Hello, welcome to module 2 of NPTEL NOC on introductory course on point set topology, part 2. So, today we will take the topic of differentiation on Banach spaces. So, many things run parallel to what we will do in calculus of variable, one variable calculus or two variable calculus and so on. Actually, you will see that it is copied one variable calculus, but the things have to be put in a proper perspective. So, start with two Banach spaces. One can possibly do many things with just normative spaces also, but we will concentrate only on Banach spaces. Because our idea of this presentation of these things is not to do the entire thing in a very general setup, but to cover the implicit function theorem and inverse function theorem for Banach spaces as a sample, as a sample of application of topological methods. So, that is why we will concentrate only on Banach spaces.  So, there is open subset system makes sense because we are using the norm to induce a metric to induce a topology. Start with an open subset u around a point. A function defined on this open set into another Banach space is said to be differentiable at a point x naught. If there is a continuous linear map from t, t from v to w such that this x is this limit x is equal to 0. What is this? It is f of x naught plus z minus f x naught divided by the norm h. I cannot divide by h. So, h is a vector inside this normed in space v, okay. Therefore, I cannot do just this limit, but I have to do it by subtracting t h where t is a linear map which is going to be the derivative. Then I can divide by norm h. This limit as h tends to 0 which is same thing as saying norm h tends to 0, this limit must exist. So, where is the limit existing? What is this one? f and you know f is taking values into w. t of t is also from v to w. So, t of h is also inside w. So, all this numerator is taking value inside w. It is a vector inside w, okay. So, divided by norm h, of course, that is just a scalar. So, it is a vector inside w. This limit must exist. So, the important point here is that we must have a continuously linear map t. This is the part of the definition, okay. I want to caution you that there are slightly varying definitions, you know weaker or stronger and so on. There are different definitions possible and then they will make under this condition, this will be equal to that one, that will be equal to this one and so on. We are not going to study all that in this course, okay. So, let us take this definition namely there must be a linear map which is bounded, that is continuously linear map from t to v which satisfies this equation. Limit of f of x0 plus h minus fx minus th whole thing divided by norm h, this limit must be 0, okay. As soon as such a t exists, okay, it has to be unique. You cannot have two different linear maps t1 and t2 having satisfying the same property. This is an easy consequence of just similar to what we do in a real analysis or any other different, you know, multivariable calculus and so on, okay. Uniqueness is not a difficult thing. So, that unity is called the derivative of f at the point x0 and I am using the same notation df of x0, the standard notation. The only thing is you might not have called such a thing as a fresh derivative, we are going to call it as fresh derivative, okay. This fresh A O started with Banach space calculus, okay, fresh derivative of f at the point x0. If f is differentiable at each point x inside an open set, then we say f is differentiable on the open set tube. Further, if the function which assigns to each point u its derivative, remember derivative is a bounded linear map, right, t is bounded from v to w. So, it is taking values inside bvw. If this function for each x here inside u, you take dfx, that will be denoted by df. If this itself is continuous, then we say that f is continuously differentiable on u or we can say it is a class C1, okay. There are ways of making class C2 definition C3 and so on. So, we will stop here, only class C1 here, okay. So, if you go back, the very first thing you do is the so-called increment theorem for differentiable functions or function which has a derivative at a single point. Rewriting this equation, you know, as what we said, clearing the denominator, reinterpret it. That is called increment theorem. Same thing is true here also, namely f of x0 plus h minus fx0 minus t of h0 is equal to this norm h as one on the other side. I am writing that as the remainder r of x0 depending upon h, it depends upon x0 as well as h, okay. So, you can write it as f of x0 plus h is fx0 plus dfx0 h plus some error term. This is called the increment theorem on the first approximation, linear approximation to f, okay. If we increase the value of x0 by h, the increment is roughly dfx0 of h, you can ignore this one. You can ignore the last term, that is the whole idea. Why should you ignore this one or why?  It is not always possible but because of this definition, what we have is if you divide this by h, then take the limit, it is 0. So, remainder after the first term here has the property divide by norm h and take the limit, it is 0. So, this is called increment theorem, okay, exactly as in the case of one-variable calculus here, okay. The following statements are all easy to check exactly as in the case of one-variable calculus, okay. Every constant function is differentiable everywhere, everywhere means what on the whole of v, on the whole wherever they are different, okay. And its derivatives are always 0, the derivative at all the points is 0 for a constant function. For every vector v belonging to v, the translation function, see on a vector space, you have this u going to u plus v, where v is fixed, there is a translation function, I have written t upper v by u, okay. Maybe I will forget to write this notation every time, the translation function is very easy to determine. This is differentiable everywhere and its derivative is the identity function. Remember, translation is from v to v. So, the derivative will be also from v to v, it will be linear map, it is a continuous linear map. In this case, its identity of v, all that you have to check is, you know, go back this definition, f of x0 plus h minus fx0 will be what now? Tv of this one will be adding v, then again adding v here, v cancels off, this is just like x0 plus h minus x0, okay. So, what should I take? Take a identity map, then this numerator itself will be identically 0, there is no need to divide by norm h and so on. So, it will be always true, that is all. So, the translation maps, adding a constant, you know, this is a rule, you can differentiate this function, you are going to use identity, right? Identity map, derivative is identity, that v is constant, so it goes away. So, that is another way of looking at it. Every bounded linear map is also differentiable. Here, one lucky thing is that we do not have to make a further assumption. Start with a linear map, you do not know that it is continuous. So, you have to make the assumption, you know, you have to put that extra condition, continue it. Once it is continuous, it is differential and its derivative is again the same function t at all the points x inside. This is again standard result inside Rn, R into Rn, if you have linear map, you know that its derivative, it is a linear map itself, ok. You can directly verify it by taking t itself as in the slot, in the third slot here, it is a t of x naught plus x minus t of x naught minus t h is 0. So, that will give you that t itself is a derivative of t, ok. And then this standard addition rule and scalar multiplication rule, if f and g are differentiable to x naught, alpha, beta, scalar, alpha f plus beta g is differentiable to x naught, ok. Indeed, if alpha, beta from u to k are scalar functions which are differentiable to x naught, then this alpha times f, this is not a composition, this is just multiplication, right, the scalar multiplication. So, derivative of alpha f makes sense, it will be differentiable. Similarly, beta g makes sense, the sub makes sense. So, this will be also differentiable to x naught, ok. Of course, you have to use Leibniz's rule here, ok. So, f is differentiable to x naught, then it is continuous at x naught, same, same proof as in the case of one variable, this is one variable calculus, ok. The logic, the definition, you can just look at the increment theorem here, ok. You show that if f is differentiable, this rule is true now, you can show that f is continuous also, ok. So, so far, except in the definition, I have started the continuous linear map, this is just like one variable calculus. In the one variable calculus, you have just a real number, but if you think carefully, if you know that you have, you must have done it already, a real number is actually represents a linear map from R to R, ok, namely multiplication by that number. So, there is, so far there is no difference at all. So, it may be noted that if f is differentiable to x naught, then all is directional derivatives, sorry. So, let me, let me call this one, ok, and jump again. All the directional derivatives are also axial, will also exist is what I wanted to say. So, let me, what is the meaning of directional derivative? Again, it is the same thing as in the multivariate calculus, starting with two, but Banach space is V and W. Again, opens up set U of the domain, x naught belonging to U. Now, you take any vector, preferably a non-zero vector, even vector 0 is also valid, ok. Take any non-zero vector, ok. Let f from U to W be any function. So, the directional derivative dV, dV of f at x naught. So, this is derivative of f in the direction of V at the point x naught, ok. E is defined as follow, ok. Namely, it is a vector W inside W, such that in this third slot, whatever your t of h, you are writing, instead of this one now, t of W, multiplication by t here or you know the vector W is just the direction that. So, f of x naught plus t, x naught plus t times V now, we are not arbitrary h, minus f of x naught minus t of W, this entire thing is now function of a one variable t, real variable. So, you are dividing it by t itself, ok, no norm. So, see f, x naught is fixed, V is fixed, W is fixed. So, it is function of real variable, one variable. This function must be, this limit must be 0. In other words, if you just look at f of x naught plus t times V, this function must be differentiated, ok, as a function of t, ok. And this derivative is W, that is called directional derivative, exactly same definition as in the case of usual multivariable calculus, ok. And you can immediately verify that all the directional derivatives will exist as soon as the derivative at x naught exists. So, often one calls the other derivative which you have defined as total derivative. It is a directional derivative, total derivative. You can talk about partial derivatives, but then you have to fix up coordinates. In Banach space, coordinate fixing is something very fishy, you do not want to do that. So, let V and W be any two normed in spaces. A continuous linear map T from V to W is said to be an isomorphism if it is invertible as a function and the inverse is also continuous, ok. So, here I have taken this definition for all normed in spaces also, ok. The remark here is that the inverse of a linear function is automatically linear. This is elementary algebra on any vector space, ok. If you have a continuous in a bijection which is sorry which you have just a bijection which is linear, then the inverse is automatically linear, right. It