Live from the FIA Barcelona Grand Vía Compensator in Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube at HP Discover Barcelona 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Barcelona, Spain for HP Discover 2014, the European edition that we were in Las Vegas earlier this year for HP Discover in North America. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We talked to the execs, we talked to the product managers, we talked to the geeks, entrepreneurs, CTOs, and we had a great segment here. We grabbed up day three, getting down to the wire, day three of three days of coverage. We got Fernando Lucini, CTO of Big Data, and Chris Goodfellow, CTO of Idol on Demand. Basically the tech guys, the entrepreneurs who invented the products here inside The Cube, so great to have you guys. Thanks for coming on The Cube. No, thanks for being here. Thank you. So Fernando, we were just talking before we came on, totally geeking out on crowd-chatting data, Idol on Demand, so much good stuff going on. Under the hood, some stuff's trivial, some stuff is not. Before we get into some of the things around Idol on, Haven on Demand and Idol on Demand, what shared the folks out there? Just some of the complexities that goes on in Big Data. I mean, like, it sounds easy, but there's magic that happens. What's some of that tech going on? How hard is it? I mean, it's hard, but hard is a bad word, right? We're trying to simplify something that's actually quite fun for everyone, but so a good example of this is as we, so we're a company that deal with information, right? We dream information, we work with information, we look at these problems, we look at video, voice, and some of it is harder than others, so the image recognition is tough stuff, you know? You're looking at something that is even difficult to interpret with your eye, let alone with a machine, right? Then we have all the tech stuff that has such richness and context, this magic. I don't see it as difficult, I just see it as rich. Well, first of all, geeks love this stuff because it's a geek dream, right? There's a lot of stuff to get your hands on. One of the things that we talk about all the time on theCUBE is around Big Data is the diversity of geekness. I mean, there's machine learning, there's data science, there's large-scale systems. Talk about that for a minute. What do you see as a spectrum of skill sets and challenge areas and Big Data? The engineering standpoint and development standpoint. So the variety thing is important and we should spend a second on that, right? So variety historically has been a barrier to try and get things done, right? So if you have to worry about all the specialist knowledge and hardware that you need to deal with video, all the specialist knowledge you have to deal with, voice, or text, it becomes a barrier for you to achieve what you want to do, which ultimately is do something amazing with that thing, right? So what I think is definitely changing and we're changing at HP for sure is making much of this very approachable, right? Now it just requires for you to have a great idea. It just requires for you to know that you want to use video and understand that the outcomes and then it just takes the execution to become easier. So if you need to consume, and I use simple examples, right? So we've got customers, I was talking to somebody in Oslo and got one of our customers who processes about two billion documents a year. I mean, these are human beings processing information and we did the math on that and it would take like 200 people, 24 years to read this data, right? And they do this 50 people, right? A year. So these guys don't want to know how much hardware they throw at it or they want to just do it. And I think that's what's really changed. Now it's about what do you want to do? X, Y, and Z. Well computation is certainly awesome. I mean, you can spin up now with cloud, computation plus is at will. Well, it just boom. Oh, we do it all the time. We press the button in helium and we get ourselves a thousand nodes and we're off to the races just like that. You get special keys to the kingdom with helium? Tell the truth. Wow. Not special keys to the kingdom, but we're brothers and sisters and we do it. You get special backdoor access, family class. Oh no, nothing like that, nothing like that. But it's there. I mean, that's your question. That's what's there now. So if I want to create a business for Chihuahuas to process a large amount of data and I just want to have that computer, I press the button, the computer's there, I get on with my life. It's super exciting. And Chris, I want to get you in here because idle on demand is free and people can try it out. But it's a fun time right now to be in big data, be a geek in coding away because there's so much action happening.  What did you guys do? You guys sitting just whiteboarded out? Did you back in the napkin? How did this all come together? Well, as you say, I mean, it's an exciting time. We've been doing big data for years. I mean, what everyone is now talking about, I mean, we've been building systems that index millions of emails for billions of emails for a long time. But what we did with idle on demand is we realized that we could take that powerful technology and get it out into the hands of everybody, the developer in their bedroom, the developer who's been given a small project that, okay, perhaps he doesn't have the funding to go and set up a server farm and all that. So it was really about opening that up. So what we really did is we sat down and started to work out, okay, how do I make this available to a developer? We went through the process of getting things out there as soon as possible. I mean, so from project kickoff to our first release was literally just three months. So we could get it out there. We could start talking to developers, start going to developer events, hackathons, and getting it into the hands and start to work that out. Now, at the same time, we had to, in the back end, as you were saying, there's some interesting problems here. We've solved a lot of the functionality pieces through kind of what we've been used to. So we've got a lot of experts in how to handle image, how to handle video, extract the meaning out of text. But obviously, building something on demand where you are dealing with hyperscale volumes, knowing how to scale, a lot of interesting problems there, knowing how to protect yourself in false quotas, ensure that fairness of service. Things that are very much part of the modern cloud era. So I got to ask you guys here. We've got a question on our crowd chat.  A question came in from the crowd father, one of our anonymous handles. Crowd father. The crowd father.  So the crowd father would like to know, what about the evolution of reasoning? You know, Watson at IBM is certainly here. He's got the machine as their shiny object. Meta reasoning, metadata, the role of data, active data, passive data, reasoning. As geeks, how do you guys look at that? What are you guys doing? What's the hot area around reasoning? Because that's an area to simplify. If you can reason, you get some personalization, collective intelligence, roll the crowd. Well, there's plenty to choose from. And I know we've got the Watson's on one side, we're doing a great job of promoting the idea of something intractable and untouchable, but we've been working on what we call meaning-based computing for 10 years. And the principle hasn't changed that much, which is it's the user that's changed. The principle was that human information is something that we humans understand because it's based on context.  But my wife can sit there and look at us like we're mad because she's context-less. So today, this is still the case. So today, reasoning is all about the context of information, but more and more it's understood by the guy with his phone is the mini analyst. He can see information and demands that there's context. And interacts with it. Correct. The other part of this is the whole question and answer thing, the conversational software. So we all want to talk to our phone and get an answer. We never get the right answer, but we get an answer. We all demand that. So what I think is going to be very interesting in Christian Chippen as well, is that the evolution is demand-driven. So now we use consumers at demanding the machines understand or applications in your application, which we were having a look at. And it's very interesting. We demand these things speak to us and do something more useful to us than just give us it. So what we're obsessed about in the big data division is of course the backend tools that allow us to shift information in the trillions of objects and all that jazz, right? Understanding the data in whichever size, volume and variety, but we're really obsessed about how is it going to be delivered to the same user who is demanding that it does more for them. And there is where, you know, I think everybody has to do a lot of work. Watson has some work to do. We have work to do. Well, you nailed it. I think this demand interaction is interesting. This is where real time comes in because but Dave was here. Dave would be like all over this because we talk about real time. What does that mean? If you're crossing the street and you get hit by a taxi certainly in Barcelona, you might, but that's if you're like off by a second, if you're getting bad data and you walk out in the middle of the street, you're dead, right? So real time is interesting. So near real time, real time, that's a big part of this. The eyes of the beholder, right? So you're the consumer, you got the phone, you didn't get that answer when you wanted it. Is it real time? It doesn't matter whether it's real time or not. It's not right for me. It's the context. You nailed it. I love that. So let's drill down on that. So what does that mean to businesses? Obviously it's a spectrum of demand on real time. So that's why near real time, it's good enough. It's close, you can talk about a grenade or a bomb. It's close enough, okay, it still kills the target. That's my old analogy. But when it comes down to the actual platforms, what is the pattern right now that you guys see from a current state of the art? Because you got visualization, visualization is cool. Around the real time and the BI, this is the new market. What are some of the state of the art things that you guys see that have crossed the chasm in customer minds, like okay, that's cool. I don't think we still know the answers to even the questions half of the time. So if you take real time as part of that program, right? We all want real time in the sense that I think we all want instant gratification, right? We all want the answer now. But we, again, I'd love to see both of you use on this, but it feels that we don't in many cases know the question to begin with. So we're in a bit of a strange place. For real time stuff, I think more than real time, what businesses want is that they want to create this year 10 applications on their data as real time as possible, whereas last year they were building one in the whole year. I think the demand is I want to create five apps on my data, because my data's rich and has all the value. And I want to do it be as fresh as possible because the value of information is lower and lower and lower and lower, right? So cut the time back up and commission it. And that's what they're demanding. So these things, the on-demand platforms, the pay-as-you-go platforms, the rest-based functions where everything is the pure value and not the geekiness of how the face recognition works. That's where these things come in, because you're telling the guy sitting in his bedroom or in the company, hey, I'm going to do all the heavy lifting for you. You just have the idea. We've got some, Chris can talk to a couple of great examples of people creating apps. We'll talk about Sparky for a bit, have a go at that. Let's catch that point, because I just made a note of that on the crowd chat, was one, the app evolution is going to be data driven. So a data fabric has a development kit. Data as a development tool is a new concept. Not to us, but to you guys, not to you guys, but to the world. Oh, I can actually program with data as an input. And two, the third party developer, this comes in to more of a development platform. So when Robert Young-Johns was on last year, we asked him that direct question, what's your development strategy? Because that's huge, right? If you can enable people to build apps. So can you guys talk about that? What's your experience just in the industry, with the data and your platform? Is it the customer's going to build the apps? Certainly, I agree with you. I think apps is going to be a tsunami of apps, at some point, once they get out with their virtualization. Well, Chris, you build those development platforms.  