Lebanon is set to hold elections on May 15. Parties are readying for a campaign, but there is very little enthusiasm among the people for this round of polls. A major reason for the lack of enthusiasm is the feeling that no meaningful change can come from this process. The elections are taking place after a particularly difficult few years of a severe economic crisis and the disastrous explosion in Beirut. Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News analyzes the coming elections and why there is very little excitement among the people. Well, the last two years in Lebanon have been very difficult economically. The country is undergoing an economic collapse. It's being called one of the worst depressions in modern history. And of course, the upcoming elections, as important as the international community feels they are, they really don't seem to be on the minds of most Lebanese because they feel they know that nothing will change. The system is the same. The parties, the political parties are the same. And there's no real hope to change them. The stagnation kind of just continues along. What would inspire all but the most diehard ideological supporters of these political parties to vote anyways, like that's who's going to be voting. So it seems like maybe mainly Western governments care about these elections because in the West, the ritual of going to vote and legitimizing the system is treated as this kind of like religious obligation that epitomizes democracy. And there's a belief among Hisbola and its supporters and allies that the West wants these elections to weaken the free patriotic movement or FPM, which is one of the largest Christian parties in Lebanon and is an ally of Hisbola. And they also feel that the West wants to weaken the other non-Shia allies of Hisbola using these elections. And people believe the West has given up on weakening Hisbola directly. And that's why they want so badly to break these alliances that Hisbola has with such a strong Christian party like FPM. And the FPM itself admits that it'll lose some seats in parliament, though it expects to remain the strongest Christian party. So there's this really like intense competition in Lebanon right now between Christian parties this year. And they seem unable to form alliances. So both those parties, both the ones close to the West and those closer to Hisbola are expected to lose seats. So not just FPM. And then you have the Sunni community. And I would say that the Sunni community in Lebanon right now is more divided than ever. There's no really nationwide party for Sunnis anymore. Now that Assad Hadid has withdrawn, at least for now, from politics and taken the future party with him. So it'll only be local Sunni politicians, meaning a weak result for Sunnis. And even Hisbola actually expects to lose some of its supporters to not other people necessarily gaining more votes, but to those who just want to boycott the vote. So not out of opposition to Hisbola necessarily, but out of a kind of cynicism about elections, making a difference and a real frustration with Hisbola's cooperation with parties that are viewed by the vast majority of people in the country as corrupt, meaning FPM and also ML, the other Shia party. So elections may just kind of enshrine the same order and politicians, in which case why hold them, right? That's the thinking of a lot of people. And the West had placed its bets and its money on the so-called civil society and these kind of Western allied parties who were loud during the uprising that you referenced in 2019. But these parties, these groups, they have no real clear agenda apart from representing a shrinking liberal middle class. And so it's unlikely they'll really get any support at all. They might gain a few seats, what they'll call independent seats, but nobody really thinks they'll gain much more than that. So that's all to say, you know, Hisbola remains the most popular political party in Lebanon. In fact, it even sacrifices seats in favor of its allies in order to help them out. And, you know, there was a speech given recently by Hisbola leader Hassan Nasrallah about the election, saying that these elections will in fact take place and, you know, we're not forcing candidates for these elections. So, you know, that's pretty much what we're at in Lebanon right now. It's these elections, we're just going to kind of enshrine the same system that we have with maybe a few slight modifications. For a long period of time, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies played a vital role in the politics of Lebanon by backing certain leaders associated with the Sunni community. In recent years, this support has dried up as the Saudi strategy has largely failed in the country. What is the approach of Saudi Arabia and its allies likely to be in this election? The current strategy of the Gulf monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, it's really Saudi Arabia strategy we're talking about here, is let Lebanon burn. The Saudis have really just like divested from Lebanon and given up on the idea of having local puppets in Lebanon. Their biggest puppet used to be Saad Hadidi, but he was a huge failure for them on a number of levels. And now he's withdrawn from politics. And there's no one who's stepped in to take his place, though people are trying. It's all local though. There's, you know, Bahat Hadidi, who's Saad Hadidi's brother, but it's kind of like the dumber brother, if you will, of the Hariri clan, who's trying to be the Sunni leader he's based in. But it's mostly like localized to Saida in southern Lebanon. There's Ashraf Rifi and Tripoli. There's Fahad Magzumi, who's this billionaire Sunni politician, but he doesn't really have a base. I mean, none of them really have bases. So there's no Saudi backing for like a strong Sunni figure in Lebanon anymore. The only person that the Saudis are really backing, and not even to the same extent that they backed someone like Saad Hadidi, is Samir Jaja, who's the head of the Lebanese forces party. But he's, you know, it's not to the same extent. So it's a little bit of support. So for the time being, the Saudi strategy is really just to help strangle Lebanon and let it collapse. That's what Saudi Arabia would like to see. And if Trump had gotten a second term in office, Saudi Arabia probably would have had more support for that strategy, let Lebanon burn. The Americans now, though, under Joe Biden, under the Democratic leadership, you know, they of course are still imperialists, but they do imperialism slightly differently than I guess Republicans do. So their view of the situation is they don't want Lebanon to succeed. They don't want Lebanon to get better, but they don't want Lebanon to collapse completely because they think that that would actually benefit his fellow. So for them, it's let's keep Lebanon on life support. And that's what you're seeing right now. You're seeing Lebanon on life support. Now, should a Republican take power in 2024, which is looking increasingly likely given the unpopularity of Democrats and all the failures of the Biden administration, then you probably will see more of that let it burn and help it burn strategy that the Saudis are pushing for. But that, of course, remains to be seen. The elections are also the first after the historic protests of 2019, where tens of thousands of Lebanese people came to the streets demanding systemic change. The protests forced the then Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign and led to many discussions about the future of the country. Nearly three years down the line, what remains of the demands and agenda of these protesters? Will any of these factor in the elections? The idea of completely changing the system around remains in the realm of ideas of more than anybody really presenting any kind of plan that could actually be implemented in order to change the system around, you know, people, if you ask most people in Lebanon, they want an end to the sectarian based system that that that was imposed on Lebanon long ago. They just there's nobody's really put forth the plan and how to get there. And there's also the fact that regardless of people wanting to change the system, there are a lot of parties that do want to, especially these civil society parties that the West supports. The problem is they're not there's no ideological coherence. There's no and there's no economic ideology to back it up. Like, yes, of course, Lebanon's problems. Many of a lot of Lebanon's problems you could say stem from this sectarian based system that that that supports clientelism and this kind of patronage network and supports people and pushes people to to depend on their communal leaders rather than the state because the state is so weak. So some people will say we need a we need a strong state. But that you know, that doesn't necessarily get to the root of the problem if you're not talking about economics because the biggest problem in Lebanon is not just a weak state. It's a weak corrupt capitalist state, right? So you don't have any parties really putting forth an idea of how we can move forward as a country economically and you know, Lebanon also is not a country based in the global north. It's a country based in the global south, meaning it's a country that's also subject to imperialism subject to all kinds of violations of its sovereignty, whether by Saudi Arabia or Israel or the Americans or the French. So many of the voices that are supported by the West who are all about overthrowing the system that exists in Lebanon as corrupt as it is. They don't present a program for how to change that system while acknowledging the fact that it's constantly being attacked by outside forces. So that's why a lot of the people who do support parties like Hezbollah but also do want a change in the system are very much opposed to these sort of like middle class, liberal, very Western oriented civil society active political parties because they see them as extensions of the imperialism that they feel is the bigger issue in Lebanon. Like before you can start to tackle all of these local issues, they see the issue of imperialism and outside powers violating Lebanon's sovereignty as the primary culprit of Lebanon's greatest issues and that's why they're called the state. They are in the resistance axis and they put that kind of before everything else. So all that's to say no one is presenting a program that can take on both the local economic factors as well as the outside meddling that are the biggest obstacles to Lebanon moving forward. For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.


