This brief presentation will be titled The Three Mist of Cycling Debunked, which is something that I try and talk to the general audience about. I am George Liu, the Executive Director of the Urban Cycling Institute at the University of Amsterdam. What I do is I work in my PhD in this field and I'm also putting out during this COVID time quite a few online courses, and there's a YouTube channel. We tweet a lot. We're quite active on social media. Our mission is all about bringing the science of cycling from research to practice and back. If you're ready for the Three Mist of Cycling Debunked, I'm going to go ahead in this presentation. It's a Dutch-centric view, but hopefully this will also apply in your individual context. First we start out with something quite common, ordinary that has somehow become a very, very commonplace image in our society. It's a hundred years ago, right? We have the first automobile was invented, and here we are a hundred years later. We have scenes like this, scenes of huge amounts of money, investment, and energy being poured into human mobility. This is one example of the mobility just on the surface, but you can also imagine the different ways that this picture and this idea can then be applied to all aspects such as aviation, marine mobility, and so forth. This is really one of the biggest challenges in our time, is how to move from A to B in a way that's friendly to our economy, to our standard of living. This one always cracks me up, and it's the black hole of urban transportation. This is the black hole theory of highway investment, which does let us to question what is the logic that we're using with our government money. This is highway investment is done mostly by public funds, and I liken it to the military industrial complex in a way, where especially back in the Cold War in the U.S., a lot of investment in weapons was fed by the private sector, but through very big government contracts. If we think about the relationship between the automobile industry and the government, it's kind of the same type of relationship. The government provides roads on which you drive your cars, so it's providing a platform on which we can at the same time then connect both the private and public sectors. Arguably this is not the most efficient way to do it, and arguably the spiral demonstrates the falsity of this logic. More highway congestion, as you've seen in the picture, leads governments to react by adding more capacity. We know from research that this capacity is quickly taken up by even more traffic on the roads. There is near infinite demand for trips because the price of using the roads is zero. I'm talking to a group of executives here. When you have the price of zero, basically there's nothing to control the demand, and the supply curve is straight up and down. If you think about road space with a price of zero from the user perspective, you have a really difficult economics problems here. This is partially why I became interested in the idea of road space pricing because traffic congestion doesn't have to be an unsolved problem in this world with electronic tolling, etc. We have solutions that can really affect the way that we use our road space and solve this problem of having road space costs have a marginal cost of zero, which is not really the society's cost. What happens if we keep investing in the spiral? What happens here is we fall into this black hole, but what happens when we reverse the spiral? This is what my presentation will talk to you today, is that reversing the spiral requires a completely different logic than what got us into here. This is the alternative. This is an alternative where mobility and place making happens in the same spot. This is an alternative where if we choose to build cities that cater to pedestrians and people on bikes, then we can create spaces that are much more activated than the highways that we see being built today. Arguably it's more economically vibrant, plus we provide a place making function where we don't drive away people from our cities, but instead complement the people who are there. The three myths that I will go through today. Number one, I'm studying bicycle infrastructure, so build it and they will come. There's the argument going around in cities, especially during the times of COVID where we see cities building quite an extensive network of bicycle infrastructure, right? That cycling replaces driving. Is this true? Can cycling alone be the solution to the black hole of traffic investments? And the idea that if cities write a plan and follow it, that this is in itself sufficient to bring about cycling in the urban environment. So let's tackle the first myth. Build it and they will come, right? And this is where my experience as an urban planner comes in, right? And it's this idea of combining the physical and spatial with the behavioral and social that building bicycle infrastructure is perhaps not enough, but if we combine it with how people move about, that we can come to a solution. So this is an interesting map of the city of Amsterdam. And in the center, you see the city center, which is on the left on these green bars. The light green is mode-shared by car. The middle green is percent of trips by bicycle, and then the dark green is percent of trips by public transport. And what is clear from this picture is that we like to think about Amsterdam and the Netherlands as the cycling capital together with Copenhagen of the world, right? But within this picture, you can also see that indeed when it comes to cycling, even within the same city, you can see there's much more bicycle mobility in the city center. And that the way that we move is highly dependent on the urban form that we have created, right? And this urban form is highly dependent on how governments choose to plan their cities. So it's likely that in your own city that you will also have different segments where in the city center, you see a very different way of people moving about rather than compared to the outskirts, that in the city center of any city, there's more people walking about compared to, in general, more driving out in the suburbs. Perhaps that is a nature of the city that we're building, but perhaps there's something that we can also do to deliberately affect change. So to illustrate this point further, you can see that if you have bicycle infrastructure in your city, you can see that this is, in fact, what looks like a perfect piece of bicycle infrastructure. You have a separated bike path on the side and a roadway in the middle. In any context, this would be quite excellent. But we're looking at, this would be one of the bicycle networks out in the suburbs. But it's not necessarily what the separation and the explicit accentuation of cycling and walking that is necessarily the thing that will get people to come. In fact, if you look at this streetscape, there is no bicycle infrastructure at all. But in fact, this environment is much more attractive to a higher number of people who choose to go by bike and number of people who choose to walk. So this kind of represents a conundrum and two different approaches to city planning. And the way we can design our streets is represented by, do we have to separate everything, which is very much the modernist approach, right? So we provide each mode with their own way of getting about. Or do we kind of embrace the chaos of what is fundamentally so advantageous of city center environments that we try and mix modes as much as possible while using traffic calming for cars and leveraging the economic activity and the frequency of social interactions on the street to then further increase the economic value of what is on the street. Because as you can see here, this is a very lively use of public space. And in fact, here the restaurants are benefiting from the environment. And I would argue that the people sitting outside in the patio are benefiting from people watching on the streets that are passing by. So something to think about.  