I am choosing to go, I am choosing to follow Jesus. I am choosing to obey the great commission. I am choosing to love the way that he first loved us. I will not settle for anything less. I am choosing to be a disciple of Jesus. There we go. Good morning everybody. It's good to see you. Those of you who are joining us online from home or wherever you are. We welcome you in Portage. We love you guys. It's good to be with you this morning. As you just saw, a big give this year is going to be massive and it's gonna be uniquely different than it's ever been before. One of the things that we heard early on during COVID, this pandemic period was from our missionaries. Unfortunately, how many of the churches that supported global ministries around the world missionaries, actually one of the first things that churches began to cut out of their budgets was their missions giving. And that was absolutely inconceivable for us. We actually, it's one of the priorities that we have is when Jane and I planted Radiant Church years ago, the very first check we ever gave was a missions check and the commitment that we made was we are never, ever, ever gonna be so financially strapped that we can't make missions a huge priority. We believe that's what the church has called to do is the Great Commission. And so that got the wheel spinning about how we could not just help strengthen or sustain our missionaries globally, but what if in the middle of one of the most unique years, one of the most difficult years, we actually were able to make deeper inroads into global frontiers and to give our global partners and our missionaries unprecedented fuel to do things that otherwise they would be unable to do. Because let me just tell you right now, it's not just in the US, but around the world, this has changed the whole landscape. And there are actually doors that are opening for our global partners that have never been open before. They just need fuel to get it done. And so we wanna turn this whole season around and not just get through it, but to actually advance in the middle of it. And so the whole idea of this global ministry's stimulus was Pastor Joel Dorlag's idea, our mission's pastor. And so what that is is, as you just saw, we're gonna be giving, in addition to our regular support, all of our global partners and all of our local ministries that we support, like Gospel Mission, here in our own city, Urban Alliance. We just did $25,000 towards Warm Kids Program to provide 500 children with cold weather gear here in Southwest Michigan this year. That was in advance of doing this because cold weather was supposed to show up in November, but instead June showed up. But these kids are gonna have warm gear because of you. We've already taken that step. So on your way out today, if you're at either one of our campuses, we have our Big Give brochures, our magazines that talk about what those opportunities are. You can pick that up if you're joining us online. There's a PDF link on our website that you can download that and you can view that. And we're just asking everybody to be praying about that. This is our opportunity to make a big difference through the Big Give. And so we love that Radiant is a missions giving church and it's exciting every single year to see what God does. So thank you for praying and joining us in that. If you have your Bibles, open them with me today to Acts chapter two. Title of this message, which is part of our disciple series. I've entitled it The Church Revival and This Cultural Moment. The church revival and this cultural moment. The church, we understand what that is. Revival means God putting the paddles of passion, heaven's life and energy on the chest of the church and bringing us back to our original state of being in the midst of what I've called this cultural moment because so many things right now are shifting and moving around and so many questions are being asked. What does this mean? Are we living in end times? I think the answer to that is yes. What are the implications of that? How should we then live knowing what we know and seeing what we see? How do we respond to that? And what is God's purpose for the church in this hour? I think before God will ever bring an awakening across our nation where lost people are drawn to Jesus, first, God is going to revive and re-strengthen his people, the church. And it's, how many know that right now? God is in heaven and he is not thrown off by anything that is happening, even when we are thrown off. Isn't that the good news that God is bigger than we are? I go back to the theology of Veggie Tales. God is bigger than the boogeyman. He's bigger than Godzilla or the monsters on TV and he's watching over you and me. That's just good theology to know that God is bigger. So we have to keep that in mind and then we also have to allow that to lead us to the question. Okay, God, if everything is changing around us, what are you calling us to be living in the midst of this cultural moment? So that's what I wanna talk to you about. Look with me at Acts chapter two, beginning in verse number 42. Verse number 42, we're gonna read down to verse number 47 and it says, and they, that's the church, the early church, devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer. And awe came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to awe as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together, breaking bread in their homes and receiving their food with gladness and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day, those who were being saved. So this is