All right. I would like to now introduce Nathan Smith, who is the OER coordinator at Houston Community College. And he's going to tell us about their OER degree work there at Houston Community College. Thank you, Nathan. Hello. Thanks, Una. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. Glad to see quite a few participants that are on the line. So that's really cool. So I'm just going to give you the overview of our OER degree plan, or we are calling it the Z degree. And I've got a PowerPoint here, but then I also have my notes from the questionnaire that CCCOER sent out. So I'm going to be referring to that too. I might have a couple of things to add. OK, so we'll go ahead and get started. I'm the OER coordinator. I'm also an instructor of philosophy. I've been in the position of OER coordinator since about summer of last year. So I'll talk about that in a second here. OK, let's see. Make sure. All right. So just an overview of HCC. So Houston Community College is accredited as one district or one college, even though we have three regions and 27 campuses. We're a very large urban community college. And so here's some of our demographic information for you. An extremely diverse population. The largest number of international students in the United States at a community college. And if you look at the total individuals enrolled in the institution, I don't know if you can see my cursor as I'm waving it around here, but that might be useful to you. The total enrollments are close to 115,000 individuals in a year. So we reach quite a few students in mainly the Houston metro region. OK. So as you look at the OER or Z degree, what we're currently offering are basically two different degree plans. We have an associate of arts or associate of science in what we call multidisciplinary studies. This is basically the Gen Ed transfer degree program, transfer degree. And then we also are offering an associate of arts in business administration. The business administration degree is the largest enrollment degree plan that is not a Gen Ed degree plan. So it's the largest enrollment specific major. And we are currently offering these courses at three campuses, or depending on how you count it, we have two face-to-face campuses, the central campus, which is our largest enrollment campus, and then Northline campus where we have these what are called centers of excellence where predominantly workforce programs are sort of located in a particular region and coordinated with industry. And there's kind of a focal point on that. And we have our business center of excellence at the Northline campus. So we chose to kind of launch the degrees at our highest enrollment campus and at the campus where we had our center of excellence. And then of course we have most of the courses are also offered online. Let's see. Oh, and the way we construe, just to sort of add a bit to this, the way we construe a Z degree, I know this is a little different for different people, but we try to offer a structured schedule of classes that aligns with the advising plan. So if we say that students need to take these five courses in their first semester, then we are offering those five. We're offering a schedule of classes at a particular campus where a student could actually take all five classes in that first semester. And then the same thing with the second semester and third semester. And so there's a little bit of coordination that has to occur in terms of sort of lining up the schedule and working with the chairs, department chairs, to make sure that they get classes scheduled at times where their instructors can teach, but also so that we don't have like conflicting times. So students need to take English 1301 and they also need to take the student success course. We don't want to offer all the sections of 1301 at the same time that we're offering the student success course. All right, so I've got a timeline here that shows you kind of how we ramped up to offering a Z degree. And it happened very quickly. For many years, we had a decentralized structure and we had lots of people doing good work in OER, but it was pretty loosely connected. We had a new chancellor in 2014 who embarked in this transformation, which basically united all of the academics programs. We used to be in separate colleges and now we're kind of all together. So we created new departments and there's a lot of shuffling around. That actually enabled us, as far as the Z degree was concerned, to kind of unite some of our efforts. In 2016, the provost or chief academic officer, we called him the Vice Chancellor of Instruction, put together a capstone committee on open educational resources. And at the same time, we had this student group called the Student Library Advisory Council, or Slack, here. They did a presentation to the Board of Trustees on the price of textbooks and the need for OER. And that really put the need really in front of the people that matter. And at the same time, achieving the dream was coming out with their grants. And so we put together an application. We didn't get that application, but the whole process really helped us focus our energies. And what happened was in the summer, the Kendra Foundation, which is a local Houston nonprofit that focuses on education and the arts, they approached us and said, we're really interested in this idea of an OER degree. And we'd like to support Houston Community College. And we said, well, good news. We've got a plan ready. And basically, we shared that with them. And they were really impressed with how far along the process we were, how much we thought about it. And so they were willing to fund us. And that really helped out. In fall 2016, we kind of did a lot of the groundwork in terms of getting policy together, working with the Tidewater policy statements to kind of get our definitions right. Attended Open Ed 16, which was really helpful, kind of giving us a broad picture of how this stuff works. And then in the spring of 2017, we really started rolling it out. That's when we needed to do training, bring faculty on. We received the first installment of our grant funding. And then in the summer, I was hired as a full-time OER coordinator. We began recruiting students. We also were accepted into the OpenStacks Institutional Partnership. So this year, we've been institutional partners with OpenStacks, which has been really helpful as well. OK, I'm going to get you. And then in fall 2017, we launched the degree. If you look at the overview of the program here, so fall 2017, we launched. We've got 28 sections. 11 of those are online and 17 face-to-face. That netted us a little over 700 duplicated enrollments. And that's 12 unique courses. And we were doing it online and at central campus. Then in the spring, there are two factors that led to expansion. One was that we increased to another campus. We started offering at that Northline campus. But then also, you roll into the second. We started out with just offering the first semester's classes. And then in the spring, we offered the second semester's classes. But we kept some of the first semester's classes. Because once the faculty had developed the classes and they were comfortable with teaching them OER, we could easily just reschedule those classes. And we also could conceive of it as if a student missed a class or they needed to make up, or if they were slightly out of sync with the advising plan for whatever reason, the course would still be available. So you can see the jump in the total of classes significantly more online. Of course, it's really easy to offer a class online. And basically, as soon as you've produced the class, any faculty member can just offer that same class online. So it was easy to jump our number of classes online. Of course, our enrollments grew correspondingly. And so then we have the three campuses. So when you look at our estimated cost savings to students, in the Z-degree, we can pin this number down with some accuracy. We're assuming $100 per student per course. I really want to look at that number more closely. I've kind of done some preliminary research in it. It may be a little high for us, but it's not a bad number to start with. And it's a pretty standard one that people use. But if you use the $100 per student per course as the average textbook cost, we can pin down that over this year, just fall and spring, we've saved students close to $200,000. Now, we want to sort of project not only what we're doing in the Z-degree, but what all of our professors across the institution are doing with OER. And those may be people that we've trained in the Z-degree and they're offering OER classes, but we didn't tag them as Z-degree because they're just other classes the instructor happens to be teaching. They also may be instructors at different campuses that they just didn't fit in with our plans for the Z-degree right away. But there are people we really haven't contacted yet. But this is an estimate because we don't have a really great way of tracking the total number of enrollments in OER classes. We're working towards that. But we estimate this based on survey data and projecting how many classes instructors teach. So it's a little bit more rough. But if you put the two together, we do suspect that in just a year, years time, we're probably saving close to a million dollars in textbook costs for students. Again, I've got some caveats on those numbers, but I'll be happy to answer questions later. So as we look to expand the program, you've got the fall and the spring there. Sorry, this looks a little busy. But as we go forward, the goal, the next stage of our development with the Z-degree is going to be to try to provide a core curriculum zero cost option at every major campus in the district. So I mentioned that there were like 27 campuses. But a lot of those campuses are tiny. I mean, we're talking in the hundreds of duplicated enrollments per year. So when I talk about major campuses, we're talking around on the order of 4,500 or 5,000 enrollments per semester. We have nine of those in the district. And so my goal is to get at least the core curriculum, at least one or two classes in the core curriculum that we can tag as having zero cost to students, an OER class that has zero cost to students. And we want to try to get that at all campuses. So next year, I'm focusing on two of our largest campuses, the Spring Branch campus and the Stafford campus. So after Central, those are our next largest campuses. They're up in the 18, 19,000 student enrollments per semester.  