In many ways, it's not just the real-time of being able to ask the query, it's the real-time of being able to change what I'm asking. So being able to get the business to the point where I no longer have to have a six-month project to introduce a new application or introduce a new project. We've had some great examples where we've had both enterprises and the indie developers out there developing some great applications over the course of 24, 48 hours and starting to ask new questions and being able to evolve much more quickly than the traditional model of kind of being three months behind. So your business is real-time, not necessarily in the sense that it returns the answer in 10 milliseconds, which we do have a few customers doing, but more than, okay, I know I need to do something new. I can do that in a week or two weeks rather than in three months. So we've got some great examples, whether it's a Mexican startup who within two weeks had built an application to do social media monitoring for parents and started presenting it to VCs to get funding. How good is that, right? So we're looking whether our kids are being bullied in Facebook, come on.  You don't want to waste six months coding to get that out. You want to get it out in two weeks and see if it's got traction. Yeah, exactly. It's the show me now. Now it's the business and I think bosses in enterprise are going to turn around and say, I've had a great idea, which is so-and-so. I'm going to take this data and make a sign. And they're going to say show me, show me. Yeah, I just want to post on this on force called the marketing cloud, evaluating Oracle. They actually have a good, that's not fully there yet, but what you guys are doing is the same thing, which is I totally agree. This notion of upfront licenses is gone. I mean, it's going to be like, show me, I'll do a little buy here, I'll taste. And if I don't like it, I'm not buying. But so, okay, if I like it, yeah, I'll take more of that, right? I buy the drink, whatever you want to call it. I mean, it is- You show me. I can say it wasn't a philosophy. I've actually tried it out, the technology. I've created a little UI, which I can show the principle and off I go. Well, there was a CIO telling us the other day that he's changed his RFP process. So it now includes a hackathon. So they run a hackathon for 48 hours with the software and see what you can produce in 48 hours. And he says it tells you so much more than the traditional process. We should talk about hackathons because for us it's been, I mean, we come from enterprise world, right? We sell enterprise tools and we find ourselves in the place where we're thinking, actually, if you open up the Kimono, right?  You know what the outcome of that is? Applications. Yeah, and also loyal things. People, it's like, it's like cars.  You're like, I like this car, right? I like this to be good at cars. Let's continue with that. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is, but this is what it's like. I mean, this idea of locking, grab by the throat, the old lead gen. They are like, oh, here's a six month migration path and a million dollar upfront license. And the market's moving too fast. And I think the SaaS thing's interesting. I want to get your take on this because I have a lot of tech friends like you guys that are out there and we're doing the same thing where SaaS is the ultimate iteration, DevOps for entrepreneurship. You can put something out there fast and get instant feedback. And then iterate quickly, agile, lean, start whatever you're going to call it. But most entrepreneurs don't actually go out and do the SaaS business model in parallel. Meaning, if your iteration cycles on the tech is fast, you have to understand that it's a land and expand business model, which means if you do land and have to expand, you got to think that out. So if you do get successful. I see what you're saying. So I see a lot of guys that still don't know where I live, it's like, dude, you have a land and expand leverage model that if you do land and grow, you got lightning in a bottle, you've got a rocket ship. So what's your customer average of the cost? I don't know how to, what would I sell it? I'm excited. Don't you see the opposite model as well where you have the old problem we have, you and I created that problem like you guys created, right? And you've got an element in the old world that you've got IP that sits in the back to solve. They'll have a lifting problems and you have a delivery part where you're creating something the user might want to touch, right? What these guys see now is they don't have to worry about the creating the IP side. So you've removed an entire part of your delivery and how you're going to expand it. The only thing you're going to do is say, look, I'm going to create the UI which is compelling, you know, the average gal or chap that's going to use it going to love it. Oh, I've got a thousand users. I start paying. I don't have to worry about creating IP. Well, I think that's a huge point. So here's my take on that, right? So there's two levels of land grabbing, right? You know, the more IP you build that does heavy lifting, if it's good heavy lifting that has a market, you'll do make more profits. But what you're bringing up is on my belief the monetization of the first, a real new monetization opportunity for developers. And that is if your platform does a lot of heavy lifting, if I'm an entrepreneur, I can shed that off. I'm essentially a reseller partner in a way. So if you take the old business model concept, what is a reseller? They're front-ending someone else that has reseller selling gear. So the developer model is interesting. I can be an expert at a UI or interaction experience, whether it's voice, you know, drones or something else and provide real value that is worth potentially a very big business. Let me give you something that blows my mind, which is that, so we look at our on-demand platform. On-demand platform is all about not only about the heavy lifting that we do, all the stuff we do with structured data and human information, video voice, it's not only about what we do there. So one of our philosophies is to be able to give our partners, our developer community, everyone, the ability to expand that platform. So find yourself in a situation where you look at the 50 APIs that we provide today, as well as the SQL access, right? And you, as a developer, can say, actually, I've written a bit of technology that is core IP and I want to surface it through you as a bit of functionality, as a risk. It's not a marketplace, I just, I want to use it together with your stuff. That's where we're going, where it's going to be, hey, if you got something valuable, add it to the name. We were talking before you came on, before we went on about what we're doing, and more importantly, my pragmatic view is simply this, and you said it, Fernando, use case. The business innovation actually is IP, right?  I mean, come on, one click, everyone clicks once. It's not really a unique idea. But they branded, they trademarked it, but there's little innovations like that that I think are going to be huge. And just this data world's so big, like just your command center stuff, the haven on demand, so I just think it's really early. I think we're going to look back at this time and say, hey, remember when we had one app on big data? And now- And the business innovation is so critical. So what is growing my mind is we create all these amazing back-end systems that do heavy lifting, we provide the platform, and all these guys come along, and every time we do a hackathon, we look at the ideas of people when you sit there, we say there, you can't make this stuff up, because back to your car analogy, the car manufacturers build mules, right?  These guys are building a real car, it's just not very polished. And the use case is amazing. They're making boat cars, right? They're doing all these things that you wouldn't have thought of. So what's going on with you guys? Tell us a story about how you guys started the product, how it all came together, some of the challenges, things you've learned. I can start a little bit and you take it over for yourself. I'll plug it in when he starts, right? So we were, when Robert, young folks, we know, right? Robert joined us whenever that was. Robert came and said, look, I've got a dream that the world is going to consume information through services, and we're looking, yeah. That sounds like it, that sounds like it, that sounds like it. We're on board with that, yeah. Yeah, we get that. And he literally said, guys, why don't you build me, take some of the cool functionality of idle, for example, to give a face recognition, or I can't remember what, you probably know this. Give me a couple of these functions just to have a play. So suddenly we find ourselves with a couple of functions. That was the first, dude. And then we containers start, and now they're going to let you take over from there. Guys, I love containers. Suddenly it's a whole brand new concept. What do we do with this? So what did we do with this? I mean, the big problem we had is just, where did we start? There's so much technology we have in the Hayden platform. Do I want to do NPR? Do I want to do face detection? Do I want to do conceptual search? Do I want to do, it was, where did we start? So one thing we realized quite early on is we needed to build a platform that allowed us to basically democratize people adding in those extra pieces. So we could say, okay, image experts, you add in your pieces, and here's just the framework we're going to deliver in. For onboarding new tech? Yeah, for onboarding new tech. Okay, and scaling it or not? Okay. So we built a platform that took care of us handling, okay, who's coming in? What do they have access to? Am I allowed to do this? Are they able to pay? Do I have voters? Do I, how do I distribute the data? And basically we've got a framework which we call workers or kind of like little containers where the image teams, the experts who know how to get that face out of that image can concentrate on building their piece and packaging it up and delivering it up in a standard format so we can turn just exposing it. And that's what's allowed us to do this pretty much in amazing time. You basically built the Docker model internally for yourself. Yes, Docker now is all over the place, but for us, here's the- Containers have been around Pat Gelsinger, he was like, Pat Gelsinger. Oh yeah, we look back at Linux, sorry, at some of the Unix products and containers and some of us old timers go on here. Rapper, container, whatever you want to call it, it's been there. So we found ourselves using OpenStack of course and Helium a little bit later and we thought to ourselves, this whole container thing sounds like fun but I tell you what, we kind of need them to talk to each other because in data you start doing some analysis here and you pass it on to this and you do some outcome here and all these things need to talk to each other. So we found ourselves creating this worker fabric which is, I think it's working, sorry. So at that point, I think that is when, on demand is born. On demand is born the moment that we don't have a few REST functions for some servers and we have a worker fabric where these things talk to each other for years. So persistence versus non-persistent, you don't care. Both we have. Communication, say I want to build something on social media and I'm getting 100 tweets a second, I can't be doing that in an inefficient way. I need to pass that data, perhaps I want to do entity extraction, then I want to index it, perhaps I want to do some notification. The data's got to flow through the platform, it's got to know where to go. It's basically, it's like, you've got to build that bus. You've got to build like a sort of bus for containers, right, you've got this bus for containers that moves the data around shopping. Some data motherboard. The data motherboard, that's a good way. I'm going to print that out, you know, take a note. Data motherboard.  