But for those who are interested, it's how we look at the transport system and how the way that we move relates to the way that our cities are built, right? And that our transport system is intimately connected with the activities that we do and the accessibility of where we need to go. So for example, if the closest place to get groceries is five kilometers away from your house, then in a way your activities are forced to be further apart. And if your activities are forced to be further apart, then naturally that will also lead to you having to travel more. And of the minimum you can get away from traveling is a large distance and naturally you are going to choose to drive a car, right? So I'm trying to illustrate the connection between how our cities are built, how far we are from our destinations, with the idea that we get to choose how we move. And the further away things are, the more likely we are to favor driving, which then we get back into the black hole of traffic highway investment. So that was the first myth. Build it and they will come, right? So it's not necessarily true that we have to build separated bicycle infrastructure to get people cycling, but here's the caveats, right? Connected, meaningful, daily destinations in a real bus network, and through over time we will attract more people who cycle and walk. And this is interesting and perhaps in the last 10 months or so has been really accelerated by this COVID pandemic. And it appears that the cities who are building bicycle infrastructure are seeing a huge increase in recreational use, right? So that we're seeing a use of not just people riding to the store, but also people traveling because, well, they got to get out of the house. And that's one of the important considerations for these leisure modes as well. Cycling replaces driving. So if there is the black hole of road space investment, would we think about if using the bicycle can indeed replace the automobile? And indeed, if you look at your city, it's likely that it's probably very automobile and public transport dominated. So how do we insert if we want a cycling into that system? So this is an image of a train station in the Netherlands. And you can see what's powerful here is that there's a lot of bikes parked outside. And it's not in the Netherlands, it's like a marriage of convenience. But if you really think about how the system evolved, it's quite a powerful way to leverage the train system as or the public transport system, such as a BRT, to get from A to B over longer distances. This might be interesting. This is a chart of the different stations in the Netherlands. This is probably applicable to in general any type of train network, especially I think in Switzerland, it's a very big train network, also very dense. And what this figure shows is that the catchment area of pedestrian, how many people live within one kilometer of all train stations? And then how many people live within 75 kilometers of all train stations? 7.5 kilometers. And this just makes the argument that 81% of all people in the Netherlands live within 7.5 kilometers of a train station. And the argument here is that if you can get to a train station quickly, then that train network, if you have a robust train or bus rapid transit network, can then transport you at a much faster rate to anywhere else that you need to go. But the challenge is really getting to a station. And as we know, most public transport systems are set up in a way that get you from nowhere to no place, right? And basically, we can use cycling as a way to solve the front door to a train station problem. And if you think that 80% of everyone lives within 7.5 kilometers of a train station, right? Then you start to think about what impact that micro mobility and e-bikes could have on the system. That in fact, you don't have to ride 30, 40 kilometers on an e-bike. But in fact, if you can make it easier for people to get to a portal for getting onto transit in a reliable and time effective way, that if you can time your commute so that you arrive at the train station within 30 seconds of when the door closes, then you can really offer a novel way to move away from automobile transport. And for places like Switzerland and perhaps Germany, this could be a very powerful way to think about replacing car travel. So this is your conventional bike pedestrian range. And then on the right, it's an idea that you have much more choice if you are able to electrify these access modes. That if you're able to move faster through your environment, it's actually the area that you're able to cover. It's something like, what's the math? Like a circle is the pi r squared of the radius. So if you're able to move more quickly, you actually access more destinations at a squared function. So it's not linear, but it is a squared function. This is the same idea as the chart that I showed you earlier, but in a map form. And this is the Dutch train network. It's very well served. So what's the caveat here? Cycling replaces driving? No, cycling plus a dense and high service train network can possibly replace driving. Because there are people who commute 30, 40, 100 kilometers to get to work. And for that segment of the population where you don't live within cycling distance, that we should think about having cycling and public transit as a complement to a healthy urban transportation system. Let's get to the third one. Write a plan and follow it. So this is perhaps aimed at the city administrators on this call. And I think the Dutch really loved to plan. And you can see it's historically based on the because they've always had a fight with the water. And damming the water and making sure the water is well managed has been a history of the Dutch. And therefore, urban planning has become a large history of the Dutch. But with that urban planning also comes why it's masked plans for these cities and power to execute these plans. So when we had urban renewal around the world in the 1970s, which was another way to, say, build highways through less desirable neighborhoods, the same thing has happened in the Netherlands as well. So there was a time when their plans to raise quite a few cities, not just in the Netherlands, but around Europe. And it was fashionable at the time to build highways. And even at the expense of mowing down whatever buildings are in its way. And this is one of the examples of a neighborhood in Amsterdam undergoing the same transformation here. So we're going to connect to another issue, perhaps, of urban mobility is that the adverse impact that auto mobility has had on public health in terms of not just obesity and lack of exercise, but also of traffic deaths. And this is, in general, the number of traffic deaths in the Netherlands. And you can see it really peaked in 1972 with 3,500. And it has gone down ever since. So the first increase here before the 1970s was really doing a large part to the growth of automobiles. So a lot of people were buying cars and driving them on the roads. But then what's interesting is that globally, traffic deaths has really started to fall and follow the same pattern. The same pattern then leads us to question, well, what happened here? Partially because of good road design and better road design. But the number of vehicle miles didn't decrease after the 1970s. So it was actually another causal factor. And in the 1970s, we had the oil crisis, which impacted all around the world. And the Dutch, during that time, taken the advantage to really rethink their traffic policy. If you look at a street in 1981 on the left and you look at a modern Dutch street in 2016, you can clearly see the differences that has happened. So the number of vehicle kilometers traveled hasn't really gone down between these two eras. In fact, it's probably much higher in 2016. But the way that we've managed traffic within cities, especially, has really changed in the meantime. Again, here, 1973, and a similar transformation happened on the street as well. So basically, the general mood of keeping automobiles away from the city center and more towards peripheries has had a positive impact on urban life in the city centers. But that also brings up the question of just because we've removed the problem from the city centers, do we have a new set of problem in the periphery that by making the urban center more walk-friendly, do we then give an incentive to the people who like to drive to move further out? And of course, that is a very valid question. And perhaps we don't have clear data to follow people and where they go in terms of their preferences. But overall, I think we also want to look at design from a human perspective, which is what I'm doing with my PhD is looking at this idea of experience and using people's behavior as a blueprint to see how we can change intersections and how we can design cities differently. So here is a route map that traces cyclists as they go past an intersection in Amsterdam. And I want you to notice this is very interesting. They don't follow the way that they're supposed to go, right? Like if you're making a left turn, you should technically, in this design, go all the way across and then wait for a green and then go left. But you see people ducking this design all the time and they just cut right through. Similarly, the pink. And similarly, you also have the same problem in the green. So how do we design to accommodate people's behavior rather than trying to wrangle people's behavior to the intersection and the mechanical environment? And perhaps one of the solutions is to change the primary focus of design, going from a design that forces people to conform to the logic of an intersection to an intersection that then is molded around the desires of the people using it. And you can see here are some quite subtle changes. These are some old traffic islands here. This was the old island and then the old island here. And then this was much bigger here. So they managed to remap this and do away completely. Because people who are going left were actually trying to go left directly. So why not just take away this traffic island here, rearrange the signal cycle, and make it easier for people to make a direct left. After all, the people who ride bikes through this intersection are many times more than the drivers who are going through this by car. So if that's the case, then the primary design vehicle really should be the users who are