how do we control those? Because again, everybody was using paper forms. They were keeping in file folders within each office and now how do we help them to facilitate all these different electronic forms? How do they store them? How do they manage them? And what happens and what's the retainment schedule and things like that? But as we all know, and now for something completely different, the pandemic hit in March and it threw a bit of a monkey wrench into a lot of our plans. So we had to start thanking ahead and we're doing it quickly. We closed campus March 2020 and the E.T.D. services that were immediately impacted at least in the libraries side of things. We're walking in support, we had to walk in support to us that we had finally put a sign up for and people were visiting quite regularly. However, now they couldn't be there because the libraries were closed. The formatting workshops were all done in person at our main library location. Every once in a while, we would do a satellite one of that at a particular departmental site. However, again, we couldn't facilities. We didn't have the right application for performing workshops online. We could have used something like Panopto. We'd even given thought to something like Skype. We're doing some YouTube live. This was prior to COVID, obviously, since the pandemic. We were just talking about how we could reach out to students who were not in Pittsburgh. We have a lot of students who were for ABD or they were non-traditional students who weren't living on campus. They were doing remote education, but they couldn't attend these workshops. So we made a video prior to this as well, but we needed a way to actually perform these workshops. And this gave us a really good arguing point to say we need an application that will do this. Students couldn't access computer labs anymore. So how can we help them format a document if they didn't have all the software that was available to them? And we actually were suggesting to them if they had no access to those particular computers. The forms obviously couldn't be physically delivered. So luckily we were already thinking along the lines of getting rid of all those physical forms, but there were still some things that were physical at that time. And ETD contacts and support staff were all starting to work remotely, including the time we had two student assistants. One actually left the university prior to the closing. So we were left with one student who I had to try and coordinate with. And also we're working on their own studies to make sure we can get this all straightened through. And even though they were technically hired by the libraries, they're not staffed. So there's different limitations to what they could access, what they could do and the software they had. And I don't know what type of technology they had at the time. So it was a lot of figuring that out. So there's a link to the notice we put up. It's still there for COVID-19. And we decided to say, well, what can we do for walk-in services? Well, what if we just use the Lib To Answers chat service from SpringShare LibChat to be there for the same hours that we had for walk-in in our office? I would say that if your library has any sort of chat like that and the ability to create multiple queues, that's a great solution to change up your walk-in services, just make them visit us at this chat location. We have an office, actually our sister office in the Digital Scholarship Services office who do sort of open office Zoom meeting, like a Zoom conference meeting. And we gave a thought to that and said, well, that would be an interesting idea, but at the same time, it's hard to have a queue of people coming into an open office for ETD support. It used to be different. We had a desk where they could sit at you and say, excuse me, I'll be right with you, helping somebody else here. We can grab my colleague here. We thought it might be a bit more interruptive to the process. So having the chat is easier for one person to manage. We can then create tickets directly from that if we need to send it out. So it's a little bit easier to manage that way. And we had our ETD support, OSCP and ETD support assistant working remotely with the chat, basically. So they could do that on their own, be still working on their own studies and be facilitating chat. For the workshops, we were lucky the pit got to Zoom and we were able to then just easily say we're gonna start scheduling via LibCal, which is also a spring share product. And we could provide a Zoom workshop that we customized ourselves, created our own presentations and new slides and figured out a way to do sort of live captioning using Google Slides in the background, which is not perfect, but at least allows us to make sure that we have some ability to create captioning while we're talking. And so that's been working out great. And we actually have seen an uptick on the number of people who will be attending. Less people don't show up, I should say as well. We often have a lot of people who would sign up for every workshop in the semester and then only show up to one. So your numbers seemed odd when you're looking at the possible people who'd be registered, but now more people are showing up and it gives them, I think, a little bit easier of a time to be able to manage it and the timing of their workday and such. The no access to computer labs was a problem, like I said, but PitIT released a virtual lab instance that mimicked the same software that would be on the computing labs we had in our library. So we were able to allow, to push people to that and say, hey, if you don't have this on the computer, here's a version on a PC that you can use. Because if you're not familiar with what goes on with Word for Mac, it's a different client than on PC. And there's a limitation to how it creates a PDF because we don't actually force them to use, force them to use Adobe Acrobat to create their PDFs. We can do it directly, strictly through Word, using the styles that we've created and some of the format we've done to the template. And unfortunately, if they have a really large file, it will just error out in Crash Word for Mac. So having an option for them to go and use a virtual PC has been really good. And the forms, as we said, we created really quickly a fillable PDF form, got permission for doing that. And there was a mandate that went out from the provost that said, you don't have to get everything signed in person, an email is fine. We're gonna make this work. We're not gonna worry about some of those particulars. So that may change as we go forward, but at the time, that was what was happening. We are all working remotely and we're probably gonna be working remotely until there's a solution that makes sense for us because we had an open office. It's tough for us to come back and schedule that. So we are being delightfully, for me, asked to stay home as long as we can until there's a solution in general for the population here. So we had to start talking to the staff who are also staying home with the reviewers who are in these different schools. How can we support them and talk about ways to use the technology at hand? And one of the things that I suggested early on as a possible solution prior to the shutdown was to use Adobe Acrobat. And so to step back one second here to say that our process is the students submitted the PDF version and de-scholarship. And what had happened previously in previous years was that the reviewers would look at that. They would create notes in a separate file, send that file as an email and return the PDF and the record to the user work area and in our de-scholarship or e-prints repository. So there was often this disconnect where there was an email that had all the particular details for what was wrong with the ETD. But not necessarily when they came to ETD support, they would say, you send us a message saying something was wrong with the ETD. Well, we weren't the ones who did it. We don't know what they're talking about. And there may be a disconnect of the word version versus the PDF versus the notes that were sent. So one of the things I suggested was using Adobe Acrobat to annotate directly on the PDF version that they sent and they could create a second version of it and send it back with them in de-scholarship and upload it that way. And it allowed us to be able to go in and access that directly and say, ah, they're talking about this. Here's what they really want to see. Here's what they're talking about in the guidelines and so on and so forth. So I was able to offer tutorials to the staff members to sit down and talk about what here's the changes we made to the templates. Here's a common solution to this problem. You may even be able to suggest rather than have them come to us. Not everybody takes us up on that, but just trying to educate the staff members to make sure that they have the ability to work with the students in a more streamlined way, lessen some of that confusion. Using Box OneDrive and then Overly for the LaTeX templates has been great because we can then use the Zoom consultations if they need to work with them directly or just provide them the solutions via Box OneDrive and not have to worry about the email chains that have given nowhere. We can make sure they're all unbox, annotate