And we don't do it once. This is something that anybody can do out there and say, I'm going to use 10 of your APIs and I don't care how you do it, but these things need to talk to each other because that's the demand. There's no policy in there. You've got to break it. Whatever it is, whatever combination. So that ends up being on demand. As well as we have our vertical on demand as well and then the problem is complex as well is how do you have a warehouse in the cloud that can do everything that we can do at a scale that we can do, right? So what about developers? What are you guys doing right now? So, I mean, this is not a business question, but more like a technical question. Is the focus on developers? This is for them. This is for developers. On demand is for developers. Whereas Vertica on demand is obviously our warehouse product. The idle on demand piece is for developers. If you go to the site, I'll put a plug in there, www.idleondemand.com. Idle on demand.com? Idle on demand.com. It's purely for developers. It's something that they can immediately get a logging, immediately start looking at a community, immediately start playing with the functions, do tries. They can create an application. I mean, and this is as simple as that, but the focus when you have it going and you're putting it on your screen there is you'll immediately be able to see that it is built for developers. There's no marketing, no, I'm going to say, no BS, right? As they would say, right? No, no executive. No marketing speech. So I'm going to view the APIs, here's the parameters on that. And it's also about building a community for those developers. So having the forum with them to connect to each other, having competitions for them to compete against them, ways to promote their applications. So we basically want to, at this point, we want to hear what they're doing. We want to hear their feedback. And we want to, if they've got a great idea, we'd love to hear it and we'd love to promote it. We're obsessed about Net Promoter, so everything we do is Net Promoter. We're also obsessed about being honest and we put things out there. And sometimes we even say, we're putting this functionality out there. It's kind of half-fake, we might break it, but tell us if you like it and then we'll kind of push it through. So I mean, open source has cleared the way for the new model for software development and that's collaborative, open, out in the open. The minute you got to start body-swerving and head-faking, you're dead. Well, we do open source a bunch of stuff, by the way. So some of the UIs, we just open source. The work are infrastructure- It's about transparent value, right? If you have a platform, people want trust, they want credibility, they want to know that you're going to be around, right? They don't want to waste their time on a platform that's not sexy or cool. And Amazon's cool today, and HP's working on being cool with Helium. HP's cool, man. HP's cool. What's wrong with you? HP's wonderful. And cool. Of course. We want them to know that HP is going to take all this amazing functionality, serve them. We're going to be here. We're going to be here. It makes 10 years, 20 years. HP's not going away. So they can rely and build their business on it. That's all we want. And I tell you, I'd be in a blue mix, guys. I say the same thing, guys. I don't hear engineers saying, oh man, I can't wait to up and blood my app to blue mix. Just that's not the vibe. You got to earn it. You have to earn the receipt. We all have to earn our stripes. You got to earn the stripes, earn the respect. And I said, it's definitely doable. Why not? If you have distribution, I'd be in, right? You guys have- We do as well. You have technology you're sharing, right? So the gifts are all about, it's about the gifts. At the same time, make a good environment, cool people. The premium is there. They can get on with it. The transparency is there. They can engage for themselves. Absolutely. You guys have a good group. I'm very impressed with Robert Young-Johns. Obviously George Kedifa, big fan of him. He's now doing some other special projects. Chris Selland over there at Big Data. You guys are doing great work. Always been a big fan. I'd like to see that action happening. But I want to give you guys the final word on culture. Share with the people out there. One of my favorite questions. What's the culture like? You guys are cool. You're super geeky. You're polished. What's it like? What's it like inside the culture? What do you guys do? What do you guys stand for? What kind of people do you hire? What do you guys do for fun? Share with the folks out there. What's the... I'll have a go. So we're the kind of place where you build things like Idol on Demand and Vertical on Demand. We create new stuff. But we understand the legacy of what we do and the importance on our customer base. It's a fun place. We're very relaxed. We like people that are creative and smart. I wouldn't categorize it in any way. The top, the bottom. It's people that are smart, that like to create, that have respect for customers. We're very, very customer focused. But we're good fun. And you guys solve hard problems. And we're smart. We wear jeans and... Big mothership behind you. The aircraft carriers, Martin Miko said. But really, to me, I think the challenge has always been whether you're talking to any engineer, it's always about having fun, solving big problems and really being relevant.  You guys are like I said, the facial recognition and some of the confidential stuff you told me about operationally is fantastic. It's great, great. Well guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. This has been a CTO conversation here inside theCUBE. It's been great talking big data. I love it. I could do another hour of it. Now it's going to get ready to wrap down day three. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back here for this short break.


Asela went to CCC was a popular rhyme 50 years ago and it's still sung now, we know different words to it Asela went to Disneyland to see what he could Disneyland But all that he could Disneyland was the bottom of the deep blue Disneyland CC My Playmate was actually a pop song but finally turned out to be a clap rhyme CC My Playmate cannot play with me My boyfriend gave me an apple, it's a song we like because it is a little bit rude My boyfriend gave me an apple, my boyfriend gave me a pet My boyfriend gave me a kiss on the cheek and I threw him down the stairs


Hello everybody and welcome back. We are actually on our way to see our third house. We've been kind of seeing one house per month, so we are pretty excited about Western's pumping gas out there. We're pretty excited. I'm super excited. This is the first one that I found. I didn't actually do a video of the last house we saw, so I did a video of the first house and then now we're on the third house. The second one, I don't know. I just my iPad wasn't charged and yeah. So anyways we're on to the third one and it's a 45 minute drive so we are hustling but I'll have to tell you more on the way. Boy, I never thought I'd ever be too tall for a shower. Oh gosh.  Look at this. You can eat it. You can get that adjustable. So I don't know if you noticed, it is window AC. I did do that. It's already having central air. Do you know if it's much... Like since the infrastructure is there, how costly it is to install? As long as the ducting is there, that's the expenditure part. Right. And then you just buy a furnace. Okay, so last time I spoke to you guys, I was in the car on my way to the house and now we are back. I have all these thoughts floating in my mind and I kind of want to tell you guys all about this house as we're strongly considering putting in an offer so let's go ahead and get into it. So I want to talk about why this place seemed like a great location. So I really liked it for a few key reasons. It's really close to Weston's parents house. This location in particular was only 20 minutes away. And then it's also 15 minutes from my gym pier bar that I love to go to. And then it was also super close to the, not only the public schools there, but also a Montessori school, which I'm really interested in sending my kids to. So those were really, really close by within 10 minutes, if that. And then after looking it up later, I found that there is listed to be no crimes reported in the last year in this neighborhood and in this area because there's actually a police station like right down the street. So very safe, which was very reassuring to me. There is a two car garage. That's something that is very important to us. We need to be able to park both of our cars in the garage. And I really like that this place looks a lot nicer in person than the pictures made it look. So that was a really great thing to see. However, this place is farther from Weston's job. This is an older house. It was built in 1947 and it is very outdated. So if we did end up buying it, it does need some major remodels. As you can see walking through the front area would need a little pick me up and then like that porch area. And then if we go farther in, the kitchen is extremely outdated. It's very small and just a lot of the areas are outdated. It needs new flooring because the floor is warped. If we go downstairs, the wall is actually bowing in the basement. So that would be something that we would have to fix at some point. If we did want to try to resell it. And down in the basement, it did say there has been some water seepage. So that is something important to think about. This place also doesn't have air conditioning. So we would have to put in about 6000 plus dollars to get that replaced. Although it did already have the bones for that. The other thing is remodeling is expensive. So that would be something that we would have to strongly consider. However, this house was priced at $210,000. So it is definitely something that is at the bottom end of our budget. So we would have plenty of extra money that we aren't putting towards the mortgage and extra money in the front end to be able to put in repairs and do things like that that could build equity in the long run. Well, I feel like this kitchen could be an easy place to make some equity. Yes. Kitchens are always top of the list. Yeah, this is definitely... This is my most excited part. Wow, this is nice. I thought it was going to be. I was fully expecting another murder dungeon. Some other key things that I really liked is that the house is very bright. It is small, but it does have everything that you need. And if we go into the other parts of the house, there is narrow stairs. The floor plan is not really that great. We are trying to look for more of an open floor plan. But again, this is our first... This is a cheaper house. It's small. It's not going to have everything that you want. And this is our first house, so it's not a big deal overall. The bathrooms aren't that great either, but again, old house, small. It's to be expected. The yard was really nice. So the main reason that we actually went to go see this place, in addition to the price, is that it is on .86 acres, which you can't really find in the areas that we're looking. These more suburban areas with lots and lots of houses around. You're just not able to get those yard sizes. So seeing .86 acres was incredible. And we were super, super excited about that. And then also in the backyard, they had a shed. They had a garden, lots of trees and a little playhouse for the kids, which was so cute. On the other end of that, the yard wasn't that great. Because of all the trees, there's not really any grass growing, so we probably would need to cut down the trees. Otherwise, it was super cute. The price is such a steal. The only kind of big debate that we have is two main things. So while the price is super low, is there a reason for that, an unforeseen reason that we don't understand right now and is going to be an issue possibly later on? The second being that we know that if we wait until the end of December, we'll be able to afford a much better house. So are we being impatient? Are we going to be able to find something later on that maybe we end up liking more and we're happy that we didn't go with this place? So yeah, I'm really excited. I know I talked about a lot of the cons, but that is to be expected with the price point that we're at and the older house. But there are lots and lots of amazing things like the location is just amazing and the fact that it's so cheap is incredible. So we're super excited and I'm going to come tomorrow and tell you guys what our plan is. So yeah, we have a lot more talking to do. Obviously there is a very big con list. So we need to really go over that, go over our financials, look at more documents about the house and then make the ultimate decision. So we're going to spend some time talking tonight and I'll come back tomorrow and let you guys know what we decided. See you then. It's looking a lot nicer in person than... It's small. It is small, but for the price I guess, we've