What's up guys? What's the best message so far you guys have gotten this year? Ni yo moka liyanza kitambo. Moka liyanza? Ilisha anza? Kitambo. It's my first day in the studio. Tango moka liyanza. Oje bada ni kwa apiniwe ya. Bada ni kwa mombasa bada. Bada ni kwa posta. Mi kwa bada. Bada ni kwa... Bada ni kwa... Bada ni kwa... So guys, what's up? We wanna do ajawe wrap up in a few. So kama kawa kuna kama ni twa ABCD. Ushene ma kama kaya premali? Ni kumbuka. ABCD ni ba ya sanha sanha. Sa aja bige mi twa kama ni wakanya. Wasa ni wakanya. Wasa ni wakanya. Go spread. Go spread Kenya. Go spread music ABCD ni ba ya sanha. Ya kia nga kise ma. Paneju. Na kwa watoto. So ya bima wakanda practice ma pema. Toka ni kama kama zi mi tula January. First of all, jabidi ame twa ABCD. And then kuna ingine ya mandi. Mandi ame twa nasavara. Have you guys checked that one? Yiko haji zi? Yiko poha. Yiko poha. Ba ya sanha. Bona money views as a song on YouTube. Bona money go ma. Atu eli. Ura na katubo ma na bluetooth. Ni ni wakusha ni to ni audio top. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Bada wa aja. Y cai. Yoro fa addition suggestions hipa Teko nako ni. Yoko ni kuna ni become oldie. Yea both. Yea already. Rob progressing. Ya ayao. Ya in Ya gubadey name zij Hopefully. Chika maniau.ective p'wa tika. ok So this ikona kazi kama ya edukasyon Was tene na none za kwa mi ya mo about ya Was tene, oh my god Was tene na kwa mi ya me kazi ya nizini wits I have another thing that traumatize this man I don't know if it's about some things that have already hit the headline Ku na ktwingine na itu wa mambu ya liki Kuna liki kwa itu ya telegram na pwene kwa edu ya obizi Mambu ni live Kuna mambu ni tse mgaimu waka I don't know if itím about ya Is any ko moa na What's up, man? Is any rumor Inim kokin Rumas I don't know precisely if it's about two M But it's water, water only I can't figure it out Tell me please, it's not about water No comment on YouTube I will not comment I don't know if it's about two M I am just a telegram If it's about two M Two M Okay, mndakam na baby, niki nipaku liki nilza dem Like dem ona, ulu kwa death dem, like she was your surek Like is it nice liki in the nunti? Ah man, si po wa Si po wa sini wa mo? It's a bad thing, right? Nga wei, kama me ulu zatare kaza kwa zi liki wei, kama ma na wad Muxiai tuma Muxiai tuma Muna jwa Wei wa muxiai tuma, niki ni kama me tuma mahali Bale kwenye miira baby Aga ito tuma I see what I'm seeing All death from Kisi Me I'm ready I'm ready But let me just tell that question Let's say now you bought subludes from Achile Can you lick it? Can you lick them? Kuna tuma bayi na sema I just wanna see you naked, like I can buy Like see big deal Like is it?  Don't be so cute... Next week... First week... We are going to a field called Crown. Where? Where? In the Chemka compound. In Chemka? Don't say that. In Chemka compound? Yes, I've been to this place online I've been to Crown. In Chemka compound. Nini, this afternoon... This morning, it's a bit of breaking. It's about a journalist. It's called Tumbele. Tumbele has this issue that the mama, like the mama questions me online and people are getting on with it. It's a story. And if it's going to happen, then young people are going to be bored. And then people are going to be like shaking their heads. So Nini, what's your view on that story? Like is it good? Who do you have a opinion on that story? What's your view on that story? We don't know what the story is about. We don't know what the story is about. So you have a message and a bag? Yes, a message. So what's your opinion on that story? What's your opinion on that story? What's your opinion on that story? I didn't get the idea. I don't know what the story is about. I don't know if I have a focus or something. But what I want is if you don't get it. I don't understand what's going on. I don't understand what it is about. I don't know anything about it. I didn't get the idea. But if you don't understand what is going on, I don't understand what it is about. Kusaputia, so you should follow the sameanyakumutia. We have to understand the teenager something that she's offering you. It doesn't mean she's in the middle of the matter. Ya, witi witi, witi witi, witi witi. I've been in a toxic relationship before. Yaṅga na kumge nili katatutu prafu. Apaate ustanya kuwan gu. Weather that friend is my cousin. Yaṅga na ataki kuwan na skata? Akuna skata pa na vuruga. Ane pa na remote? Ha, we are not raising my hands up, maze, ati when you nani. Wee! Nani, my boys around, my boys are like, who in the best of clothes? When you nani, hey, I'm not this one, I was like, you think I love cake? Unungekama nani, I'm mad, ha, hey. Me am like, what's wrong? So me, me, I don't care about, I don't care about what kind of shower. Who in the nani? I don't know, I don't have to come to any man. Ha, ha, ha, wanna, like, hey, she's bang, maze. So, tzada, tzada, tzada, tzada, buuna threads. So, this show, when I sat down and ask, amuna udemak sana, dhumbana dhumbana dhumbana kabo. So, tzada, kono issue zingan, mehine, zushi hapa maze. ха, man dhaku zuri shiekach karma anthake, dhema nashi karma tahi bako. Mehine, mamo dhumbana in vaji, adsi, mamo zi sheka, so, Icstoriiku shia hapa, mama na watapa na, tata, hoha, tata. Badzi, hudemi nufa, yaa, hey, hapa na viju. wia wia zikura arto wia wia wia wia job ma baby yi uyu wia na piya adibai wia wia na, wia wia wia ni milia atiwa nika atxana bata zinirushi suri tila bata zinirushi bata na bua mia ah, take it ma bata ma macing remotely in the haling girl right kwa saba buu, waila isen ni kuja bwim zendu buu re kabisa bul re kabisa My guys, my guys, three certain so many events and some of the highlights of the events like kuna ziawasani wa likam kenya, kuna niya kukam, kuna event zili bako, kuna event zili weza sana Nani kuna paivi my event organizers, one of the events zingine zili weza sana These are some issues, ish ish I need them to clarify, tell me what happened Na kule naji event ika kuna issues Na binyakrabil ke machanab, so I saw so many things on social media What happened with the event and when was it? Miki rei tiwa tia miki ranzi So, event ii kwa kubu What was the event you were talking about? Chomafes 2023 edition 2023 What was the event you were talking about? Event ii kwa kubu asana Most awaited So sit kwa pala sites What was the event you were talking about? Dasbaian Kiyamu Dasbaian Kwanza dasbaian na jina kafi tipi aninini Sit kwa sites pa lewa Tumaka, saywa ni ingi ingiya Sanda ni, mwantu wan meja na injiya Badotu ni wengi So sit nande liya pala na ticketing Iii, misuka 60 Kido kikumi dasbaian wa kuna case Pa lewa na area police Iii Now say me before the event Tume nika bro Kuna permit Kuna pa kama police kwa ground What's up? Iii Iii By nine Lukuwa sites And this problem is about two area Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Iii Ui Ui Ui And Iii Iii email Uo Ma以 Yes Bor Mongla IHHH Should get ready 11 paka 6 11 paka 6 11 paka 6 ya ya ya kwa pa le na DJ Monjambas Phoenix and Monjambas kwa 6 ma polisi wa na kama polisi wa na mekuhuja conflict of interest mawa na kwen na pa le kufisi ya manager bro kumeku niwa polisi wa na mekuhuja kubs��니다 Sea Sea ya ni metu kufisi ya mekuhuja meki-le terms pays ko merimu mekuhuja gasib earrings kwa ni kupyaan to k subtle asi kawe ya mo kwen la kakufisi kwama datimu na sowed wana dance wakitu wa shalti. Weh. Weh. Nangali nashiguranda. Nasaia bado. Kuna maka ampu zikwa kwa timi. Bado divina. Bado wana daku pa. Sasaunadjwa