there, provide comments, put it in a ticket and our live answer system would have you. So that's been a really useful tool, having some sort of collaborative space to work from. And because we're decentralized, we don't often involve the reviewers in that formatting review or at least the formatting changes that we're doing. They tell us what they need to, what needs to be done before they'll approve it and we try to go from there and work with them. We also linked our calendars and Outlook to a LibCal, which is another spring share product, so it's a whole suite, not trying to sell a spring share, but it's been working for us. And I'll add students to request Zoom consultations with myself or Jonah during our normal office hours. So again, we set our hours in Outlook and it goes from there. So looking at the avenues of opportunity, in my opinion, what things could work in different processes, everybody's different. And again, ours being a decentralized process has its pluses and minuses, but I always think having agile solutions versus fixed, one of the things I really wanna see change in the future is this sort of strict ETP formatting and review process. We have people who, you know, if there's something off by an eighth of an inch between a spacing of a line, they're sending it back or if the block quote is not justified properly because it's not using the block justification or the left-right justification, it's using left, things like that that I feel are not necessarily the biggest problem in terms of making a document in type setting. I would like to see more flexibility in terms of accessibility and adaptability in different ATDs, even in the PDF form. I know we're talking beyond the PDF as we go forward and what other ways we can collect information and documents and supplementary materials and things of that nature. But even in terms of if one student in physics writes a particular document this way because that's how they're disciplined writes documents and formats things versus this is a student in the arts who's doing it this way. How can we come together and say this is all that's really needed, the accessibility of the document, make sure the links work, making sure it's consistently formatted within its own environment, rather than it has to be this particular guideline of type setting that really doesn't change anything and how people read the information. It's just a formatting to be formalized. So that's my particular opinion on that and I'm hoping to keep working with them on allowing students to have a more individualized voice in the type setting, just so we make it work for people who want to read it. Centralized management can be a problem though. I think some people are quite tied to that. I like the decentralized model in some ways because it allows us to seek partnerships to educate others and the staff on these different ideas. Five minutes, I can see it already. I'll try to zoom through this. So what are we gonna do in terms of the future? What are things that I think are probably gonna come up and that be a problem? I'm not sure how remote services are gonna continue or back in the office. I hope that we can find a nice hybrid model in ways to support the students. And again, we already been thinking about some of these issues in terms of how do we reach out to students who are remote? What can we do to help them with the technology gap that they may have with not having the applications we suggest and reach out about education and some of the open access, especially concepts that we promote? What can we do to make the templates more user-friendly? Now, we also have an accessibility mandate coming up. So we're gonna have to really climb quite a steep mountain to figure out how we can integrate all these accessibility concepts into our processes. And I am not looking forward to that, but I do like a challenge.  What other aspects need attention in the process? Again, that process audit might bring that up. We might also see things that we weren't aware of on the library side that will come out of the administrative side of the process. How can we also reach out for and gather an audience for niche things that we may not have been offering before? We don't offer a lot tech tutorial right now or at least a workshop and we may have to start doing that. And the closest thing we have to an expert in the library is in that and I don't consider myself an expert. So again, another challenge we'll have to figure out. Granted, overleaf might be our solution for that, but we need to figure out what other ways, what are the things students need to see? And also what other ways can we support staff members in our schools so they can be more independent on how they do feedback? That's always the thing that I wanna try to support. I don't want them to always feel like they're helpless. I don't wanna feel like they don't have an answer to this. There's a lot of answers we can provide quite quickly and we can just put into an FAQ or put into a standardized document behind the scenes so they can feel like, ah, I know this already, I've done this before, here it is. What can we do to facilitate that? So the last slide is questions. I know this seems dramatic, but this is literally a slide the university gives us out for putting in slide decks and that's the cathedral learning. I swear it also doesn't have a laser and it's not on fire, but there's a good question for that. So, John, thank you very much. It was very comprehensive and really the decentralized environment harkens back to my days at West Virginia University in herding cats and just be polite about it, but it was always a huge challenge with decentralized environments. We have a couple of questions in the chat panel here. Maybe I can read them to you. First one is, for what spectrum of circumstances would you allow an erratum? Sure. So far we only had a few. Normally we try to stay away from sort of vanity changes. I hate to say them, it sounds again, not really professional and to say it that way, but somebody just wants to change a particular name of something in this or they had a capitalization problem or something that is probably not gonna be approved. It's really, we've had one where somebody had the wrong factor in one of their data tables. So it was like that research is gonna cause a problem. So we need to fix that. We allowed them to make that change. We also had several instances where if there was somebody was saying abusive relationship where they needed to change something because they felt like it was gonna be a problem, we put that through the provost and it was allowed to do that. So we have some basic guidelines, but it's still up to the school and the provost office. Is there's a two tiered approval to that? So it goes to the school, the dean of the school and they say, yes, that will be allowed. Then it goes to the provost and they say, yes, we'll allow that too. And then we create a new copy, put the erratum on there and go forward. So yeah. Very good. I swear to God I heard a cat meowing. There was a cat, yeah. Is it when somebody liked to comment heard in cats? That was my favorite phrase too. So next question here, we got another commentator. So do you have any recommendations for digitizing the print copies of thesis and dissertations from years, decades past before electronic submissions? And are you contacting those people asking for permission to digitize? Sure, that's not something we are definitely, I've always thought we should do that. We don't have that process in place right now. However, we do have an option for if a author comes to us and says, I'd like to digitize my thesis. The process we have is we basically just say yes, we'll do that as long as you allow us to put it in de-scholarship. As long as the digital copy will be available to the world, we'll do that for you for nothing. We do it in-house for like, I think it's $25, $30, something like that if they just want to have a copy for themselves, which sounds weird, but they can then get a print copy made as well of the digital version. But we really haven't looked to see what with vendors we would use for digitization. We may do it in-house. We have a pretty prolific digital library team here that could possibly help with that and facilitate that. But it's not something that the university has asked for. So we're still waiting on that because obviously that will be the impetus into that. Okay, one quick final question. Is that still using E-prints? Yes, we are, not for much longer. We're actually in the process of looking for a repository alternative. We just feel like E-prints has had a long life and it's probably at the end of my opinion and some of our other staff members that we would like to move forward to something else. But we haven't picked one out yet. We're literally at the beginning of that process. But the E-prints has been good, but the support isn't there in community in my opinion to continue with what we need to do. Great, great. Thank you. I think the suggestion here is that you could work with ProQuest to harvest out things, but you can read that chat. Oh, very well with ProQuest. For further possible solutions. So thank you very much. That was quite informative and thank you very much from my esteemed colleague in Pittsburgh, just 50 miles up the road from here.