a description of what the early church, the very beginning, the first church in Jerusalem looked like in the middle of their cultural moment. This is the beginning of the church. Jesus has been crucified just outside the city gates of Jerusalem. God has raised him from the dead. In Acts chapter one, you see that resurrected Jesus. I mean, Jesus who can walk through walls, Jesus who has overcome death, Jesus that is radiating the life of God teaches the disciples about the kingdom of God for 40 days. They literally go through a 40 day boot camp on the kingdom of God. Can you imagine, by the way, if you were invited to a master class for 40 days and God was gonna teach that, how many would sign up for that class? I know I would. The disciples went through a boot camp for 40 days where Jesus teaches them about the kingdom of God, which was his primary message. Jesus went about declaring the kingdom of God, the rule in the reign of God in the midst of history, that God sees the broken systems of our world and he has a plan for breaking into it, redeeming it, restoring it and reclaiming it. Jesus was the first step in that. Jesus broke into history and established the kingdom the first time he came and then he left his church here, his disciples here, to continue that work knowing that there's gonna come a day when Jesus is going to return and put a capstone on it and consummate and fulfill the kingdom of God in its totality. That day is still to come. You and I as the church, just like the book of Acts, are kingdom people who live in the now of the kingdom but the not yet of the kingdom. And so we live in the midst of a cultural moment where things are broken, where there's division and there's turmoil and there's chaos. And if we're not careful, we can oftentimes convince ourselves that the times we're living in are vastly different either for the good or for the bad than any other times that other people have lived in. But let me tell you that the early church in Acts chapter two lived in a tumultuous time as well. They were living in Jerusalem that was occupied territory of the Roman Empire. They had religious fights. They had the Jewish zealots that were trying to overthrow the government. There was rampant crime. The average life expectancy of a man in first century Judea was probably 45, 47 years old. I mean, there were all the things that you and I are enduring. And there was tension, less than one generation from this moment, less than 40 years, 250,000 plus soldiers of Rome would come to the city and actually destroy it, kill thousands of Jewish people, take the rest into captivity and sell them as slaves in the Roman Empire because of their rebellions. And in the middle of the religious community of Judaism you had the Pharisees on one side arguing with the Sadducees on the other side. So he had division that way. You had division this way. And in the middle of all of that moment God plants this thing called the church. Acts chapter two, God poured his spirit out on the first disciples, 120 in an upper room. Think about this, 2,000 years later you and I are a part of something that began in a room in the Middle East during a massively tumultuous time with just 120 uneducated men and women. And now there's two billion people alive on the planet who worship Jesus and millions more already in heaven. I mean, when Jesus said he would build the church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it, he meant it. And this is where it all began, Acts chapter two. He pours out his Holy Spirit. Peter stands up, gives the first all to call. 3,000 people say, yes, I need Jesus. I want forgiveness. I want to serve God. And they joined the church. Their first baptismal service. 3,000 people got baptized. I mean, think about that, that's crazy. And the church was born. And what we just read in Acts chapter two is a description or a pattern of how the church looked right from the beginning. It's a blueprint. It's a pattern of how they lived in the middle of all the crazy. It says that they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to prayer and to breaking a bread and to fellowship. And it says that even those who were in the midst of it, verse 43, ah, came upon every soul. Because they were watching what God was doing in their midst and going, can you believe that we're a part of this thing? And look at what God is doing. And out of that came supernatural generosity. They're taking care of one another. They're meeting together. And what's most interesting is how they were viewed by people from the outside. It says that they had favor with all the people. People were looking at this community of Jesus disciples who when everybody else is at war with one another, when everybody else is scared, when everybody else is trying to overthrow things or get away or just hunker down, they were banding together in unity. They were standing in awe that heaven was breaking through into the earth, through them, they were taking care of one another. And the world was looking back and going, who are these people? Who are these people? Because what they were observing was that in the middle of their crazy, God was planting an embassy that carried the culture of heaven on the earth for the whole world to see. And let me tell you, that's exactly what God wants the church to continually be. Is an expression of the culture of heaven being lived through God's people in the midst of crazy so that the world can look at the church and see that we are uniquely different. How many of you have ever traveled to another nation? You've gone overseas to another country, another continent. You ever ever traveled to any place? I'm not talking about Canada. Canada is like our backyard.  