using this the most. And this is kind of one of the results that we got. So similarly, you have a lot of people crowding here, especially with COVID, with social distancing. You really don't want people bunching up at intersections. And what can you do? You can just cut out this whole concrete island. It doesn't really need to be there. But it's something that was there because of habit and tradition. We kind of figured out how to win some more space by looking at our designs critically. So write a plan and follow it. Maybe not. Maybe writing a plan is more of an iterative process to help us to listen and watch people, to experiment, to follow what people want from their city, think about the uses of the street critically, and then as an iterative cycle to rewrite the plan. And as we come back to the image of the neighborhood that was raised in the 1970s, I thought it would be good to reflect on that with massive power by the planning authorities in government. There's also massive power to do away with entire chunks of neighborhood. But as part of an iterative process, it seems like with citizen pushback especially, that many of these projects were able to be stopped completely. And for that one neighborhood, it was too late. But if you were to go back to the plans, perhaps even the plans in your city, you may think that most of the highways have been implemented in its entirety. But if you go back to the plans in your city, you'll be very surprised to learn that probably a majority of the large infrastructure projects that were planned and were popular back in the 1970s were probably stopped by the turn of the 1980s and the 90s. I know this is definitely true for Dutch cities, for a lot of American cities. But it's this idea of always consulting citizens and this idea that our mood and the way that we view cities and public space and the role of government is a constantly evolving process. So yes, planners do plan and we do have a long-term vision based on the era that you're in. But one of the roles of government and the people really is to think about how these plans can be iterated and be aware of what comes in the future, that we don't project what our vision is now, 15 years in the future and fail to revisit these plans. So some key lessons here and I want to end off with this. So it seems like infrastructure works, but combined carefully with consideration of the urban fabric. So we saw that the way that infrastructure can be built in a very car-friendly environment that accommodate bikes, but what people really want for a vibrant neighborhood is actually liveniness and it's not necessarily provided in a context by putting infrastructure next to a highway. That there's huge potential for cycling and transit. So if you're thinking like a company like Bombardier, how do you sell transit to municipal governments? They're tight on budget. And perhaps one of the ways to sell transit in a city where no one wants to take transit is to illustrate the symbiosis. That if you're able to replace some of the car drivers to people who walk or ride bikes, then naturally you will develop a market for your transit system. And thinking about the symbiosis together with how you build cities around transit development is perhaps a good way to think about how we can propel cities into the future. And then as we move into this 21st century of urban planning, it has become much more fashionable to do this plan experiment, observe type of consultation and planning that's much more on a short cycle, that much more involves people. But there's also something insidious about this short term process, that as we move on to an era of big data, that governments are really responding to these models and data collected from people and that we have to be careful who possesses these data, who's in control of this, whose interests these are in, and definitely be sure that these do reflect the will of the people that we're designing for. So here's a bunch of links to our social media and Coursera offerings. Thanks for the content from our team who provided many of the images from the slide. And a couple of things before I open up for Q&A, there's the Unraveling the Cycling City course from the University of Amsterdam. So it's free with a paid certificate if you're so interested. We're almost up to 10,000 people enrolled in that course. So it'd be great if you want to contribute and help us to get there. And then for the people who want to get into the profession of designing bicycle infrastructures, that we have just funded by the EU. So this is now free, Designing the Cycling City, which is at designthecyclingcity.com. And I believe my past self has spoken much more eloquently than my present self in these courses. But I'm really here for the Q&A and I hope this has stimulated some thought and I want to open up the floor to you guys.


It was a smoky morning for some elementary students as they got to practice how to escape a house fire. As part of fire prevention week, students from Black Duck Elementary got the opportunity to take a tour of their local fire department and learn about all the tools firefighters use. The Black Duck Fire Department partnered with the Bemidji Fire Department to set up their safety house so that students can experience and practice fire safety first hand. It's something that we probably don't talk about enough as parents. We should talk about it and there should be a way for them how to get out of their room when there is a fire, where they're supposed to stay and where they're supposed to wait till their folks come and find them. To wrap up fire prevention week, the Bemidji Fire Department will host its annual fish fry event Saturday night at five. Tickets for adults are $15 and $7 for kids, 12 and under. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


So let me show you a real chevron plot instead of my illustration first. They would look roughly like this. Again, we have three important regions. We have the region here on the left, where unfolding dominates. We have the region, sorry, where folding dominates. The region on the right where unfolding dominates. And we have the midpoint, whereas we measure these shifts on the curves. The classical example here is one called Barnais and Barstar, that Alan first spent almost entire career studying. And the idea is that we take a small protein and we systematically mutate one residue at a time. And then we get the new chevron curve and then we see how that changed these two slopes.  And these dots then define for that particular residue whether part of the transition state or not. So I say this is actually bacterial ribonuclease. That's why it's called Barnais, but it's not important for now. Based on that, Alan and colleagues have been able to identify the entire transition state, characterize it, build models. They've been able to confirm those models with collaborators doing molecular simulations lately. So we know everything about how the actual folding process happens almost, despite never having seen any actual structure of the transition state itself, because we can't determine that. That's pretty cool. Here's another example. Beta and outer membrane protein. So when we talked about membrane proteins, I kind of glossed over that there are actually beta sheet membrane proteins, but they're pretty rare. So in the outer membranes of some bacteria, you have membrane proteins that is just a barrel of a continuous beta sheet. But we know much less about how they fold. So maybe we can use this type of method for it. So when we have the structure as you see here, we start introducing mutations and then we determine a number of chevron plots as you see there on the lower right. Based on that, you would have some residues here that are definitely part of the transition state. And do you see how they tend to group in the middle layer here of the beta sheet? So this appears to suggest that there is a small component of the central part of the beta sheet that forms pretty much all the way around this porin. And then they gradually extend to both sides, which is likely how they are then inserted in the membrane. Again, this is based on models derived from the transition state. We can't determine the transition state structure itself. Last example from Mikael O'Liverberg, colleague at Stockholm University. They have been studying a number of proteins involved in neurogenerative diseases. This particular small protein is interesting because the N and the C terminus are very close to each other. So it's almost that if you just created a small link there, you could link the chain to itself. So it was infinite. They couldn't do that, that wouldn't fold. But they then ask, how important is it exactly where the N and C terminus break is? So maybe if we do link the N and C terminus together, but instead create an opening elsewhere. So that is, you're essentially doing a circular permutation of the protein. In that case, it turns out that the transition state is roughly the same. You have to first approximation the same residues involved. It folds in the same way, meaning the actual sequence in the chain is not important. It's the global properties of the entire protein. Pretty important.