Thank you, everyone, to our second lecture today. We see two on two Christian apologetics. We started talking about the third reason for suffering. We're talking about satanic oppression, though things are the devil does. And we were just looking at the Old Testament incident of Joe and what happened there. That it was Satan who did everything to Joe. But there was also a problem from Job's side, which was he had great fear, great dread, that these very kinds of these same things would happen to him. So the question is, one question came up during the break time, did God allow Satan to do this? And says, yeah. But why did he allow it? Well, the same reason you and I here on the earth, the devil is, God has allowed the devil to be around. There are demons around. So has God allowed the devil to be around? Has he allowed the demons to be around? Yeah. But he's given us something, the shield of faith. He's given us weapons to use. In Job's case, Job could have also had faith in God. But he didn't have the Bible that we have. So we have a big advantage. We have the Bible, we can read, we understand things now. We are in a much better place of revelation than Job. But faith today, faith in God works the same way all the time, meaning in Bible times or now, same way. It has the same effect. Faith is our shield. But if you don't have faith and you have fear, fear is an open door to the devil. Faith is a shield against the devil. Unless the door is closed, fear is the opposite. The door is open. There's no shield, there's no defense. That was what was happening in Job's case. But anyway, we know in Job's case everything worked out, meaning at the end of that time of trouble, Job turned to God. God taught Job how to forgive his friends, how to pray for his friends.  So God did good things, even though the devil did bad things. He turned everything around. In Paul's case, now we come into the New Testament, 2 Corinthians 12, verse 1 to 10. And we will just look at a part of that scripture, 2 Corinthians 12. And I think it's important for us to understand this, that because many people use Paul and Paul was, again, an apostle of Jesus, a devout follower of Jesus. And yet he had what he refers to as a thorn in the flesh. But what was this thorn in the flesh? What was it actually? So 2 Corinthians 12, Paul says, unless I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me. Lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, most gladly, I will rather boast in my infirmities or weaknesses that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities and reproaches and needs in persecutions and distresses. For Christ's sake, for when I'm weak, then I am strong. Now, what is this thorn in the flesh? So some people read this passage, see, Paul had a thorn in the flesh. What was it? Then they will cross reference other place. In Galatians, he said, I have written this letter with big letters so maybe he had eye problem. Another place they say, he said, I know you Galatians, you would have gladly given your hand for me. Oh, maybe one of his hand was problem. But he's just using phrases. Like we say pain in the neck. Or we say, you would have done this for me. I'll die for you. Not really going to die. This is expression of saying something that, you know, you mean so much to me kind of thing. So people take those things and say, okay, maybe Paul had an eye problem. He had a hand problem or some sickness or something. But actually, right here in verse seven, he says what his problem was. He says, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh. What was it? A messenger of Satan. A messenger, the word messenger is the Greek word, angelos, which is a neutral word. It means angel. So when we say that word angel, angelos, angel, angelos is a Greek word. It can mean God's angel. Angelos is also used for demons, that means devil's angels. Angelos is also used for preachers of the gospel. Messengers of the gospel. It's a neutral word. Depends on the context. Whether it's Satan's angel, God's angel, or a messenger, a preacher, angelos, a bringer of news. It's a neutral word. So he has an angelos of Satan. Clearly he said, okay. So that thorn in the flesh is a phrase. It's also found in the Old Testament where it says the Old Testament, I figure the exact reference, but in the Old Testament, the phrase thorn in the flesh is used. And it's talking about the tribes, the enemies of Israel will be a thorn in your flesh. Your enemies will be a thorn in the flesh. He's talking about, in that case, in the Old Testament, he's referring to people. These people will be a thorn in your flesh. So it's not like some sickness in your body. In the Old Testament case, it's the enemies, people are going to be thorn in the flesh. Here, what was the thorn in the flesh? It was an angelic being of Satan. An angelos of Satan, a messenger of Satan. That was that angelic being was like a thorn in the flesh, causing trouble. What kind of trouble he mentions right here? Verse 10, it is coming with weakness, with the reproach, with needs, with persecutions, with distress. That means this angel is trying to attack Paul with everything he's got, trying to put sickness, trying to put reproach, shame, bring need, persecution, trouble, and all kinds of things. But what was the thorn in the flesh? It was actually a demonic being, an angelic being, trying to bring all this thing against Paul. Okay, so people have said so many things about this thorn in the flesh, but it is right there. Whether he had a problem or didn't have a problem, nobody knows. See, either way, we can't prove or disprove it. We don't know. Which one? Yeah, like from 2 Corinthians 12, 7, we cannot say he had a problem. That is only an assumption. Only assumptions. Or head problem, hand problem, what problem? None of these things, right? He says very clearly, it was a messenger of, say it, an angelic being, to do what? To buffet him, buffet means to keep on coming after him. Buffet means like the wave of the seed, the little picture there is like the wave of the seed keeps on coming, keeps on coming, keeps on coming. So this messenger of Satan kept on coming against Paul to hinder him in his work, in his ministry. That is what he is saying. And Paul realized, hey, the troubles I am facing, it is because there is a demonic angel coming against me again, again, again, trying to hurt, disturb, cause trouble, cause distress. And Paul writes all his troubles. So when he was shipwrecked, he was beaten. These were not things God was putting on him. There was a messenger of Satan coming against him over and over and over again, just doing all these things to prevent him from preaching the gospel. So about this demonic being, he prayed three times. God, take this fellow away. Why is this demonic being coming against me, troubling me? God, why can't you do something about it? It's like, how if you and I pray, God, take the devil away or take this demonic demon, demonic being that's causing this, take it away. God will give us the same answer. There's a time that's coming when Satan and his angels will be cast into a lake of fire.  So what is God's response to you and me? My grace is enough for you. My grace is given to you. My power is given to you. What more you need? God is not going to take that messenger of Satan away. You and I also face messengers of Satan today. We can't pray, God, take this devil away.  