is not a problem, but inverse may not be continuous. This is what we have been telling. Even if it is a bijection, even if it is bijection it is continuous, the inverse may not be continuous. So, we have to mention it separately, ok. In the above situation, some author simply called T an invertible operator which is another name. They did not isomorphism, inverse is continuous etcetera. They will just say invertible operator. So, I will also use that term, ok. If V and W are Banach spaces, then for any invertible continuous linear transformation T from V to W automatically T inverse will be continuous, ok. See remember invertible just for me it does not mean that it is continuous. So, I want to be very careful. Invertible operator when you say by convention inverse is also continuous. A linear map may be invertible, ok. It has an inverse, but it may not be continuous. That is why I am making discussion. But if V and W are Banach spaces, no problem automatically the inverse will be continuous, ok. But this one needs a deeper theorem there namely what is called as open mapping theorem, ok. We are not going into that deep into function analysis, it is not a course on function analysis. But I am just mentioning this. I will never use this property though, ok. I will never use it because we are not going to prove inverse. I am just mentioning it as a information that is all, ok. If T is an isomorphism from definition that we have taken applied to both T and T inverse, we get two constants. This right hand side constant says T is continuous, right. Norm of T is less than or lambda x. Similarly, I must have other way around also for T inverse which will give you a lambda prime on this side. Lambda prime of norm x is less than or equal to norm of T x, which you can write it as you know norm of T inverse of x is less than or lambda prime lambda prime times norm of x also. You can write similar way. So, both sides you get a constant here. Remember this was the definition of that two functions are similar, two linear transformations are similar, ok. So, this is what we are. So, T itself is a similarity here because it is similar to the identity map. It is not identity map, but it is similar to identity map. So, T from W from W is called a similarity of two normal spaces such that we have, ok. We have studied similarities in the in the part one. Now, here is a theorem that I need to use. So, go through this carefully, start with two Banach spaces. Put A equal to A, V, W. A is a short form here when V and W are understood. What is this A, V, W? It is all set of all similarities from V to W, ok. Not all transformation is only similarities. Consider the function eta from A to B, WV, the other way around from W to V, defined by eta of T equal to T inverse. So, each element here is invertible. So, I can take the inverse. Again I am getting inside A, V, W. So, this eta is actually lands you from A to A, WV, ok. Does not matter. So, it is inside B, V, WV, B, WV which is a Banach space, ok. So, let A be then, sorry, then A is an open subset of this V, V, W and eta is differentiable on the entire of A, ok. So, I am stating a non-trivial thing here. First of all I say that this subset is an open subset of V, V, W. Remember V, V, W itself is a Banach space, ok. And eta is differentiable on A. Further, the derivative of d eta which is a map from A into B, W, V, ok. Because eta itself is the map into B, W, V. So, its derivative is of taking values there, ok. For each point A, you have a linear map. Given by d eta of d eta operating at a t will be a linear map operating on S, ok. This is nothing but, you know, pre-composing with inverse and then post-composing with inverse and taking the minus. So, it is a complicated derivative here, ok. For every S belong to V, V, W. Start with for every S. S is not invertible, S is arbitrary element, ok. Arbitrary element of linear C. A is a subset of this, right. And I am claiming A is an open subset. On an open subset, you have a function. You can talk about whether it is differentiable. The statement is that that is differentiable and its derivative is this one, ok. So, that is the statement. So, let us see the proof is not all that difficult at all. First of all, what may happen is this A is empty. What is the meaning of that? There may not be any similarities between V and W, ok. So, if you want to say anything, there is no statement about this being an unempty here. But on empty space, whatever I have made, they are vacuously true. So, there is nothing no logical difficulty here. But you want to prove something, you should assume A is non-empty, that is all. Otherwise you do not have to prove anything, all right. So, assume A is non-empty, then we can follow. What is the meaning of A is non-empty? There is some similarity which means V and W are similar already. That is a non-trivial assumption, ok. The above theorem implies in particular that A is continuous because we have already remarked that any function which is differentiable at a point is continuous at that point. So, we are going to prove that D, this eta is differentiable on the whole of A. Therefore, it is continuous on the whole of A which is not stated here. But it is an easy consequence of that. So, we will use that also, ok, towards the proof of that A is an open subset. In the last lecture, we have already made the preparation for this. So, let us see how. Take a point T inside A. What is it? It is a similarity from V to W, ok. So, it has some norm, ok. I am taking K equal to norm of T inverse, ok.  This 1 by K is obviously, you know, it is non-zero, right. So, that will show that A is open. For each point you have a ball open before contained inside that set A. So, A is open. So, how to show this? So, this is what we want to claim, right. So, let S belong into B, V, W, ok. This ball is taking place where inside B, V, W, right. A is instead of B, V, W. It is such that norm of S is less than 1 by K. Then we know that T inverse composite S is less than or equal to norm of T inverse into norm of S is less than 1, right. That is the whole idea why I took norm of this K equal to T inverse, norm of T inverse, ok. T inverse, norm of T inverse, T inverse will cancel out though it is less than 1. Therefore, by lemma that we have proved, you know, that we have stated and indicated the proof also lemma 1.63 follows that identity plus T inverse of S is invertible. There it was identity minus, you can take minus S here and you can put, this will become plus identity, but T inverse of S is invertible, ok, because norm of this one is less than 1. But then you can write T plus S as T composite identity that is T plus T T cancel, T and T inverse cancel away as, ok. So, this is T is invertible, T is a similarity, this is invertible, so the composite is invertible. So, T plus S is an element of A, ok. So, these are the points inside the, inside this board. Every element here looks like T plus S where norm of S is less than 1 by K, that is the board. So, the board ball is contained inside A, that is all we have proved that A is open, all right. Now, we want to show the derivative, ok. Fix a T, I want to show that D is that eta is differentiable at T, ok. The map S going to T inverse composite S, composite T inverse again, it is a bounded linear operator. Why? S is the variable here, I am taking the right composition and the left composition by some other bounded linear operator, exactly T inverse on both sides now, ok. So, we have seen that composing left or right is again a bounded linear transformation, we have moved twice. What are they? They are actually L T inverse and R T inverse. So, this map S going to T inverse S T inverse is nothing, but I have a short notation S V T which is minus of R T inverse plus L T inverse, that is it is minus sign coming here, you see in the statement it is minus sign. So, I have put take this as put minus V T, 50 to minus R T inverse S T inverse. This is a linear map from B V W to B W V, ok. We want to show that this minus V T is the derivative of eta at T, ok. This is the same thing we are showing that now, remember what is eta? T plus S inverse, see eta taking the inverse minus T inverse it is like F of T plus S minus F T, right. It is like that that F is T plus S T inverse minus T inverse plus this map V T operating upon S which is T inverse S T inverse. So, V T operating upon this one. So, there is a minus sign. So, here I get a plus sign divided by the norm S tends to 0 must be equal to 0, this limit must be 0. So, this is what we have to show, ok. Then the proof is over, right. So, first of all T plus S can be written as identity plus S T inverse T. T if you push it inside T, here now I have stopped writing composition S T directly I am writing, ok. So, this is just for convenience everywhere composite-composite. I have already stopped writing compositions here. Here I wrote, here when I am doing computation I am now no, no long, it is just like multiplication now, ok. You must understand that these are compositions that is all. So, identity composite T plus S T inverse T inverse is S. So, that is T plus S, ok. So, since we can choose norm S to be less than 1 by k, ok. So, that norm of S T inverse is less than 1, then we have this identity plus S T inverse can be inverted. Identity plus S T inverse, inverse will be nothing but 0 to infinity minus minus 1 raise to n because there is a minus sign, ok. If it is plus sign everything will be plus here. If it is minus sign here, then everything will be plus here. This plus is alternative minus 1 minus 1 raise to n. S T inverse raise to n. This is geometric series, 0 to infinity. Therefore, T plus S inverse minus T inverse plus T inverse S T inverse, I am computing this one, ok. So, T plus S inverse can be written as now T plus S was this one. Its inverse will be T inverse into identity plus S T inverse. Identity plus S T inverse is this summation. So, I am writing that T inverse into that summation minus T inverse plus T inverse S T inverse as it is, they are terms, ok. So, from here to here what I have come? I have just used this T plus S inverse is this way. I have written inverse of that will be first T inverse, then inverse of this, but this is like this. This is a geometric series. So, I have substituted it here. Now, look at the first term here n equal to 0. So, it is just T inverse that cancels as this one. What is the first term here? n equal to 1. What is this? S T inverse into T inverse on the left. So, that is this term. It also cancels out. That is a minus sign here with the first term. For the 0 term, this is plus sign, this is minus sign. So, those to cancel out, what you are left out is this summation from n equal to 2 onwards, ok. So, S T inverse raised to 2 comes out. So, T inverse into S T inverse raised to 2 and 0 to infinity S T inverse, S T inverse powers, S T inverse raised to n. So, up till here you have computed. Now, what we have to do? We have to divide it by norm s and then take the limit. When you take the norm of this part, the norm s comes here with a power twice, right. So, one power cancels out when you divide by norm s. Other power norm s remains. Rest of the terms are anyway bounded function there. They are just some bounded functions. When you take the norm of the whole thing, right. Therefore, as norm s tends to 0, this will be 0, ok. The claim follows. Only one norm s comes in the square term, cancels out. The other one remains. The rest of them is bounded. S tends to 0, norm s tends to 0. So, this