It's like when I go, Jane and I are not campers. When we go camping, our camping is like the Marriott courtyards. That's our camping.  Oh, that hotel's nice. And if you go to another country, sometimes their hotel is not, their idea of a nice hotel is not our idea of a nice hotel. And their standards for living are not necessarily our standards for living. How many of you know we are incredibly blessed? We have so much to be thankful for. And church, I just wanna remind us, let's be thankful to God no matter what, that we live in a incredible, incredible blessed nation.  And that's culture shock.  When you go there, oftentimes you feel really out of place because people are speaking the language that you can't understand. Or they have customs that are not your customs. It's like, that's really weird. It stands out to you. There's just certain things that people do. Like when Jane and I were in India, Brother Abraham took us to this one town. And we were dedicating one of the orphanages that we built through the Big Give. And at the end of it, it was blazing hot. So when you go to India, Abraham expects you to wear a suit. Guys, the only time I wear a suit is for funerals, weddings, and when I preach in India, that's it. So it's 115 degrees. I'm in a black suit. I'm laying the cornerstone for this school, this orphanage, I'm down in a hole. And it's like 25 degrees hotter in the hole. I'm surrounded with people. It's like a microwave. And I get out of it and I am just so hot. And I'm thirsty. And we walked to this tent where they had like a little reception. And he hands me this tin cup and I look inside and it's buttermilk. It's like this buttermilk with curry. I was like, what is this? I took one sip of it and I'm like, can I have a Coke? Because how many know? Nothing says America more than a Coca-Cola.  Why? It's American culture. Buttermilk, they were all like, mm, drink it now. I'm like, because culture, cultures are different. But also when you travel to other nations, you will oftentimes see on one of the major streets in the capital, something called an embassy. And an embassy is the sovereign property in soil of whatever nation owns that embassy. So like, again, when we were in India, they have embassy mile. So you drive down and here in this gated community in the middle of Delhi, the 23 million population city in India, you'll see this building that says embassy of the United States and it's gated. And even though it's in India, it's actually soil and property of America. When you go through those gates, it's the same thing as being back in the United States. The laws of America apply in that land, the language applies, the food applies, the rights, the protection of being a citizen. India can't break through those gates and have any authority or do anything to violate you in the midst of that embassy. Why? Because it is technically American territory. And the same is true in the United States. We have Chinese embassy and the Russian embassies, but that's Chinese soil. And the culture is expressed in the constitution of those nations applies within that embassy because that embassy represents a carrier of that country. Now, here's what I want you to get this picture of because Acts chapter two is speaking about the church early on looking vastly different than the world around us. So much so that the world was looking in at these Christians in the church and in this community of faith that erupts out of this crazy tumultuous times and they're curious. And it says that actually the Christians had favor because of how radically different they were living from the outside world. And I want you to get this image because the church from Jesus' perspective is the embassy on the earth of the kingdom of heaven. The church were meant to be the embassy of the kingdom of God on the earth. The constitution of heaven is God's word. The rights and the promises of God are yes and amen in him, in the church. Our language is the language of love. It's the language of truth. It's the language of the spirit. We come from multiple different nations and people groups and backgrounds, but yet we're saved by one savior and that unifies us. This is the image that we need to have of the church and it's God's way of expressing the culture of heaven in a way that the world couldn't look in at us as disciples of Jesus and observe what heaven is like. Because if you talk about heaven to the average person, they've got all kinds of ideas about God. They've got all kinds of ideas about what heaven is like. Angels are like, but we are the ones who are supposed to be expressing that. Carriers of the culture of heaven. And so the way that we treat one another, the way that we respond to God, the way that we live our lives is supposed to establish a pattern and live in such a way that we are recognized first and foremost before anything else as citizens of heaven. Colossians 3.20, if they'll put that scripture up on the screen, Colossians 3.20 says that our citizenship isn't heaven. Apparently they don't have that verse. Colossians 3.20 says that our citizenship is in heaven.    That's your true citizenship. Your eternal passport is stamped child of God, kingdom of God. Now you might have a temporary passport.  