All right, so give you ideas of what goes on behind the scenes. We do have some key councils and committees that help guide the Z degree. And first of all, we have our Instructional Materials Council, which governs all the textbook adoptions and things like this. And then we also have this OER Steering Committee. And that was kind of an outgrowth of that capstone project that the Vice Chancellor of Instruction initiated in 2016. And the cool thing about this committee is that it really does have a cross-sectional membership. And I'll just kind of read off who is on that committee. But there are administrators, librarians, instructional technology folks, instructional designers, and a student representative as well. We have deans, faculty, as well as upper level administrators. So it's a very nice cross-section of people. And it provides some good feedback. And then fortunately, we have the full-time position. This is our OER quarter in your position is a faculty position. So I'm a philosophy faculty member, but I get a full teaching release. So basically, I can devote all my time to this. I teach one class online as an overload. So give you a rough budget. Now, I'm putting these numbers up here, trying to be just as transparent as possible. But I want you, if you're looking at these numbers, to just realize that, again, we are an institution of about 115,000 individual students. So if you're looking at this and thinking, how does that compare to my institution, just try to do a little comparative analysis for yourself. I mean, I think it's going to vary. So one of the biggest expenses we have is faculty stipends. We are paying faculty a stipend to develop courses or to adopt an OER course to change over their course. I can talk a little bit more about that in the questions. We're actually doing a little bit. We're changing this number slightly. We're going to have tiers of course adoption and development. But in our operational budget, we have a part-time administrative assistant that helps out with the office management. And then basically, there's supplies and contractor services, which is really just speaker fees and then a marketing. We do have an inclusive contract with Lumen Learning to provide some of the training initially. In the next upcoming year, they're not going to be providing that training in the same way they did previously. But they are giving us support for the courses. And instead of attaching that to a student fee, we are simply paying a lump sum to them. And these are our sources. So we are providing at least more than 150% of the grant foundation monies internally. And that's a goal going forward is to transition to shift the cost from the foundation to internally. All right, so I wanted to talk about surprises and challenges. And I feel like I'm coming up on the limit of my time. But I'll just go through these kind of quickly. Maybe you all can ask questions on this if you have any. So the first one refers to the issue of how many instructors and how many students we had. We thought that it would be really hard to find instructors and really easy to find students. And it turned out that it was kind of the opposite. We've got a lot of instructors who want to get involved in the program. And we've had a real challenge recruiting and registering students. I've got some numbers that I can give you in the Q&A, but it has just been surprising how challenging it is. We can collect student information, find people who fit. But actually getting them registered in the courses has been a huge hurdle. We've got just the internal stuff of bureaucracy. Working on agreements has been really challenging. One thing is the communication. You're dealing with chairs. In our case, we have to adopt the materials with a program committee. So you're dealing with a chair of that program committee, dealing with faculty. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts, student services, all sorts of different things that come into this. So managing that all is really challenging. OK, I'll come down to the next one. Some things to think about if you're thinking about building a OER degree. Definitely plan, plan, plan, but then be flexible. Be willing to scrap things or start over. You're going to require people who are going to push this stuff through. Because a lot of the hurdles that you run into in terms of getting people to adopt an OER or recognizing that this is a worthwhile pursuit really is people issues. I mean, it's just talking to people, working through their challenges, listening to their concerns. So you really need people that your faculty and your instructional leaders respect, that you can talk, that can take that forward. Oh, this last one I have, I do want to say this. I mean, I sometimes envy the folks who started out just promoting OER and trying to coordinate an OER effort, this sort of horizontal approach. Let's get as many classes as we can just to offer OER, figure out who we can bring on board, and then later on try to align that into a vertical degree plan. It's really challenging to do those two things at the same time. And so maybe starting out by building a base of OER and then going vertical would help. Although I will say from the point of view of upper level administrators and the board of trustees, the Z degree notion has been galvanizing and has really focused their energy. So I don't know, it's challenging to manage, but maybe it recruits people more quickly. Oh yeah, like I said, trying to make it sustainable, integrating it with our existing structures. One thing we did do that I hope is going to have a big impact is we are tagging our courses as a zero cost book option and low cost book option in our PeopleSoft student system. That is going to allow students to search for classes that are tagged this way. And a class can be tagged zero cost book without being a Z degree course. We decided not to try to differentiate those things for students. If an instructor can offer their class with zero cost to the students, we want them to highlight that in the system, whether or not we've actually put them in the structured schedule at the campuses that we've designated for the Z degree. Yeah, I mean, I think the reach would be just gigantic if we could get the core at all of our major campuses. But that's about it. I want to leave some time for questions. Sorry, I went on so long. But that's it. Anybody have any questions? I can continue talking. There's some other things that may be interesting to you in terms of the data we're collecting on this. We look at student success rates and withdrawal rates. And we need to go back and see if we can identify drop rates. That's something that we don't collect very easily in our Office of Institutional Research. We do find that the Z degree classes seem to reduce the withdrawal rates a little bit, potentially. But we did not find increases in success or rates. In fact, our Z degree classes were lower. We have a pretty small sample size at this stage, so I'm not willing to draw any kind of conclusions. It's all very preliminary data. But I thought that was interesting. I've done some interviews with faculty and students and had some interesting stories from them. But there are no questions. Una is telling me I need to wrap up. So I will sign off. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much, Nathan, for that interesting overview of how Houston Community College got started on the OER degree, because it was a little bit different path than some of the others. There is a question in the chat window. I'm going to let you answer that in the chat window, because it is time for us to switch to our next session. So thank you so much. And, Nathan, it might be helpful for folks to have questions as it come up if you could put your email address in the chat window as well. Absolutely, and I'll link to the website where I share all of this information. Oh, wonderful. All right, thank you so much. And thanks to all our participants this morning. We'll be starting our next session in five moments.


Do you need to go to university or is all the information that you can get on google.com enough or even on AI? Well, that's what we're gonna tackle today. Here we go I have been teaching at the university level for over 20 years So it may seem weird for me to talk about this or maybe I am the most ideal person to talk about this But over time we have noticed many of the greats out there have never even finished their college degree We know Bill Gates. We all know Steve Jobs. We all know Oprah We all know Ralph Lauren none of them got an actual degree But now the day and age has even changed where we have AI. We have everything on the internet We are in the information age. Do we really need to go to university? Well, I created this video and got amazing engagement across social media And so I just wanted to kind of expand on this thought because I find it very fascinating to talk about This was just me having coffee one day and sharing my thoughts, but let's talk about it Like what is the real value of an actual piece of paper from a university? Does it translate the way that it used to? I think we can all agree that it doesn't but what does it translate to it? Is it really beneficial for all the money you may be pouring in depending on where you're going to university? So check out this video and then we'll jump into the topic. Okay morning coffee thoughts for anybody who's 18 and older Okay, number one throw out the question What am I gonna do with my life and just be haunted by that every day and every night throw it out?  You're just getting a skill there. You're not getting actual experience Either way, it'll take about the same amount of time to actually like upscale on your actual skills Either way same amount of time your choice So I got a lot of comments to this video about like hey, I agree I've never used my college degree or I've used a little bit of both or now that I've done both I actually think getting the experience is better So I think it's a great time with the rise of AI to really be jumping into this topic and really thinking about it So let me just tell you a little bit about my experience. So as a professor, obviously I believe in Higher education. I don't believe that it has to be in the format that it's been for the last You know x amount of years, right? I think that education is for life And that you will continue to upscale and continue to learn and I think that what you learn in your 20s It's not necessarily what you need to do in your 30s or your 40s or your 60s. Okay, so we're always changing We're always improving ideally and that's what's so great about education So I love the idea of being on a university campus as a freshman and all just being surrounded by Thousands of kids your age and it's a very unique experience in life You don't get that experience another time if you go back to school later on in life And maybe you never did that It's not the same experience as when you're in your 20s and you're on campus and it's it's a unique experience So with that being said that's a great experience if you want to go just for that experience I would definitely definitely go and highly recommend it and have recommended it to all of my children But if that doesn't work for you or that's not maybe your personality or maybe you want to save some money Then that's fine and you can go to school later or you could just dive in I just think that we need to start valuing the idea that you could just jump into what you love doing and just go For it because so much of the information is already out there and sometimes it's better Sometimes it's better than what you're getting at the university because it's really up to date And you know people are actually in the trenches and doing it and you're either learning from them Or you're just diving and doing it yourself and learning from experience is So much more valuable now