is 0, ok. So, we have shown that eta is differentiable. From an earlier remark, it is continuous. I have already told you, I am repeating it. Ok, eta is continuous. How to show that d eta is continuous? Now, we have formula for d eta. Look at the formula. Formula says d eta is caught by T inverse phi T inverse. Sorry, minus T inverse on the left, T inverse on the right, ok. So, there is a minus sign does not matter. So, is this continuous? That is phi T inverse, right. T inverse is continuous. Multiplication is continuous. Light hand side is continuous and so on. This is what we are doing. Therefore, continuity of eta, d eta also follows, ok. Continuity of d eta follows because of, first of all, eta is continuous and phi is continuous, ok. The phi is what? Taking the left multiplication and right multiplication, maybe taking minus sign also, whatever. So, all that I am heavily using 1.53 here, right. This part I am using that L and R are continuous. L corresponds to left multiplication, R corresponds to right multiplication. Before that, you have to take inverse. T going to T inverse is continuous also, that is that is eta itself. Combining this, what we get is the derivative d eta is continuous at all the points and the whole of A. So, here is an exercise. I am not going to use it in the course, but this is something which is very, very useful for people who do leaguer groups and so on. So, that is precisely what it is. Take any Banach space that B will denote the space of all bounded linear operators from T to V, ok. Then this becomes a group out on auto obviously, right. You can compose, you can take the inverse and this is a group. What is more important is that this is a differentiable group or what we call as topological group. It is more than a topological group, namely the multiplication mu from B V cross B V to B V to mu of S T put S T. This itself is done differentiable. Taking inverse is differentiable we have seen. So, that makes it to a what is called as a differentiable group or what is called as leagroup, except that the word leagroup is used only for manifolds. This is what is called as a Banach manifold, ok, modeled on a Banach space. So, if you want to study Banach leagroups, this is the starting point. So, I am giving you this an exercise. Show that mu is differentiable, compute its derivative. Let G L V denote the open subspace B V consisting of all isomorphisms. They form a group, not this B V, ok. Along with our theorem above exercise implies that G L V is a leagroup modeled on Banach space. So, that is just an exercise. The only thing is you will see how to differentiate this one, where is the derivative and where is the derivative taking values. If you figure it out, then you will know what is the derivative, ok. So, thank you very much. This is all for today.


That's for tomorrow, that's for today, excellent. Okay, thank you. So I would like to thank everyone for being here today, and I'm thinking how we ended up here. We had originally planned the event to take place in Rome, where I had booked a very nice hotel, and I was looking forward to see all my colleagues in Rome, but unfortunately this did not happen. Nonetheless, I'm very happy that we have the opportunity to still do this event and to have all of you here. Pedro did a very good introduction of the points that I will be talking about right now. And I think that he gave something like a table of contents. And when I would be talking about the Fit for RRI project, I will be also mentioning about Foster, because as Pedro said, these two projects are interconnected in the sense that they used the platform that it was already reputable and very well used, which was the Foster Open Science Knowledge Base. So on the Foster Open Science Knowledge Base, we created the Fit for RRI Knowledge Base, and the purpose was over there to have the training materials with regards to responsible research and innovation. But because Open Access is part of responsible research and innovation, then these could have not been divided into different sections, but all these resources and training materials should have been together. So if you log into the, if you visit the Fit for RRI page on the Foster platform, then you're going to see that we have a variety of materials. For example, if you go to the top resources, you will see that resources have these very small triangles at the end of its window resource. And those triangles indicate the concepts and the projects that these resources were created for. And for example, the resource in the middle that has an orange triangle on the top right hand side. And at the same time, a blue triangle on the bottom right hand side, then this indicates that it's a combination of both the Foster, so Open Science and Fit for RRI, so responsible research and innovation concepts. So you can visit the Fit for RRI page on the Foster Open Science Knowledge Base, and this is your gateway to all the training resources and materials that are in the Foster page and RRI page right now. In the beginning of the project, we created the responsible research and innovation taxonomy. This is not something new because we did this during the Foster project when we were dealing with the concept of Open Science. The reason of creating that taxonomy was to be able first of all to organize our thoughts on how this specific subject field is being developed and what kind of notions and concepts and terms are around it. This was helpful for us to organize our thoughts, but then we also realized that apart from us, there may be others who are not quite knowledgeable on how this brand new concept is being developed around research and what is the umbrella term and which terms have the higher hierarchy or priority over other terms. So when we were creating this taxonomy, we also thought that we would need to create definitions.  So it's a very good understanding of the various concepts and it's a very good tool for someone who is not very much familiar with all these ideas to get to know these ideas better so that when this person reads about them, understands what the concepts are about. Another reason for creating the taxonomy was so that we can also organize the content that lives within this knowledge base. So all the content in the knowledge base in the platform, it has taxed from this taxonomy. So in reality, if you want to read about one thing only, you can click on a taxonomy term and you're going to see grouped under this term all the related topics. Alternatively, the other thing that you could be doing is that you would be able to find in all these terms, you will also be able to see which ones do not have any materials uploaded into the platform. This means that you can predict any gaps that are in the area and what is this that you would probably be needing to create as a research support librarians or what kind of questions you should be expecting from your researchers or PhD students or from your stakeholders in general, because this topic perhaps is not so much developed and you need to pay closer attention to it so that you need to know more about it. Of course, as you can see in the right taxonomy right now, the RRI is the umbrella term and then the very first term is the open science. And what we had already created in the foster platform was the open science taxonomy. The open science taxonomy has the same reasoning and logic behind as the RRI taxonomy and area where the knowledge has to be grouped in a hierarchical manner, where the terms are being defined, where the resources are being linked to the terms, where we can have an understanding of what is going on in the field. Of course, while we were creating both taxonomies, all the project partners were not 100% in agreement with the organization of these terms. And then we spent a lot of time brainstorming and moving terms around, but we understood that at some point we had to stop doing this exercise. This is why, even though we understand that perhaps this is not like 100% the representation that you have in your mind, we still believe that it's a very good representation of the knowledge in the field nowadays. And for that reason, we have created the taxonomies as pictures in a good quality pictures so that you can download them. And we have also created the RDF files of those images so that you can have those images integrated into your own systems. And those can be downloaded at the link that it's provided at the bottom of the slide. So apart from the taxonomy, we also created the RRI toolkit. The RRI toolkit is a page which contains courses on Responsible Research Innovation and Open Science, because as we said, those two terms go together. And we wanted to make it a gateway, like a one-stop place where someone could start learning about a specific topic. And we wanted people to be able to go there and find their way around things, not to feel that they are lost in too much information, not to feel that the environment was not clear, but it had a lot of noise around it so that people would feel overwhelmed. We wanted a tool that would be straightforward and it would have content on the most hot topics relating to this specific RRI and Open Science concept. And of course, these courses they were created by experts in the field who understand the topics and are very much knowledgeable about the various concepts and also about the creation of those short courses. And the other concept that we had in our mind is to think of our users, the stakeholders, those who would go and take those courses and get trained. And what we wanted is that we wanted them to leave the page and feel that they have gained skills and they feel that they have gained expertise, so that they know that the time that they have invested it was totally worth it and they can also go back to their daily jobs and apply either to their own research or by training others on those specific ideas. Therefore, we have created courses that are right now hosted at the RRI toolkit. And those courses are short, they are between an hour and a half and three hours to complete. And the kind of features that you're going to find in the course is that we have brief paragraphs, we have images, we have accordions, we have created infographics, presentations, we have short videos from experts or animated videos from resources that we already found available on YouTube, for example. So we did not try to create new knowledge. The purpose was primarily to make a combination of both existing knowledge and then look at creating our own content if we were not in position to find something new. And the courses are in English language to begin with, but they have an open license so they can be translated. And for the time being, the level of knowledge is introductory and the audience varies because our stakeholders vary. So we have a very big variety of audience that those courses are addressed to such as PhD students, researchers, companies, funders, research administrators. And of course we have quizzes. This is something that we practiced a lot during the foster project and we found out that the quiz makes a user understand more the concepts and also gives an incentive to keep taking courses and working on them. And this is why we created the quizzes so that we are able to assess the learners but also be able to give them an understanding of how much knowledge they have gained via this course. Now we have created six courses and all are in basic concepts around responsible research and innovation