But as soon as you die, you cease to be a citizen. But you will never not be a citizen of the kingdom of God. Do you know that the Bible actually says that you and I in 2 Corinthians 5.20, it says we are ambassadors for Christ. What's an ambassador? An ambassador is somebody who lives in an embassy and represents the matters of diplomacy from the kingdom or the nation, the country that they come from. So we have ambassadors in all of our embassies that relate to the people of the culture that the embassy is in. You are not just a citizen of heaven from heaven's perspective, but you are also an ambassador to the world, pleading with the world, pleading with people that are far from Christ to be reconciled to God. That's diplomacy on behalf of our King Jesus. So we gotta get a different mentality about who we are. You're actually royalty in the kingdom of God.  If I were to take any one of us at either one of our campuses or anybody even online that's joining us, that's a follower of Jesus. And I were to say, hey, here's what we're gonna do.    Immediately you would have a missionary mentality. Well, first of all, you'd have to say yes or we'd just tranquilize you and put you on a plane when you arrive in Papua New Guinea and there you go. But if you went as a missionary, your mindset would immediately change overnight from how you think right now to how you would think then. Here's what you would do. You'd begin to think, okay, if I'm gonna be a missionary, I need to learn the language, I need to know the history, I need to know the culture and the context, why? So that when I get there, I know how to present Jesus. Your prayer life would go to another level. You would be studying the scripture so that you knew what you believed and how to communicate it in a way that they culturally could understand it. You would be very cautious when you arrived there about where you went. You would purposely build relationships for the purpose of leading them to Christ. You would spend time with other people strategizing about how to reach new people. Why? So that you could be most effective in that context. That's how you would do it. You wouldn't just go hunker down and watch American television and drink Coke and wait your two years out. That's a failed missionary. If we had a missionary like that, we would fire them. Now that's what you would do if I sent you to another nation. What we need in the American church today is for every Christian to realize I am a missionary sent from heaven as an ambassador to the North American 21st century context. Your citizenship is in heaven. God sent you to earth as a missionary and the mission field that he planted you on is called Kalamazoo, Michigan. It's called West Michigan. It's called the United States of America. Wherever you live, you are a missionary and let that sink in because that will change the way that we plan. It will change the way that we love our lives. It will change the way that we prioritize things and it will change, listen, the pattern of how we live out our lives and look more like the culture of heaven. When we look at this passage in Acts chapter two, we see that they did several things that were how they developed and how they lived out and express the culture of the kingdom of God. You guys okay? You guys are really quiet. You're soaking it all in. I'm about ready to send all of you to Papua New Guinea. So let's get fired up. Okay, number one, look at what they did. It says, number one, they devoted themselves instead of neglecting. This is where the difference comes in. They devoted themselves. The new King James says they continued in and what did they do in the four things? The apostles teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer. This is what they did. They were part of what Jesus is building on earth, the culture of the kingdom and it's like, if we're going to be the people of God, we need to devote ourselves to these things. Number one, we need to devote ourselves to the apostles doctrine. What is that? We need to know scripture. Why? Because that's the constitution of the kingdom. We need to know the constitution of the kingdom of God. Well, what is that? It's the apostles teaching, IE translation, Bible. We gotta know it. Well, it's hard. That's why you devote yourself to it. You devote yourself to it. It's like, I need to grow in this. I need to get this one because the kingdom of God is breaking into the earth through the church. We are his embassy. I'm an ambassador. I need to know this and I'm going to devote myself to it. If we don't see ourselves like that, we won't devote ourselves. What we'll do is neglect it. And part of the problem that we have in the American churches, not that we have lack of Bibles, it's that we have lack of devotion to understanding it. So we have biblical illiteracy, why? Because we don't see ourselves as part of the culture of the kingdom.  When I was a young man in youth, well, let's see, in the youth group, I was in high school, in the 80s, this will date me. There was a Christian group that was really popular, a Christian contemporary music group called Petra. Anybody remember Petra? About five people, because we're the old ones. A group called Petra. If I would have asked that question 20 years ago, every hand would have went up. But today it's like, well, maybe. So, but Petra had this song and I remember it when it came out in the 80s, how it helped re-calibrate my perspective. And it was a song called Not of This World. And it was based on scripture and it said we are strangers, we are aliens, we are not of this world. And the whole song was this context, that I'm a pilgrim passing through this world, but my real home is in heaven. Whatever you consider to be your