Welcome to Liquid Margins. I'm Frannie. I'm going to be your host and I'm going to run through a few slides about the show. And then I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Erin Barker. She's going to be moderating today's session. And this is successfully implementing social annotation at your school. Today, we have some wonderful guests. Like I said, we have Robin Foshe. She's a service manager, academic experience design and delivery at the University of Washington information technology. Eric Hagan, he's the Dean of online educational. I feel like there's a word missing from that, but maybe not. Maybe it's the Dean of online education and I mistyped it. So sorry about that. This is Sal's University. And then we have Mela Lewandowski. She's an instructional designer at the University of Wisconsin River Falls. And then our moderator today is Erin Barker, and she is our wonderful lead customer service specialist at hypothesis. I love working with Erin. She's so great. That's my plug for Erin. And thank you with that, I'm going to stop sharing and I'm going to turn it over to Erin. So Erin, I don't know if you want to share your screen or if you have stuff to share or you don't have to. And by the way, anyone, people on the panel, you could, you can share your screen if you do have the need to. So, Erin, you can handle that. Thank you. For me, I actually don't have a screen to share because I'm hoping we can run this as just a conversation about implementing social annotation and hypothesis in the different schools represented here. What are some kind of best practices for implementing a new tool such as hypothesis with your instructors and professors. And actually what are some things to avoid. I just want to kind of give a little bit more of an intro. I am the customer success specialist or the lead customer success specialist for hypothesis. And I have worked with each of these wonderful individuals here participating in our discussion today. And there's a reason they get chosen for liquid margins. It's because I put a little star next to their names for being fantastic to work with, and for being incredible implementers of hypothesis at their schools. So I'm actually going to start off. And those of you who are our attendees, if you want to walk yourself over to the chat and tell us where you are at at implementing hypothesis at your school. And I think that will give us some good background to address and give us some good questions, I think, and topics. So while you're doing that, I want our panelists, Eric, Mila and Robin to introduce themselves to you. And because we're on zoom and it's a bit like the Brady bunch. I'll just call one of you to get to start so hopefully you've thought deeply about this. Let's start with Robin and here's what I want you to answer Robin is tell us about your role, and your school, and how you ended up as the one with who you are implementing hypothesis at your school. That's good. So hi, I'm Robin Poche, my pronouns are they and she, and as Aaron and Freddie let you know I'm from the University of Washington so we're a big school. We have multiple campuses, lots of different needs when it comes to teaching learning and so the group that I'm with academic experience design and delivery is a team of researchers service owners service managers and we basically are constantly trying to check in with what needs are, how the tools that we are currently centrally supporting our building those needs, and how we can continue to improve experience and fill any gaps that are happening there right. So, even prior to pandemic, we have a really great research group. So, particularly my colleague Janice for me is here today, constantly reaching out to the campus to do research to see how well we're doing with all of those things we're keeping an eye on. So we knew that we had had some gaps, and also continuing need around discussion and engagement with students which I'm sure is not a foreign topic to anyone else is here in the room today. But we wanted to see how we could provide some more tools to make that work better and to give faculty more opportunities to engage with our students in different ways so we piloted three tools this last academic year. I had recently seen one of them, and I had recently joined the team but I had also had some experience. I co taught a class, the previous winter quarter right as we were getting up to pandemic, and we had my co instructor and I and we were looking at some tools and trying to figure out how we could show our students in that class who were going to be teachers very very soon. How to implement new technology so we kind of chose hypothesis at random, and had an overwhelmingly positive outcome with that with our students they were really excited by the tool really excited to use it with their students as they started to teach and it actually made us we didn't really expect that sort of overwhelming excitement and so having seen that with my students and then coming to the team and they're like oh we're piloting hypothesis would you want to take that up I was 100%. Let's see because I was really excited to see the other side of it like what it actually did with students what the outcomes were like and did it have a positive impact on learning outcomes so yeah that's how I kind of got involved with getting the pilot started or getting the pilot rolling and continuing it through this last year. I hope you don't mind me saying this but when we first started the University of Washington, it was going to be a very small pilot, and I believe that it organically grew. Absolutely. Yeah, it was, it was very like invite focused at the first quarter and then after the first quarter we kind of just open it right up and we're like all right. The farmers had a banner going on canvas that we were just kind of taking anyone who was interested. And we had, we had good interested I mean you know we always have that. All those frictions of do people have time to pilot, we're in the middle of pandemic there's a million things going on do people have bandwidth but we have, we had good reception with it. So that was positive. So why don't you talk about your role and how you ended up with the responsibility for piloting hypothesis at the sales. Sure, so in this role of dean of online education I'm responsible for our, I'm in the provost office and I'm responsible for our instructional technology instructional design and kind of classroom support team, as well as our adult education program. So, when I, and it's possible that when we started talking to hypothesis I might have been directly in charge of the instructional design and instructional tech team but yeah so we're always looking for ways to enhance our learning programs I think when we first were thinking about hypothesis it was a real simple objective it was just you know how can we live enough our online classes, we have, you know, several small, the sales university is a small Catholic university with a strong liberal arts tradition and we have traditional day students week as we call them and also part time adult undergraduate students and graduate students. So the adult students and graduate students pre pandemic we're taking online classes we're always looking for ways to liven them up. And as I saw in the chat, you know do things that involve human connection even though they're involving technology. So that was it, you know do something more exciting than boring discussion boards. So first the pandemic hit and pretty soon everybody was doing things in hybrid and online mode so hypothesis became, you know, a lot more attractive to a wider range and pretty much all our student groups at that point so we were glad we were doing some some things originally because it helped us when we had to transition to more tech based teaching. And, Eric I would imagine that you have more in person classes this fall. Yeah, even last fall we had a lot of. We still remained open and we had sort of socially distanced, essentially hybrid classes where the classrooms have lower capacities, but this year we're back to full capacity classrooms but I think, you know, one of the, I guess positives of the whole pandemic was because everyone up and down the line are, you know, 130 or so full time faculty members and, you know, a number more adjuncts all had to engage with technology to some extent so some of them found they were really great things that they can use to complement their class, even if it's a fully, you know, lecture based classroom type class so I think we're going to see more tech adoption and in every kind of class that we have not just online classes. And one of the things we haven't tried but I'm interested in the other panelists has I've never, I don't know that we've had anybody use hypothesis like in a live class it's usually been a homework assignment, but I'm curious if anybody's tried that. I think, and actually Eric in two weeks, is it two weeks for any I'm not sure we have a liquid margins on using hypothesis in a variety of class formats is that correct. Yeah, that's correct. The 27. Yeah, we'll be calling you Eric. All right, I gotta sign up. Mila, what about you, what's your role and how did you end up with the responsibility for implementing hypothesis. So I'm an instructional designer at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls and that's part of the larger UW system. And so how did I end up in part it was looking at other members of the University views in our system because it was a tool that I know that other people were interested in and then subsequently, or maybe independently faculty started to come forward and say, do we have this can we use this is something that, you know, we could add to our to the LTIs to within our canvas system. And as an instructional designer and I'm working with faculty for consultation and also for training and and and so on and so then that's kind of how I became integral to to from the beginning to the end of our piloting that we started this last beginning of this calendar year. And so we kind of worked with the faculty who had come forward for asking and then also I kind of pick some other folks who had been using other social annotation tools or kind of using or implementing it as a as a way of doing it in face to face. In groups so brought those people in and started a pilot program and got in touch with with y'all and and begin the piloting program. And as we continue through the last semester with people using it, kind of conservative folks in them at the beginning about like what their plan was and then midterm how's it going and then at the end how's it been. And now we're, we're ready to, we've added it to to our, to our system and everybody is going to begin using it and we're going to start some more classes for our faculty on