you are going to fail when you jump into something new and you jump into a new business You're 99% of the time you're gonna fail at some point You're gonna lose a lot of money, but that's not any different than you going to college and spending a lot of money Okay, but the lessons that you learn running that business are Second to none. I would say in my personal experience as a professor as a as I have a master's degree As somebody who has run multiple different businesses and across all different industries from construction To skincare to Amazon business to a content creator digital marketer so many things Okay, I can see the value in all of it and hands down nothing beats actual real-world experience Like learning how to make money is more than just the skill to do it, right? So you have to learn you have to learn that and that's really gained from experience It has never been a better time to start an online business in the history of the world Because there is no cost to it There are so many businesses and skills that you can learn that I literally Know cost minimal cost. I mean just think about your grandparents Like they used to have to like if they want to start a business had to have a brick and mortar store And they couldn't do the side business on the side, you know, it was you have unlimited opportunities I think that it's dumb to not take advantage of this opportunity So if you're at university and you're doing these now obviously certain skills you have to go to university for doctors lawyers That's what a thing. I'm not talking about that I am just saying that if you're at university, if you're at a job You can learn a skill on the side and start doing that job until it can replace your full-time job If you want it to or you could just keep it on the side and it could just be your vacation money or Money for your kids college or whatever you want it to be but like to not take advantage of this opportunity In 2023 is to your disadvantage. So there and you're wondering so like what kind of jobs can you do? There's so many things and I have so many opinions about these jobs and obviously I think YouTube is a great option You could become a youtuber and you don't have to be a huge youtuber to make a lot of money You do if your only income is from the ads, but if you have a business behind it You know, you don't need that many views. So in keeping with the topic of this video I have created a youtube video. That's two and a half minutes long With AI online it took me exactly three minutes and 12 Seconds to create this video and you could have a faceless youtube channel But this video also overviews 10 different skills that you can gain By just learning it on google learning it on your own instead of going to university Here we go. Did you know you can make money from certain skills without having to step foot in a university? Harness the power of the internet Learn new skills online and turn them into lucrative opportunities No traditional university courses. Just pure skill building. Let's delve into the top 10 skills you can learn online to make money First up coding It's the of making computers perform tasks You can learn it online and make money freelancing or starting your own venture Coding is a skill that's in high demand and can offer excellent pay And here's a you can use AI to automate repetitive coding tasks making your work more efficient and productive Next we delve into the world of graphic design It's all about fabricating visuals that speak volumes and the beauty of it is that you can acquire this skill online AI can step in to elevate your designs assisting you by suggesting color palettes fonts and layouts that will make your work stand As a freelance designer the potential for earning is significant Consider graphic design as a precious skill offering unlimited creative possibilities Third digital marketing. It's the driving force behind online businesses enhancing visibility and profits Digital marketing is a skill that can open doors to numerous opportunities An added dimension of digital marketing is the role of AI AI can analyze data and provide insights to improve your digital marketing strategies thereby augmenting its effectiveness Fourth content creation In the digital era content reigns supreme Monetize this skill through blogging vlogging or social media Content is king and knowing how to create it can be quite lucrative Additionally AI can help you create engaging content by suggesting topics based on trending keywords Fifth search engine optimization or seo It's the magic behind online visibility making websites shine in search results Mastering seo can significantly increase your earning potential Furthermore AI can assist you in optimizing your website for search engines by suggesting valuable improvements Six language translation as our world grows more connected translators thrive with the help of AI You can translate languages accurately and quickly reducing errors and increasing efficiency Freelancing in this realm can provide substantial earnings Thus language translation can be a rewarding and flexible career choice Seventh social media management today's businesses on social media Mastering its management can unlock lucrative AI can help you manage multiple social media accounts efficiently thus streamlining the process Social media management is an in-demand skill that when coupled with AI can pay well Eighth online tutoring the surge in online education avenues for you to become an online tutor Online tutoring can be a fulfilling and profitable venture with assistance from AI You can personalize your tutoring sessions catering to each student's unique learning style This not only enhances the learning experience, but also makes it more effective Ninth becoming a voiceover artist Entertainment and marketing crave unique voices with captivating tones. You could earn handsomely Voiceover work can be a fun and profitable skill to acquire. And here's an interesting tidbit AI can help you find voiceover gigs that match your voice profile Finally, we come to affiliate marketing. This involves promoting others products and earning a commission on sales Affiliate marketing has potential to be a source of passive income if done correctly And here's a game changer AI can help you find profitable affiliate marketing opportunities making it even more efficient and lucrative So there you have it We've explored 10 powerful skills from coding to affiliate marketing all of which you can master online These skills hold immense potential for income generation without the need for a university degree Remember the world is moving fast and so can you choose a skill learn it and start making money today There's some great businesses that you could start today That's not going to cost you very much or just upskill and learn something new because it's even fun Even if you don't use it and make money off of it But then how do we decide how do we really decide if we should even bother with university? Well, I think that question comes down to self-awareness I think you need to be really honest with yourself If you need a lot of structure in your life, or if you're very Internally motivated and can get up every day and do things and make things happen Just having some self-awareness around these issues will help you determine Your best way to learn and your best way to Improve your skills comment below. Let me know if you enjoyed this video subscribe to the channel There is going to be more content like this and please reach out to me I love helping people start new businesses move on with your career mentor them a little bit I'm here to help. I'll see you next week


The US Embassy in India recently conducted their Facebook live event and in this event they shared some important updates about availability of slots for the student visas, for the B1, B2 visas as well as for the work, EDGE and LVISA. So in this video I'm going to be sharing all these updates with you and also my analysis of the same. So keep on watching. Hi guys, my name is Shachi and I'm a travel and visa coach. On this channel you will find lots of useful videos on the US visa process. We have separate playlists for FVISA, for JVISA, for B1, B2 and for the LVISA. We also have new videos coming up for all of these categories so make sure that you subscribe and stay tuned. So after listening and analyzing the Facebook live we have classified all the updates that were shared into five categories. So in this video I'm going to take you through each of these categories and share the insights with you. We also have a full transcript of the event. So in case you missed attending the event and want to know what exactly happened we have the entire transcript so do check the link in the description box for that. So with this let's get started. So let's start with the first category of visas and this is the student visa that is the F, J and M and I know that this is a category which most of you have been waiting for. So the biggest insight shared by the embassy for the student visa category is that the opening of slot is going to follow the same pattern which they used for the fall 22 intake which means that the slots are going to open in two bulk tranches. So the first one will be sometime between 10th to 15th of October and the second one will be sometime between 10th to 15th of November. In fact just last week we had a video on this channel for starting the spring 23 prep and this is exactly what we predicted in that video that the slots are going to start opening in October. So many of you I know are waiting for the visa slots it's now a matter of just a few more days so make sure that you fill your DS164 you pay your visa fee and just get really active and start tracking the system for the slots. The second update in this category is for people with a prior rejection. Now here the embassy shared that again they are going to follow the same pattern which they used for the fall 22 intake. This means that the slots for people with a prior previous rejection will open sometime after the two bulk openings are done. So we can expect slots for people with a previous rejection to open sometime towards the end of November. I know that if you have a previous rejection the wait gets a little bit longer it can be frustrating but just focus on your preparation right now because these slots will open up eventually they did for the fall intake as well so do not worry too much about availability of slots focus on your preparation and keep tracking the system really really closely. For the spring 23 intake we have a detailed preparation plan. This is the 7 day program and this starts from analyzing your profile filling your DS164 to a one-to-one session and multiple mocks. So some of you have already enrolled for this program so if you're looking for a stress-free way to smash that visa interview then do check the link for this program in the description box below. The second category that we're going to talk about is the H and visa and if it's going to become really easy for people looking for visas in these two categories because the embassy shared that they are going to release 100,000 slots for the HLN visas in the month of October. So if you are