wana yi yunga venue sasa 6, 7. Neliawa masasaa masasaa masasaa. Sasao sasao sasao sasao sasao sasao. Ay, wali fika iwa na kuguna butua. Kuna. Mambo ii meche muka. Ay. Yaniwa sasao niki kwa sekana. Zopali. Atapeona na wana. The owners wali kwa naishuna na the police. Ay, wami natsini ni. Ay, isipu kwa na pamichu kwa na polisi yotu sa iti. Kama tumi kwa kuna shida. Kama tumi kwa kuna shida. Eventi ngeza from 11 to 6. Ngewa nenewe. Ay, yuki kwa balituwa zi eventi from 11 to 6. Mame kata eventi kama tumi kwa tumi kwa timi ngepa namba 1. Kama tumi kwa na pamich, atunga leta polisi sa iti. So no polisi afuji, lasumu kwa na pepas. Mwana. Nosui tu pia wa likuwa abo kwa matsukua pia. Kwa gawa ni nini. O kuna pia licenseza. Ibu paka na police. Eventi ngekwa na fkesangabu. Eventi ngekwa na fkesangabu. Like the eventual regulation. Closing time. Most probably. Nga dati kuna atuapu yanga syere. Nga baka isi nga. Oh, ay. Paji anto paati. Paji anto paati. So we've been here for a few months. So fresh to come from Wachiawa. We'll be back. Now by our tenants and you know how we already do it. We are back on the second term but we are just gonna say it. The second term is going to be postponed events. And we will be casting the same party. We will see what we can do. We will do events, children and boys. kusitru ki patanata espi mbazi naisho


get underway. Great. Okay good afternoon everyone and welcome to our parallel session today and we have Helen Lockett from the Open University who I've just been speaking to and I'm really looking forward to seeing what she has to say about Open STEM Labs and we have enabled the chat so you can type in the chat everybody and please feel free to put some questions in there. If you do have a question if you could put a Q at the beginning that will help us find it when we're looking for it in the chat but by all means please do comment on it as well as we're going through and I'm just going to close down these slides and pass over to Helen and the second Helen so if you could just get ready I'm just going to stop sharing these and then I will go into our slides and get them set up for you and then we shall pass over. Thanks Vian. Oh sorry thanks. You're there. You're coming along now. There we go. Right hopefully you should see it now. Can you see it now Helen? I can see it now. Can you hear me? We can hear you fine. Lovely. I'm going to close down my mic and my camera now and pass straight over to you. Okay. Thank you. Hi everyone it's great to be talking with you. I'm really sorry I'm not there in the room with you. I think it'd be great if we were all together wouldn't it? It's quite hard doing it from home. I'm going to be talking to you today about the open STEM labs at the Open University and our experience of delivering practical learning at a distance particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic but also before and after. So in my talk I'm going to start by telling you a bit about our open STEM labs the history of them and the the way that we design our experiments and I'll pick up just a few sample activities. I'm afraid I'm not showing anything live today but I've got some nice shiny pictures to show you. Then I'll move on and talk about the reflections on our experiences in the COVID-19 pandemic period and some things that went well and some things that were pretty challenging for us too and try and draw that all together at the end with some lessons learned for the future. So I'm sure you all know practical learning it's an essential aspect of many STEM subjects. It's really important that students get proper hands on expertise taught in a laboratory environment and in conventional universities practical learning is taught in a laboratory with the staff and the students co-located together of course until this year when everything's been different for all of us. At the Open University we've existed for more than 50 years now and we've always had to teach practical learning differently because our students are distance learning students. In the very early days we used to send home experiment kits so if you were studying chemistry you might have got a chemistry kit sent to home, you get engineering kits, computer science and students would have undertaken experiments in their own home and we've always complemented that by keeping an element of face to face too so you might have heard the stories about the OU summer schools in the past and they've changed somewhat but we still have residential schools in many subjects so we have them a week block or a weekend or even an individual day. As technology changed and things moved on we've moved away from the home experiment kits in particular health and safety is quite a challenge with chemistry sending out chemistry kits through the post. So we've worked of different ways of delivering practical learning to students when they're at home and we came up with this concept of the Open STEM Labs as a digital way to deliver practical learning to our students and we do that with our residential schools they work together. So what are these Open STEM Labs? Well they're remote and on-screen laboratories that deliver practical learning to our Open University students and we use them right the way across our STEM faculty we teach bioscience, chemistry, engineering, physics and astronomy and the basic idea the picture shows it the student sits at home in front of their laptop or even a mobile device just using the web browser they connect through perhaps to a remote experiment or a simulation and they are engaging with practical work from home and the Open STEM Lab is actually a cluster of different initiatives that we have at the Open University they've existed over about a 10-year period. So we have an open science laboratory which was the first part of the lab that started in about 2013 and was mostly focused on simulated type experiments. Then we moved on to introduce the Open Science Observatories so the OU has three remote fully autonomous telescopes that students can connect to from home one on our campus in Milton Keynes, two on the island of Tenerife on Mount Hyde in an observatory there and students studying astronomy can connect to those telescopes and observe the sky directly from home. More recently we introduced the Open Engineering Laboratory and that allows engineering students to do remote engineering experiments from home and the final part is the on-campus laboratories so particularly in chemistry with the wet labs we need a real hands-on environment and that sits within the Open STEM Lab's umbrella. And we've had a couple of major injections of funding to develop this so in 2013 we had funding from the Wolfson Foundation to develop the Open Science Laboratory and we had another large funding proposal funded for the Open Engineering Laboratory in 2016 from Higher Education Funding Council for England, just a really substantial initiative. I want to talk about about the concept behind the Open STEM Labs and the sort of principles that were used to develop activities so the sort of vision statement is to bring the laboratory to our users we want to deliver it wherever they are and whenever they need it and we do it using a number of different ways of delivering experiments so we have remote experiments so the picture on the left hand side is an example of that so this is a piece of real physical mechanical engineering equipment sitting in a lab in Milton Keynes and the student through their web browser connects