seen ones that are small that are way, way more expensive. At least it seems like... It's just that these older houses, these types of basements, they're just always going to have moisture. It doesn't matter how much. I'm trying to see... if there's any... deterioration. It's like they're reading a beam or something. But they did nails. Yeah, it's pretty common. It's like... I don't know if you noticed the floor is a little wobbly. And that's because the house is so old it's settled so much that they have to... Yeah. Interesting. Boy, those are creepy. Pretty cozy. Yeah, I'm not a fan of those. Are there windows up here? Yeah. Like, I don't know. Concerns that you're seeing that maybe... The kitchen's my big concern. It's kind of a weird entryway coming in from the garage into the kitchen, into the basement. That project could get bigger than you'd expect. Because once you get a contractor out here, maybe he wants to redo that entire hallway as well, coming off the garage. That would give you space as well. Maybe just have a door coming in from the garage and then you get another door going down. That's where a contractor excels, not me. But typically it's like 15 and 20 for a kitchen. That could easily jump to 30 if you're doing actual projects like that. With a wall out. That's probably load bearing. Hey, everyone. So we decided that we are not going to put in an offer for the house. And this came after a lot of debate. Because this house, like I said before, was such a good price and not only was it an amazing location but it could have been a really great starter home and there was a lot of things like the yard and the location that I was having a really hard time seeing past that. But we ultimately decided that the renovations and the possibility of having to put in a lot of money to make it our home. I don't know. There was just something that we felt like this wasn't the one. And last night I had messaged our realtor and asked if we could have a phone call today to talk about putting in an offer and I ultimately decided to text him and say that we weren't interested in putting in an offer and he did tell us that they did call for the best and highest offer today at 6 p.m. So it definitely was one that was going quick. It literally went up on the market yesterday. We went to go see it yesterday evening actually. And then after 24 hours so tonight it is going to be having an offer accepted on it. So it was definitely something that we had to move quick if we were interested and in a way I kind of wish this was a video about me being like we put in an offer for our first house but I'm also happy. I think this this could have been a really great opportunity but I think we really want to save some more money and so I'm glad that together we tested and I spoke and decided that this wasn't the best investment financially for the two of us and that we don't want to get ahead of ourselves our realtor said that we should check out places at least and this was only our third place so we have a couple more places to check out we have been doing like one place per month so this was September our third place so we should be moving on to looking at I guess in November what hit our fifth place that we'll look at if we're going month by month so then by the end of December we will have we will have enough money to purchase our top and so then we'll have lots of opportunity to look at many different options so I'm really excited for that I think I think I just don't want to get ahead of ourselves and you know it's kind of funny Weston doesn't really like to be in videos he finds it awkward to talk to the camera so that's why I do most of this documenting but he did say that he is really open to buying pretty much anything that has a garage and a decent enough yard so that's kind of what he was telling our realtor and last night I said we need to make this decision and he shared a lot more of his concerns and you know he does have more investment into this than just like oh yeah whatever if it has a house like it has four walls I'm good so that's not really the case and I'm glad we really spoke about it and so I'm really really happy that we did take the time to truly discuss you know in our relationship what this is going to mean for us and it ultimately just didn't fit in with the plans that we are hoping for so anyways we didn't put an offer in we're not planning to and we are going to continue our search so yeah I hope you guys enjoyed this though it was quite the emotional roller coaster from the minute I found it to going there to making the decision that we were going to put in an offer we were pretty positive I mean texted that to our realtor and then making that tougher decision to say that we weren't going to so yeah that's kind of where we're at third house so let's keep on searching and I'm excited to see what else is going to be out there in the next few months so we'll catch you in the next one bye guys


Today, the objective is to share some information on different ways to teach to talk about the implications of active versus passive learning and the implications of what happens when there's a mismatch between instructor and learner preferred styles. I'll be using the course I designed to teach as an example of how to overcome the challenges inherent in all of this to deliver interprofessional education. And as you may recognize from the picture on the left, this is the reconciliation totem pole that UBC constructed. So obviously we are benefiting from the knowledge generated in institutions of higher learning such as UBC and the ancestral lands on which we all stand. It might help to understand why I teach this way to understand how I got to this point. Like everyone who teaches at a university or in some university graduate degrees. But perhaps unlike many people who have a straightforward academic career, I've had about seven careers. I started out as a lab tech a microbiologist in a clinical lab about the same time that the modern era of hospital infection control is expanding. So after a few years in the lab, I moved over and spent a few decades involved in leading infection control programs. I've also been a SCUBA instructor when I got tired of working for hospitals. I became a consultant. I did commercial software development in that sector. I have as a target of research opportunity periodically done other jobs. I was a state health department program manager for one of their inaugural programs. I've been a journal editor internationally, search and crew member. And of course university professor. The reason I go through all this is a lot of the environment that I learned in was not straightforward stage on the stage memorize what the instructor said. It was more like apprenticeship was more see one do one teach one. And there's a value in that for some of the things I actually can't speak teaching SCUBA underwater, for example. So a lot of things have to be set up as a safe learning environment to explore and then ways of leading people through those in terms of challenging students and bringing interdisciplinary students together. I've done research methods courses for public administration students. Instruction to business administration students. Data analysis vis a vis statistical analysis for MBA and nursing students. And I've taught epidemiology for public health and nursing as well as the course we're going to talk about today. So from a variety of experiments to what works what doesn't work. I stick years ago moved into SPBH. What I've been trying to do in everything I've taught is create a higher level of understanding. You're probably familiar with Bloom's taxonomy of teaching and learning, circa 1956. You may be aware of Anderson et al updating and expanding that in 2001, both very valuable references. So summarizing the more complex tables. There are basic levels of understanding and it's not what I'm interested in teaching so knowledge. Can you remember a word? Can you define it? Can you repeat it? I've actually inherited several courses where the request was revamped because people come out able to speak about these concepts, but not able to do anything useful with them in our work environment. So analysis, synthesis, evaluation. I'm trying to get my students to attain higher levels of understanding through the courses that I've developed. A watershed moment and epiphany for me came in 1999 when I attended the seventh conference on distance learning and public health put on by a couple of American government agencies. It was an interesting conference because within the first hour the attendees hijacked the conference and we changed the name of it. We pointed out this was not about the difference between classroom and distance learning. This was about the difference between active and passive learning strategies and that active learning is more preferable and could be applied anywhere in a classroom or elsewhere. So as you're probably aware, passive it's culture form that the instructor knows everything. The students with their little tape recorders listen to the instructor with the big tape recorder and then there's a game. Students over the years learn to get A's by figuring out the game in the course. What's going to be on the quiz? How does the instructor like things answered? There's usually a closed book exam to show you've memorized what the instructor said would be on the exam. There is a role for closed exams. There is a role for multiple choice exams, but it doesn't lead to as rich a learning environment as the active strategy. So here the instructor has a different role as a coach or a consultant consultant in a structured learning environment. And those learning environments are very complex and difficult to build. It's not a simple easy task. Students take a role in defining and satisfying their own needs. They bring curiosity. They're also ideally going to participate in performance evaluations along the way. And the idea here is open resources. So we really want a different consultative sort of relationship to develop. These are not new ideas. Self-directed learning, as you may be familiar, especially if you have gray hair like mine, Malcolm Knowles was the great white father of the concept. And in 1975, he proposed this definition of self-directed learning. So at this point, feel free to open your microphone. Do you have prior experience as a student or as a teacher encouraged in a self-directed type course rather than just a lecture type course? So does anybody have prior experience? Maybe when I was a student, undergraduate student many, many years ago, I see the word directed here on the slide. So taking a course on direct study or undergraduate thesis was a whole course that I can do it on my own with the directions from the supervisor. I think if we're talking about a whole course here, David. One approach would be an education degree, a pedagogy-oriented program where you're taking a course devoted to the topic. The other would be any other subject where the whole concept of education is self-directed. You put forward lessons where the students have to identify what they need to learn, what resources they need to find, formulating individual learning goals, identifying what's pertinent, choosing and implementing strategies, getting a better understanding. I'm at a cognitive level of understanding. So it can be addressed in a course on the subject or it can actually be a way of teaching anything. Some things don't work as well in self-directed learning. People need to be led by the hand. Statistics wasn't about to bear that way. But other things work really well in this for some people. According to Knowles, if this is going to succeed, first off, adults must understand why they need to learn something. So as an instructor, you can't just say, read the following and memorize these things. There has to be an understanding of why this is important if you're teaching adults. You have to set a way of adults taking responsibility for their own learning. I mean, I'm not here as a kindergarten teacher, so I'm not here to remind you that there is a course outline. I'm not here to remind you every time you ask a question that's answered somewhere else. I'm here to point you to the resources that you should be using. Some people like that, other people don't. So I'm taking the idea that I'm not the nanny. The individual student needs to be given the resources, need to be given an orientation, but they need to take responsibility for their learning. I need to be available, office hours need to be generous. So if they want to discuss an issue, a question, a stumbling block, they have an opportunity to do