and RRI. So we wanted to have a course on the introduction of RRI for those who are brand new to the concept and we presented at the very first position in our courses list because this is what we believe the course that everyone should start if someone is not familiar with the concept. And then we took basic concepts around RRI that we thought that they were very popular. So for that reason we created the course on how to engage the public with RRI. What does RRI mean with regards to companies and industry and how this can be conducting business in a more RRI way. And then we tried to combine the concept of RRI with existing or perhaps a little bit more used terms such as data ethics or open science or open and fair research data. And of course the RRI toolkit cannot stand on its own but it is combined also with the existing foster courses that were created and were ready already. So for example this is one slide of the Responsible Research and Innovation for Companies course where over there you can see approximately what kind of features its course has. So for example on the very top you can see a little bit of the text where it tries to explain a little bit the concept and what is happening right now in this specific case at the European Union level and then how a company defines its own RRI strategy. So this section over there it has like very small tips on the side, two videos under it and then at the bottom on your left hand side you can see a sample of the quiz questions for this specific course. So all these courses are for free for anyone to take, you don't even have to log in to take them but you are required to log in only when you would like your progress to be tracked and that's because it is very difficult to track your progress if you don't log in. And you need to log in in order to get the badges for the courses. This has not implemented yet but it's going to be implemented soon and of course before the end of the project. So along with the courses we are going as Pedro has already announced, we are going to create learning paths. The purpose of the learning paths is not something new. Others are doing it already in other projects but we also implemented this during the foster project as well and we saw that it was working very well. We would like via the learning paths to make users be able to make connections between the various courses so that they can then reach the level of understanding and knowledge to a wider concept in the research agenda. And when a user logs into the course, this means that their progress during the course is being tracked and this means that the user can gain those badges which at the end they can be combined together so that the user gets and receives badges for the learning paths that has fulfilled. So for example we have created four different sections of the learning paths and the first one which is the Open Responsible Research Innovator is the ultimate learning path that someone can have. It contains a lot of courses and the courses are a combination between RRI courses and foster courses and the purpose is for someone to gain the vast majority of knowledge that we think that it's needed right now so that this person is able to understand the concepts of RRI and be an Open Responsible Innovator. But apart from this learning path we also have the research communicator with another set of courses and the combination of which can help them understand better this specific concept that relates to research communication. And then we have the learning paths three and four. The one is for the Open Responsible Researcher and the other one is for the ethical research data scientist. So all these are being set together so that the user can go into the RRI toolkit or in the foster platform where the RRI toolkit is and can find their way around it. This gives a quality of information in the platform and it makes it easier for the stakeholders to feel secure about the knowledge that they are getting that it's not leading them nowhere but it is leading them somewhere and it gives them incentives to be able to start working on it. And apart from the RRI toolkit we also have a trainer's directory. Again this is in combination with the foster platform so over there you're going to find the resources relating to speakers relating to Open Science but you're going to be also able to find speakers relating to RRI as well. When you visit the page you're going to be able to see on the very top that there are three filters and the one is a filter where you can choose by topic, a filter where you can choose by audience or a filter where you can choose by the language. So the trainer's directory is an international directory and even if you plan to have an event of your local knowledge, visit the RRI trainer's directory because there are many chances that you're going to find a speaker who will be able to train your local language, who will be able to speak your local language in case you are having concerns whether a presentation in English for example may not be understandable by everyone because we do understand that all these terms are very difficult to conceive especially if they are presented for the first time to someone in another language. So with regards to the specific RRI trainers, this is the people that we have for the time being and these trainers are in position to present results, to present both in RRI and Open Science events but if you are looking for trainers in your own area and I understand that now due to COVID you may be doing online events but let's say in the future at some point if you would like to have a face-to-face event when we come back to the normal and more traditional way of training, those people could also identify other local trainers in various areas but nonetheless if you have any questions or if you would like to use any of these contacts you should send us an email at e-learning at Foster Open Science EU and we would be happy to train to help you with this. So in total what we have found so far is that the project and the toolkit has received a lot of attention from our stakeholders. As Pedro has already announced, RRI has promoted some events during the course of the project but in general at the Foster Open Science platform there were 55 events created which had the RRI tag and 145 on Open Science and the reason that I am presenting these two concepts together is because the Open Science term is something that we had before the RRI term and because as I said at the beginning of my presentation the term Open Science is an important term in the RRI umbrella therefore I am going to be presenting those concepts together here in our statistics and apart from the 55 RRI events we had 145 Open Science events. New users 3433, with regards to the content it was 446 new RRI related materials uploaded into the platform, 22 RRI courses and we had a vast majority of both monthly views and daily views. And this is everything. Thank you so much for your attention and I think I will have to go back to Antonio and I'm going to stop saying. Yes, thank you Nancy for this and without delay I'm giving the floor to Emma Harris from Orion representing the Orion project. Emma, can you please start sharing. Hi, thank you. Right, yes I will start sharing in just one moment when I can get hold of this. Right, share screen here we go. Okay, share and move that, present. Okay, can everyone see that? I don't know why I always ask that as if you're going to say yes but I assume it's all okay, so okay. Perfect, lovely, great, thanks. Yeah, so lessons learned from Orion Open Science and RRI training. So some of this is a little similar to what we've already discussed it was very interesting to hear from all of you about what you've done and we've followed a quite a similar pattern ourselves but I'll try and bring in a few new elements and if we get time I've even got a couple of many meter things we can do to just do a little taster of some of the elements but we'll see how we go for time on that one. Okay, so the Orion project, EU soft project aimed at increasing the amount of open science and RRI in RFPOs. This involves doing a number of things, co-creation experiments, public dialogues, we funded two citizen science projects and one of them is slightly held up by the pandemic but the other one's doing very well in terms of development. We also did an art science piece, that's the picture, the second one down on the left, which was where an artist did a residency at the Maxwell Brook Centre and then represented her ideas about genome editing and aging and that was very interesting. We also do a podcast every other week where we interview people about different open science topics and of course we do the training which is the focus of what I'm going to talk about now. So we're Work Package 4, we're based as I said at the Maxwell Brook Centre in Berlin and we do the open science and RRI training. So that's myself and then the Work Package leader, Louisa Bengson and our colleague Zoe Ingram. Now Zoe did an interesting gap analysis where she looked at the research institutes in the EU life alliance, so flagship microbiology type, life science type organisations and she looked at what training they did and did they have any open science aspect. And as you can see from this big massive grey box, most of them in 2018 did not. I would imagine that picture looks very different now, not least because of the efforts of a number of projects like ourselves and fit for our RRI. And the one that had the most was CRG, who of course were very much part of the foster project that's being mentioned. So they had some of them had elements of science communication or open data, but very few had specific open science training. So having established that there was a need for open science training, we then thought about our audience and those were PhD researchers, research managers, policy makers, funders. So we divided the training loosely into researchers and funders and research managers. So we delivered slightly different training as you can imagine for those two groups. So the training we delivered, we did nine half or full day training workshops where we were the main event, if you will. And then we did 23 conference workshops and seminars where we came in for an hour or two and just did a workshop as part of a bigger event. That was across 13 countries. We also did three webinars. I think that might have increased by now. We did two live runs of the MOOC, which I'll talk about the matter of open online course, and we're doing a trainer trainer in October. So next month. So the in person workshops were structured around different activities. So we'd usually start with a question board where people could raise their motivations. For being there and also ask a question and that was a good way because it meant at the end we could go through all the questions and make sure everybody had their question answered. We do a card activity, which is based on the foster open science cafe cards and also the Heary similar similar development. So we give those out and in pairs people would talk about their card and whether they agreed or disagreed. It was a nice icebreaker and also it got people thinking about the issues behind open science and RRI. And if we get a chance, I'll show you how we've adapted that a little bit to the online world that we now live in. We also did brain walking. This is where people will have a marker pen. There's three flip charts with topics so open