looking to give your H1B interview your L1A L1B interview then it's again time to get up for booking these slots so do fill your DS164 pay your visa fee and right from the first week of October itself start monitoring and tracking the system because these 100,000 slots are going to be released in the month of October of course they're going to be spread out the appointments are going to be spread out over the next two to three months but you will be able to book and catch these appointments in October itself. Just a few days back we had a video on L1B interview experiences and this video covered all the recent L1 interview experience for the month of September so do check out this video to understand what are the recent trends and pattern of questions for the L visas and for a more detailed prep you can also reach out to me for a one-to-one session. If you're still here still watching the video do give this video a thumbs up and comment US visa slots below so that I know that you're still here. The third category of updates that we're going to cover is really important and this is all the changes that is coming up in the CGI portal that is in the portal where you book your visa slot and here they shared three important changes which are going to be implemented really soon. First one is that the number of reschedules are going to be reduced so as of now once you book your visa slot the system allows you to reschedule your appointment up to four times and in the Facebook live event they shared that they're going to drop one of these so the number of reschedules is going to drop to from four to three which means that once you book your appointment you will now be able to reschedule that appointment only three more times. The second update was about the placeholder slots now placeholder is a concept where you basically book a dummy appointment and use that to request for an emergency or an expirated appointment. Now in the Facebook live event they shared that they are doing away with the placeholders there are no dummy appointments and all the appointments that you see on the system are now real appointments which means that they are actual interview appointments they're not something which are going to get cancelled they are not placeholder. To be honest it's a little hard to believe this because right now on the system we can see appointments even up till the year 24 so are the appointments being given out in 2024 real interview appointments well we'll have to wait and watch on this one and the third important update about the system changes is about the Dropbox appointment so as of now if you qualify for a Dropbox there is no way in which you can expedite that and a typical Dropbox process takes anywhere between four to six weeks so the embassy shared that they are introducing a new feature where you will be able to expedite the Dropbox appointment that you have by requesting for an in-person process which means that even if you qualify for a Dropbox but you want to get the process done faster you can request for an in-person appointment go meet the visa officer answer the questions and get your visa process done in a faster way so these are the changes in the system and all of these are again going to be implemented in the month of October. The next category that we're going to talk about are the B1 B2 visas and the J visas now for the B1 B2 visas they did not share any clear timeline or any clear release of slots and they stated very clearly that right now the focus is going to be on H and L visas followed by B1 B2 visa however in the last two months we have seen a significant increase in number of appointments which are being given for the B1 B2 category and almost every day we see interviews being conducted for the B1 B2 visa which means that they are being released regularly into the system so again as far as B1 B2 visas are concerned it's all just comes down to tracking and monitoring the system so if you want to know some special tips and hacks as to how to catch these B1 B2 appointments do check out this video because this video is a very detailed guide on how you can monitor the system and book a B1 B2 appointment for yourself. Another thing I would like to share is that for the B1 B2 category whatever dates you're getting be it 22, 23 or 24 just go ahead and book that because once you have an interview date booked it becomes much more easier to reschedule it to an earlier date. Coming to the J visas now again there's happy news for people looking for the J visas because they shared that they're giving more importance to J visas in the coming year and they will be looking to release the slots for the J visas on a weekly basis rather than monthly or ad hoc bulk openings so if you're looking for a J visa category this weekly release of slots will definitely make life much easier and make it simpler for you to get that visa appointment. The fifth category of updates is I think one of the most frequently asked questions and something which is being discussed extensively in all the media as well and that is what are the timelines we can expect for the embassy to become normal. So a lot of viewers had this question that when do we see the wait times going away when do we get to the stage where we will just be able to log into a system and book appointment like we used to do in the pre-COVID era. Well for this they shared that they currently at 75% capacity not still at 100% still at 75% capacity and in the coming few months they are looking to add more consular officers increase the size of the team and within the next one year they hope to get back to normal functioning where the wait times will not be as absurd as that is now. Well this remains to be seen again how things pan out but definitely over the last few months we have seen much better traction for all visa category not just for the student visa but for H1N B1 B2J and even the other categories as well. So if you're looking to travel to the US in the next one year now is a great time to start your US visa process because the next two to three months is where we see the traction picking up significantly and increased chance of you getting that visa appointment and the US visa. So these are the five big category updates and like I mentioned earlier for a full transcript of the Facebook live event do check the link in the description box below you'll be able to download that PDF and read about the entire event. If you have any more questions feel free to leave them in the comments section below you can also DM me on Instagram my Instagram handle is at shachi.mull and to make your preparation process much more smoother we have a ton of free resources as well and these free resources range from document checklist to D-day checklist to interview question banks and a lot of you have used it and found it really useful so make sure to check it out. That's all for this video thank you so much for watching and all the updates are going to be tracked really closely and brought here right on this channel especially about availability of slots so do stay tuned for that. If you're a student looking for the spring 23 and take definitely check out this playlist that we have exclusively for the spring 2023 and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.


Hi there, with the 2016 baseball season coming up, I thought I'd look at every single Super Nintendo and Super Famicom baseball game. Or almost every game, there are a few Super Famicom games that are just too tough to navigate because they are not English friendly, sorry. Anyway, just a quick glance at each game and I'll be looking at four major factors, pitching, hitting, fielding, and pace of play. A game has to get all four aspects right to be a decent baseball game. For example, if pitching and hitting are fine but the fielding sucks, well then it's just not gonna be worth playing. We'll go alphabetically here and start with Cal Ripken Jr. baseball. No MLB license here, so it's all made up teams and players except for Cal Ripken Jr. This game is just okay. The pitching is functional, the fielding is actually well done, but I played through two entire 9-inning games and managed only two hits, and it's not a matter of making contact. It's that every single time I hit the ball, it was right to someone, I do not understand that. Cal Ripken Jr. baseball isn't bad, but you can do better. Dōlaki no Kasa Yaki-yu is Japan exclusive as you might guess. It had a North American release scheduled under the name Zubal, but it was canceled. And yeah, you can see how the name Zubal came about. You play as bears, cats, cows, whatever. And this game is not easy. Pitching is pretty good, fielding is fine, but it takes a lot of practice to get the timing down for hitting. Dynamic Stadium is another Japan-only game that's very good. Fielding pitching and fielding are all well done and easy to get the hang of, and I especially like how after the ball is hit, you can get a head start at the ball before the viewpoint switches to a wider perspective. Dynamic Stadium is a good pick-up-and-play arcade-style baseball game. ESPN Baseball Tonight is no different than any other ESPN game of the time. The big selling point is the ESPN presentation with the TV graphics and Chris Berman.  Fielding is just about impossible, since the game's sense of depth is so off-kilter, and the computer AI is idiotic. Avoid this game. Extra Innings is very good. There's quite a few different game modes, like multiplayer, custom teams, an all-star game, and a pennant race. No MLB license here, but the team names are fantastic. It's the bees versus the winds. Pitching and fielding are intuitive, but hitting may take a little while to get right. But still, the pace of play here is outstanding. There's no wasted time, and the game zips right along. Extra Innings is worth playing for sure. It's one of the most accessible games on this list. There's a Super Famicom sequel as well, Hakunetsu Pro Yaku Ganba League, and it plays the exact same way while updating the visuals a bit. Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball, right away with this intro. Wow, that looks freaking amazing, but that feeling does not last long. It is really hard to hit, mostly because of the lower camera angle, and the long pause between when you hit and when it flips to fielding mode really makes the game clunky and slows down the pace of play way, way down. You can pick from a menu to pitch, so it's more of a simulation game from that aspect. As good as this game looks, I'd avoid this one. Hardball 3, the third game in the Hardball series for PC, is a classic case of a game that was probably pretty good in its time, but it just hasn't aged all that well. The graphics and the use of the MLB player license, with a headshot of each player, that would have gone over really well in 1994.  