homeland, you will dedicate your devotion to learning the culture of it. If I'm from heaven, I wanna know about heaven. I wanna know the constitution. So they devote themselves to the apostles' teaching. Number two, fellowship, which means brotherhood and love and relationships. If you're my family, because we're all the body of Christ and we're part of the household of God, then I wanna, I need to be together, we need this fellowship thing. The word fellowship is more than just hanging out, it's actually spending time to one another. Brotherly love, we need, Koinonia is the Greek word, we need that fellowship. Why? Because if you're in another country and you go out into that culture outside of the embassy, you have to think premeditatively how to operate in that world, but you can relax when you're around people of the same culture. When I come back in, it's like, whew. All right, sit down and we can talk about things. Why? Because we have the same context, same perspective, same moral vision of life and this world, and so we can come together. Those are your true friends. Then you go outside and you engage in the world, but the reality is the people that really know you are the people that have the same allegiances that you have. That's what fellowship is, and then it says breaking a bread. How many know Christians can eat better than anybody? I grew up when I was in church, potlucks. You had church and then you had potlucks afterwards. Anybody grew up in a church like that in the church basement? Come on, somebody brought that taco salad with the saggy Doritos, the jello mold with the pineapple ring in it. Come on, you know what I'm talking about. The buns with the ham and the cheese, it's like every funeral and every potluck had those in them. And you've got the baked beans and the crock pod and the coffee percolator brewing and tables all set up, and you sat down because Christia, there's something spiritual about sharing meals together. I mean, prayer is awesome. They devoted themselves to prayer because prayer is the actual legislation of the will of our King onto the earth. That's what Jesus taught us to pray. Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. What is that? That's prayer. That's saying my king is making a decree and he has put me on the earth as an ambassador. And I'm saying yes and amen to his will. Prayer is the language. It's the dialogue between heaven and earth and they devoted themselves to it. Notice what they didn't do. They didn't neglect these things. What else did they do? They emphasized togetherness. This is the pattern of the kingdom. Instead of dividing apart, they drew together. I want you to listen to me, church. There is at work in our world, a demonic spirit of division that wants to divide for the purpose of isolating and ultimately destroying.  And the way that you isolate them is through fear and deception. The devil knows that the church united is far too powerful for hell to withstand. And so what he does is he divides. He gets us isolated. Do you know that during the pandemic of the last seven months early on, one of the most, I think, one of the most disastrous aspects of things like a lockdown that nobody talks about is that from March until June of this year, one out of every four young adults from ages 18 to 27 contemplated suicide. Nobody talks about that. Why did that happen? It's because the way that God wired us is we need togetherness. We need togetherness. We need to be together. It's not just Christians, it's our human wiring and even more so in the church. It's our strengthening. And I think more so now and on into the future. The enemy's gonna use every means he can to divide the church, divide us over theological things. I'm not talking about major issues. I'm talking about distinctions. If he can use politics to divide us and make us hate one another, he will use it. If he can use fear tactics to divide us and keep us away from one another, he will use it. Notice what it says here. It says in verse number 46, in day by day, attending the temple and in their homes, breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with gladness. And it says that their togetherness was expressed in generosity. God was doing something so powerful that instead of people looking out for their own self-interest, because that's what fear does. Fear says, I gotta take care of me and we isolate ourselves from one another. Fear says, I don't like you and I don't agree with you. You're not right. I'm right. And so therefore I've gotta be divided from you. And what happens is we get divided and we become survival mode instead of when the spirit of God is poured out and we recognize we need one another. We're connected to one another. The Bible says in Hebrews chapter 10, it says, do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together as is the habit of some, but actually even more so as we see the day of the Lord approaching. It's no accident that we're living in the end times and the devil's working overtime to actually shut churches down and to isolate us. Why? It's because in the end times the church actually has an assignment in the earth and we're to be filled with the spirit of faith, not the spirit of fear. And if you think that this was just a one off, there's all kinds of things that demonically the enemy is going to release in the earth to get believers offended at one another, to get them afraid of one another, to deceive us, to isolate us, to get us into self-sufficiency instead of, hey, what are the needs that you have? How can I help you? Because these guys in the early church were not looking at self-preservation and survival. In the middle of they're crazy. You know what they were doing? You have a need and they'll go sell my boat so that I can help you with your need. Oh, you don't have groceries? Well, guess what?  