that. But I don't want to put them in a role where they can be passive, where I'm just lecturing every week, and all they have to do is read the course notes. Students in an adult learning environment also need to exploit their experiences as a resource. So drawing from what people already know, incorporating new knowledge into what they already know, seeing how a new understanding can expand what they already know is important. So this way of doing case-based studies in medical school, for example, where you link the readiness to learn with real-life situations. And as we'll discuss later in the hour, that's what I've done with several of the courses that I've taught. And you want to orient their learning by life tasks. Again, this reinforces this is going to be useful for the following reasons, as opposed to here's just a bunch of stuff to memorize. Now I've talked about a structured learning environment. It can be done in a variety of different ways. So for example, in a distance education course I taught for nursing, a thinly disguised epidemiology course, Nursing and the Health of Communities. One of the things in there was the ability to investigate an outbreak. So there was a computer simulation. For a couple of weeks, my students lived inside of a computer simulation, and day by virtual day in that simulation, they investigated an outbreak. The design of that software was clever. I mean, at some points, for example, if you tried to open your office door and go out and do something, there was a maintenance guy changing a light bulb blocking the door. You couldn't get out because you forgot an important step. They didn't tell you what that step was, but now that you're stuck in your office, what am I going to do here? You can review what you're doing. You could chat with the instructor. You could figure out what that missing step is and then the maintenance guy went away. So a computer simulation that's well designed is one way that you have a structured learning environment. And then in the end, my students did the outbreak investigation report, submitted it to me, and I can see how well they did overall. Another approach is actual cases. So again, in the nursing course, I gave as required reading the provincial health officers annual report on the health of British Columbians and the provincial health officers supplementary material on Vancouver residents. I asked my students in that course, pick one topic in that report. You can agree or disagree with the recommendation in there, but I want you to write a one page briefing document with references telling me why you support or do not support that action and what would have to happen to make that action actually work or to block that action effectively. So it took the material from the actual case, took that information into a format that could be interpreted with an epidemiologic understanding, and then asked for an action outline, what are you going to do? An example, there was a entry in there on a benzodiazepine overuse in nursing homes. We sedate the patients to make them easier to work with. One of my students, a nurse, said, you know, I work in nursing homes. Now that I've seen this, yeah, that's true in my home as well. And I've really looked at what are in ABC, my nursing association has done. They don't have a statement on this. So she submitted her home or an ABC as a prompt, you need a position paper on this subject. So again, this can engage them in a purpose, identify their own needs, their own value and action. MBA 540 was my attempt at teaching statistics to a group that really didn't like being taught in that way. But one of the things that I included was an assignment. Here's a classic story. It's not really well explained in what my assignment is. You've got to do the research, then you got to come back and do an oral presentation. So an example of that, one of my favorite stories was a guy named Abraham Wald. If you've taken statistic courses, you're familiar with things like the Wald test, but few people, including me, after years of studying statistics as an end user, knew who Abraham Wald was. Turns out this guy escaped Europe just before the Nazis were there to kill him, got a good job in an Ivy League university. And during World War II, in the front lines, the Air Force decided their planes were just being shot up. And they needed to think about where to add the combat engineers didn't really know what to do. So they said, let's get a statistical expert out here.  You can see the bullet holes in them. Where should we add armor? How should we approach this? So my favorite example there is because his answer was, these are not the airplanes I want to see. And that stopped everyone in their tracks, including my students. Well, I would then ask my students and, you know, if we had more time, I would ask you, all right, why did he say that? But what he really was implying is these aircraft made at home. I don't care about the bullet holes in these aircraft. I want to see the other aircraft, the one that didn't make it back to base. Well, I'm sorry, Dr. Wald, we can't take you there. That's behind enemy lines. So what's the next thing he did? And again, I would challenge my students to brainstorm. He then devised several things that had not been done before. He realized the data set he was looking at was not what he really wanted to analyze. It was the complement to that data set, the aircraft that didn't make it back. Since he could not see them, with a bit more math involved, he came up with the conclusion, all right, add armor, we do not see bullet holes in these aircraft. His premise was they can survive all this damage. Don't add weight, don't add armor that will degrade performance. But where you don't see bullet holes, we will presume that's where the other aircraft were fatally shot down, or those spots. And that actually turned out to be the key to modern aircraft design for fighters, things like the Warthog that attacked tanks. So again, a classic story, the AHA discovery moment, frustrating for some students till they get used to it. But in the end, it was useful to the students. Whoops. The complex group project is another approach. So in another course that I taught, I actually required my public admin students to write a research proposal. Take a topic that's important in your field and write me a research proposal. In the course that we're going to talk about today, we're going to require the students to pick a real problem somewhere in a real community in the world that deserves an intervention and write an intervention proposal. So again, a complex group project is a way of getting a structured learning environment up and running. It can be done in many different ways. I'm not going to spend time this morning on it. But again, at that conference, I ran into a guy named Christopher Dede who really influenced all of us. I mean, he was one of several where our first question during the end of every lecture, our first question is if we stay longer, will you keep talking? Because what they were doing was just brilliant. So if you're not familiar with his work, have a look. He, among other things, pointed out there are about seven different modalities for distance education. Most people just thought there was one. And when he taught the course, his students lived in each modality they was talking about. So if they were doing computer simulation, they learned about it in a simulation. If they were doing audio conferencing, they learned about it in an audio conference. So he combined theory, practice and real life experience. One caveat before I go any further, both for the instructor and for the student when this works, it is wonderful. It makes it way more an interesting experience on both sides, way more enriching experience, but it doesn't always work. Some subjects probably cannot be taught effectively this way because of a variety of reasons. And some students are just not ready. And that's where I ran into a problem when I was trying to teach one course and the students just rebelled. So I started looking into the distinction between teaching styles, learning styles and mismatches and what can go wrong with self-directed learning. I ran into a guy that probably had an even more serious problem than I did, Gerald Glass, and I followed some of his paths. He actually on the student course evaluations was reading things where his students just hated him. They not only didn't want him ever to be hired again, they wanted him fired, they wanted him dead. They hated the guy. It was visceral. So this led into thinking what's going wrong here. So looking at his work, looking inside of a doctoral thesis I found, a variety of people have talked about self-directed learning and what it takes to make this work. So Knowles, for example, talks about an explicit process set of skills, almost a learning contract, if the student is going to succeed. Others have talked about personality traits. So again, willingness and capacity to conduct one's own self-management. I'm willing to set the time aside and raise your hand when you need help taking various traits and recognizing their weaknesses that have to be worked on on a student level. These are all important. When I first started teaching distance education for that nursing course, I was under the naive impression that now that we're not in a classroom all together, self-conscious, weak students would raise their hand when they needed help because it was a private conversation with me. I was wrong. What I learned through experience is that the A students, the ones who really were doing well, were the frequent callers. Am I on the right track? I'm interested in this. Can we talk a little more about it? Can you give me some more examples from your experience about how I apply this sort of theoretical understanding? So the students were not calling. I learned you have to build in things in the course that force them to identify themselves. Otherwise, they stay weak in the background. So understanding whether a student is ready to a certain degree, you can advertise how the course works. But then you take your chances on whether they're going to enroll anyway. Gerald Rowe, as I was talking about, when he ran through all of what he could find, he actually said there are four stages in terms of students and teachers. You might start with a totally dependent student.  I've run into some students like this. I ran into one in a lab where they would not touch the computer. Unless you sat at their side, they refused to try any of the exercises. Unless you showed them the keystrokes, they weren't going to hit the keys. That's not the point in the course. You know, when you get out to the real world, that's not the way you're going to get a job and keep a job. So to a certain degree, I'm not willing to do that. At the next stage, you get people who are interested but not quite ready to leave the lecture format and become self-directed. And then eventually you get up to students that are entirely self-sufficient. On a teaching level, there are some micromanaging authority-driven teachers. You know, I will tell you exactly when to jump and have a high to jump. I will tell you what notes to take. I will tell you what's on the exam. On the other hand, when you get up to the fourth stage, I'm really here to be a consultant.  