In each game I played, I got absolutely pummeled, I don't know if that's just me or what. Hattiyama Hachinopro Yaku News Jutsume Han This is an example of an unbalanced game. The speed the ball travels, whether from a hit or a throw, is way, way too fast compared to how fast the players move. So as a result, you get a hit to the outfield and get thrown out at first by 20 feet. Avoid this game. Human Baseball, as opposed to a grizzly bear baseball I guess. Here's the opposite problem from the last game. He can throw. And you have no choice but to sit there as the ball rolls and rolls in from the outfield on any base hit. Avoid this game too. Next there's Jikku Powerful Pro Yaku Series, which has 6 games in total. This series is made by Konami, and early 90s Konami is always well made. Everything certainly looks great, but these games are just way too hard. I don't doubt that with enough practice you can get good, but the hitting system here where you look up to see where the pitch is going and then move your cursor over to it and then swing all within nano seconds, that's really hard to pull off consistently. So while these games are good, they are really tough. Onto the crown jewel of baseball games for the Super Nintendo, Ken Griffey Jr. presents Major League Baseball. This game gets everything right. Speed, pacing, balance, the unique art style, real teams, real stadiums, a home run derby, a full season, season stats, pitching, hitting, and fielding are all more than manageable. I did a full video on this a long time ago if you want to check it out. For more details on this game, but for now I'll just say you can't do any better for a baseball game on the SNES than Griffey presents Major League Baseball. And that includes the next game, Ken Griffey Jr.'s winning run. Don't think of this game as a sequel because it isn't. It's made and developed by Rare. Winning run is fine. The presentation and amount of game modes here are great. It's certainly playable, but hitting and pitching feel pretty stiff. Fielding is very good and the balance of speed here is well done, but I was expecting more. It's better than most of the other baseball games on this list, but it does not touch Griffey presents Major League Baseball. The Koshien series has three games on the Super Famicom, and it's kind of inaccessible because the teams here are selected by region. And I don't really know what I'm doing here. The gameplay itself once you get to it is fine. Hitting and pitching are definitely manageable, but the fielding is lousy because you're so slow. These games are all right, but you can find better. MLBPA Baseball is EA's one and only baseball game for the Super Nintendo, and you can see why because it's not all that great. Pitching is actually very good. Hitting is functional, but fielding is a big problem. You're given very little screen real estate to work with as the camera viewpoint zooms way in as the ball travels. Yeah, this does not work. Real players here, but no real teams. All the traditional game modes are here, but if you're going to play MLBPA Baseball, switch auto-fielding on. Nolan Ryan Baseball is not at all what you'd expect. You'd think this would be your typical player-licensed game, but instead it's an extra innings rip-off with anime-styled players. It's not bad, but the fielding is lousy, and none of these guys can throw more than 10 feet. I'd rather play extra innings. ProYakuStar is the rare game on this list that's almost too easy. Each game I played, I scored at least four or five runs in the first couple innings. Not much behind the pitching and fielding. It's easy enough. This is a decent game. Relief Pitcher appears to be the cheap generic baseball version of stuff like Pro Quarterback. It has some impressive aspects like Jack Buck doing the play by play, but this game is just not good. The animation is terrible. So bad to the point that you have to start your swing while the ball is still in the pitcher's hand. Avoid this game. Roger Clemens MVP Baseball is a pretty good game with one fatal flaw. You can't get anybody out. Facing the computer is just one hit after another. I swear, the computer got at least three or four hits every single inning I played.  Hitting and fielding are both pretty well done, and the game goes by fast. But it's kind of hard to get into a game if you can't get anybody out. Next is Sporting News Power Baseball, a pretty funny title considering that it's freaking impossible to hit in this game. The pitches are either lightning quick or incredibly slow with no in between, and the AI mixes it up constantly. The base runners are also comically fast, beating out every ground ball. Avoid this game. Worth mentioning real quick, though, that this is a localization of Super Power League, a series in Japan that got four games, and are all pretty much the same. Not that good. Next we have Super Baseball 2020, one of those strange futuristic sports games where you play as men, women, and robots, all with varying strengths and weaknesses. Players earn money depending on how well you play so you can buy upgrades later. The field is also totally reimagined to have less foul territory. There's a lot of good ideas here, and this is a great two-player game for sure. Fielding can be a bit problematic as the map doesn't tell you where you are relative to the location of the ball. But Super Baseball 2020 is still pretty good, and definitely something different in a genre that needed it. Next we have the Super Baseball Simulator series, starting with Super Baseball Simulator 1000. This is an early Super Nintendo title, and it shows. The graphics and sound are very dated, but the game plays surprisingly well. Hitting, pitching, and fielding are all very accessible, and the game goes by in 10 minutes or so. There's a few sequels on Super Famicom, two of which are just clones of the first game with Japanese teams, and two others, Ultra Baseball Jutsu Maven, two and three, are slight upgrades. In terms of visuals and sound, but I think the original is the best of the bunch. Super Baseball Simulator 1000 is a pretty good pickup if you're looking for something basic. Super Base is loaded, has three games for the Super Nintendo. The first is almost exactly like the NES games. With the same viewpoints, and same pitching and hitting gameplay, which is perfectly fine, it works well enough. The fielding angle, however, is switched to behind the outfield wall. The second game is totally different, and I think it's the best of the three games. The fielding here is really cleverly done. The camera stays fixed on the ball as it leaves the bat. Yeah, it's slow, but it works well. The third game is back to the familiar bases-loaded viewpoint and gameplay. It's another pretty good game, typical of the series going back to the NES games, but the second game is the best, in my opinion. Super Batter Up was made by the same people who made RBI Baseball for NES, and this might as well be an SNES sequel, because this game pretty much is RBI Baseball for Super Nintendo, and it's every bit is good, too. The same familiar gameplay, good balance, and you can get a nine-inning game done in 10 minutes. Super Batter Up had four sequels in Japan, otherwise known as the Super Famista series. They're all pretty much the same, until the fourth and fifth games that had a graphical overhaul. But yeah, Super Batter Up is quality. Super Kyukyoku Harakiri Stadium is an oddity because it's the only Super Famicom game that features some American teams in addition to the usual Japanese teams. It's even got real players, too. Not their names, but their likenesses. This is a very good game that cuts a good pace. Hitting is fun, and fielding is easy. Prepare to give up a lot of runs, though. Next is Super RBI Baseball, and I don't understand this because Super Batter Up is way more like an SNES version of RBI Baseball than this game. It's fine on its own, nothing spectacular, although it's pretty hard to get people out. There's real players and real teams and all that, but if you want a Super Nintendo version of RBI Baseball, go with Super Batter Up. Last we have Tecmo Super Baseball, which is a mixed bag. I like the traditional Tecmo mechanic here of matching the other player's choice just like in Tecmo Super Bowl, but the execution of certain things here is just terrible. Like on defense, the ball is hit, and suddenly I'm in the middle of nowhere.  It's really jarring. This game could have been good, but that kind of ruins it for me. Alright, there we go, that's it. If I were to pick my five best from this group of games, number five would be Super Baseball 2020, number four would be Dynamic Stadium for Super Famicom, number three would be Extra Innings, number two would be Super Batter Up, and number one, of course, would be Ken Griffey Jr. presents Major League Baseball. And hey, thanks for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


Welcome to Chrome Dev Summit 2020. I'm Dion. And I'm Ben. We work on the Chrome team and we're your hosts for this year's keynote. It sure has been a memorable year. And we're as excited as we think you are that it's nearly over. CDS has always been about bringing the Chrome team together with the community so we can learn from each other. We're really sad that we're unable to gather in person but we're doing our best to replicate this experience online. Both with streaming videos on YouTube where our team will be monitoring and engaging with comments throughout the week. But also with a new experiment we're launching today called Chrome Dev Summit Adventure. A playful online world where you, the virtual attendees, can interact as we try to recapture some of the joy of face-to-face interactions. We'll talk more about it later today and look forward to hearing what you think about it. The Chrome team at Google has a two-fold mission. First, strengthening the web and other open ecosystems by contributing to open-source projects such as the Blink Web Rendering Engine, the V8 JavaScript Runtime, the AV1 Media Codec, the Scea Graphics Library and developer tools like Workbox, Lighthouse and of course DevTools and more. And these projects are used far beyond Chrome and even the web. They help power countless other products and platforms like the Node.js ecosystem with V8, OpenVideo with AV1 and Scea, which plays a critical role in Android and Flutter. Now the second part of our mission is of course building the Chrome web browser, providing a top quality web experience across Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Android. And on iOS, we bring as much of that experience as we can to millions of users using Apple's WebKit framework. Across all of these efforts, our focus is pretty simple. It boils down to three things. Ensuring the web delivers a safe and secure environment. Making the web browsing experience faster and more seamless. And adding more capabilities to the web, enabling richer and more diverse applications on the platform. In this keynote, we're going to give you an update on our progress and highlight the work that others in the community are doing as well. First, let's transition over to our colleague, Parisa Tabriz, to give us an update on the Chrome browser. Thanks, Dion. 2020 has been a year of challenges and new experiences for all of us. Back in March, we decided to skip a Chrome release for the first time in our history because we wanted to make sure that everyone had a stable, performing Chrome as our team transitioned to work from home. Now, we're proud and humbled that so many people around the world choose Chrome to help them stay connected and informed, especially in challenging times. Reflecting on the year, I want to share some of the ways that we've seen Chrome usage change, how our core principles have helped us be prepared for this shift, and how we continue to build improvements to help users.  