to it is able to control it and to receive data back from it so those are remote experiments and that's one part of our lab. We have on-screen experiments so these are simulated sort of virtual experiments but they always use real data so that's very important to us that students are only ever engaging with real data so the example we've got here is a virtual microscope and they're real specimens that have been scanned and then the student has a software environment where they can interact in the way that they would with a real digital microscope and then the final way we have of delivering experiments is through lab casts so these are kind of live lab demonstrations and we have some software tools to help us to do that effectively where members of staff are describing or demonstrating a real physical experiment and students have means to interact with them while they're doing it I'll show you another example later. So the principle on which all of our experiments are built is we want to provide authentic online practical experience to enhance student success in STEM that's the principle that all of our experiments are built on and then we have these sort of four pillars that all of the experiments are built around so inclusivity making sure the experiments are accessible at any time from any place by anyone they're all built on the open university's distance learning teaching pedagogy so they're designed around either individual or group working it might be in the context of a student led inquiry or a tutor led inquiry and always they're interactive and collaborative so we don't want our students to be able to be passive when they're working in the open STEM lab they can't just sit and watch even with the lab cast they should be engaging and participating. Veracity is very important to us so we want to be sure it's always real data from real equipment in real time and even in those virtual experiments the real data element is important if it's a scan slide of a blood sample there might be something a student can find in there that no one's seen before you know it's real data that they can study and finally authenticity we want to use bespoke teaching tools or industrial grade equipment or research grade instruments but always it should be authentic. I wanted to just reflect a little bit about the physical lab environment because we're all familiar with what a lab looks like and how we work generally together in a lab but once you start designing laboratories to be remote they actually look completely different to the labs that you would normally work in so the picture on the right hand side is from our open engineering lab and what you see is that in order to get maybe 500 students through an experiment in a two-week period we might have 15 or 20 sets of the same experiment set out at one time. We don't need the space for students to move around and interact because we don't have students there so we can use multi-layer racking to do it. An individual experiment might sit on the racks and you possibly see we've got video cameras pointing on the experiment usually more than one video camera two or three cameras so they get a good view and then each experiment will be connected up to a computing equipment at the top of the racking so it's quite interesting that a lab really doesn't look like a lab when it's a remote lab but the experience for the students should be comparable. I wanted to try to get across the scale of the operation at the OU so our open STEM labs are used in about 46 of our taught modules in the STEM faculty and within those modules there's more than 100 open STEM labs experiments that students can undertake and in the last four years or so we've had more than 10,000 individual users use the labs per year so it's really a substantial operation for us and it's embedded well into our STEM curriculum. So before we move on I thought I'd just show you a few examples just to maybe help you visualize what would happen if a student came into the lab. So if we start with a remote experiment this is a scanning electron microscope it's used on a number of our science courses so we have two research grade scanning electron microscopes and they're purchased as remote enabled. When a student wants to use one so their module will tell them the week of the course where they should be using the electron microscope or the period they should be using it. We have a booking system so they can book ahead and students can book an individual slot where they can use it on their own for 30 minutes. They connect on their web browser so this is what they would see just using a normal chrome or edge browser. They are looking directly onto the outputs from the electron microscope so we've got the large screen here where they can see observe the specimen. We've simplified the controls to make it easier for them to interact so the remote scanning electron microscope has a remote environment but it's quite complicated and you could potentially damage the equipment if you didn't understand it so our technical staff developed their own user interface to make it simple to use and protect the equipment. One of the really important things to make this multi-purpose is if you look in the top left so this is kind of an overview of the stage of all of the specimens that the electron microscope can look at at the moment. So potentially we can have 36 different specimens all loaded at the same time and then students from different modules can come in and they'll be told which specimen to work on. It means we don't need technicians going in and swapping specimens over in between different activities. Something like a scanning electron microscope is a really expensive piece of equipment and lots of undergraduates wouldn't get their hands on one in a conventional university because it's just too difficult to get large cohorts of students through an expensive device in the time that's available in timetabled sessions but of course we can run 24 hours a day seven days a week so the equipment is available to our students over such a long period we can get a lot of throughput. I wanted to show you an example of a different kind of remote experiment so the scanning electron microscope really expensive high-cost kit that we need to have only one or two at the other end of the spectrum in electronics they took the decision to have many instances of lower cost kit so this is built on national instruments technology if anyone's interested underneath and the example here is controlling a driven pendulum so when the student logs on the same thing they'll book a slot they'll connect in at that time and through their web browser they have a live video feed of the piece of equipment that was allocated to them they can control the equipment with the controls at the bottom and they'll see a trace of the outputs of the pendulum moving around so again it's an example of a remote experiment that students could control from home obviously there's a challenge with the remote experiments that we have limited resource you need to keep up I mentioned this idea of electronics sometimes will have 10 or 20 pieces of the same kit laid out to get the right throughput so if you have a very large course or you want to be more flexible then the virtual experiments can be more effective so here's an example of one from science so this is an experiment to measure lung function so the students are understanding or they're investigating the effect of say age height sex and