campus this semester so yeah, that's kind of the steps. So now we're going to see every single student at UW River Falls or University of Wisconsin River Falls using it right now. Yes. I mean, across the curriculum to so the, you know, I've been working with faculty this summer, you know, and saying, hey, this is, we might have this coming so I'm really excited about, you know, the idea of people using it from everything from Shakespeare literature where they're actually going to engage with that old text and using it, which I think will be really interesting. And then also just kind of the folks that were in the piloting program like our animal science folks like we've had so just across the curriculum and seeing all the different applications and the potential of it. And I, and I think online and and there's like, like you were saying too is that there's in the, in the face to face mode to I think there's some opportunities to be live. And I should just put a plug for our success team that we have lots of ideas for how to implement it in a live classes so feel free to contact our success team, or your success specialist who can absolutely help you with that process. I do want to take a quick second and say make sure if you are typing in the chat to type to everyone, not just hosts and panelists. Because I think that will lead to a richer conversation and it is highly likely that someone else also has your question or might be able to answer your question. So please, please make sure when you type in the chat that you switch that little drop down I believe to type in the chat type to everyone yeah I was like whoa I got lost in that question. I already want to jump into clarify because it used to say all panelists and attendees zoom change that setting unbeknownst to me so I in my slide I said all panelists and attendees but it now it says everyone. So, thank you. Yeah. My question I think we should maybe get at some logistical pieces of implementing a pilot at hypothesis on my role on the success team and in working with schools. Oftentimes I work with contacts at schools or instructional designers whoever's running the pilot. What I know is, what are the exact steps I need to take to get this going at my school. So what I'd like to hear from the three of you is what are some specific steps you took to make the pilot successful at your school and if you want to boil it down to three steps that's great if you want to elaborate even more. That's fine to I'm actually going to go backwards and start with Mila on this one. I'm going to have a list of eight because I thought about this ahead of time, a little bit. So, I mean, you know, talking with kind of my support area because in my area, I mean I'm kind of between I'm in the provost here under the provost and our technologies team so it initially it was this meeting of my local team in the provost area to say, how do we do this practically, and then communications, you know, with the with the pilot group so I kind of that just kind of came with my responsibility to then to work with that piloting group, but initially meeting with the hypothesis success team for planning, and just the canvas logistics like because that's where we were going to be having people access it and use it and play with it as a tool within the other courses or sandboxes or whatever they were working in. You know, of course, determining who's going to be on part of the pilot was a big deal to to make sure that people are going to be in it and committed have the time.  You know, in any kind of clarity that needed to get going on the on in working with the tool. And again, I think I mentioned earlier is kind of surveying them. Actually, I surveyed them on their existing knowledge before we even got started it's like, do you socially annotate, you know, how do you do that what other tools have you used previously if you have used other tools online, and then how that, you know, thinking about how that might translate in our training for them with hypothesis. And then after the training, of course, how did the training go, and so on, asking them those kinds of questions and serving that getting that in writing. So I created this table of kind of this, like I think about slinky going down the stairs, you know, it's like the question and then the subsequent follow up and what's next. So, and then adding more access to resources in a kind of a digital learning environment canvas as a resource for them and then their departments to kind of look at to say what what are they working on and, you know, and just idea development just letting people know that this is what we're doing. Even if they even members were not a part of the pilot, they could kind of visibility to it. And then having running this is how I teach session with people who finished with the pilot or got through some of the piloting so that they could demonstrate to the folks in their areas that this is a tool. This is how we're using it with the potential could be. Finally, at the end is just surveying how the tool and any recommendations from the faculty what what more do you need to know what more. You know, and so, yeah, so in those next steps. When you talk about determining who which specific faculty are going to be involved in the pilot. Are you finding those faculty yourself Mila, or did you were those faculty who came to you. Yeah, so it was a combination so one of the things is it was the people that had already, you know, approached and said, you know, can we get this. Then there were and the majority of the people were people that I kind of looked at from training sessions I had had that I'd worked at worked with for supporting them with teaching online. And so, if I saw them as a person who was kind of an early adopter or had been already doing social annotation either in live classes or using another tool, or kind of mentioned their group work. Any of those kinds of things were kind of cues for me to think about, you know, this is a pretty good candidate to be a part of the pilot. And those were the those were the folks that I've then reached out to and say, do you have bandwidth for this do you have the time for this to be a part of this and would you be interested and sent them subsequent, you know, information from hypothesis to say this is what this tool is is if you and, and this is what we're going to try to pilot. And, you know, out of all the folks that I reached out to the only person that there was only one person who couldn't and it was just time restriction. Everybody was really positive and I think it's, it's good to pick good, you know, people who are really kind of already on doing something that would relate to what hypothesis can augment as a as a teaching and learning tool so Robin, how about you. We have a lot of similarities to what I was talking about so you know communication, a big piece, reaching out initially to the people that we had had requests from previously that had interest that seemed like the needs that they had expressed either individually or could be well served by hypothesis. We had a really great email that went out to everyone who as they joined the pilot to let them know you know here's getting started information we pulled a lot of that from the excellent hypothesis resources to help them kind of understand how to get it set up in the course access it, get their first assignments set up and get going and also that they can reach out to me or to Aaron, as they were going through the quarter, if they needed any technical help. And then I think it was, you know, letting them know about resources we used a canvas course to provide resources and provide practice areas and continue to populate that throughout the year with the webinar recordings. So we're offering a webinar per quarter. Gathering feedback. So we were doing a survey with them every quarter to kind of ask, you know, how are things going. How hard is this to adopt or you're having any technical issues. Is this actually helping you achieve your learning goals and we had a number of aspects of you know how are they engaging with one another. Are they engaging with materials to really get some information on that. And then using that feedback to iterate on the materials that we're providing, because we saw some things over the over the year, like, oh, people are really understanding that sections and groups are different things and how do we deal with that right that's not an issue anymore but that was something we kind of dealt with this year and even things as simple as, hey are you remembering to check. Open this in a new tab because we started you know after the first quarter people were going oh I can't see it's too constrained right and you like you realize all these small things you're going to help people with as they're onboarding so. And reporting so we were creating reports each quarter. Based on that feedback so that we could really track and have an idea of how the, how the pilot was rolling along and if we were moving towards adoption of this tool so. So I think that's one of the pieces I think the kind of consistent ones just continuing to grow along with the users, and figure out how we could best give them the resources they needed to try to be as successful as possible, and give us feedback. So that we knew if this was totally wanted to. And I don't want to leave Eric out and keep within the time constraints. Eric, what are some specific steps you took it to sales. So first of all the, I think the integration with our lms which happens to be blackboard is pretty, pretty easy I think it's kind of a standard thing and only probably took a few minutes really. And since I'm supervising instructional technology team, you know wasn't any problem getting him to do that. And probably the next thing we did it was, you know, the instructional design and technology team and myself, especially several of us that teach classes we became familiar ourselves and you know when we had opportunity use the tool ourselves. So we were some of the early adopters but then we tried to find other, you know, well respected faculty fought leaders to become early adopters as well. And then, you know, we do regular training sessions and after having some initial training sessions from my hypothesis we generally like to lead them ourselves because you know people like to see the other people from our university leading the sessions but even better what we really try to do is get one of those faculty thought leaders to then demonstrate how they're using the tool and have them, you know, talk about it so technology adoption I'm sure every place maybe is has this in common is just difficult to do. There's nothing making people do it they have to sort of see and becoming interested in doing it. So seeing another faculty member do it is usually the