I put some guardrails up for you. And I'm not here to lecture. I'm not here to dictate. I'm here to work with you. And then there's some examples on the right-hand side of what kind of techniques would work depending on whether everybody is aligned. If they're aligned on the diagonal here in this graphic, it's magic. I mean, if you're an authoritarian instructor and a dependent learner, everybody's happy because you've got lecture, drill, immediate correction, and everybody's happy with it. On the other hand, if it's not the way you want to teach or if that's not the way the student wants to learn, there's a problem. At the other extreme, if you've got self-directed learners who really want to run with the material, you know, they don't want to sit in a classroom and watch you read the textbook. They want to rely on you when they need you. If you're there as a consultant and a delegator, they're there as self-directed. Again, it's magic. So as you can see, there's a good alignment if you're on the diagonal. The problem is if you're off the diagonal. And this is the situation that Gerald Rowe was in. This is the situation I found I was in a couple of points. So the first is what happens if you have a student who is really ready to be totally self-directed, but you've got an instructor that sits on being authoritarian. I will lecture. I will tell you what's on the exam. This is the way we're going to work together. According to long, some people are willing, some students are willing to sit in that and they'll still succeed. But others resent it. They resent the authoritarian nature. They rebel against a barrage of low-level demands. You know, I don't need this quiz. You know, I don't need this drill. I'm already five steps ahead of you. What can I do for more advanced material? So again, these learners might rebel or just retreat into boredom. And as Fox pointed out, as a teacher, you're probably not going to interpret this as a result of the teacher being the problem, the mismatch being the problem. More likely you're going to see the student as certainly uncooperative, unprepared to get down to the hard craft of learning basic facts. You're probably going to be in a conflict. He describes this as havoc. And this is where extreme control conflicts can engage in behaviors that are just chaos. At the other, you might have totally dependent learners that are just not ready for what they got themselves into. And a teacher who really wants to be there as a coach, as a consultant, not as a dictator, a lecturer. It's not sage on the stage. And unless you've done the reading, unless you've done the homework, you're not going to work well in a Socratic style of you ask a question. I ask you a question and I lead you to an answer instead of just, well, here's your answer to your question. So, various authors in the first paragraph there point out that many students are just not able to use the freedom to learn. I talked before about certain skills and personality traits that androgogy identifies to make this work. Well, if they don't have those, if they're not ready, then it's not going to work. If you're forcing the students for something they're not ready for, frustration, anger, resentment will emerge. And if they want closer vision, if they want immediate feedback, if they want frequent directive interaction, if they constantly have to be motivated, they're in the wrong class, but they're not going to see that. And in some cases they're trapped in the wrong class because they didn't drop out in time. And they may grow to hate the teacher as Gerald Gro pointed out, his students literally said they hated him. Other students like the ones Nadler described and some I've encountered in the lab may just withdraw, you know, I will recite, but I'm not going to come up to the level that you're wanting for me. They'll shy away from the independence that Americans value. So Hersey describes this as havoc. And the problem is you can't fix it. If you give in too late, they just resent you for holding out so long.   So that brings us to the challenges that I had to address when I designed SPH 410. The course has the longest title that I've ever seen, but it accurately describes that it's improving public health and interprofessional approach to designing and implementing effective interventions. It's a large diverse class of about 70 students. We kept the enrollment to the size of the room. And when I went virtual, we kept it at 100. Historically, the courses attracted three different kinds of students. There were those who really did anticipate a public health career. And as I pointed out to my students in the first session, as I pointed out wherever opportunity arose, I've designed a course to be as realistic a look at a public health department experience as possible. So nothing in the course is arbitrary. The way it works, the way the teams work, the way the assignments work, the time frames, the required products. Basically, this is what you'd encounter if you worked in public health. There are also people who are looking at a different career, law, medicine, politics, but they know they're going to be working alongside public health, so they want a better understanding of how public health works. And originally when I designed this, UBC had a voluntary interprofessional education passport program. And so I designed this and submitted it to the IPE program. It became accredited as one of the courses students could take. The idea is if they took enough of the IPE accredited courses, they graduated with both the university degree and with a certificate indicating that they have mastered various skills in interprofessional relationships. So some of my students have not been interested in public health at all, but they were interested in the team development skills that are inherent in this course. Another challenge is there is a huge body of knowledge to cover. I mean, as I tell the students, it's going to be like working in the fog, navigating in the fog, and drinking out of a fire hose for the first half of it. But have faith, it will become clear.  Obviously, like any course, especially in SPPH, where we're not, I won't get into that, any course has to be cost effective in the way it's delivered. So designing this in a way that minimizes the costs. And since we're paid per student for undergraduate students, maximizes the income to the school was one of my goals. So I've been able to handle a large complex class alone. I haven't ever used a TA. There are a couple of handouts available if you want them send me an email, David period burn bomb at UBC period CA preferably on UBC address and ask for them, I will send them back to you as an attachment. So the early experience in this course was reported at a national meeting and a subsequent international publication that's the article on the left. You don't really need that to understand what we're talking about today. The key take home points from that. The way this course is structured on day one student students self select on a broad area of interest basis into groups of no less than five no more than 10 less than five wouldn't have enough complexity. More than 10 is too complex a group to keep going, unless you really know how to manage groups. The course itself meets only monthly when we have something to discuss. As I point out, I'll do most of the talking in the first session, but after that, the students will do most of the talking. So it's peer to peer learning as well as teacher to peer to student learning. The teams meet weekly though. There's a course outline that tells them week by week what they need to be reading what they need to be working on what they will need to be producing. And it asks them to rotate the leadership of the team meetings at the second meeting of our course. The teams are required to give an elevator pinch. You know, basically you've got five minutes to sell three ideas here. So in the time it would take me to ride an elevator. I need to understand what the problem is you've selected why it deserves an intervention why what's being done isn't good enough. And why the approach you're proposing has a better chance of success than what's been done in the past doesn't have to be fully researched. But of the three ideas, you'll then get feedback, both from the class and myself. And from that you pick one project proposal to move forward with. So the teams then choose a specific topic to develop a written and oral proposal, except for a couple of financial pages essentially what you proposed and submit to the Gates Foundation as a intervention on a local national regional community international, whatever scale, the grading in the course. I grade the oral and written work, but team participation is actually graded by the students in each team. I've got a formal rubric for that which I adapted from the medical school and the business school. It's got three broad categories in it and about 15 characteristics under each. So the teams have to do a peer self evaluation and award themselves points. So somebody isn't carrying their due weight on a team. This is a way for a team to drop somebody a full letter grade in this course. The course itself has six objectives that are very specific to public health so they're not really pertinent to our discussion today, but more pertinent to today there are four additional objectives that are generic. The ability to communicate ideas and opinions with clarity and respect to demonstrate collaborative teamwork and leadership skills to demonstrate effective and respectful problem skills, solving skills, because there will be conflict. I guarantee it in this course I guarantee it in real world, and you have to be able to identify and use information resources from other disciplines. So in terms of today's talk and the whole idea of developing a, I've never heard the term authentic learning, a realistic and authentic learning experience, a practical experience, a successful experience, those last four objectives are really critical. And they're not just arbitrary. I mean they might sound like a good idea. National Board of Public Health examiners another group I work with has done any job task analysis to find out what's really important if you're going to work and succeed in a public health role in any of the domains where public health work is done. When you look at what's on this grid. It's all the soft skills of those last four. We know that you're going to need epidemiology some biostatistics etc etc, but these other things are more important because if you can't do them, then you're useless to us. So, that's why all 10 of these are important for anybody working in public health but the last four are really the critical ones for everybody, and not just in a public health setting. So, how does it work challenges. I talked about maximizing enrollment minimizing cost. Well, if I had to do 70 major essays alone if I had to deal with 70 students alone that would obviously be impossible. Students I think really value what senior level people bring to a course as opposed to what a TA is going to tell them. So, by having the students working teams, not an individuals, I grade between seven and 10 major papers both in draft form and in final form. I listened to seven major oral presentations. It's manageable. Working as a team, it promotes what's going to happen in the real world because you don't develop projects like this as individuals, you don't work in public health as an individual. So, this is a realistic thing, not just a game. And unless you're doing it as a team, you're not learning how to sell your ideas. So, with journalism in this course, and one of the things we've noticed is a difference between the journalism students and the public health students, the science students, science students think in terms of data. Public health students think in terms of data epidemiology has been described as data with tears removed. Journalism students on the other hand, recognize what public health only recently in the past few years came to understand stories, Trump data, stories of power. So, to get these teams to understand how to sell what they've got a scientific basis for proposing is equally important to having a valid proposal. So, letting the students pick what they want to deal with is what makes it engaging as an authentic learning experience. I basically in the first lecture, spell out the broad areas under which public health works, maternal and child health, infectious diseases, chronic diseases, etc. I tell the students, okay, gathering groups, if you have an area, a broad area of interest in that particular aspect. And then within that group, start introducing yourself to each other, narrow it down and pick a team of five to 10. And then with the elevator talks, pick and refine and ultimately select what you're going to work on. So this makes it engaging as well as authentic. It's not an artificial exercise I put out there. It's meaningful to the students. I really want them to deal with, you may have heard this term before, wicked problems. I mean, some things are just easy. Other things are difficult. Some things are devilishly difficult. They are wicked and public health is full of that. So to be able to get novices to tackle wicked problems on a safe path, the course itself provides comprehensive, sequential, clear, concise materials. Now, I often have to point out what's in those materials when students don't read the materials. But again, that's my style of teaching. Now, I'm not going to give you the answer to your question. I'm going to point you back to where it is in course materials. If you have a question about what that means, sure, I'll be glad to discuss that. But if you're just asking what are the grading criteria, well, that's on page X. There are also guardrails in the course to prevent novices from tackling the impossible. I mean, sometimes there's a topic that is really just trendy, you know, like Zika or now SARS and COVID. I discourage my students from picking a topic that is moving so quickly that they don't have a hope at all of keeping up with it.  