No, my grace and my power is enough for you. That time will come. It's already written in Revelation. And Satan and his demons will be cast into the lake of fire. God, that time will come. But till then, we have to depend on his grace and on his power. Knowing that in the middle of our weaknesses, his strength is made perfect. That is when his strength shines through beautifully, when we feel weak. The other thing we must understand in verse 12, verse seven is, why did God allow this messenger of Satan? Why did he? So in this case, it is a very targeted attack. And as a, maybe this, we don't know what level. So we know that in Satan's kingdom, there are levels of demons. It could be that this was a very powerful demon, troubling Paul. We don't know. He just said messenger of Satan. We don't know what degree or what level. But why did God allow this? And why was this targeted? It says here, lest I should be exalted above measure, verse seven, by the abundance of the revelations. That means God had given Paul so much of revelation. He had been taken into the third heavens, you know, caught up into the heaven. He described it earlier in the beginning of chapter 12. He says, you know, I was caught up, verse two, 14 years ago, I was caught up into the third heaven. And I went into the paradise of God, verse four, and I heard things that I cannot, I'm not even allowed to speak. So can you imagine, Paul must have gone into the heaven. He must have gone to the throne room. He must have seen so much, heard so much. He said, I can't even tell you all these things. And he says, because God gave me such abundance of revelations, this messenger of Satan was troubling me. What would the messenger of Satan gone after? Saying, we don't want Paul to release the revelation he's given. Because Satan comes for the word. He comes for the truth, to try to stop it, right? We know from the parable of the soul. Satan comes quickly to steal the, why does he come? More word. He'll say, oh, I should go and take it out. It's coming. God had given abundance of revelations to Paul. This messenger of Satan wants to stop that revelation from going forth. But God is turning that around saying, Paul, just hang in there. It'll keep you humble. The enemy is coming to do evil. God is saying something good will happen in you, in this battle. It'll keep you humble. See? So that answers the question, why is God loving the devil today in the world? Why can't he just take the devil off? Because something good is coming in us. The devil is trying to do bad. Good things are being accomplished in us. We are being changed from glory to glory. We are being strengthened. We are being refined. If there was no devil, no battle, no battle, no strength. So devil is saying, I'm going to go after them. I'm going to destroy them. I'm going after what God is. They're only becoming stronger. So we are being prepared for greatness, for greater things through these battles and things that the devil has caused. So you see how things are working out, right? God has given abundance of revelations to Paul. This messenger of Satan is coming to try and stop that. But God is saying, Paul, my grace is there for you. My power is there for you to stay there. And one good thing is coming out. You will keep being humble. You will stay humble, keep going. And this messenger did not succeed because in his final episode, Paul writes, I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith. I finished this messenger of Satan, did not stop Paul. I finished my course. Others here have said, hey, I still have something to finish that messenger stopped me. Now, you're writing to Timothy. I fought a good fight. I finished my course. I've kept the faith. Now I am ready to be offered up to God. That means this messenger of Satan did not succeed in stopping Paul from doing what God wanted him to do in his life. It was there, troubled him, but good things came. Paul was kept humble. He continued and he gave the revelation. Whatever we needed to hear, Paul wrote for us, right? Where did Paul get all this revelation? God showed it to him. He wrote it down for us. He finished his work. So we understand both these passages, Job and Paul as, look, there is a devil doing bad things. We acknowledge. Even believers will face bad things from the devil. Job did, Paul did, Paul did. We'll face the Bible tells us that, But God has given us what we need to stand. And even in every attack of the devil, God is working something good in us. He's working something good for us. We are being developed. We are being strengthened. Our faith is being encouraged. So that's what we must pursue. But it may be frustrating. It may be disturbing for us, of course. It's not easy. Like Paul, he also said, God, please take this thing away. And Paul prayed. And God didn't take it away. So I'm giving you the grace. I'm giving you the power. Keep going. So we will face this. We may feel the pressure of what's being done. But we keep moving forward. Yes, go ahead with the questions. As the believers, how unbelievers face the problems and how in their lives Satan will work and how they overcome the problems, how the work actually happened in non-believers' lives. They also face problems. They also overcome. So how all these works happens, how the problems will come to them and how it will get resolved. Because people will say, like, we are also facing problems. We also, because of our faith, we will also overcome them. Okay, interesting question. So the Bible is not telling us everything. But I'm trying to just think about what scriptures we can look at. One is the Bible says, first on 5, verse 18, the whole world was 18, I was 19. First on 5, verse 19, what did I say? First on 5, verse 19, the whole world is under the control of the devil. So first on 5, verse 19 says, the whole world is under the control, the influence of the devil. So we're talking about the non-believers. They are also affected by what the devil does. Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1 and 2, it says, the spirit of disobedience is at work in them. So it's moving them to do bad things and so on. Anyway, so they also face the consequences of sin, the temptations of the enemy. They can come in bondage to demonic power, so on. Now, there are general principles that everyone can benefit from. The general principle is, light removes darkness. Truth removes error. Good overcomes evil. These principles, just like gravity. Gravity is for everybody.  Gravity works for you. See, these principles apply. Good overcomes evil. That's a principle everyone can use. So, I'll just give you an example. Even non-believer faces some evil. Let's say he's being troubled by some people and he goes and does good to them. What is the principle that will work in their situation? Good overcomes evil. He doesn't have to be a believer to apply that principle because these are principles. We could say moral principles or spiritual principles that apply for everybody. So if that non-believer does good when evil is done to him, good will overcome evil. If the non-believer speaks truths when people are accusing him of evil, he will overcome because truth overcomes error, evil, untruth. Just as light overcomes darkness. There's a principle applies to everyone, right? So even non-believers, when they do these right things, they are going to get the benefit of these principles. It applies to everybody.  It doesn't work because they're not applying the principle. The principle is overcome evil with good. So that do non-believer's face problems. Yeah, they will all face problems. Same principles apply for them. The only thing they cannot do is take the revelation of the Bible to fight against the devil because they don't have that. They don't. In that space, there is a disadvantage. What they may do is go to witchcraft. Some people, right? So that's where they turn to witchcraft. So when they turn to witchcraft to get free from evil powers or they turn to the occult to get free from evil powers or they turn to gods and goddesses to get free from evil powers. What are they doing actually? They're tapping into degrees of demonic powers. So there are higher degrees of demonic powers that can override what lower levels of demonic powers do. That's what Jesus said. If Satan casts of Satan, then his kingdom will fall. And that's exactly what's happening. Satan is self-destruct, destroying, right? So in this process of witchcraft and occult, it's act, there is a demonstration of demonic power but it's also very self-destructive. It is Satan destroying himself, but people tapped into that. So that's how they'll go to do these things, whether pilgrimages or sacrifices or occult or all these things. They're tapping into the levels of demonic power that can override, but eventually it'll be self-destruct. Yeah. I don't know anything. When we're seeing all this suffering in the