thing that gets them curious rather than the tech person, you know, telling him how great it is. So that kind of works for us. So the other thing we do have a faculty community but you know an organization they call it within Blackboard where we keep a lot of documentation about hypothesis for people that want to go that. I feel like the three of you who are all our superstar implementers. I have some common themes here which is like, I think the first one that I have been thinking quite a bit about is this idea of finding specific faculty to pilot the tool. First, instead of this just general whoever would like to join can join, and maybe we're not necessarily sending private invitations to those faculty to join a pilot. And I like that idea and I'm actually on my end on the success side going to think more deeply about that and how I can encourage my contacts at different schools to do that. The other thing that I have definitely heard is the providing of resources and updating those resources and growing along with the faculty and students as well as they start to use the tool. And we do try to help with that on the hypothesis side, but I know that each of you also expanded that even further on your own side. And then the last one that I like is using the faculty thought leaders to promote or to assist with implementation with other faculty and Eric you unmuted so go ahead. I think I was thinking about I think one advantage that hypothesis has maybe compared to other tools is once people see it. They get it right away it's not really hard to figure out I mean I know there's a lot of magic that makes that happen, but you know you see attacks to see the annotations you see the, you know, engagement interaction and you know, they get it right away. And those tools are either so general they are hard to wrap their mind around, or so specific that there's like no wiggle room and you feel like you're stuck in a box so hypothesis seems to be in that sweet spot of, you know, powerful can use it different ways, but also intuitive at the same time as far as the basic idea of what it's for. We're recording this and we'll now put you as an advertisement. I'm just kidding. I just wanted to say something. Quite windy I'm going to show my window. Yeah, so it's, I echo that I think it's, it's, it's so amazing that that what what comes through with hypothesis in terms of use user ease is, is that it's just the pedagogical background of the teachers, I mean, I know that a lot of folks in hypothesis have teaching and that comes through in terms of the ease and the facilitation of understanding and the direction of using the tool integrating the tool applications to, to use and teaching and learning so that that was really. So I want to echo it Eric said on that it's that's really good another thing too I think that is a commonality. And maybe that we all share is that kind of getting that feedback along that process one of the things I never wanted my faculty to feel was that they were just hanging out there on their own in the plane and does somebody still care that I'm doing this. You know, and I think you know, having those regular surveys and getting that feedback, even if they didn't necessarily respond you know I'd say I'm here again and I'm asking these questions. I think that kind of that may have helped as well as in our process because it certainly gave me some feedback to think about, you know what seemed to be a priority at least for some of the folks as they were responding in the process of the pilot. I would say one thing that's the only thing that's not intuitive about it really isn't hypothesis it's really the interface with blackboard and I don't know how it works in canvas and bright space. It's like a two pass thing and you have to remember not to attach the article and you know I wish blackboards interface somehow was better that it could lead them through it because the ideal thing is something you just happened upon hypothesis in the menu, and it would just like guide you through the thing, whereas you do have to kind of know, have somebody show you how to do it once, and then it's very simple. I don't know if that makes sense and I don't know how it works in canvas and right space and so forth. I think I was a little bit worried at the beginning that so many of our LTI is show up in the, in the course menu that people would go where's hypothesis I don't see it right so the fact that we included that in our onboarding of like okay you have to go in and it's a selection in your in your assignments. But it really wasn't a problem it was one of those things that I was kind of like anticipating as a service minded thinker, but it really didn't have to be a problem at all and was people were, it was, we knock on wood have had a pretty good time with getting people on and getting started and it seems like thus far the support burden has been pretty low. This has been with a really small amount of people so I'm kind of hoping that continues through once we roll out University wide in autumn, but yeah it does seem like it's been really user friendly for both students and faculty so far. And I think with canvas I mean it with with our the way we have it is, you know folks can always bring hypothesis in through their assignments area and so it accessing it is like other LTI is that we have integrated, or not all but some many, like, that are pretty commonly used and so subsequently it makes it not such such an issue for faculty using canvas so. And Jeremy put a question in the chat some of you may know Jeremy, our VP of Education. So, and this is specifically for moving from a small pilot to larger implementation across your school. Right, so how do you move from piloting hypothesis when generally you have a smaller group. And as I know for sure we did at University Washington and also at River Falls. And then you move to a subscription to a much larger contract. So what are some of your processes or ideas and Eric you might have experience with this because you have moved from pilot to subscription. What are some of your ideas and processes for that. Anyone can answer.  So everyone doesn't have to use a tool right so the idea is like we're rolling this out university wide but we're not expecting everyone at the campus, all three campuses to pick it up and immediately run with it. And I think that it's a big jump from where we were the pilot but it's also, you know, still not our full population, but we're kind of doing the same things that we saw work in the pilot right we're expanding our documentation, we're just putting that out on our main site instead of having it housed at a canvas course. We're going to reach out to faculty that participated in a pilot who have already generously shared examples of their use and ask for more examples because we can share those and we always know that there's a real desire for that from instructors to see whether peers have done with the tool. And we, you know, we're preparing our support staff, we're working with hypothesis on support and that way and I think that we're going to try to think about how we're providing training and resources. That's always, I think one of the biggest hurdles is how do we provide enough training, but doing it so that we're not expecting everyone to devote all their time to come to webinars right and actually we did a really cool thing in spring. The number of this was Aaron suggestion or Jeremy suggestion but we were in a real big time crunch because we only have a week between winter and spring, and that's you know finals, and then spring break that's grading, and then we're right back into the start of a new quarter so try to figure out when we would do a synchronous webinar was really a hurdle so it was suggested that we try an asynchronous workshop and do it in hypothesis magic right. So Aaron provided us with a really great article at a prompt. We put that up in the Canvas course and faculty just dove in there and ask questions and it was really low maintenance on our side I just jumped in every couple days to check in and mostly answer questions about logistics and technical issues where I could provide, you know, some, some experience that I've had with the tool so far, or links to documentation. And that really, really worked well because it allowed people to participate on, you know, at their pace on their time that they had to devote to actually trading up so I think that we'll look to do that a little bit more in in the coming year so that we can make it flexible for folks but that's really kind of the big thing it's just like expanding on the things that we already learned from the pilot scaling that up and just trying, trying to find ways to provide more resources that people can access at their own time and base. Taylor Eric you have experience with this so. Yeah, I. Sorry. So, what Robin said. And so I think, specifically, that's going to happen as we're getting ready for our next semester. Yeah, very soon for the academic year. We're actually running some more trainings much like the pilot. We're running trainings, but this time we're going to try to integrate like things that I know from the feedback that faculty are really interested in like, you know, how do I use this with groups and then subsequently those groups and the group assignments to make them part of the grading, you know, assessment, both well formative and summative assessments, but so there's so there's that and picking up the themes from the pilot and bringing them forward. Also more of the, you know, this is how I teach I'm hoping with some of my faculty which I need to talk to you about that. And then the other thing is integrating hypothesis more deeply into kind of our qualifications trainings for our faculty to teach online. So there's, so that'll definitely be a part of it. And then any of the department trainings that I do where I work with a specific department and say, okay, what are some of the things you want to focus on to augment what you're currently doing. Hypothesis will definitely be a part of that. I think I love that idea. Oh, sorry. I was gonna say we just, you know, continue to try to talk it up and to get those faculty members that are using it out there to assist us with, you know, sharing their experiences. One thing I wanted to mention before we run out of time that I got out of, you know, a hypothesis presentation, one of the initial ones that I think is a great starter is that idea of having faculty members annotate the syllabus. I tried that in my own class and I was really amazed at the results because I think most people's experience you, you have maybe that first or second class where you're kind of going through the syllabus. You know, I know there's different ways to perhaps do that better but a lot of times it's just kind of routine, and