whether a smoker or not on your lung function so when the students run the experiment the idea is they come up with a hypothesis maybe you know what will be the effect on lung function of being a smoker they set the parameters as they want them and press start they get a kind of live video with really nice sound of the person performing the experiment they're using a spirometer that is the medical equipment that you use and then they get a trace of the equipment running students can then investigate the hypothesis by rerunning as many times as they want now of course this kind of experiment is scalable to as many users as you want so we have found this really useful for some applications but even though it's a virtual experiment we use a real data set of 7 000 individuals who all performed the experiment it's a published data set from Australia and that's embedded in here so as I said before the students are using real data and then the final kind of activity that we have are the lab casts and as I said before lab casts are kind of live demonstrations so the picture here is one of my colleagues undertaking a lab cast it's in one of our on campus laboratories and we have it set up as a studio so we have three or four fixed cameras that are already embedded in there it means that we can have cameras on the presenter and on their hands and in detail on the specimens that they're working on and we generally present these in pairs so that there's one person actually doing the experiment and another person supporting them and interacting with the students on the chat because it's really important that students are part of it so they can maybe ask questions they can respond to queries and we have a sort of widget set where they can engage with quizzes as well so they feel part of it so the live lab cast is another way that we can deliver practical learning to students it's not hands-on but it's giving them that practical experience and we record them and make them available afterwards but student feedback is that they like to be there on the day and they like to feel part of it okay so I spent quite a lot of time talking about open STEM labs and what the concept is but I guess the main purpose of today is to talk to you about what happened to us in the pandemic period and the things that we got right and things that we found challenging so what happened in the COVID-19 pandemic well I'm sure like everybody here we had this huge challenge you know university campus was closed all of our face-to-face teaching was postponed and of course open university we're a distance learning institution so I'm sure the effect on us was less than others but nonetheless in STEM subjects we do have face-to-face teaching and we had to face that challenge and even for the open STEM labs our campus was closed we had no access to laboratories to set up equipment or resolve problems we had to manage with what we had at home so how did we respond to this situation well the open STEM labs really gave us a head start with being able to continue to support our students in practical learning any experiments already set up we could leave running because they were designed to run 24 hours a day already so we did have a substantial number of activities that were up and live and running we left them running we worked really hard on communicating with the students because we just didn't know how successful we'd be at keeping them running and we knew we couldn't fix some things if they went wrong so we worked on the columns and warned all the students that everything was at risk but we were trying to keep things going as an example in our open engineering lab we had 24 experiment kits online at the beginning of lockdown and that meant that for giving students one hour slots we had kind of 500 experiment instances a day that could be available for student use and we had hundreds of students on modules go through those open engineering lab experiments through April May this year something we really benefited from was the design of the labs that the people designing the labs originally they wanted the equipment online 24 hours a day and they knew they couldn't provide um technician support out of ours so they built in automatic equipment self checks that were run after every student use so typically that's once an hour and then a more substantial reset in the middle of the night every night now we designed these to run on weekends I guess over Christmas maybe nine days but we had no idea that we might have to run them for potentially 60 90 days with no one being able to go to campus to have a look and I think we surprised ourselves at how successful they were at keeping equipment online one of the things they're designed to do is to email the staff if something's wrong with a piece of kit and they would also automatically reallocate kit from something else in the pool if a particular piece of equipment went down so our technical staff working from home could monitor things and there were certain things that they could resolve but we did know that if something went wrong with the hardware there was no way to recover we lost a small number of pieces of kit but generally things were very reliable and we carried on working I wanted to talk a bit about this graph which is quite interesting I'm sorry it's all a bit small to read but essentially it's the cumulative number of users of open stem lab over a six-year period so on the bottom we've got the dates and it sort of starts 2014 and runs up to end of July this year and then on the vertical we've got the number of users and what you see is after a sort of slowish start in the early years typically we have 10,000 new users a year every year using our labs and that's a mixture of open university students and some external users so the blue dash line is the beginning of the lockdown at the end of March so the bid in the circle is the usage of the lab after lockdown and what you see is not only did we keep going but actually we registered a lot more users than we would have expected in that period and actually here at the end of July we've already got 10,000 new users in 2020 which is as many as we had in 2019 and I think there are a few reasons for that I think one is that we carried on everything as normal and we had some new activities come online this year anyway so we had additional users we would have had additional users anyway I think another reason is that because we couldn't offer face-to-face teaching we did some reallocation of practical learning and so some face-to-face residential schools became virtual and they picked up activities from other courses and they delivered them again so we had more users for that and the final reason is that we offer some resources externally for free I'll talk a bit more about it later but we try to encourage external users to use the labs and I think we got quite a lot of external people registering either just for personal interest or from other universities so it's a real measure of I guess the success of the labs that we kept going not only at our normal rate but at a higher rate of course not everything went smoothly and we had quite a lot of challenges too so I just thought I'd summarize some of them of course one of our challenges is that we weren't able to set out any new equipment for activities that were due to start while the campus was closed and unlike most conventional universities with that sort of fixed academic year of October to June where things perhaps