Since January, time spent video conferencing on Chrome on desktop is up by 4x. And we know that performance is key, especially when using video on the web. So to keep Chrome fast and efficient, we introduced profile-guided optimization, which results in up to 10% faster page loads. We also launched tab throttling, and that helps speed up just about everything. Chrome startup, tab switching, tab restoring. And it does this by prioritizing your laptop's resources to the tabs that you're actually using. So this will also reduce power consumption and improve battery life. And finally, we've also made some progress on memory savings, which you'll hear more about from Dion later. Now, when we look to Google search trends data, we see that queries related to health, news, science, government, and food all increased during lockdown. As people look to stay safe, get updates on local restrictions, and just learn how to cook at home. More generally, having access to information on the open web is so critical. And we continue to focus on product inclusion and serving the diversity of our global user base. For those who are low vision or who rely on a screen reader, Chrome became the first browser to create accessible PDFs with auto-generated headers, links, and tables. All of that makes PDFs more legible for screen readers. We've also made it easier to translate entire sites to your preferred language and added support for 28 additional languages. Lastly, we've begun testing a visual based search, which we hope can help users that are new to the internet or who have low or no literacy. As many of us shifted to working from home and all that comes with that, smaller screens, juggling work and home commitments, and so much multitasking, the Chrome team has continued to prioritize productivity features. Tab groups make it easier to organize your tabs by project, urgency, or, well, anyway you like. And you can even collapse tab groups to just get them out of the way. We're also beginning experiments to add new modules to Chrome's new tab page to help you quickly jump back into a previous task, whether it was researching a product, planning a meal, or catching up on your favorite shows. Now, we're conscious of the increase in pandemic-related phishing attacks and other online security threats, and we're proud of both how Chrome has protected users and some new features we launched this year to make it that much harder for online attackers. For example, we've launched an additional layer of security with enhanced safe browsing, more secure and private DNS over HTTPS, and many password manager improvements. We've also delivered more accessible and intuitive privacy controls, starting with the redesign of Chrome settings. And for users that want an additional piece of mind, we introduced a new safety check within Chrome, and we're now rolling out quick access to some of the most used privacy and security controls, like deleting your browsing history or opening an incognito window directly into your address bar. Finally, we've continued to make progress on some ambitious ecosystem safety initiatives. You'll hear later today about the progress we've made on the Privacy Sandbox, which is an open-source initiative to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally improve privacy on the web. And Dion will announce a major update on our work with extensions. As we give users more control over the data shared with their favorite extensions, we want to give you the tools to get ready for this new reality. Now, before I hand it back over to Dion, I'd like to just conclude by acknowledging the Chrome team's really hard work this year, all while being at home, to make our users experience better, releasing eight stable Chrome builds, meeting default browser requirements for iOS 14, and improving performance, helpfulness, and security in Chrome across all platforms that's available. Thank you so much. And now, back to Dion to tell you more about the latest and greatest in the world of Chrome extensions. Thanks, Parisa. A lot of great improvements, and really excited to see everything we're doing to make the browser more efficient, secure, and more privacy-preserving. Now, we think extensions are a superpower for the web, an aftermarket that allows first and third parties to add rich capabilities that can enhance a site or the entire experience of the web. We love the extensions you've built, with over 200,000 active developers and over 250,000 extensions in the Chrome Web Store. And users love them, too. Fun fact, we estimate that users have installed over 20,000 extensions just in the minutes since this keynote began. And users have an expectation now of strong privacy and security guarantees, and we really agree with that. So we've been working on updating our extensions platform to better align with our vision for a more private and secure browsing experience. We call this Manifest V3, and today we're announcing the official release. So for improved security, we'll start with disallowing remotely hosted code and provide developers with more tools to write secure extensions. To enhance user privacy, earlier this year we made controls more visible in the new extensions menu, with some sensitive permissions made optional. Users today can turn off those permissions after the extension is installed. In 2021, we'll go a step further by withholding these permissions by default and giving users the option to grant them at extension install time. Manifest V3 is available to experiment within Chrome 88 Beta, and updated extensions could be submitted to the Chrome Web Store starting January 19th when Chrome 88 hits stable. You can learn more at the link mentioned here. As Dion explained, privacy is a major theme of Chrome's new extensions model. We've also been collaborating with many others in the ecosystem to improve the privacy of the web platform itself. We've been working on a major initiative called the Privacy Sandbox. It's organized into two tracks. First, reducing the cross-site tracking that happens on today's web, and second, enhancing the web with new capabilities that form privacy-preserving alternatives that can power tomorrow's experiences. Some websites use third-party cookies to track people across the web. While Chrome plans to phase out third-party cookies once these privacy-preserving alternatives are in place, we've made cookies more secure for websites and users today. This year, Chrome finished rolling out a new policy known as SameSite, which limits cookies to first-party access by default, requiring developers to declare which cookies can be sent to third-party domains. Before this change, most cookies could be accessed by third parties even when they were only intended for first-party use, needlessly exposing them to security threats such as cross-site request forgery attacks. Now, 99.9% of those first-party cookies are automatically restricted to first-party use in Chrome, and all third-party cookies must be sent via HTTPS, encrypting them in transport. Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox are also in the process of adopting this new SameSite policy. We've been working to address covert tracking, such as browser fingerprinting as well. Now, this occurs when developers attempt to create a unique profile of your browser, a so-called fingerprint, that can be observed across websites. With a new project called Privacy Budget, we're experimenting with a new way to enable rich web functionality while also severely constraining fingerprinting. We also launched the User Agent Client Hints API, which is an alternative to the User Agent Strings that we all know and love going back to the beginning of the web. This enables developers to request only the data that they truly need about your browser. In the second Privacy Sandbox Track, we've been working with the web ecosystem on a new family of web standards that provide privacy-preserving solutions to accomplish important web use cases, such as personalized content, single sign-on and relevant ads, without the need for third-party cookies or other cross-site tracking mechanisms. I'm happy to share that the first two solutions are available for early experimentation by developers. This includes the Conversion Measurement API, a new capability that measures when an ad click leads to a conversion without using cross-site identifiers, and Trust Tokens, a new API to help combat fraud and distinguish bots from humans by conveying trust from one context to another without passive tracking. Both of these are available for testing and feedback via Chrome's Origin Trials mechanism in our current Chrome Stable release. We'll be going deeper into some of these changes later today, so don't forget to catch these sessions. Users are only a low-friction tap away from the next great experience, and they traverse the web link by link. To make that journey great, we all have to ensure that our web pages load fast. Once loaded, we want the UI to feel responsive and buttery smooth. Now, achieving fast loading and runtime performance requires that the browser and web developers work together to do the right things. Earlier, Parisa shared how Chrome is getting updates like profile guided optimizations and tab throttling. In addition, we've also been optimizing memory utilization overall, and have made some really substantial progress here that we want to share. For example, the prior stable release of Chrome, Chrome 85, introduced enhancements to how the browser reclaims memory, that resulted in up to a gigabyte of reduced memory usage for power users on macOS. Our next release, Chrome 87, is showing savings of up to 80 megs for each top site. And we recently updated VA with a memory compression technique that reduces the JavaScript memory footprint significantly. This can be seen here with Gmail, which benefited with a 45% memory reduction. Finally, VA is now able to load a page's JavaScript files in parallel, so scripts can be parsed and compiled and ready to execute as soon as they're needed by the page, eliminating parsing pauses entirely. Now, we're also continuing our work to make it easier for web developers to do their part to create high-performance websites. Earlier this year, we launched Web Vitals, providing clear unified guidance of the attributes for web page that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. We focused the program on highlighting three aspects of performance, referred to as Core Web Vitals. The Chrome User Experience report shows that the majority of sites have good interactivity, and nearly half are fast-loading and visually stable. Overall, about a quarter of all sites parcel three metric thresholds, so we've still got a way to go, but we think it's a great start. Now, we dive into this data much more in the Web Almanac, which is launching its new 2020 edition today, authored by experts from across the web. I actually always love finding some absurd stats in there. For example, the longest image all attribute that we