context of this, can we see this wealth or rich? Maybe in the perspective of suffering, like some of the people will be in rich families, will burn in rich families, some of the people are in poor families. Can we, anyway, can we talk anyway in the perspective of suffering? Like we can overcome it, the poor. Yeah. So about rich wealth and poverty, what we can say is, we can say clearly that God blesses us with wealth. That's a blessing from God. You can, Deuteronomy 18, God gives you the power to get wealth and so many other scriptures. So wealth is a blessing from God. Poverty, as we can see from Deuteronomy 28, it's a part of the curse. So when we help somebody come out of poverty, we're actually blessing their lives. That's the work of God. When we help somebody come out of poverty. So God brings the poor out of there. So we are actually doing the work of God. We're actually helping them come into a place of blessing. And so we can expect God to work in people's lives to bring them out of poverty. But remember that wealth and poverty is no indicator of the level of faith because James said, you know that there are those who are poor in this world, but they are rich in faith. So we should not make that mistake. Oh, you have so much wealth because you're so great faith. No, it may be some other reasons, like you said, they were born into that family or something else, right? So we should not equate wealth or poverty to faith, no. Faith is something you have in God. We know that God can bless people with wealth or provision and all that. We know that God wants us to bring people out of poverty. So they have enough for their needs and for their living and live well. But we want God wants us to do that to take care of the poor and help them out. But don't make the mistake of equating faith with this wealth. Is there any reason for poverty, like how you said in Deuteronomy 28? It's because of course. But we are, I mean, we are not under the curse, right? Because of Jesus Christ. Then how come people are living in poverty? I mean, when we see this verse, it's because of course. But because of Jesus Christ, we are not in poverty out of the curse. So how come people are still... Believers, you're saying believers? Believers or non-believers. Okay, believers will take believers. How come they are still in poverty or the people who are about to come now, they are in poverty, burning in poverty? Like if we take these, these things are in the context. See, one is, let's say, people are, there are people who are living in different conditions, right? So people are born, they're automatically born into that immediate environment into which they are born. So it's not their fault, anything. They're born into that. But once they become believers, they can expect God to lift them out of that place. How God works, He'll work differently in different people's lives. But we need to help people saying, see, we have a practical responsibility also.  Let's do the practical responsibilities. We have to do that. We have to earn belt, we have to do the right thing. But we can believe God to bring us out of that place. But that truth has to be given to the people, including believers. Sometimes believers are given the wrong information that poverty is a sign of spirituality. Stay like this. God wants you to be like this. That's wrong information. Actually, if you read the Bible, poverty is given under the curse, not under the blessing. Under the blessing, he said, I will bless your basket and your store. I'll bless you when you come and I'll bless you when you go out. You'll have more than enough. You will lend to others. You will not borrow. That is the blessing. So we have to teach people, hey, God can bring you out of this. He can put you in a good place. You believe God. You work, you do your part. Trust God and come out. And then generation after generation will become better and better. Yeah. Just like any other probation we have to. If somebody wants to stay like that, that is their choice. If somebody wants to stay like that, that is their choice. It's not like any other person can do something like that. Because I don't have any possibility. That's right. Now there is four families and they work as my parents. I don't have any sort of relation with them. So I'm just working with my mother. So after that, it doesn't mean when they're going to come to the decision, I'm going to come to the decision. Right. I'll become this. Because I know the Word of God. But if we see practically, maybe we can sit and discuss all these things. If it comes to the practicality things and all, it won't be happened, right? Why? That is a faith comes in. No, seriously. Seriously. God can do something unusual. I'm not saying how God works. He can work in so many ways.  They say, hey, I will provide free education. Then he goes to get educated. Then he gets a good job. And then he does, and there's so many stories we hear like this, no? God can give an idea. They do something. So so many things happen. And there's so many stories like this. I can tell you, like at APC, now this is about, how many? About 17 years ago, one young man, I mean, he just, young men sitting here just got married. This early stage in life. He came at that time, he was broke. Very sad state. Without a job, bro. He used to come and sit in church, the back. Sit in the last row, quietly listen and go. God started working. He got a job in a kind of like a very small, like small company. I knew all the people there who started that company. And the 17 years ago, I think to all four of them, you should visit APC. Two of them were commit to like part of APC and other two were in other churches. He started the work. Today, the company's become so big. Three of them are living, two of them are living overseas. Two of them are living overseas. Companies become very big, all of them are. Like your own houses, cars, this, that, everything. And literally I saw how God worked in their lives, lifted them up. So it's amazing story. And like there's so many, so many examples where people come and I was actually thinking about this the other day where how important education is because, and I again, I've seen other people, their immediate family is still living in the village. They are here in the city, having owning a home and a car and all of that. So they have really made that change, the transition. And some of them are believers have seen God do this in their lives. It's amazing that they have made that shift. So can God do it? Yeah, you can. Now, just to clarify, we're not differentiating people. We're not deciding on their faith or spirituality based on wealth and I think we should not do that. But we know that God can bring us out or bring people out of that place. How about you? Bless them. All right, Chaya has a question. When one suffers because of their humble and meek, even they're doing what is right in the eyes of God, then is this suffering from Satan? Well, not always. Sometimes it could be, sometimes it could be suffering from Satan, but like we're gonna see in the next point, it could be suffering caused by other people, by the wickedness of man itself, right? So we may walk in humility and kindness and goodness, but people can be evil to us. So there's the enemy that does bad things to us, but there are also people who are evil. So inherently people could be evil, wicked. So some suffering happens because people are being wicked to us. All right, so let's go on to the next point. Do you have a question, Prince? Yes, go ahead. Like we have seen about Job and Paul. And from Paul, like we have seen like enemy is after us, like he wants to attack us or he wants to oppress us, but like he is after us. And in Job case, we have seen that it's like we have, we've seen that it's because of his fears, it happened to him. But like, but in the Paul case, but it was not mentioned like he was, he had any fears. So in Job chapter one, it also gives us like the conversation happens between Jesus and Satan. So like, is it because of fears something happens or is it normally like, can we like, can we say in the Job case, like it's because of fears of Job, it was happened or can we also say like, it's because he was prospering. That's why David has attacked or did everything. So kind of understand the question. Can we say that the devil attacked Job because he was doing well? I mean, if you read chapter one, Job chapter one, God commends Job's devotion. He says, he tells the devil, and I haven't just seen myself in Job, you know, how he is, he's working with righteousness. But what actually prompted Satan to go after Job? Why didn't he go after Job's neighbor? Why didn't he go after some other person? Why did he go after Job? What prompted Satan to go after? I don't, I mean, it doesn't tell us necessarily what prompted that. Maybe, and we can only, I know, I would say I call this speculation that means you're only imagining, we don't know for sure. Maybe it was Job because of Job's devotion to God.  