were ramping down through April-May we have new modules starting rolling program through the year so we had modules starting in April in May in June and so on and so any activity that wasn't physically on the bench and switched on we had no way to get in and do that so we did have some courses that ran without their practical learning like everyone we had staffing challenges everyone was working but they were working from home and depending on their access it could be very difficult to resolve student problems in a timely manner so we again we tried to manage communications with students I think students were pretty sympathetic and we did our best to keep things going but there were certainly issues with with supporting students one thing that was really frustrating is that we didn't always have a consistent set of backup resources for live activities so some of the practical experiments if we could only have had a video of someone running the activity that we could have shared with the students that would have made a reasonable substitute but if we didn't have it we couldn't create it and it meant that for some of the courses we just weren't able to offer anything and I think that's really frustrating to us because it's quite a short thing to do because we had no expectation of this situation happening we didn't have them in place so that's a real lesson learned to make sure that's done as soon as every activity is created and it's also true for for data sets for students to analyze we were better on that we had that for almost everything but again we didn't always have it in the right place in the right format and the final challenge for us is always have this rolling program of new activities coming on stream and it meant that we weren't developing the activities for the new academic year because we weren't on campus so we've now got a challenge to try to get our schedule back on track to get the activities live for our students who are joining us this October I thought I'd pick a few successes I think it's nice to to see some positives that happened during this really really difficult period the first one is perhaps lucky rather than by judgment but we were able to launch a new remote experiment during the lockdown period this is an experiment that had been under development for about six months before the lockdown happened it's an experiment to explore planetary atmospheres using real space hardware areas to develop for our physics courses so there's a there's a valve somewhere in this piece of kit that OU research staff developed and is being used on a real space mission and they embedded it in a student project and the experiment was just about set up and tested by mid-march so it was live at the point that the campus closed but it had never been used by a student so the staff took the risk they did a testing and they took the risk to try it with a live student cohort they've been able to run it successfully for the whole cohort through the April May period and we had several hundred students go through that so that's a real success I think no one could have predicted the reliability that that experiment would have you know it's a mechanical electromechanical experiment using gases there were lots of things that could have gone wrong another success is really down to the creativity of some of my colleagues so colleagues in the computing department use lots of labcasts for their teaching and usually they would use that labcast studio that I showed you earlier campus was closed they said why can't we do it from home so here's my colleague John Rosewell he's sitting in his dining room he managed to rig up a multi-camera system so that from home students could see a camera on him and on the networking equipment that he was demonstrating the staff that would usually have run the labcast and all of the software from home from campus were able to run it from home so students could still do use the widgets to do the remote quizzes and they were able to engage with it very much the way that they would have done on campus albeit with low-cost cameras and lower cost equipment but that was a real success and it was an individual drive that got them through doing that I wanted to talk a little bit about free learning and some of you may know that alongside our talk courses open university also offers quite a lot of free learning we have a platform called open learn that we use for that the university as a whole there's a lot of marketing around open learn during the lockdown it was used quite extensively by people at home trying to educate their children the government also directed people for skills development to open learn so we had a lot of new users but for the open STEM lab we have a open learn astronomy course that uses our open science observatories so that's those remote telescopes they talked about on tennaree and we publicized that course during lockdown and we had a huge number of new students register and they were able to continue to use the telescopes during lockdown we just lost a very short period I think two or three weeks when spain's lockdown was so severe that they banned all campus all access to their observatories so even the technicians weren't there so they shut everything down but really that was a great success and it's been nice to know that we're supporting lots of home education through that process and the final thing I wanted to share was around what we've done in sharing expertise and resources during this period we've had a huge number of inquiries from universities all over the world saying we've seen your open STEM labs and could you help us in this situation we've not been able to do everything but we've tried to do what we can to support other people so the first thing we did is we created some blog resources and a showcase page so the resources are at the end of this presentation and they're in the program as well if you want to try them but basically if you go to the showcase page you can register to have a username on the site and you can try for free some of our activities some of them are always free we have some open educational resources on there so those would always be free in particular you might want to try the virtual microscopes a nice one but we've also added some of our internal student facing remote experiments that we don't usually allow people outside to use because we thought it would be great if people could experience that from outside so we've got those live we've put quite a lot of effort into sharing expertise through blogs and networking and professional groups I think it's been interesting that despite the fact that the lockdown has stopped us meeting face to face actually the networking probably it's been easier to attend some conferences than it would be in normal times and the final thing we've done is we've had to think about off developing a paid offering for some of our resources it's not necessarily something we would have wanted to do but what we found was the demand was really high and the amount of effort to support people outside was just beyond the resource that we had so we've been working on developing just a limited number of values that people can pay to use and that's aimed at international universities and also UK universities I've seen the octagonal sign so I know I'm coming to the end but I am on my final slide so really just to summarize I think the long-term investment we've made in the open stem labs did give us a head start to