found is over 50 million characters long, which is enough to write War and Peace five times. Let's get back to Vitals. Last month, the Google Search team announced their plan over the next six months to incorporate Core Web Vitals into their process for measuring web page performance. So if you value discovery via Google Search, this provides an extra incentive to optimize your Vitals and reach the three thresholds. So get started now. We've got all of the tools to support you as you measure, track, and improve. And the ROM provider ecosystem has moved really quickly here, too. Core Web Vitals is now available to you if you use Cloudflare, New Relic, M-Pulse by Akamai, SpeedCurve, Caliber, and many more. But we also know that many sites are currently using Google Analytics and they want to be able to measure Web Vitals there. Last summer, we released the Web Vitals JavaScript Library, along with instructions on how to collect Web Vitals data and send it to Google Analytics. Now we're excited to launch the Web Vitals report, an open-source website and tool to let you query and visualize your Web Vitals metric data writing Google Analytics. This report also allows you to compare data across segments so you can see how much performance affects your business results. Now we're seeing the Web Vitals approach really resonate with developers, particularly in markets where network infrastructure conditions and device capabilities can be a little bit variable. So what does it take for you to do the work to improve your Vitals? Well, to share an experience of taking a site and iterating on it to meet these thresholds, please welcome Sunit Jindal, principal engineer from Nica. India's leading online marketplace for beauty and wellness products. Over to you, Sunit. Thanks, Dion. I am Sunit Jindal, principal engineer at Nica. India's leading omnichannel beauty destination at Nica. Our belief is that a highly-performance application is a prerequisite for a great user experience, especially for mobile users. One of the things that we have found key for performance success is to be fully aligned with our business-focused teams. How soon the content is rendered to the users, possible benefit in SEO and conversion rates are some of the metrics on which we ensure alignment with our marketing and business counterparts. When Web Vitals were first announced, to be honest, it meant extra work for us, but we also knew that this was a positive change. Although the new metrics meant that we again had to dig deeper to meet the thresholds, but once we did it, it was worth the effort. We improved each of the three core Web Vitals by making optimizations within our core, adding the right CDN where needed, replacing bulky third-party scripts with lighter implementation and much more. As a result, we managed to improve all our core Web Vitals within a few months of working on them. For our users, pages loaded even faster and there are minimal or no content shifts on the page. We also saw a continuous uptick in our performance-related scores across devices and network bandwidth. Post-migration, our page views per visit increased by upwards of 23% as compared to our old mobile site. The traffic from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities also increased by nearly 28% and finally, we've seen an uptick in our other key metrics as well like average order value and search traffic. Having led my team through this journey, I feel that core Web Vitals stand for a guideline that promotes us to provide a crisp and fast UX. We are happy with the outcome so far and look forward to what's next in the Web Vitals program. Thank you and back to you, Dion. Thanks to feedback from partners like Sunir and the developer community at large. We found opportunities to refine the core Web Vitals' 2020 metrics and how they're measured. Watch Annie's talk later today to learn about how we're thinking about this and how you can share your feedback as we iterate on the metrics set for 2021. You want to be able to create fast, responsive and beautiful UI as easily as possible. You gave us copious feedback on areas of CSS that you wanted to make simpler. Unir is going to share some of the recent changes that target this feedback as well as giving you a peek at some new work that we're particularly excited about. Thanks, Dion. There are so many exciting things going on in the CSS world right now and I have a lot to update you all on when it comes to making UIs easier to build and debug. We've been analyzing trends and conducting surveys and have found that styling has actually been a really big pain point for a lot of you building Web Interfaces. And we hear you as a Web community. We want to fix the issues developers struggle with today. So what have we done recently? Well, first, we've been improving tooling along with our friends at Microsoft by introducing grid dev tools and working on Flexbox tooling to hopefully relieve some of those layout debugging woes. We're also working on a lot of other small incremental changes that will make it more clear what values are being calculated and why. This year, we also launched some pretty key updates for CSS. We've had some major strides in Flexbox cross browser behavior and shipped gap in Flexbox, meaning you can now have parent driven control over the space between your children just like you can with CSS Grid. We're shipping aspect ratio to ensure consistent ratio sizing of your responsive content without hacks and we shipped content visibility, a CSS feature that can significantly improve rendering performance by skipping an elements rendering work including layout and painting until it's needed. This allows for faster interactions with on-screen content with that content still being searchable and accessible. Along with external contributors and help from the Agalia team, we also shipped a few styling APIs including list bullet styling with the marker pseudo elements, more refined text decoration styles, the focus within pseudo class which enables the ability to style a parent based on if it's children are being focused, path support within clip path to support a wider variety of clipping effects and soon we're shipping hardware accelerated SVG animations to ensure better performance across browsers. Another feature I'm excited about is app property which shipped in Chromium 85. You can now register CSS custom properties with syntax and fallback values directly in your CSS files. This is a part of the CSS Houdini effort, specifically the properties and values API. If you're interested in extending CSS with Houdini even further, look out for my talk all about using Houdini in today's browsers including a tool my team built to make it a little bit easier. And if you're watching this talk later, the link will be below. The feature is also looking extra bright for CSS lately. Moving into the coming year, the Chromium team is going to be focusing on bigger picture frustrations for web styling. Along with the open UI community group, we're committed to exploring form control styling and expanding the current set of possibilities for web form extensibility which many struggle with today. We're working on shipping animation timeline to enable scroll linked animations to be styled with CSS, an operation that's currently a pretty heavy lift with JavaScript, and we're looking into how we can make CSS architecture more clear for design systems and products including cascade layers to enable a new injection point for style sheets between the user agent and author styles. We're also looking into CSS nesting, a favorite from PMPost processors as well as scope styles natively in CSS. Soon, we'll be shipping is and where matches selectors for more clear CSS statements when targeting multiple or longer selectors. And finally, the Chromium team is currently exploring container queries, also known as element queries. We're actively prototyping what may soon become a game changer for component driven design, enabling elements themselves to respond to the size of their parent container wherever that is on the page and not just the documents view port size. This is a massive shift in styling capabilities and something I can see really changing the ecosystem to help usher in an era of more individually responsive design components and systems. All of these improvements coming to the web are exciting in their own right, but together they really tell the story of UI styling becoming a priority on the web platform. We hear you and I can't wait to see the CSS and the web evolve from here. Thanks, Yuna. I can't wait to see the rich fluid experiences that you'll build with these improvements. Now later at the event, we'll be talking about how content can be taken to the next level via web stories and more because we're seeing a real surge in creativity as we visualize stories in new ways with creators using rich new tools. And there's another critical aspect of seamless, reducing the friction that users encounter as they transact on the web. We continue to invest here in areas such as identity and payments. With one-time passcode support, or Web OTP, users no longer have to copy and paste from their SMS app when using two-step verification, and this works with Chrome and Safari. Now Web Authent brought biometric sensors to the web, and with Safari recently added in support, Touch ID and Face ID are accessible to the web. We want to bring this level of simplicity to payments, and we're experimenting with secure payment confirmation, which brings Web Authent to payment flows. And we're experimenting right, have started to really explore here, and we can't wait to see the result of these enhanced payment experiences. So check out the sessions and the code labs that will walk you through using some of these APIs. We build these UI features and the capabilities for identity and payments to enable you to build more powerful and rich web applications. You know, we've seen what happens when we lack certain capabilities that you need. You may have to resort to using systems to let you use your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, but now you've had to give up the core benefit of web deployment. Being able to reach users on any platform, on any screen, and without the overhead of forcing a large app download that a user might actually seldom use are all things that make the web such a successful platform. Growing the success of the web means pushing the envelope, unlocking new use cases that are not even possible today, while maintaining the traits that make the web great. Developers like Henrik, who I've actually known in the web community for many years now, are doing just that. So I asked him to join us to share some of his recent work that has a real human impact. Henrik, thanks for joining us. Hey, Dion, thanks so much for having me. I sure wish we could be doing this in person, though. I know, me too. So can you share what you've been building with us? Sure. So any time you put somebody to sleep in a medical setting, it's considered best practice to, you know, keep them alive. I would hope so. So I guess you'd have to monitor the patient's real vital signs. And here we mean human vitals, not web vitals for once. Yeah, exactly. So you have to produce something called an anesthesia record. And part of that record is a chart that shows what the patient's vitals are every five minutes throughout the case. And sometimes the case goes really long, so you might do that 50 times during a given case. And a lot of people are still doing this on paper and producing these little charts like this. And so naturally we built a progressive web app at anesthesiachartting.com that actually does all this for you. Got it. So I'm actually trying to look at that paper, trying to kind of visualize how that PWA would work. Yeah, it's probably easier if I just show you. You can show us? Okay, please. So as you can see, I'm all hooked up to a patient vitals monitor over here. And not only are we able to read the data directly off of that and put it in the chart, we're actually able to issue commands as well.  