access, open data and science communication with the usual ones. And everyone walks around and basically brainstorms in silence by writing any tools or ideas or what have you on that. Case studies, fairly self explanatory role play. This is where someone is the bad guy. And then the two or three other people in the group have to persuade them of open science. And that's always a nice one to do after lunch. It really wakes people up. It's quite a high energy thing. Then we did meet the expert and I think this is really important and kind of goes towards some of the things Nancy was talking about in terms of localised experts. Now this, we didn't do this in a different language, but in terms of having that local knowledge, that institutional knowledge or national knowledge, I think this is really important. So this is our way of trying to get around that, which is we'd have like a librarian or a senior researcher come in and give a presentation about what the status of open science and RRI was like in that institution. We also gave a presentation to kind of ensure everybody understood all the major terms. And then at the end we do something called individual action plans, which was basically people wrote what they would do in one week, one month and one year for open science and RRI. And again, Zoe Ingram did some analysis on this to look at what people were actually saying they would do. And you can see that they've far and away that the biggest one is the almost last one from the bottom is further educate myself on open science. And I think this was really important in showing us that our primary role as trainers were to provoke, you know, that that position change to wait people up to the fact that open science was a thing that they could use and that that you know that they were these tools and things available and to give them that insight into those those concepts as opposed to maybe more hard say open data training which is more of a skills based training. So we what we were doing was more kind of raising awareness than maybe training and detailed, you know, like I say skill training. But we did do more sort of skill based training in the the MOOC, which yes, so hopefully going to show you a video I don't even know I don't think you'll get sound but you might get the the video so this is the the MOOC the massive open online course that we develop. It was six modules across six weeks, each dealing with different aspects of open science, and they were expert contributors from across Europe. Now that did not work. Hold on. Yeah, so hopefully give you a kind of taster of what the course kind of involved so we had forums and so forth to encourage a kind of feeling of community and we ran it live so people did it between set dates as you can see here the last one run the February 2020 that's when it started. And now it's standalone so people can take it anytime and obviously we try and answer questions and so forth for the duration of the project. We hand over 300 participants river 25% completion rate which is, I don't know how familiar with e learning but the completion rates are usually very very low like anything between two and five percent. But I think even those who didn't do the full course and so get the certificate still benefited from doing maybe one or two modules and now it's completely standalone and open people can come and just do whichever modules they wanted. They want to so I mean, we found that was it was it was it was quite challenging obviously, but it was a really good experience and the feedback we got was was brilliant. So yeah I mean if anybody wants to ask me more specific questions about that I'm happy to to talk about that. So yeah this I was going to do the training activity. Do we have time for that it'll take like three minutes I imagine five minutes maybe. Yes, I think it's okay. Okay, so then I've got type of that. So yeah, go to Mentimeter and type in that code and hopefully this will work. Meanwhile, I will ask also if you have questions please type them in the chat. Thank you. Okay, this is working very nicely. It's good to see. Yeah, so this is as I was saying this is like adaptation of the foster card game. And yeah what we would do if we had more time is we do this and then we'd have breakout groups in the discussion. So people could could talk a little bit about why they they formed those opinions. But yeah this is just to show you kind of one of the adaptations that we've made and that, you know to maybe start thinking about I mean I don't think covid's going away anytime soon unfortunately. We need to be thinking about future proofing our research. And I'll say a little bit more about that. Just at the end very quickly. I'm going to give it a couple more seconds and then I'll move on to the next one. Okay, so yes. Interesting the split in opinion actually scientific publishing will always be dominated by commercial publishing houses so that we have, we have some cynics I think that that aren't as optimistic as I would be about the future but that's. Yeah, at the same time perhaps they're just realists so yeah. Okay. So you see how this works and you can see how this could be used to spark discussion. The next one. Best arguments for open science and all right so basically like just elevator pitches just really really just quick arguments that you've heard you know maybe in a couple of words. This is kind of to represent the role play thing so if again if we had more time. You'd have to maybe put the best counter arguments. So why shouldn't we have it, and then you'd have, you know, best arguments for so for and against, and you could do that in groups or whatever. Because obviously the role playing thing doesn't really work in in a video chat situation, because you've you've got a situation where you'd be talking over each other, which really doesn't work in in a video thing you can really only one person can talk at once so. Yeah, this would be a way of, of, again, kind of having that nice just science done right. Having that without the, the, the need for the sort of vocal back and forth if you understand what I mean. So I'm going to give people a little bit more time for that. Because obviously you've got to write things democracy. Yeah, adapting science to a change in society impact visibility transparent open science will improve the reproducibility of scientific results social return on money invested in research transparency trusting and quality of science. These are lovely. This will maximize the investment in science more transparent. So I'll take one more, and then I will get back to the presentation because there was a couple more things I wanted to say. Very quickly. There we go nine perfect. It's nice and symmetrical on my screen, improving transparency and quality of the, of research workflows and outcomes. That's excellent. Yeah. So yeah, that as I said would be an adaptation of the role play exercise. So let me just. Okay, right. So just a quick word about the train the trainer that we're doing. We're running that from the 19th of October to the 4th of November. It's a hybrid model. So asynchronous and synchronous training, which again I have a typo and that's really bothering me actually going to change that. Okay, synchronous learning. So that basically what it is is there's live webinars and then there's new learning course that people can do at their own pace. That's what that means basically. We're going to have 21 participants. We had to actually limit it. Because the course will culminate in the participants in groups of three doing micro training for the Berlin Science Week. So we're going to have a day where there's an open science cafe and twice an hour. So for 20 minutes at like on the hour and then half past the hour, the groups do a micro training in a topic of open science. So we had to limit the number of participants unfortunately because obviously they couldn't have sort of 100 micro trainings. So we had applications and we have our successful applicants represent 17 different countries from from all over the world and that's this is what I actually wanted to say about COVID and future proofing is that while of course there are many advantages of in real life training. It can limit the people who can attend in terms of geography and cost and so forth. So while it's nice to have that human connection and to be able to do certain things. I think even when the pandemic is over we should think about training that allows people who are maybe not in Europe or not in these big institutions to be involved. Because we've got applications from Kenya and Malaysia and so forth and those people would never have been able to partake of this if they if it hadn't been for COVID if it hadn't been the fact that we switched to everything online. So I yeah I just as like I would like to talk about this in the in the next session as well, but going forward I think we really need to think about ensuring that we include more, more people and using online technology to do that and be more, more global if you like. Sorry, Emma, we really need to wrap up. Yeah, I have literally one more slide. That's it, then I'm done. Yeah, no problem at all. Sorry, I knew I was running over time. Yeah, so the key principles that we use we focus on professional benefits kind of what's in it for the researchers or the funders like what can they gain from it encouraged peer to peer learning I think I demonstrated that so it's about people talking to each other not us talking at them. Emphasizing concrete but achievable next step so that's the individual action plans. And the other thing I'd say is utilize existing resources and people, which I think has been demonstrated by the other presentations anyway you know don't reinvent the wheel, you probably have expertise and existing training packages there. Everything that we've made is on Zanodo. And you can, you can use it it's all CC by of course so and also just contact us if you if you have any questions or one thing like that's it. Sorry, there we go. Emma, this is this was really interesting and thank you for your contribution. I think we can make any questions that people may have in the following session because we will be talking about the community involvement. For our eye, and also the contributions of the foster plus projects and fit for our eye and Orion, we will be having a green a kushma from Eiffel. And she's also the coordinator for the community of practice of training coordinators from open air, and also a lawyer Rodrigues for which was the coordinator for the foster plus projects. And so, we will can all meet in the in the next session and we will talk some more on all of these matters. Okay, so thank you so much. You can see the link for the next session in the chat. So, we will be starting in four minutes. Okay, we really need to close here. So, thank you all Emma and Pedro and Nancy for this and let's meet in a few minutes in the next session. Thank you. Okay, perfect. So be aware of the of the link for the next session so we can have five minutes of break and join the other session. So Emma, we can raise some of these issues in the in the next day. Let's discuss. We have also too many meters for the discussion to help the discussion. Just to discuss around this community of practice that's that's too. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks. So the links are in the chat. So for those that are still connected, feel free to click and access the other session. Okay, thank you.