continue practical learning during COVID-19 pandemic but I won't say it was all pain saving and you know we had challenges like everybody else in particular our residential schools were all postponed that's been very challenging for us and we're not we haven't finally resolved how well resolve fix all of that in the future it increased our reliance on the open stem labs in the short term and we were very grateful to have that as an alternative resource we saw this substantial increase in use of our free resources during this period and I think we're going to try to find ways to help people to find those more easily and to make sure that people are aware of what they can do and we've learned some lessons I think we never in the reliability that we would need from our equipment when it was being designed so we really want to think about resilience for the future and three quick points for that firstly making sure that we always generate sample datasets and videos for all the activities at the time they're created and that we store them somewhere centrally so that they're easy to get to we're thinking about ways to support these lab casts from home you know perhaps we could have kits that could be delivered to academic staff so they could have a lab cast from home more easily rather than having to do all the putting things together themselves and the final observation relates to research that it was very clear when the lockdown happened that our teaching practical work was carrying on but all of our PhD students were prevented from doing any practical work and if we could have applied the sort of remote access approach to some of our research equipment we wonder whether we could have allowed some of our research students to carry on in fact we had one example for the remote observatories that there was a PhD student who uses those for his PhD and he did observations and made great discoveries for his PhD during the lockdown so this does seem to be an opportunity there but it's not something we've absorbed very much so I just wanted to highlight the resources that I mentioned they're also on the program so there's a blog that I wrote that really just points you to different activities that we have and to different publications that we've previously written about we're voting on screen laboratories so that's a good place to find out more and then we have this showcase page where you can connect to opens them after you can try it out for yourselves and see how you get on. Well thank you all very much for your attention I'm happy to answer any questions I'm afraid I haven't looked at the chat at all so I've no idea what's there. Thanks Helen, thanks so much well done and despite my best attempts to distract you with my octagonal sign they were supposed to be really subtle but I just want to say well we're an octagonal sign everybody well done that was really good and well done that was excellent timekeeping I have to say you didn't need me there at all it was really really great presentation as a an X OU student myself as well I was really excited to be doing this session and it's amazing isn't it I just think that's so good to do distance learning and have all of that kind of stuff available really really good and I can see that there's been quite a few comments in the chat I did spot one question which I think was from Dom and I'm just going to whiz back up quickly who said that academics teaching in this context of the OU would assume remote first for their teaching whereas in many of our institutions they would at least before COVID assume in person first so Dom was wondering how you would encourage academics who were used to in-person teaching to consider the benefits of remote labs great question and think about that I think it is definitely a really different mindset what we've been trying to do recently is to think about the learning outcomes that the student would get so it's easy to get caught up in the lab environment and the the activities that they would usually do and then panic and think well remotely they won't be able to get their hands on the kit they won't be able to plug things in the wrong way and what you need to do is to think well what do I want them to get out of it and then try to design activities that will deliver that learning outcome I think I did see very early in the chat someone asking you do you build in errors and maybe that's something also for people to think about building errors but we try to build in ways that students can go wrong so we have definitely found that if you create a remote lab where you force them down a path and they have to do it the right way there's no way to get it wrong they're obviously not going to learn as much as if they have to find their own path and sometimes they can take a wrong tack and they have to to recover and go back but I think it is about it is thinking differently and and I won't say it's easy you know the the resources that the OU puts into those remote labs is huge you know we have a large team of software developers and technicians and project managers and academics and it's it's it's not an easy thing to do so I sympathise with colleagues in conventional universities I've not been at the OU that long and for me it was a big learning curve oh really really really yeah I can imagine yeah having having I've worked at the OU as well so I kind of been on both sides so yeah I can imagine that so great question thanks Dolbyn thanks um thanks Helen for that as well um I was going to say if if anybody does want to have a chat with Helen we've got plenty of time so um if you do want to grab the mic we can try and give you mic access if anybody because I know that Emma um was having quite a chat in there with anybody you don't feel please don't feel obliged but if you would like the mic you're more than welcome to take the mic or at least tell us that you want it anyway um I'm just going to have another little look to see if I've spotted any others um just lots of love in the room for you I'll have to go back and read it all won't I you've just done a really great presentation um really good oh Rian says really impressive I love the balanced reflection and aim to continually improve it's really incredible what has been going on um that has formed the foundations for everyone to now think differently and creatively yeah that's true I think that's the change and I think maybe in the past we thought people would just want to do this in the short term you know if other universities will go remote in the short term but what we've discovered is actually people are seeing benefits in the longer term and I mentioned a little bit about um more effectiveness of resource and that's actually really quite important you know that you can get many more students through the using an expensive piece of equipment if you do it remotely than if you have to have you know a demonstrator and a lab technician in the room with them to allow them to do it in in a timetable session so I think maybe a blended approach could be quite good you know lots of universities in the future and we've always had sorry sorry interrupt just gonna say presumably your blog post that you shared as well would kind of give a reflection on that as well does it yeah it was written quite early in the lockdown I'll have to do another one went on it's more kind of reflecting on the way we did things before rather than what we did in in lockdown I'll have to say in developing countries we've had lots