So I discourage them from those topics. But again, it's not a, except this reject that it's a discussion of strengths and weaknesses in their elevator talks. Sometimes they don't separate their topics in the elevator talks well enough. I always tell them pick three distinctly different things. One year I had a group that had one topic and three approaches. My first comment to them is you didn't follow my instructions. If this had been a great exercise, I would give you an F on it. And unfortunately, since the topic you chose cannot succeed, the city of Vancouver already imposed a solution different from what you're proposing. They would never accept yours. You're going to have to start over. Other people have done a better job of staying within the guardrails. And again, I indicated building in progressive check stages where people have to do something to communicate with you, and that identifies which ones are struggling. So the elevator talk, the rough drafts, some of the other discussions that we have, which have some Trojan horse questions embedded in the class discussion. You know, that gives me a clue to people who should have been asking for help, but we're not asking for help. Promoting interprofessional collaboration skills. So I designed this as an IP learning experience, both in the content and the grading. So part of what I do is say, all right, there are different models of how a team can work. You know, you may or may not have time to develop this kind.  I want you to rotate the leadership of your team. We've got the self evaluations within the team. It's difficult to have those awkward conversations and I realize not all the students do it. Some just, all right, we'll give everybody full marks, but others take it to heart. But giving them the exposure, if not the actual experience starts them down that path. I point out with this course, everybody, no matter what level they start with, will have something in there that advances their understanding. Promoting team collaboration and skills development, as I say, I described the options, you know, there are different kinds of team. In some cases, everybody wears the same uniform, but they're playing independently, like track and field. In other cases, it's fluid, you can't really have central control. Some kinds of teams, you have central control before the play. So think about how you want to work. I also talk about some tools. So learning, what kind of learner are you? Is it visual, auditory, is it tactile?  Is there an understanding of different ways people can interfere with team functioning and how you should deal with that? So there are some resources in there the students may or may not need. I basically point out, once your teams are formed, that's it. You're not changing teams.  You cannot drop somebody off a team. If it really comes to armed conflict, I'm willing to intervene in a session where we will all meet together and I will be the mediator, and we will come to agreement. I point out that everybody has to sign off on those self-evaluations. I've had situations where one student says, well, I'm not accepting this. Well, when I'm the mediator, I point out, okay, we either come to agreement or I will accept the form without your signature and I will give you a zero on that entire 25% of your grade. So walk the plank or play. Most of the time, though, I have not had to be the heavy hand here. Most of the time, this thing works like a charm. Meaningful evaluation criteria for the course grade. The team product, the proposal. They really come out professional quality. I've had some of my colleagues sit in just as a guest at the last session. And a number of them point to, you know, this is mostly undergraduates in this course and they are producing what we're trying to get the master's degree students to produce as an end result. So the team products really have high caliber. And the products which are basically graded this, what same way I mark manuscripts submitted and when I'm a journal editor, the same way I mark grant applications when I'm hired as an evaluator of grants. It's not a unique answer is correct. There is no unique answer to these wicked problems, but rather is your logic convincing are your arguments convincing and well structured is your evidence. Well appraised and well used, where are the strengths and weaknesses. What have you recognized as weaknesses versus things you didn't include in there. The worst situation would be the evaluator says well you know this other reference that you didn't say just blows all your arguments out of the water. So the end result after the feedback on the ungraded elevator talk, the graded first draft and the other presentations in class really leads them to succeed. Most of the students get an A in this course. So that brings me to my last point. It's got to be safe enough to stumble in the early stages because they're going to and you learn by your failures. It's not a hard enough problem if you can just do it in your sleep, but they have to be able to learn by doing and still excel by the end to get a good grade. They need a grade to get into medical school graduate school. So I don't want to create a course where high performers are going to do poorly. On the other hand, I really want to be challenging. So the first assignment the elevator talk as I mentioned is critique but it's not graded. So now you can see the kind of critique kind of bring to your work. And you can see where you've not done a thorough enough job in your search for evidence critical appraisal of evidence incorporation of evidence, layout of slides, whatever. Later components are safely scale and progressive constructed criticism leads towards success. The early complaints I had about my courses too many students are getting an A and why is that so that's when I started inviting faculty alright see for yourself what they're producing. I agreed on the basis of achievement, not on a curve. Here are some of the problems that my students have chosen. I'm not going to talk about all of them. But as you can see some of them are local to Vancouver, some of them are regional within the province or the Western provinces, some of them are Canada wide. Some of them are a specific population of like minded people. Some of them are international. Some of these get to be really interesting. The last second to the last one combating hazardous nicotine electronic delivery systems is by Canadian adolescents. So I had two teams in the same term pick vaping as their topic. So two teams were picking exactly the same topic, but they came up with equally defensible different solutions to the problem, which made for really interesting discussion. Some of them are just amazing. The last one, for example, improving access to contraception for women's release from prison.  So one of the things that one of my teams discovered is women in prison don't fill out a number of forms like income tax. So when they're released from prison for six months or more, they're not eligible for health care coverage, which leads to all sorts of problems, including on presses. And the whole thing really is ridiculous because the prison system has a fiduciary responsibility to reform and manage the welfare of people in their charge. Wouldn't it just be a simple set of forms six months before release to solve this problem? In that case, the students said, you know, like what we basically would propose is our action because, you know, they really learned politics is important in these proposals. But what we take as a letter to a federal ministry proposing, why don't you do this? You have a responsibility you're not fulfilling. Other proposals are way more complex in terms of the politics. But as I tell my students when I first worked in hospitals and epidemiologists, my job was 80% epidemiology, 20% politics. When I worked in government running a state health department program, my job turned into 80% politics, 20% epidemiology. So this course really encourages students to understand culture, politics, feasibility, economics, local priorities, rather than just say, you know, we from the west have got a solution to your problem. These are wicked problems. I've taken this from the work of Bob Evans, who is a very bright economist in our school here. Some fields have difficult problems. I mean, some medical diagnostic problems, some patients doctors work with are really challenging, but it's nothing like public health. When you really look at this conceptual model, first off, you have to understand the values and assumptions in a culture. You have to understand what the research and evaluation of prior projects has informed us about what works and what doesn't work. You have to understand the whole process here in his diagram is evidence based decision making. There's another guy that I really like who hates the word evidence based. I went to one of his presentations and he said, yeah, what if I told you there's a drug that's over 90% effective, it's inexpensive, and it has very, very few mild side effects. As a government policy, shouldn't you be buying this drug and supplying it? And after a bit of the body, you know, most people say, yeah, I guess so. And then he comes up with the punchline. Yeah. Well, the drug is Niagara and I don't think erectile dysfunction is the biggest public health problem you're dealing with. So rather than call this evidence based decision making, it should be evidence informed decision making. And unless you the policymakers are informing the research community of what questions you need to be informed on what decisions you're facing and what gaps they need filled, they're going to just bombard you with evidence and expect you to act on it. So being able to pick and choose among the evidence, build it into logical arguments. Understanding the values and the experiential learning. Yeah, that's part of what my students have to bring to critical appraisal. On the front phase of this, we have a number of determinants of health. These are the classic determinants of health we teach in schools of public health. If you want to move upstream and start solving root causes, you might deal with income, housing, education, not just deal with disease at the impoverished backhand. On the other hand, we have schools of population and public health. So when you talk about public population health, you're usually talking about strengthening systems within the public. So that's the right hand face of this tube. And then on the top, again, figuring out the politics of it. Are you dealing with individuals, families, communities, sectors, or society? Who is your target audience and do you reach them directly or indirectly? Some of my student projects, I've pushed them to realize, yeah, you're trying to really influence the government, but you're going to do that by creating a mob on the front lawn with flaming torches demanding action. Because the political will is not there at the moment. In some cases, you want to reach the individual that the individual you want to reach is not going to listen. Talk to the guy's wife if you want to get the guy to do something. So understanding where to aim your pitch and how to aim it is part of the sales package that the students have to understand to create a whole approach to these wicked problems. I mentioned that interprofessional is part of this. When I first put this course together, the IPE program was a voluntary program in an office.  And then on a rubric, that office would decide whether or not you've got enough in there to accredited. That office has disappeared. The program, as I understand it, has evolved into a mandatory curriculum integrated into most of the health programs. But frankly, I'm not sure how well it's been done because I don't see an awful lot of it on the working end. But there are, there is a logo here which shows you the concept. There are resources on this slide. And I believe CTLT has distributed this slide set to anybody who's participating. And again, you know, if you're viewing the recording later, you can pause on this slide. But you could go to the two links for UBC collaborative materials as a starting point. If you're interested in how do I get started? How do I build IPE content into my course design? They have the challenge as teachers to create a safe but challenging learning environment. That's the approach I've taken. I hope this has been useful to you. I would be happy to answer any questions if there are any at this point. But that is the end of the material I've prepared for the hour session.