Okay, so I'm here to introduce the first session and to tell you a little about the format of the session. So this session is going to have three speakers talking about the revision of the ACMG list. We're going to give them a chance to talk. We're going to have a few questions per person, but then at the end we'll have 20 minutes for group discussion of this topic. As most of you know, the ACMG had a list of 56 gene disease pairs. They considered actionable, and this was recently altered to a list of 59. And Wendy Chung was part of the panel that made the revision, so she's going to tell us about the 2.0 version of the test. And then Sharon Plahn is going to give a little feedback with a perspective on some of the genes that might have less evidence than you'd hope for. And Ian Krantz is going to give some perspective on a pediatric population needs with respect to this, and then hopefully we can have a robust discussion. So we'll start with Wendy.


Hi, my name is Gabriel Guillaume. I'm the president and CEO of Livwell, Colorado, and I'm excited to be joined here by Tameka Butler, the executive director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust. And Tameka was fantastic today in speaking at our Healthy Eating and Active Living Summit that we've held over the last two days. Really talking to us about a variety of different things, including community, including land use, and including racism, which is an important topic here as we really discuss what's getting in the way of healthy eating, active living, and a lot of other healthy behaviors. Tameka, you had so many wonderful things to say. I've got a long list of questions, but only time for a few. I really thought some of the things you said about the difference and distinction between allies and accomplices was really important to hear, particularly for the group of people in the room today. Could you elaborate a little bit on the distinction and how you see that being really important in moving this work forward? Sure. So as I talked about earlier, I think that everybody's on a journey and everybody's on a different journey, and there are different steps to that. A lot of folks are just actors in this fight against isms. They're just showing up as the well-meaning person, the well-meaning liberal, the well-meaning dude who respects women, the well-meaning whatever it may be, but they're just acting and they're not really doing anything actively to change the landscape. And when you graduate from that, you move on to being an ally. And so it's not that being an ally is bad in and of itself, but in order to truly be an ally, it has to be more than a noun. It has to be a verb. You have to actually do something. You can't just be passive. And so some folks, you might hear a comment in a room and you might say something in that moment. You might go home later and write something on Facebook about how what the person said was wrong. So you're doing something, but you're not necessarily always shifting the dynamics and you're not always saying something. And I think the real step, what I was saying earlier is we're at a time where we need more than allies. If that's where you are on your journey, we appreciate it, but we need more. We need accomplices. And so we need people who are really trying to shift the narrative, who are really trying to break free of the constructs and who are really trying to change the way that society oppresses folks and they're doing work to dismantle those structures. And so they're actually accomplices and most important, they're willing to lose something. They're willing to risk something. And they're willing to go all in and be co-conspirators and dismantling white supremacy. And if you're not at that level, then there's still work to be done. Right, right. That's an excellent point. I think for me and a lot of other of my white colleagues, both within the organization at LiveWell and others, first start with this realization of, wow, I've had a lot of great things happen in my life and privilege actually may have played a role in that, not just something I accomplished on my own. That is kind of an early stage as you become an accomplice, hopefully. How do you use that privilege? How would you see people effectively using that privilege to create real change? Because that's a lot of the tool a lot of white people have is that privilege to start with. You're absolutely right. And there's that moment, that realization for so long. But I worked really hard. And no one's saying that folks didn't work hard. It's just think about the folks who aren't white, who aren't cisgender, who aren't, you know, from educated homes or both parents were there. All these different things that make privilege. I have privilege because of my education, because I grew up with both of my parents in the home. So there's this realization where it's, you know, not, I didn't work hard. It's I worked hard, but there's folks who have to work harder, and that's because I have some privilege. And once you have that realization of, oh, yes, privilege is a thing, I think what a lot of folks do is start feeling guilty. And when they start, you know, apologizing and saying, it's not, it's not my fault. I'm not the one who did this bad thing.  And folks get really lost in the apology and the guilt of all of it. And I think once you start being an accomplice, it's realizing that privilege. It's acknowledging it, and it's not doing it once and then moving forward.  You know, you got to come out a lot. It's not like you just say it once. For me, you know, people know when I walk in the room, but for many people it's not just that you say it once and then you never have to say it again.   And then when you're in the space where you're able to do that regularly and get past the guilt, it's how do you use that? How do you use it to be an accomplice, to dismantle white supremacy? How do you use the fact that there are some rooms you can get in that I can't get in? And when I'm not in that room, but you're in that room, how can I trust you as my accomplice to still be doing that dismantling work? And so do you just feel guilty and do you say, you know, this is just overwhelming? I'm not going to do any of this work. I can't do it. I'm not the right person. I'm just not going to speak. Or do you really use that to move forward? You know, I think that one privilege that many of us share is that we work in institutions that get to try to move this change forward. And for many of us, we are working in communities. We're listening to community. We're learning from community. We're trying to encompass within our work what community is seeing as relevant in their community. But I also know that that can get convoluted at times, right? And so one of the things that I was thinking about when I heard more about your organization was you were doing an incredible job of listening to the community about how to change a piece of land, what to do with that piece of land, and ultimately improving that piece of land. Do you get pushback on your contribution to gentrification that may result as a result of improving that piece of land? How do you deal with it? We definitely do. And I think part of the issue is the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, I think is an organization that builds parks and gardens. I think we do it better than any other organization. I think we put the community and we put equity and we put racial justice and food justice. I think we put those things first. But we're still not perfect and we're still an institution with privilege. I get paid a really decent salary to do that. And I'm still relying on community members to help me do my job. And though we have a model where we, you know, pay stipends and we try to, once the park is built, go back to community members and hire those folks to be groundskeepers. I know my paycheck is more than the groundskeeper. And he or she is probably on the ground every day doing, you could argue more for that park and more for that community than I am in my office in downtown Los Angeles. And so I think it is tough because what we have to realize is that privilege and power work together. And what often happens is sometimes we are the folks with the power and sometimes we are the folks without it. Sometimes we're the folks with privilege and sometimes we're the folks without it. And you're constantly switching places and it's how do you not play victim always and how do you step up when you're the one with that. And I think for us it was this intentional push and continuing to push ourselves. And this next year we're going into a strategic planning process. And part of the reason we're going into a strategic planning process is because the world is changing from when we started 15 years ago. It doesn't mean racism and displacement wasn't around 15 years ago. But we're in a different place in our country, that's just true. And so maybe 15 years ago we could have been a park organization who's doing everything right. But what's our lens on homelessness? Are we the kind of park developer that builds a bench with an armrest in the middle so people can't sleep there? Are we the kind of park developer that engages homeless folks in our community engagement meetings? What are we doing about the cost of housing? Are we thinking about how our park is elevating property value? Or do we say, you know what, that's a housing issue and you know what, that's a homelessness issue. And you know what, that's a transportation issue. And so I think it's being willing and it's tough because the golden rule of a nonprofit is not to have mission creeps. And so it's tough to be core to your mission and be aware that you don't want to take on multiple things. I always tell my staff, we don't want to be mediocre at a lot of things. We want to be excellent at a few things. But being excellent at a few things means we still have to be informed. And so how do we make sure that we're not allowing ourselves to just be in a silo of just parks or just gardens or just food justice and really thinking about the other issues because the folks who are using our parks, the folks that are using our gardens, they have all of those issues that impact their life. That's right, yeah. I think it's also very indicative of this balance between being issue-based and place-based because place has all the issues in one place. And issue is extremely relevant to certain things, but you only have this limited way in which you can engage. And that's been something I think a lot of organizations are trying to address. What I've seen and I'm curious to get your thoughts on is more of the nonprofits that have their very clear idea of what they're doing, but participating in these broader coalitions that are trying to look at the broader picture and bring each of their own talent to those issues so that as a coalition they can be more place-based. Curious to know how you guys are doing that. Same way. I think for us it's really making sure we're comfortable with the spaces we're in. And when we can add our expertise, volunteering that expertise, but knowing that we don't always have to lead in those spaces, we don't always have to get the accolades, we don't always have to get the grants. And how do we make sure we're in the right