of interest because what we've discovered is that obviously in developing countries you may not have access to any practical learning and you might be remote first because then you get this maximizing the use of resource but we've also talked to we have a project with Ghana where they'll do remote activities but they'll do them in the lab that might sound a bit strange but it's to do with that they can connect more efficiently from multiple labs so people will come into a space where there is internet and then they will connect to a remote experiments or simulated experiments from there so there's lots of different thinking in developing countries as well yeah definitely yeah good point there's some more chat in there about civil engineering type lab type sessions well we at the moment we don't have a civil engineering we talked about one of the challenges for mechanical engineering was you can't do destructive tests very easily we talked about doing testing but obviously if you need someone to reset the experiment every time that's an issue um I think the closest we've got to civil engineering we have we're working on a wind tunnel experiment for mechanical engineering and one of the applications for that will be looking at flow over buildings as well as flow over aero so that's probably the closest but I think activities in civil engineering could be done but we don't have that good answer and another comment by Lucy um great comment actually developing countries does access to the virtual lab require a good internet connection so it's a good question and I tried to answer it before and I garbled it I'll try it again so what we found with Ghana so with our if you think of the lung function test I mentioned would be a good example so working with people in Ghana we talked about well could that be delivered delivered to online to their school teacher training I think was the application and they found that they didn't have good enough internet so what they did was um they have some sort of local solution that I don't understand very well that is a kind delivery of internet within the campus in a local environment and then they run the virtual software locally within that environment so it's not a wide area network access it's just all local and that's why they have to come into the campus to use it because you can't rely on them having internet at home so they kind of came up with a hybrid solution to deliver local internet to let people do virtual experiments on the campus interesting yeah yeah I don't know if John Traxler's left he would have been uh oh no are you still here John yes you're still here I just wondered that that might be something you'd be interested in chatting about as well based on your your presentation earlier I heard all that he says yeah so open stem africa if you look there's a particular team working on it I think you can google that open stem africa excellent well that's really good um okay so I think I don't think there's any more um questions or comments that we need to look at and I know people are starting to kind of head off now but that was really really good I really enjoyed that thanks ever so much okay thank you very much it's been really nice to talk to you lovely okay well we shall just stop the recording and then um if people want to


Hi everyone, Sean with jaspyscasebrakes.com doing a 2017-18 Panini Prism Fast Break Basketball personal box two boxes from our jaspys.com personal break site. For Matt he's already picked out his two boxes so now it's time to find the hits. Good luck to Matt. So there's one autograph per box on average. Obviously you've got the fast break parallels. Not Tatum and Luca. Tatum, Mitchell, Markinon, Fox. Trying to think. Bam out of bio.  But more than anything, Jason Tatum. To get confused, is this is this Deer and Fox and Marvin Bagley or just Fox or just one or the other? Okay so it's Deer and Fox. Oh that's right I forget Lonzo as well. Lonzo and Kuzma I think too right? Or is Kuzma 18? I think Kuzma is this and Thomas Bryant was 18 for the Lakers. Okay that's what I thought. So I think yeah Thomas Bryant 2018 for the Lakers. Cool. So that's the first box. I see purple over here. Save that for or maybe it was pink. I think pink's lower numbered. Good luck Matt. Paul George. Fast break. Fast break auto. Yitwan Moore. Josh Hart. Bradley Beale. Get hyped. Steph Curry. Blue fast break. That's numbered to 175. Rick Berry. Fundamentals. Chandler Parsons. Eric Bledsoe. Red fast break. Number to 125. Nikola Miritich. Fast break. Kyle Kuzma. Emergent fast break. Kyle Kuzma Vase. Evan Fornie. Purple to 75. Isaiah Thomas. Fundamentals. Fast break. Luke Walton. We won't talk about the coach cards. Ben Macklemore. Blue. Fast break to 175. Malik Monk. Rookie fast break. Hassan Whiteside. Get hyped. Willie Hernan Gomez. Chris Dopps. Chris Paul. That's the first box. So not what we're looking for. Let's see box two have a little bit better luck for you Matt. That's what I'm hoping for. Rip, I don't know. I have to update orders after this. I'm not sure if anybody is. I'm keeping an eye on the case breaks also. No other orders are in after this. There's a couple of orders on case breaks but nothing that'll sell out any of those breaks. Okay, cool. You got a rip. So then you'll be up after this then. Cool. Good luck Matt. Starting with Jokic. Thornwell. Dotson. Dwight Howard. Fast break. Carl Anthony Towns. Rondo. DJ Wilson. Collison. Kevin Durant. Fundamentals. Nogara. Mahini. Clarkson. Levine. Lonzo Ball. Rookie fast break. It's nice. Seth. Curry. Derrick Rose. Hollis Jefferson. Rob. Harry Giles. Emergent fast break. Waiters. Hood. De'Antoni. Ingram. Laurie Markinen. Rookie fast break. Thomas. Gortot. LeBron James Bates. Wade. Jameer Nelson. Blue to 175. Chandler. Nirkic. White. Oniwaku. Wayne Selden Jr. Powell. Dorsey. Harris. Jordan. Bradley Beal. Kerr. Cousins. Porzingis. Sabonis. Fournier. Again. To 50. Covington. So far. Let's see if it gets better. Van Gundy. Satoransky. Lopez. Damian Lillard. Playing out of his mind. Bender. Thompson. Felicio. Connolly. Adams. Dearon Fox. Russell. Johnson. Fisdale. Chris Dunn. Blue. Out of 175. Wiggins. Porter. Roberson. Anik Bogu. Oladipo. And Ananubi. Kid. Turner. Kuzma. Clay Thompson. Wesley Matthews. Bellinelli. Clifford. Genobly. Lopez. Purple. Out of 75. Drogich. Lyles. Holiday. Anderson. Ananubi. Emergent. Brown. Harris. Johnson. Donovan. Cinderius. Thornwell. Is your fast break auto. Siakum. Ubre Jr. Love. Sumner. Lance Thomas. And Dirk. Still no Tatum man. That box was much better. But no Tatum or Mitchell. But thanks for giving another shot Matt. And that was 2017-18 Panini Prison Fast Break Basketball Personal Box Break. Two of them for Matt. Available on Jaspies.com. JaspiesCaseBreaks.com for all personal, sorry, case break and group breaks. I'm Sean and we'll see you next time.


CD95-LmRNA can induce apoptosis or toxicity depending on the presence of certain proteins and RNA interference. It can be toxic when processed into small RNA molecules, which bind to the RNA-induced silencing complex, risk, and lead to cell death. This process can occur either directly or indirectly, as it can also induce the production of other small RNA molecules that can cause cell death. Additionally, CD95-LmRNA can be processed into shorter RNA molecules that do not bind to the risk, leading to cell survival instead of cell death. This article was authored by Ashley Halakengas, Madeline Fink, Elizabeth T. Bartom, and others.