then you say anybody have any questions and you know crickets. If I annotate the syllabus, I got almost more questions than I could possibly answer. So, those questions were out there and of course it teaches them how to use hypothesis or familiarizes them with it. And, you know, you can kind of go from there so that's a great way to get a specific class up and running with hypothesis that practice of annotating the syllabus. Yeah, I love that idea. It's also something that I want to in fact here are looking at the syllabus. It also informs like what were my missing information that I could so that there won't be that annotation next time. The same thing with assignments, I think that's really a good one. Another thing too that I have as a resource here is in Canvas, there's a Canvas resource that I've developed perfectly much like what many schools put on the websites. But this one they go into Canvas specifically and I have pages set up for specific kinds of tool use pedagogical approach and so hypothesis is one of those pages that, you know, I add information to and will include, you know, liquid margins and some of the things that we were talking about today. I think, Mela, you were the one or Robin, one of the two about this is how I teach who referenced that one. Eric, you also referenced a similar concept just probably I think with a different name. The idea of using faculty to promote or to talk about how they use hypothesis in their own courses has been a good one and I'm on my end definitely pushing schools to do something similar as much as possible. And then integrating hypothesis into faculty PD sessions, just as a tool for them to use to begin with has also been very successful across a variety of schools, because if they can use it. Initially, then they can quickly see the value of a tool like hypothesis. I do want to say also on the annotating the syllabus piece. One thing that I often think about is if you give students the opportunity to annotate the syllabus you can also see where they feel anxiety. Or they feel worried about something that might occur in the class or part of the curriculum and I think what we may not change our syllabus it's important to note and to see that in our students. So, Jeremy had one question and then I'll end with one last question and he said how do you take instructors past the basics to the next level of social annotation and what does that next level look like. Do you guys need about 30 seconds of think time. I'll let whoever would like to answer that jump in and if you want to see a visual representation of the question it's in the chat. What comes to mind with that is taking them from the basics to to the next steps is to contextualize whatever you're working on with the students for them to their own lives or to current events. And then that can kind of be a springboard to think about how can this annotation how can the students maybe take on their owning an annotation. For example, if there's a particular issue that arises and then they think, you know, this the instructor could ask them to find a resource to for them to then create as their own annotation in a group. That relates to their, like I said, their lives are contextualized in some way. And that sends to take to take faculty to the next steps or take the class to the next step in using hypothesis and more diverse dynamic ways. So, for example, so there's so so for example, one of the faculty I worked with this summer we were talking about making Shakespeare come to life, taking that old text of Shakespeare and and having the students look at that and then think about what's what in the current events or what in their lives relates to that text and then then taking that finding a news piece and bringing that in and then having the students socially annotate on that. And then that's leading to, well, maybe I should turn that into groups. Well, how do I, how do I do that? How could I make groups be formed and using hypothesis and subsequent for creating and form and so on. Robin or Eric you want to win. Yeah, I was going to say that one great thing about hypothesis is I think it leads to more authentic dialogue around around text as opposed to, you know, kind of box checking behavior. I think that's always something that particularly in online classes but really any kind of assignment right you're trying to get people not to go through the motions but rather to think at a deeper level, and it helps with that so I think some of the things that I was talking about in terms of, you know, even simple things like having students bring in their own content even if it's, you know, in their annotations even if it's another link or even a meme or just anything where they had to kind of do something is great. And then, you know, maybe some of those other ideas like you know doing it within groups or having student led sort of annotations. I think those are all kind of next level activities where you kind of know you're getting there where you're getting beyond, you know, the discussion board paradigm not that you can't have good discussion boards as I saw somebody mentioned in the chat but to more, I don't know, deep and authentic uses of the tool. I mean, I think about this it's a conversation, we've actually been having a lot in the last few days of when we're trying to take these tools to the next level right when we've helped get them on to campus get them set up make sure they're running make sure making sure we're being responsive is it gives us a really great chance to collaborate with our partners on campus right so thinking about the UW libraries have been piling press books, and there's annotation in press books so how can you get students involved with actually creating content in the class that's generated as a group and then maybe creating that working with our center for teaching and learning and thinking about how they work with faculty and that they've are they've been doing a lot of di work this year. And how does that tie in with that could we be using this tool as a support for that could we be tying those goals into how people are annotating in their classes and what sort of environment that's creating for collaboration and engagement Yeah I think for us it's just we don't expect to be bringing faculty to that level alone we're looking to like faculty to partner with partner divisions on campus to really help us get to that next place and help everyone use the tool in a ways that's helping them achieve the goals that they're they're really looking to me. So I wish I had attended universities that all of you work at I did go to a very wonderful university but I feel like teaching and learning has certainly changed in the past few decades since I've graduated from undergrad. I'm going to give you a last question and then I'm going to give you some time to think about it and take a look at the chat and we'll come back to the last question so the last question is this what is one piece of advice just one Mila would give to a school who is just starting to implement hypothesis. So think about that. Everyone else who's attending today, this is your chance to again walk yourself over to the chat and get in your last questions for any of our experts here on this panel. So take yourself over to the chat get in your questions. And even if they're just general hypothesis questions will have our hypothesis team answer those as well. Erin if I can just jump in for a second I just want to make sure that you know we are we are at the closing out time I just want to make sure that if the panelists can stay for a bit more time that would be great. I would love that if you have to go totally understand same to the people who are attending today in the chat. Thank you. Alright, so you had your think time sort of one piece of advice you would give to a school who is just starting to implement hypothesis and Robin you get the first word this time.  The first thing that came to mind is understand, like know what your success metrics are right. And I think for us like really thinking about our surveys helped us do that like why were we bringing this in to look at what were we hoping this was going to help faculty with. I think it helps us understand what we wanted to ask about so that we can track that through the year but I think that, you know, it's the, the sharper you have that in focus of what you're really trying to compliment, you know how you're trying to complement other tools that exist. What you're trying to help faculty with. I think that helps you understand better how to help them, and how to on board the tool and also to think about what you're looking for in your decision to adopt or not at the end of the pilot so. I would say that again something that hypothesis itself models in its own training is trying to get people to do something. So, you know, we've certainly run training over time and various subjects where you know it's a webinar people go to the webinar they watch the webinar and then they forget about the webinar.  And you know we try to take it to the next step, you know, as far as faculty and have them actually set up, you know hypothesis assignment in our learning management system. Done it once and you kind of get over that hump of how do you get this technology adopted so you know, learn by doing I guess not rocket science but something good that hypothesis models and we're trying to do more of that our university. Agreed I've been to many webinars in my life. I don't have to do anything. Last word. Okay, one thing. Hmm. So, I think after determining what the pilot members really are looking for after surveying them. Connecting hypothesis support materials in a customized way as much as possible so that they can. It's really so it's really targeted what what what support they need, and I don't mean like tech help alone, like all the great stuff that's out there that that speaks to kind of their desire and then consulting with them afterwards like helping them interpret if needed for application. That was fabulous, and I will say as the lead customer success specialist at hypothesis I now have four pages of notes for things that I learned in today's session. So thank you. And I'm going to turn it back over to Franny. So I am just again so pleased with this discussion today it's been really great it went by so quickly as these things often do. And thank you for staying over a little bit and thanks for everyone for attending today. Again, you will get a recording of this. And as will your colleagues who registered but could not attend today. So everyone who registered will get a copy of the recording and there's anything else you would like, such as the chat again, you can email me directly. And, um, yeah, thank you for being here today. And we'll see you next time on liquid margins.