Let's really test it out. So maybe that led to, I mean, these are all just imagination, right? I'm not saying this is the exact way it happened. But this information you have in chapter one, but this was the kind of conversation that went on and then Satan went in trouble, Job. What really caused that, we don't know. But we know that Job had fear, which allowed these things to happen in his life, which kept an open door. Not because of being here, it happened, but it's kind of opened a door for a little job. Work in his life. Yes, go ahead. I think there is a word like, which is... Yeah, verse 10. I delight in my greatness. Yeah. Yes. There are times or there are some people who are literally like, applies it like, we actually don't know what Paul is telling about the weakness that he is mentioning. He tells about weakness, but there are some people like, they literally take the weaknesses of their flesh for the desires of the flesh and they use it in that context Oh, you're saying they apply this to weakness of the flesh. So if the weakness of flesh is drinking, okay, I will drink a lot of alcohol. I take pleasure in this. Yeah, something like with everything, if they are greedy or if they are angry, if they want to do some smoking or drinking all these weaknesses of the flesh, they used to tell like, his grace will be sufficient and people used to apply it and used to quote it. They are very smart. And also in the first year we have learned that like, this was specially for Paul's case because he was given with more revelation. Yes. So it was only but we can't take it and apply it to a... like God was giving me a ton of flesh and we can't tell it. Yeah. So that application that you just shared, right? Like somebody taking this second Corinthians 12, 10, and maybe this whole incident and saying, oh, therefore I will take pleasure in my weakness, my weakness is drinking, my weakness is this, this, all the wrong things because God is giving me more grace like that. That is a misapplication of Scripture, right? So what we should do all Scripture must be interpreted in the light of the rest of Scripture. We cannot take this one passage or one verse and... No. What does the rest of Scripture say? The rest of Scripture says, you must crucify the flesh. The rest of Scripture says, we must walk in holiness. The rest of Scripture says, there are things that God does not approve, right? So I can't take second Corinthians 12, 10, and say, oh, I will take pleasure in my weakness. And whatever your weakness is, no. There are some weaknesses that have to be crucified that have to be dealt with, you know. So we have to interpret Scripture with the rest of Scripture and then apply it in our lives. Okay. So let's try to just do one more, see a few more minutes and then... So the other reason why, which we were considered now, why there is suffering is it's due to other people's actions, including persecution, right? So Peter's episode, Peter wrote this episode, first and second Peter, he wrote this episode to the Jewish Christians who had been scattered outside of Jerusalem. They had been scattered all over that region, but they were believers. And a lot of what he writes in 1 Peter, really he's trying to encourage them and if you read throughout, he's trying to encourage them to be firm in their faith in spite of all the sufferings that they are enduring, right? So they had problems in their workplace. They had problems trying to get good jobs. They were suffering persecution by people they were working for, all kinds of things they were suffering. So they were Jewish Christians, but they had been scattered out of Jerusalem and he's encouraging them. And so if you look at 1 Peter, we can identify at least six situations where the believer is facing hardship. One is if you look at the context here, there is injustice in the workplace. That was unfairness. Second, they are being falsely accused for good conduct. They are suffering against sin. That is like in relation to what we just talked about, the suffering against sin. They are suffering as a Christian because they are Christians. They are being persecuted. They are being mocked at, laughed at. Sometimes they are suffering because of their own actions, meaning not doing bad, but they're doing good, but people don't like it. Why are you speaking the truth? Why are you doing good, but people are attacking their good actions and they are suffering due to the adversary, that is the devil. So in 1 Peter itself, you can see six different reasons why Christians are suffering in this world. Believers are suffering in this world. There is injustice, all's accusation against sin because you're a Christian, because you're doing good and because of the devil. All believers are facing hardships because of these reasons and three out of these six are because of other people's actions. The injustice, the false accusation, the suffering because of a Christian, actually maybe even four of these are suffering due to our own actions, but doing good, we are suffering wrongfully. So Peter, this is a good study. Peter, what do you do when you suffer wrongfully?   Don't fight, don't punch them in the face. You don't retaliate. You don't try to defend yourself. He says be like Jesus. He was led like a sheep to the slaughter. He never opened his mouth. He said as an example that we should follow in his steps and you just commit your situation to the Lord and let God judge on your behalf. That's what he says. So the fact is we will be suffering for various situations, but we need to understand that we commit ourselves to God. But at the same time, from a practical standpoint, we must protect ourselves.  So don't stay in that situation and say, oh, I'm suffering from God. No, get out of that situation. Protect yourself. Jesus himself said, if they persecute you in Bangalore, go to Hyderabad. You didn't use the names of cities, but he said if they persecute you in one city, go to the other. That means you protect yourself.    Jesus himself said that. The point is there's nothing wrong if when you are being persecuted or you're being mistreated, you move to a place of safety. Take care of yourself as far as possible. There's nothing wrong with that, and that's being wise. It's not a sign of fear. It's not a sign of why don't suffer from Christ.  When you're dead, you go to heaven. You can't serve God here on earth. So just take care of yourself and protect yourself. So we'll pause here. We'll have a few more to do. I thought we'll finish this chapter today, but we'll finish tomorrow. Not tomorrow, next week. Sorry, what am I saying? Next week, we'll finish it up next week. So next couple of weeks, actually next two weeks, I'll be doing my classes from home. I need to stay home because I have to take care of my dad. He needs to be there. So I'll do my classes from home. So I will be present in the spirit. Absent in the flesh. I'll be talking like this. You ask us, really. But we should finish soon. We have four lectures. So I think we should finish. We will definitely finish this chapter next week and then we have some social issues that just topics I've mentioned about those social issues. And they are set up in assignment for you to do. I'll cover it. Thank you, everyone. God bless. See you next week.