collaborative spaces and we're honest with ourselves about when those collaborative spaces are becoming places where it's just you go to be seen and the work's not getting done and making sure we best utilize our time. And I hear folks, right, like I'm the first one to say it's all about community, but I'm also the executive director of the organization. So I have to make real decisions about resources and strategies and whether or not we can be yes at every table. And so I think for me it's also listening to my staff. I'm like, we have to be at this table. This is an important issue. And they're like, we don't have the capacity. And our community, like that is an issue and we do need to talk about it, but there's this other thing that is more of a priority. And so I think my number one lesson is, again, staying aware and staying connected, but staying nimble and staying flexible while also staying core. And that's why to me being an ED isn't easy. It's the best job in the world and it's the hardest job in the world because none of us get into this work just because it's because we care. It's because we see the issues and the reason so many nonprofits get into trouble is because it's hard for us not to say yes because we want to help. And we have to realize that if we're at capacity and if our staffs are burned out and if they don't understand why they're showing up at a particular collaborative space, none of us are going to be doing our best work. That's an excellent point. I think right now, and I hope it's out of reaction to what community is demanding that more and more nonprofits, at least here in Denver, are taking on this commitment to racial equity. And yet, I would say the vast majority of nonprofits in our state are still run at the executive director level and in the board by white leadership. What advice do you have to those leaders about how to really create a racially inclusive organization? So one of the reasons I got into nonprofit management is because it was interesting to me on an intellectual level. So before I did this, I was an employment lawyer and I was a civil rights legal aid employment discrimination lawyer. And before I went into nonprofits when I was leaving law, I was actually thinking about getting a PhD in organizational management because these questions are actually the questions in addition to structural racism and community gardens and parks. These are the issues that really matter to me. And that's why I say it takes every level of the organization and it takes really examining all of our practices. You know, when you're a hospital or an agency whose mission is to be in low income communities of color and you do that but then you don't hire anyone from those communities, you don't actually give as much back to that community as you're taking from that community. So you're in that community and you're serving that community but the folks who are coming to see you never see anyone who looks like them. So in some ways you're reinforcing this narrative for them that to be successful you still have to look different than them and be willing to give back. And so we have to really think about what are the small things we do? What are the small ways that we measure success when we write our job descriptions? When we say what we're looking for? When we talk about how important it is to have this skill or how important it is to be able to do this? Who are we excluding from jump? Who are we just not even talking about? When I first started at my organization I got the offer I was really excited and I said all we need you to do is a background check and I said I'm happy to do the background check and I can understand if you all have a policy that anybody who's going to be working with money like an executive director has to do a background check but do we do them for everybody? And they said, you know, yeah we do and I said why? They said, I don't know, I think we've always just done that and I'm like yeah we have a program at a high school is that why we do it? Is it just for the people who work at the high school? Does the school district require us to do it? Yeah but I don't know that that's why we do it for everybody and it's those kinds of questions what are the small things that no one on my board was trying to exclude anyone? Half of the people on the board are new and they just inherited the policy and so they don't know why it's there but who are we unilaterally just signaling this might not be the job for you. The little words you put at the bottom of a job description we encourage who you encourage to apply. My first day I changed it and I changed it to say more than we encourage diverse candidates to apply. It's explicit, it says no matter nationality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation you know and it's longer but I want it to be clear that those things matter to us and so it's all of those things on your website. When I was coming up in San Francisco as a legal aid attorney our website has a button you can press and it translates everything fact sheets you know blog everything to Spanish press another button it translates it to Mandarin who are we saying that we accept and then once those folks feel like they're in affinity with our organization who are we developing who are we pushing out because they're not you know they're not professional in the way we think they should be professional who are we saying you know they just can't do the things we want them to do and who are we investing the resources in to provide the professional development support and mentorship to get them to a point where they you know ascend to a board or they ascend to lead the organization and those are the things we have to think about. That's a great point. Thank you so much for the time that you spent with us and for everything that you're sharing and thank you so much. Really appreciate it.


Welcome to the Mises Academy podcast. I'm Danny Sanchez, Director of Online Learning at the Mises Institute. For this episode I interviewed Peter Klein, Executive Director and Carl Manger Research Fellow at the Mises Institute about his Lou Rockwell.com article, Universities to MOOCs. We will assimilate you. Universities used to have in the medieval era a certain independence from the state that they were granted charters that gave them certain rights and they were protected by the church which during the Middle Ages was separate, was rivalrous with the state. But later the universities were assimilated and you had things like ministries of worship and instruction and the intellectual bodyguard of the Hohenzollern like we talked about before. In your article you talked about the state through its university appendages may try to assimilate the MOOCs and other alternative education offers. Do you see that happening? Do you see them being successful in that? And if they can't assimilate, if they can't join them, will they kill them? If they can't assimilate them, will they crack down on them? Yeah, that's an interesting sort of case study of the kind of general principles that we're talking about. So the ability to deliver courses at a distance, of course we've had that for decades, so-called correspondence courses, but then with the rise of the internet and streaming audio and video and so forth, it seems pretty obvious that you can have a learned individual and expert communicating knowledge or facilitating a conversation among a large group of, smaller large group of students without all being physically present in the same room. You can do it through video conferencing and audio conferencing and you can send them the articles as electronic documents, they can read e-books and so forth. So when these technologies first became available, they were adopted by the new entrants. The for-profit vocational schools were much quicker to adopt these kinds of distance learning technologies, online learning technologies than the privileged incumbents, but the incumbents saw the writing on the wall and they said, yeah, well, we need to offer distance learning courses too. What people call a MOOC. MOOC is just a distance learning course with lots and lots of students and typically open enrollment, so one doesn't have to be admitted to MIT to take a MOOC that's offered by MIT. You just go to a website and maybe you sign up or you just click and watch the video or whatever. MOOC standing for Massively Open Online Courses. Right, so it's an online course that is open to anybody who wants to take it and typically on a very large scale, hence the M for Massive. So there are a lot of private companies that provide MOOCs, sometimes on their own, sometimes in partnership with universities who supply the professors and the curricula and so forth. One of the things that I think has been fascinating is that the established universities, originally sort of slow to embrace the MOOC, are now starting to bring it on, are now starting to jump right into the fray and say, oh, yeah, yeah, of course, we're all about MOOCs. We think MOOCs are great. You shouldn't take it from a private company. You should take it from us and then you get our high quality. Essentially, this is a way of kind of co-opting the technology, of assimilating the technology as you said when you asked the question. But as I mentioned before, if you look at the history of technological innovation, it's been very, very difficult for incumbents to be successful in incorporating the new technology into their traditional business. The classic reference on this is a very influential business book by Clayton Christensen called The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen introduced a concept that he called or popularized what he called disruptive innovation. And he pointed out that incumbents for a variety of reasons, because there's a lot of inertia. They already have a lot of established routines and procedures that have evolved to fit the old technology. They have an existing revenue stream from using the old model, which might be threatened by the introduction of the new model. It's generally easier to start with a blank sheet of paper and create kind of a new business model that uses the new technology. It's very, very hard for successful incumbents to switch from the old technology to the new or to, you know, embrace the new and parallel with the old. As I said before, we see this in, you know, transportation and manufacturing and most of the high tech sector. And everybody knows that if you look at digital music, right, when digital, the technology for MP3s and so forth came about, it wasn't the record companies that figured out a way to make money from selling digital music. They tried and failed completely. It was Apple, not a new company, but Apple was a new entrant into the digital music and media space. It was an outsider that figured out a way to successfully incorporate this new delivery method and storage method for playing songs. And of course now the record, the established record companies, they want to use that same technology. They want to put their song, distribute their songs through iTunes and so forth. But again, the universities today are in the same position as the record industry. And it just, it doesn't seem likely that they would be very good at incorporating the latest and