In this discussion we will discuss the discussion question of discuss the journal entries needed over the life of an installment note. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need then can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. So if we see a discussion question or an essay question like this and we don't know exactly where to start. We can start by just saying what a note is and then try to think about well what does it mean to be an installment note possibly writing down the journal entry that to first record the note and then that could possibly jog our memory to go forward. So we'll just start from step one. What is a note? Well typically a note is going to be something that a company is going to do in order to get money. They're trying to get money. They're trying to finance the operations of the business. So if we think about that the first journal entry to record any kind of note any kind of loan is pretty straightforward. We're trying to get cash. So the first journal entry on a note is going to say cash is going to be the debit of some something let's say you know 100,000 and then we're going to credit something for 100,000 and that's going to be the note payable the liability. So and that and even if we don't know possibly this installment thing could throw us off even if we don't know what that is we can we can start here and just say I know what a note is and basically this is the journal entry for a note because we're going to debit cash we're going to credit the note the note payable. Now what often messes people up in this is first that the just determined installment could throw people off and two we start to overthink the role of interest and payments and how many payments and what not when we first record the note and notice we don't all that stuff doesn't really matter with just the recording of the note I mean it matters later on it matters with the negotiation of the note and it matters when we record the interest but to actually just record the note it doesn't even matter what the interest is or the life of the note or the term of the note because we're just going to record the journal entry which is that we got cash and we owe money back at some point in the future why is there not any interest expense when we first record the journal entry because we haven't we haven't had any purchasing we haven't used the money yet no time has passed the reason we're getting this cash is because we're renting purchasing power of money and and it's just like if we rented an office building so we don't owe rent on like the office building until time passes same with this cash here we don't owe rent on the purchasing power of this money until time passes therefore we don't record interest just like we wouldn't record rent before time has passed so this would be the first thing and if we look at the the note it's just going to be a promise to pay it'll typically be in writing you know we promise to pay you know the note was for we have the term of the note that's typically going to be there so what did I say a hundred thousand we're gonna have some type of life of the note so the number the number of years we might have let's say five years and it might be paid monthly or monthly and this are just kind of typical terms that we're gonna have some type of interest rate on the note so that's typically going to be given within the note now if you think about a note normally we think about this type of note that comes to most people mind most people's mind is an installment note so we think about a car payment or a mortgage where that's a kind of installment note and installment note just means that we're gonna pay periodically and that payment isn't going to include interest in principle as opposed to most bonds that we think about where we only pay back the rent it's like we only pay you can think of a the bond being more similar to renting an office space where we pay just the rent on the office space and then we give back the entire office space the bond is the same way if we had a bond we would just pay rent on the purchasing power of this hundred thousand and then pay back the entire hundred thousand at the end the entire principle for an installment note where it's kind of like we're paying back it's kind of like we have the apartment building and then we give back a square foot each time period and back to the to the leaser to the to the lease order and that's so in this case we're paying back some of the principle each time and paying some of the some of the expense obviously we're paying the expense and some of the principle each time we're having that most installment notes are going to be made to be even payments so the payments we make are going to be the same we're going to pay the same amount of cash and to make those payments the same over the life of this note we're going to have to change the amount allocated to interest in principle so in other words if we're making a payment and we're going to say that the payment is always going to be a thousand dollars obviously this is the math isn't going to work here because we didn't figure it all out but if we're paying a thousand and then we're going to allocate some of it to interest the amount allocated to interest in principle if it you know if it if it was six hundred and four hundred it's going to be something different next time right could it could be five seventy or something allocated to interest versus principle next time for the same thousand dollar payment and that's the that's the point the payment will remain the same the amount allocated to interest in principle will differ so you don't need to when you have an essay question like this you wouldn't need to go through the math on that and kind of figure it all out to make an installment note however you want to just explain what the journal tree will be and explain that the payments are going to be the same but the amount allocated to interest in principle will differ and you can go further than that and say well the amount that's going to be allocated to interest will will go down as the life of this goes by and the amount of allocated to principle of these thousand dollar payments will go up why because the carrying a value will go down each time so it started out at a hundred thousand after we make that first payment the carrying value will go down not by a thousand but by the amount that's going to be allocated to principle and therefore the next payment we make is going to be five percent divided by 12 on a monthly basis times whatever the new carrying values is so remember what what interest expense is it's going to be rent on the purchasing power that we have we got a hundred thousand of purchasing power every time that hundred thousand goes down the rent goes down because now we're paying rent on something less than the hundred thousand the purchasing power is going down so that's going to be the idea now to calculate that the interest payments if it's a monthly payment we would take the carrying value times the the the interest rate and then we'd have to divide it by 12 if we pay monthly so whatever the time period is or you can think about it as here's the yearly rate which is always given the yearly rate divided by in this case 12 to bring it to the monthly rate times the carrying value that'll be the amount of interest and then the payment minus the interest will give us the amount that we're going to reduce principal by and then we'll take the principal minus that amount to get to the new principal and then we'll continue the process the journal entries are always going to be when we when we make the payment we're obviously we're going to credit cash and the cash is always going to be the same again it's just making it up we're saying a thousand and then we're going to debit interest expense but the interest expenses is not going to be for the for the thousands going to be some component of it's going to be part based on the the the the carrying value times the interest rate divided by 12 in our case and the difference is going to go to the note payable so the note payable is going to go down and you may not even want to put numbers here to process this you might just want to put X is if they asked just for journal entries and don't ask for numbers numbers can help but but just to give some example of the journal entries this would be basically the journal entry this journal entry would be repeated for in this case five years monthly for five years and it would be the same however the cash would be the same with the amount allocated to interest in principal would differ the amount allocated to interest would go down and principal would go up as these payments were made and then once we get to the end once we get to the last payment after five years then the note payable amount on the books should then of course be down and go down to zero and we will have completely paid this off so note the difference between an installment note and like a bond there's no there's no payment at the end as there is with a bond where we just where we pay the the original amount off at the bond meaning a bond we pay just the interest throughout the time period and then we pay off the original that's what the reason the bond payments are fixed is because the principal doesn't go down the principal amount for a bond if it were 100,000 would be 100,000 the whole time therefore the interest payments that we make if we issued it at par the payments we make will always be the same because the principal is at 100,000 the note on the other hand and that that leads to us to have to make this balloon payment the principal portion back at the maturity of the bond but the notes on the other hand we we're gonna be reducing the principal as we go that's the point so we're gonna be making even payments the whole time and there is no balloon payment there's no big payment at the end because we we have evened it out over the life of the repayments of the note and so by the time we make the last payment on the note the note then should be gone and we don't have any note on the books and we're done