We have identified a novel prognostic signature for gastric cancer based on 9 immune cell death-related long non-coding RNAs, LNCRNAs. This signature can accurately predict the prognosis of patients with gastric cancer, as well as their response to immunotherapies. This article was authored by Ziyu Zhang, Dantou Su, Abhimanyu Thakur, and others.


Hi everyone, Sam here with late in sports cards. We're doing 2019 and 21 Panina Contenders football hobby. Four box mixture number seven, random team style. Here's a look again at your random results. Thank you, Donnie. As always, you can find these on the website under the results tab, as well as the link that is in chat. Did I not post those? Did I? Definitely. I stank them. You did an heck of a lot. All right, good luck here, guys. Yeah, I should never copy the link over. My bad. Good luck, guys. Let's do it. Start with 19. Let me see. Is this what's it called? Doesn't ship? No, all card ship. Okay, perfect. Easy. Again, guys, we'll do a dice roll for the round numbers. That'll go for the... We'll do one dice roll when they come up. We'll go for the entire break. Start with 19. Keen Butler, rookie of the year contenders for the Cardinals. I mean, that's a round number. Both are gonna go to the Colts, though. So that is a Colts card. So we'll wait until an actual one and do a dice roll. The MVP contender is Brady in there. Check from this side, see if you've gotten an auto here. That is 14 out of 25. Miles Sanders, J.J. Arcega-White side on the round numbers. Nice one there for the Eagles. That is a full-on Eagles card, so very nice. That's half of a big card. I know the Arcega-White side. Senior first. Rookie of the year contenders is Josh Jacobs. What's up? I thought this was an auto of Jacobs. Oh, yeah, that'd be a good one to pull out of here. Trayvon, Westco. 81 out of 99 playoff. Let's take it for the Jets. Nice one there, Jets. Westco. That's pretty funny. There you go. Yes, actually, CJ, he has. He has as a big-time Cowboys fan. Damian Willis. Auto for the Bengals. Never. Donnie's a big Cowboys guy. Big Cowboys guy when they lose. There's Jake Dolagala. Oh, Central Connecticut State. I literally went, yeah, you're good, Bricks. Nope, no, you're good. John, jeez, I can't think of it. No problem, you got it, man, of course. Going to the Bengals. I grew up like, literally a town over from where he went to college. Like, that's where everybody from my high school went to Central Connecticut State. Is that right? Yeah. He's like the one lone person to make it any sport out of that. Geez, no round numbers still. Not like multiple teams. They've all been the same team. It's an anomaly, Donnie. Juan Thornhill, nice one there for the Chiefs. Solid safety. There you go, KC. Kind of works in our favor if he keeps up with us. Marquise Brown, yeah, true. Donnie's pissed. Donnie's like, I need a round numbers dice roll. More than I need air to breathe right now. I need to write on a piece of paper. Which way they go. Redemption. That's going to be Hunter Renfrow, rookie ticket RPS. Again, that's expired. So I do apologize, Raiders. Again, we'll still send it obviously, but see if maybe Penini still has that. I do apologize, Raiders. One downside of opening up. Yeah, opening old contenders and stuff, yeah. Bryce Love, rookie dear contenders. Round numbers, both for the Cardinals again. It's Andy Isabella Byron, Murphy. Without common redemptions nowadays, that's kind of the issue of holding on the whole product. Yeah, I mean, yes and no. I feel like so much of it gets redeemed very early on too, though. Maybe. Yeah, I know Kendall, it's annoying, dude. That's so annoying. I mean, that's the only issue because DK is a redemption in this too. Really? Yeah, he's like the big one that's a redemption. I think D. Bill might be a redemption in this too. I'm a little worried about that, potentially. Josh Allen, rookie dear contenders, Jags. Then our Segal White side is on card. He's a redemption. Drew Locke's a redemption. There's a lot of big name redemption in this. Like Kyler's not, which is good, Danny Dimes isn't. So some of the big quarterbacks aren't, which is good. Winning ticket, Tom Brady. Yeah, I wish they did too. Sure, it's just, it's not viable. It's just not possible. Gary Jennings. My big thing, what I think they should do is for the guys who don't sign redemptions when they should, let me on Bell, 54 out of 75 MVP contenders for the Jets and Keele Harry. I think they should not get paid until they sign their autographs. And I think for every month they don't sign their autos in the contract. They should be, they get paid less and less and less. So there's incentive. There's Trayvon Westkill, again, rookie auto for the Jets. Again, Jack Morris, round numbers. What would they just do? Yes, yes, yes, contact tops for sure, Joe. 100% contact tops. What would they just don't care about whatever he's paid them? Elise Mack for the Saints. I mean, there's obviously flaws to my plan, but that's what I would do. Me personally, I wouldn't let that slide. Trayvon Williams on the rookie ticket auto for the Banks, Texas A&M legend. No, that's what I'm saying, Aaron. That's what I'm saying. It's like, it doesn't even matter to them. It's a good point. I mean, there's gotta be something. There's gotta be some way to incentivize it. There we go. We've got round numbers. Kyler, Mary, Dwayne, Haskins. Gonna do a dice roll. One, two, three, top, four, five, six, bottom. We'll go for the rest of the break. They gotta re-roll that because that landed on top of the packs. That's gonna be a two.   