greatest distance learning technology. Now the article that you mentioned that I wrote was playing off an article in Slate that referred specifically to what they call the flipped classroom model. So what they mean is the traditional model is the professor gives a lecture. The students listen to the lecture. Then they go home and they're in the lecture hall listening to the lecture. Then they go home and they do homework problems and write essays and those kind of, you know, small group activities on their own. Then they come back the next day. The professor gives another lecture in the classroom and so forth. The flipped model says, well, why not do those things in reverse? So if the professor can record the lecture onto a video, then the students can watch the video at home. And then when they come to the classroom, the professor can work with them on homework problems and different sorts of exercises and so forth. So it's, you know, flipping what you do in class versus what you do at home. Now, this is hardly a new model. This is a very well-known, you know, idea of making the best use of face-to-face time. And most studies show that we best retain information, not when we hear it in a lecture, but when we get it out of some kind of problem-solving technique or a Socratic dialogue, you know, discussion using the so-called Socratic method. So good college teachers have always known that you shouldn't spend all your time during class hours lecturing. That's not an effective way to teach. You should engage in Socratic dialogue or have interactive, you know, group activities and problem-solving and so forth. The idea with the MOOCs is, oh, well now it's easy to do that because all the lectures will be online and we'll just, you know, solve homework problems in class. The problem is teaching by giving a lecture contrary to what people often think is much, much easier than teaching through, you know, carefully structured interactive activities. Most faculty members in regular universities are not trained how to do anything other than give lectures. They're not very good at organized problem-solving sessions and if they're, you know, research scholars with PhDs, they're probably vastly overqualified for doing the kinds of things that, according to this flipped model, they should be doing. The idea is while the students watch the lectures and then, you know, famous Professor Smith helps them with their homework when they're in class. Okay, I mean, fine. If you want to use that model, that's great. But why on earth would they want to pay $100,000 for some homework tutoring sessions with Professor Smith? They can more easily get the homework tutoring online or from a much more effective and lower-cost provider. Yeah, it seems that it's such a waste when you have not only intellectuals of that caliber spending a lot of time doing... A lot of times they're really great at lecturing, but they're not necessarily great at helping students through problem sets and whatnot. And so that seems like a misallocation. But there's also a broader misallocation in terms of unappreciated teachers going all the way back to Johann Sebastian Bach when he was an instructor at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. I was reading up his biography and talking about how the students there had no idea what kind of a genius that they had trying to teach them and pulling his hair out, trying to get them to do their exercises. Same thing with Murray Rothbard at Brooklyn Polytechnic and UNLV. The students there had no idea what they had. So with these online courses, it seems that you have more of an opportunity for students who would really appreciate working with them to find them and for them to come together. That's right. I think we need to bring it back to this idea of the cartel that you mentioned before. Most of what established universities and university faculty are doing now about how to use MOOCs or how to restructure the classroom or whatever, ultimately it all comes down to protecting their current position, right? Universities don't want their funding cut and professors don't want to lose their jobs or have their salaries cut. That's ultimately what they're aiming at is how do we handle this new technology in a way that maintains our privileged position in society, etc. That's why this is such a threat. Again, if you go back to this idea of the MOOC or just video lectures more generally, let's say the subject is American history, 20th century American history. Under the current model, every college and every university has at least one, two, three, four professors with PhDs in American history who are teaching that intro to 20th century American history course and, you know, not necessarily living an extravagant lifestyle but making a pretty good living doing that job. Now we have the ability for students at every college and university, for students in every city and town to get that lecture, not from the professor on their campus, but from some professor somewhere out in cyberspace who happens to be the world's best lecturer, who can give a brilliant talk on some aspect of 20th century US history and who knows where this person is located and this person may or may not also be a famous researcher. This person may just be a great lecturer. What the professor in your hometown college doesn't want is his students getting that lecture from somebody else and notice how it scales up. I mean, if this person is really great and they're lecturing into a camera, 10 students, 100, 1,000, a million students can all watch the lecture and get a much better lecture than they would get from the local professor. Now, of course, there are some differences. There are some cases where you need somebody on site for more interactive things, but there are many cases where one professor who's really good at it can give that lecture in a way that's much more effective than having every professor do it. But you see, of course, that's a huge threat. If I'm a professor of American history, I don't want to lose my job to the MOOC just as, you know, I don't want to lose my factory job to a robot or whatever. I want to keep the robots out and I want to keep the MOOCs out. Or I want to incorporate the MOOCs as a supplement somehow. I just don't want them to be a substitute for me and for my job. That's why this model is so threatening to sort of the traditional structure. So what the universities have done is to say, oh, yeah, we're all about MOOCs. We're all about distance learning. But for example, if you're, say, you know, University of Wisconsin, just to pick a random example, they'll say things like, yes, now all of the professors at Wisconsin can give lectures into a webcam so that, you know, the teaming masses in Southeast Asia or in sub-Saharan Africa can now consume our professor's courses. Wow, isn't that great? Of course, you see that means no unemployment for University of Wisconsin professors. What they don't want is all of their students taking the lecture from some guy in India who happens to be better at giving the lecture than their own faculty. The universities see the MOOC as something that they're only interested in it if it can enhance their status position. They're not interested in it. They will fight it. They will resist it if it means a threat to their business model. Yeah, not everybody can teach math like Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. And so his Khan Academy website has been used. It was one of the most prominent early uses of flipping because a lot of math teachers would use. They would have the students watch the Khan Academy videos at home and then do problem sets in the classroom. And so you have Khan as sort of like a rock star instructor and he's a celebrity instructor and is based on merit. And there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about Kim Ki Hoon in South Korea who earns $4 million a year as a rock star teacher that he's been teaching over 20 years in the country's private after-school tutoring academies. And so it seems that this is more getting towards what Adam Smith talked about. He talked about higher education and higher education in Oxford was especially bad because he said that teacher compensation wasn't tied at all to performance. Whereas in Scotland, a lot of the fees were paid, a lot of the payment was from student fees and student honor area. So do you see that as a really promising development? Well, it could be. It depends on how the structure of the higher education system, how it's changed, how these kinds of things we're discussing are played out. Most universities or in most universities there's a lot of discussion about compensation and sort of merit-based pay all revolving around problems of measurement. How do you measure research quality? Should it be based on the number of publications or the prestige of the publications or the number of citations? How do you measure teaching quality? Should it be based on student evaluations or something else? But you see all of those controversies, those discussions that you can read about in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for the university sector, they all take place assuming that the existing structure of the university remains in place. If professors were freelancers, as in ancient Greece or something where they would sell their research output on a piece-by-piece basis or they would sell their lectures, then you wouldn't have to have a university committee that evaluates quality. You would let the market evaluate quality just as you're describing. And if somebody can attract thousands or millions of students to their MOOC, they would be compensated because the students are paying the professor without the middleman or with the middleman taking the smaller cut. Or in the case of Salman Khan where it's free but he gets so many donations from people like Bill Gates because of the big impact that he's having. Exactly. There are a number of different ways that performance, sorry, that compensation can be tied to performance. But it's much more difficult to do if you assume that everybody is an employee of a big university compensation committee that decides how people should be paid. Rather, if we have a system like the ones we're talking about that's more open where there's more competition, there's decentralization, there's fundamental restructuring, we might have something very, very different. But just as some artists don't like the fact that Thomas Kincaid can be a bazillionaire or people like Norman Rockwell and they don't like high quality art, quote, unquote. So the producers of self-described high quality art will poo-poo the market system. Say, no, no, of course that's why you need, you know, the national endowment for the arts should be doling out the money, not the market, because the market will choose the wrong stuff. It's the same argument that proponents of the market have heard a million times. You hear the exact same thing in Higher Ed.  We can't trust the students to know what kind of higher education they want. It has to be dictated to them by the elites. Well, I mean, the same arguments that we would use to rebut that line of reasoning for art or for automobiles or anything else would apply with equal force to higher education. Thank you.