So if I say something like, take a blood pressure now, you notice it actually starts the blood pressure cup here on the monitor.  And that way the provider can see everything they need to. That's great. There's a lot going on here. Can you kind of chat about how you get all of these integrations working? Yeah. So we're talking a custom binary protocol that the vitals monitor expects over web serial. We're, of course, using the presentation API to be able to display all this content up on a separate screen that's different from what I'm looking at here. And then we're also using the wake lock API to make sure that this computer doesn't fall asleep on us right in the middle of the case. Absolutely. So why did you build this with WebTek? So distributing software on the web is just so much easier. We actually do have an Electron app that we're using to do some of this. Some of the monitors actually require TCP connections locally. And it's great that that exists. But it also means that, you know, a lot of actually our support headaches come from that because people don't understand they need to go download something and they're not sure whether they're running in Chrome. We're running it separately. And so just be really nice to be able to do it all with web. That makes total sense. Well, it's great to see how this is used in a real world environment. What's next here? And are there any other APIs you'd love to see from the web? Yeah. So as I mentioned, you know, I'm really looking forward to that native Sockets API because that would let us do, you know, talk to some of these other monitors over TCP. And in addition, I think the only thing that doesn't work offline right now in our app is the at the very end when we generate a PDF for you. So we actually run a puppeteer service that will take that HTML and give you a PDF back. It'd be really awesome if we could just generate that PDF in a consistent way, just using a JavaScript API locally. Sounds great. Yeah. Feedback noted. So I really do hope that we can actually chat in person at the next CDS, although it was pretty special to be able to visit you at a dentist office. And this is coming from a Brit. Yeah. No, it was really great. Thank you so much for having me. And just so everyone knows, we took all the necessary COVID precautions here as well. I even took a COVID test yesterday just to be sure we're safe. Safety first. Listening to stories like Henrik's makes us proud of the work we've all done to bring new web capabilities through initiatives like Project Fugu. While Henrik's use case may be a little specialized, there are so many other use cases that you've told us are important. For example, Gravit Designer made it easy for their users to read and write files using the File System Access APIs, simplifying the open and save experience. And they've already started working on the new local font access API, which enables their users to use specialized fonts that are installed on their own computer. We want to hear about the capabilities that you need to boost your web experience. So please keep them coming. And when you bring this all together, you can create something special. We're super excited to share that Adobe Spark recently launched an impressive new PWA. It's performant, capable, and allows next-generation creatives to collaborate and co-create seamlessly. It's a pleasure to use. Hear more from Spark as they share their journey directly in our partner spotlight talk, which is right after this. When you put in the work to build great web experiences, you want to reach as many users as possible. Services like Google Search are a fantastic platform for discovery and a powerful differentiator for the web. However, today, many users are habituated to discovering things through app stores like Google Play. Developers who build a progressive web app that meets the recommended quality bar can incorporate it into an Android app using a trusted web activity. And in Chrome 85, released earlier this year, we extended the support for trusted web activities to Chrome OS, and developers can now also publish their apps to the Chrome OS Play Store. Chrome OS and Chromebooks are a great platform to showcase the power of the modern web and its expanding capabilities via Project Fugu and other efforts. Web apps there get seamless discovery and installation via the Play Store, and they're also able to deeply integrate into the Chrome OS launcher and the overall system experience. Over the past year, Chrome OS has welcomed many powerful new desktop PWAs into its ecosystem from advanced graphics products like Adobe Spark to engaging media apps like YouTube TV and Hulu. Framer, a cross-device design and prototyping tool that was initially a single platform app on Mac OS, was able to increase their user base by four times after releasing their collaborative web version. Today, we're announcing that Google Play is adding play billing support for PWAs published in the Play Store that use trusted web activity. This integration will be live in Chrome 88, available now in the developer channel, and going stable in mid-January 2021. It'll be supported on both Chrome OS and Android, and enables both purchasing digital goods and subscriptions, including the new standardized digital goods API. You can learn more in these sessions on next-level web apps for desktop and what's new for web apps in Play. Now we've shared the platform updates. Let's discuss what's new with our developer tools and how they can help you build these great web apps. Over to you, Jessalyn. Thanks, Dion. There's a lot happening in the world of developer tools. So let me dive right in. To start with, we've got some great new features in Chrome DevTools. First off, Grid Toolings. As you heard from Yuna earlier, you can now debug CSS Grid much more easily with the new CSS Grid debugging tools. Yay, I'm particularly excited about this one. Secondly, we have added new emulations to the rendering and sensors tab, including missing local fonts, inactive users, and much more. Next up, the most used panel in DevTools, the Elements panel, will now support many more features, including style editing for CSS in JS frameworks. In accessibility, we have added a few new features, including accessible color suggestions and emulate vision deficiencies among others. And finally, we have added a bunch of new tabs and panels, such as the new media panel, to help you debug your site with a lot more ease. And there's much more. So don't forget to catch my What's New in DevTools session tomorrow. Moving on, with the increased focus on web vitals, we have seen as much as a 70% increase in growth across all our insights to over the summer. So we are making sure that we continue to make further enhancements to all of them, including Lighthouse, our tool that lets you audit your site in the lab environment and provide actionable guidance on how to improve. First off, we have added three new audits to help you identify specific ways to keep your cumulative layout shift in check. Additionally, we know that third-party libraries have a huge impact on your core web vitals. So as a first step, we have added additional audits for third-party embates to help you clearly understand their impact on your site's metrics. We hope these changes will enable developers to debug and optimize their core web vitals with much more ease. Watch Elizabeth's session later today on the State of Speed Tooling to learn more. Finally, I wanted to give a quick shout-out to the Workbox team who launched more flexible integrations with Create React App, giving you full control over your service worker logic. And more recently, the team announced Bookbox V6, which is packed with some awesome updates, including new extensibility hopes for building custom caching strategies and plugins. It also has support for Webpack V5 and a more flexible integration in Create React App V4. Finally, we have migrated even more of the codebase to TypeScript, making it easier to use from within your TypeScript projects. Don't forget to watch Jeffrey's session tomorrow for the rest. And with that, back to you, Dion and Ben. So we've talked about how to build fast, powerful, and safe web experiences and shown you some examples, but we're always looking to walk the walk ourselves. You know, we ask ourselves, can we create a rich web application that's fast to load and smooth to run?  We announced Squoosh two years ago, a Chrome Dev Summit 2018. And with the web about to get three awesome new image formats, we knew it was time to build version two. So we added JPEG XL, WebP2, AVIF, so you can start seeing how far image codecs have evolved in the last two decades. At the same time, we're making use of the latest and greatest WebAssembly features and more mature WebAssembly toolchains, making image compression go much faster in your browser. We've also asked our users what they need, resulting in a new and improved UI, and we wrote a Squoosh CLI, allowing you to compress many images all at once with all the codecs and settings that are available in the PWA. He was so productive to share the same WebAssembly binaries in the browser and node for the command line version. So check out Squoosh V2, and you can read about how the team built it and how you can use it to squish down your images at the link here. Now, as we mentioned at the beginning, the Chrome team is focused on working with the community, which includes all of you virtually here at CDS to make the Web more powerful, faster and more seamless, and above all, safe. It can be dizzying just how fast the Web continues to evolve over 30 years into the platform. I think that's older than most of our team. Are we even allowed to say that? And we've continued to improve Web.dev as your one stop for understanding our perspectives on how to get the best results out of the modern Web.  And of course, during CDS Online this week, we'll be doing our best to explain all of the latest and greatest developments and we're available to answer your questions and hear your thoughts and feedback. We have so much great content to share and bonus deep dive material that'll be available on our YouTube channel. So next up, stay tuned to hear directly from the Adobe Spark team on how they built that lovely new PWA we got a glimpse of earlier. Now, we're off to watch two and join you over in the Chrome Dev Summit adventure.