That'll go with Kyler. Unless again, it is an auto or a one-of-one or something super low numbered. Then it'll be its own separate random. Gardner, Minshew. Nice. Going to the Jags. That's sick. That is Scott R. Congrats, buddy. Minshew, Mania. I see there's just no good answer for it. That's the issue. I'm glad I'm not the one making that decision, you know? Riley Ridley is gonna be your on-card. That's going to the Bears. Nice one there, Chicago. That is Henrik J. Carson Wentz, MVP contenders, Donnie. True. D.K. Rookie of the Year contenders. Who do I get, the Honda? I don't know who's all pointy. Yeah, I don't know. They haven't released a field yet, Eric. So once we know that, I'll be able to... Yeah, you're gonna win, Eric. Gotcha. Me too. It'll be me and you in the final round at like 14 under a piece. I'll be around you, bro. Yeah. Yeah, Donnie stinks at golf. You guys didn't know. Yeah, it's terrible. Donnie needed three people to go against me, Sean and Jake. We got 2021 contenders now. Isn't that sad? Donnie needed three people to go against us. Sung Jae Im. Sung Jae Im's good, dude. Sung Jae Im is awesome. I like him a lot. He's a younger guy. Yeah, he is. He is a younger guy. I don't know a lot of the younger players right now. Yeah. I've been watching more and more to try to know. I want to. I'm thinking about getting the PGA thing on my phone. Yeah, that's a good idea. They're like monthly subscription is. Yeah, or even get like the PGA video game that helps out a lot too. Yeah, that's true. And it's fun too. They do a good job. That'll go top with, I like more Kawa, more Kawa this time. I would like to see him win. I wouldn't mind seeing him win at all. Be very happy. There's Tyree Kill to 199. I like more Kawa a lot. He's a very good golfer, very good. Hey, honestly, would it be surprised if Rob keeps up his streak and wins? Oh, a field release today. Oh, a release today. Is that for the Honda though? Is that for the Arnold Palmer? That's for the Honda. The Honda. Is that for the Honda? I would think that's the one, that's the next one. The next one, gotcha. Arnold's, I think next week. Gotcha. Pete Werner on the rookie ticket auto for the Saints. Nice one there, New Orleans. That's combo spot hit for Daniel W. Russell Wilson winning ticket. Rookie of the Year contenders, Devonta Smith. Who are they? I don't know a lot of these names. Who are they? Read me some. I mean, they're just like this. First miniature, last name. Elijah Molden for the Titans on the rookie ticket auto. Congrats on that, Tennessee. Zach Wilson, supernatural. MVP contenders, Kyler. Feeling a nausea. Nausea would be nice. See a nice on-card, yeah. Elijah Barrett Tucker, nice Allie Barrett Tucker. That is for the Jets. Congrats on that. Very good old lineman. When he's healthy, he's a stud. Gladiators, Nick Chubb. Really? Yeah. MVP contenders, Aaron Donald. That's awesome. Am is good. We've got, nice, Micah Parsons on the rookie ticket auto for the Cowboys. Congrats on that, Dallas. It's going to John M. There you go, buddy. Nice, Micah. Patrick Mahomes, chain movers. Worn Moon. I don't know if anyone's gonna take on that contract shorts. Wagner Powerflare. I didn't see like, I didn't see Speed, I didn't see Worry. Nico Collins, gonna be your on-card, rookie ticket auto, RPS for the Texans. Nico Collins as well. Yeah, Micah's not an on-card. Neither is Patrick Sartan. Usually the big-time defenders won't be. Unless they're like, top, top, top draft picked. Like one or two. Like I'm sure Walker and Hutchinson will probably both be on-card. But generally, I think Chase Young was probably on-card as well. But generally, they cut it right after that. Like I guarantee that Stingley will not be on-card. Sauce might be. I don't know. Sauce might not be though. Sauce definitely might not be. Last box of the break. Good luck everybody. See what we got. Earl Campbell, legendary contender. He wins. He was fourth overall, so. Who? Sauce. Oh, then yeah, he'll probably be. He'll probably. I don't know if Stingley's gonna get it though. There's Brevin Jordan. Nice one there for the Texans. It's like you kind of have to make Stingley on-card if you make Sauce. Seeing as Stingley went one pick before. Yeah, he's third. You know? Man, was it just all defensive players like the first five picks? Pretty much, yeah. But who was five? Aiden was two, right? Yeah, and then what was it? Josh Allen? No, that was a while ago. No, that was 2019. What's his name? What's his face? Five, Evan Neil, the Vigo Five, the Giants guy. There's Hamza Nasr al-Din for the Jets on the rookie ticket order. Jets have a lot of hits out of this now. They have four autos. Oh, Trayvon Walker is first. Aiden, Stingley Gardner, then Thibodeau was five. Ah, KT, that's right, KT. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good call, good call, Felix. Good call. Then what was it, Eguanio next? Yeah, then Neil. Then Neil. Give me this team, I want to see how many I can get. Round numbers. Maybe the next team. Next team? Yeah, to draft. I want to see if I can get something out. London. Seattle. Charles Cross. Jets? Yeah, Jets. Wilson. Orlunds. Olave. It's pretty easy. Detroit. Jameson. Kyle Trask. It's going to be here on card, rookie ticket order 99, nice one there, Tampa. Kenneth H, right now the starter, I would say. The season started tomorrow, he'd probably be the starter. So very nice, rookie of the year, Elijah. What'd you say at the last release? Jordan Davis. Ball four. Hamilton. Houston. Grant Steuart for the Buccaneers as well. You might not get this one. Position. Ombedus. offensive lineman. Oh. What's your name, Green? Oh, okay, yeah. Face. Then Washington. Johnson. Chargers. Offensive lineman. Justin Jefferson, I don't know. Zyna Johnson. Yeah, I don't know. Tennessee. To... Justin Fields. Traylon Burks. Yeah, okay. I can't give you that. No, that's fine. Then New Orleans again. Trevor Penning. Yep. Then Pittsburgh. Take it. Diggs. Kansas. McDuffie. Yep. Green Bay. Coy Walker. Buffalo. To Coyer Elam. We've got J.C. Horn, rookie ticket auto. Redemption for the Panthers. That's going to Chris Yu with Carolina on the combo spot. Scridge. Here we go. What, Dallas? Oh, we've got a new Dallas dig. What position? Oh, I... No idea. Kelly Smith. Oh, yeah. Not tonight, unfortunately, Ryan. If you do order it, we'll go tomorrow, though. There's 17 out of 99, Dak Prescott champ ticket, and TJ Wall. Let's do a quick recap here, guys. We'll continue this once the break's over. I was saying we're almost done with the pressure. There's J.C. Horn for the Panthers. Grant Steward. Bucks. Kyle Trask Bucks. Homs and Azrul Dean for the Jets. Revan Jordan Texans. Nico Collins Texans. Micah Parsons Cowboys. Elijah Barrett Tucker for the Jets. Elijah Molden Titans. Pete Warner for the Saints. Riley Ritley for the Bears. Gardner Minshew Jags. Trayvon Williams-Bangles. Lee's Mack Saints. Trayvon Wesco Jets. Hunter Renfrow Raiders. Juan Thornhill Chiefs. Jake Delgala for the... For the Bangles. Damian Willis-Bangles. And Trayvon Wesco to 99 for the Jets. That'll do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the fill. Next up, 10 bucks, Tuesday.