Hello there. This is the family doctor. This is Windsor. This is Chick Harper. Well, no faith hasn't been in yet. You bet I will. I'll give her the message when she comes in. All right. Goodbye, Mrs. Windsor. So faith coming in, huh? Gee. Oh, I better clean off that soda counter. Hello, Mr. Mayor. Howdy there, young fella. Howdy. Something I can do for you? Yeah. I can show you can fill up this bottle of liniment. Well, I don't think I can fill it up, but I can sell you a new one. They come from the holes they all filled. All right. Give me another bottle. Just a minute. There you are. How much you going to cost me? Let me see. It's down the bottom of the bottle. Forty-nine cents. Forty-nine. Well, there's four bits. You can keep the penny. Keep the penny. Okay. Thanks. Say, Mr. Miller. Yeah. It sure is a beautiful day, isn't it? I haven't noticed you've been too busy. The Almanac says there's going to be a full moon tonight, too. That's all right. We do have them once in a while. Mr. Miller. Yeah. What would I have to do to rent one of your boats for a little row around the lake this evening? Well, well, I don't have much to do, except give me a deposit of two dollars and, of course, twenty-five cents an hour. Hey, Mr. Miller. Yeah. It would be okay if I brought a young lady with me, wouldn't it? Yes. A young lady. Say, now, you listen to me, young fella. You've been residing in Cedarton long enough to know that I don't win none of my books to young ladies, except with a note from their ma or pa. Gotta have a note. Wrong. And if she ain't got a ma or pa, well, you ought to look. Fair weather. Oh, hello, Mr. Miller. Oh, hello. Nice day, isn't it? Yes, it is. Hello, Fay. Hello, Chick.  She wants you to bring home and atomize her. Your dad's got another spell of hay fever. Oh, all right. And I want a double pineapple delight with whipped cream. Okay. Right away. Say, uh, I haven't seen you in the store much lately, Fay. No, I guess you haven't. Oh, you used to come in quite a lot. Uh-huh. Well, I haven't seen you at that church. Young people meeting very often, either. Oh, yes, well, Mr. May's been having me stay on at the store here while he goes to dinner at that time. Oh. You don't like me very well, do you? What? Why, Chick Harper, what do you mean? Well, you haven't been coming into the store. Well, I kind of thought you sort of, well, didn't like me anymore. Oh, listen. I thought you liked Ella Mary's list. Huh? Oh, well, I do like Ella Mary, but I like you better, Fay. Well, there's your pineapple delight. Oh, thank you. Fay. Hello? What are you... Well, I mean, are you doing anything tonight after supper? Just starting my homework. That's all. You got much of it to do? Not much. No. Well, would you like to take a ride with me up to Miller's Lake? I could get Mr. May to let me use the delivery truck. Oh, well, yeah. I think that would be fun.  Well, I think so. I'll try. I've been out on the lake for a long time. Say, this is going to be fun. Well, okay then. It's a date, huh? Yeah. All right, Chick. Well, if I'd better be running along now, I'll pay you for the pineapple delight later. Oh, that's okay. Say, Fay. Yeah? Do you think it might be a good idea if we didn't say anything about this to Ella Mary? Uh-huh. Well, goodbye. Goodbye. See you after supper. Gee. But last I got up never enough to ask Faith Windsor for a date. Oh, golly, she forgot the atomizer. Let me see. U-D- U-D-Colony. A superior lotion for aftershaving. Huh? Well, I've just shaved, so here goes. Hmm. Gee, it smells good. Golly, that makes a man feel swell. Now, let me see. Virginia Molly. Molly Knox's rosewater. Hmm. Gee, this is better than the other stuff. I'll try a little of this. Ah, that sure is wonderful. Now, old-fashioned garden pomade for the care of the hare. Uh-huh. Well, here goes. See, that stuff smells pretty good too. Well, I guess I'm all ready just as soon as Mr. May gets back. Oh, hello, Dr. Adams. Hello, Chick. Well, how's business? Say... What's the matter? What in the world's happening here? Nothing. Why? What's Pete May done to this store? Smells like a perfume factory. Oh, that. Well, I guess it's me, Dr. Adams. You? What do you mean? Well, I was kind of going out this evening, and I was just sort of... well, fixing up a little. Ah, I see. Your engagement is with one of the local young ladies, I presume? Oh, yes, sure. Hmm. Not the daughter of a local grocery store proprietor. Oh, hello, Mary. No. Well, what can I do for you, Dr. Adams? Well, you can give me that atomizer. You forgot to send home to Judge Windsor by faith this afternoon. All that? Yeah, sure. And here you are, Doctor. This one all right? Oh, yes. That'll do very nicely. Hello, Doctor. Hello, Mary. Hello, Chick. Well, I guess I'll have a chocolate pecan Sunday. Okay. Well, Mary, are you going into the post-Ducal's beauty contest? Beauty contest. Eh, didn't you hear about it? No. Eh, I was just up to the Windsors, and Mrs. Windsor said she was going to put faith into it. Oh, is she? There's your Sunday, Sunday, Al and Mary. Oh, thanks. Well, I guess I'd better start cleaning up the back room now. Is there anything else you want, Dr. Adams? No, that's all just now, Chick. Run along. Well, thanks. Eh, hello, Mary. Yes? Do you have any sort of, well, hankering to go into this beauty contest? No, no, I don't think so. It's kind of common, I think. Well, maybe you're right at that.  Oh, is he? Oh, yes, yes, maybe he is. Well, I wonder, uh, I wonder if he's going out. Going out? I mean, I wonder if he's got a date. Well, wouldn't be at all surprised. Yes, it's quite possible. Yeah. You know, hello, Mary. Yes? I think you're making a big mistake. Mistake? Wow. Well, why should an attractive young lady like you concentrate all her attentions on one young man when there's so many fine young fellas in Seterton? Me by Dr. Adams, why, I'm not concentrating on any young one man. Well, just think it over, Ella Mary. Think it over. Hi, Doc. Hello, Pete. Hello, Ella Mary. Say, what the... What? Hey, what is this? What's happened here? What do you mean, Pete? Well, this store of mine smells like a barbershop. Oh, well, maybe... Maybe Chick might be able to explain, Pete. He's been here longer than Ella Mary or me. Huh? Chick? Oh, wow. So, I say, what's your name? And that reminds me. Chick! Yes, sir? Come here a sec, will ya? Sure. Yes, sir? Say, Chick, I'm afraid I've kind of a disappointment for you this evening. Disappointment? Yeah. You see, Amos Days put me on the committee to arrange for the first annual Seterton Festival and historic pageant. And there's going to be a meeting of the committee this evening up to the Post-Bugle Office. You don't mean that...  She won't mind. There'll be lots of other evenings later. Pete, don't you? And Chick wanted to discuss your private affairs back in the prescription room. Private affairs? Oh, they ain't nothing private about this, Doc. It'll be in the Post-Bugle tomorrow. Huh? What? Yeah, I mean about me being put on the committee. No, it's perfectly okey-dokey to talk about it. You see, Doc, I got an idea that we should ought to make this pageant sort of allegorical. Sort of what? Allegorical. I've been talking with Mrs. O'Malley about it. She's going to direct it, you know. Oh. Yeah. And now, uh, say, uh, Chick. Yes, sir? I just happen to think, hadn't you better phone up Faith and tell her you gotta break that date with her this evening? She'll understand, cause her paws on the committee, too. Phone her from here? Sure thing. Go ahead. Well, uh, you see, I... Go ahead. I'll watch the fountain for you. Well, all right. How's it about having a bottle of pop on the house, Doc? Oh, all right, Faith. Don't mind if I do. Uh, lemon soda. Hello. Give me just one of these. Your house, please. Hello, Faith. This is Chick. Yeah. Say, Faith, I'm awfully sorry, but we can't... we can't go out tonight. When I've got to work here at the store, Mr. May is going out to a... Oh, no, listen, Faith. Wait a minute. Oh, don't say that. I can't help it. Can I have... Hello? Hello? Hello, Faith? Hello? Well, there's your lemon soda, Doc. Oh, thanks. As I was... Hey, Chick. Yes, sir? Where are you going? I'm going back and finish cleaning up the prescription room until you get ready to go. Oh, okay, okay. Well, as I was saying... Mr. May. Yes, what is it, Ella Mary? I think I'll have another chocolate pecan sundae. Make it a double one this time, will you, please? Well, sure thing, you know. Say, you must have enjoyed that first one. I did. I enjoyed it more than any other sundae I ever ate in my life. Well, what do you know? Because I'm through concentrating, like Dr. Adam Settler was doing. Concentrating? And I'm going into that beauty contest. And what's more, I'm going to win it, too. This is the family doctor. I'll be in to see you again right soon. Goodbye.