Some of the most beautiful testimonies that we have at Radiant Church over the last several months have been the expression of generosity that I've seen. In the middle of a time when a lot of people are just motivated by fear, scared, listen, I'm not saying that there wasn't things to be concerned about and aren't. I think we need to be cautious and I think we need to walk wisely in this world but there's a difference between that and being motivated by fear. But I saw people literally calling one another, taking care of one another, taking care of financial needs that people have delivering groceries, taking care of kids. I'll tell you, this is what they were doing because it was togetherness. They loved one another. And church, this is the pattern moving forward. This is the pattern. I think at some point we're just gonna have to, we're just gonna have to draw closer together more than we ever had before because we need it. Jesus did not create you and I to experience the fullness of the kingdom and the purpose of our life just by ourselves. This is not Lone Ranger, we need one another. We need one another. I don't care if it's at a watch party in your home and you're just like, well, we don't wanna come into the building but we're gonna have three or four other families and we're gonna get together and worship. That's great, that's togetherness but we're gonna come in or pastor, we're ready to come back and we're coming back to church like those who are in both of our campuses on every weekend. And by the way, if you're at home and you're afraid to come back, it's safe. It's okay, you can do that but if you still feel led, let's not turn church into couch church where it's just me in a television and my comforts and my conveniences and I don't need anybody else. We need one another. We need fellowship. We need to be in a position where I can serve others and I can be cared for where somebody can give a word of encouragement and I can receive it. Where I actually worship and hear my voice blended with other people's voices. The devil says, don't sing. Jesus says, sing my praise. The world says, don't get together. The Lord says, draw near even more than you've ever drawn near before. We need one another because none of us are the body of Christ. All of us are members of the body and we need one another. This is the pattern of heaven. And the last thing that I'll just focus on here as we're closing is that they elevated their perspective. What was their perspective? Look at what it says. It says that they were verse 47, praising God, having favor with all the people. Praising God, what is that? Elevating our perspective. Instead of being people of criticism of man, what if we were to elevate our perspective and be people that are known for being praisers of God? In other words, our praise, our thanksgiving, our gratitude, our perspective is higher. Paul said to the Colossians, think on heavenly things from a heavenly perspective. That's where we gotta be. What would happen if out of our mouth, the way that we lived our lives, we were known by our praise of God. Praise God. Worship became a deeper part of our lives. Gratitude became a greater part of our lives. Listen, you don't have to practice to be critical. How many have experienced that? It just comes natural to us. I'll be the first one to tell you. My nature is to be critical and judgmental. You know what the antidote to that is? Praise. Thanksgiving. When I do that, what happens is my perspective lifts up. And when the world sees the church in our togetherness, in our devotion to the things of the kingdom and our perspective being lifted, I'll tell you the world will have favor with the world because the world's gonna say like, I wanna be a part of that. Tell me more about Jesus. What is it about you guys? How you love one another? You take care of one another. You're constantly praising God no matter what's going on in your life. You're following this Jesus.  Yeah, we are. We believe in aliens. On Q and A on Tuesday on Instagram, I get all these questions. The number one question I get asked every single time that we do red hot, that I do Q and A on Facebook, and that I do Q and A on Instagram is, do you believe in aliens from another world? I'm gonna answer it once and for all. Yes, it's you.  And the vehicle that you got here through, the UFO, is the church. So welcome to the mothership. You've been beamed up and filled with the Holy Spirit. Come on, let's stand up together. I want us to finish this morning by praising him and devoting ourselves to following Jesus. I've asked the worship team to actually take and sing this song and it's both praise and it is a commitment of our devotion. I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back. Though none go with me, still I will follow. No turning back. The world behind me crossed before me. There's ever been a time that we need to calibrate our hearts to this reality. It's right now church.  I'm just gonna pray a prayer and then we're gonna just finish this morning singing this song. Lord Jesus, today we stand as your people. Lord, help us to devote ourselves to the things that really matter. We wanna demonstrate. We wanna demonstrate to the world, your kingdom in word and in power. Holy Spirit, come and flood and fill us with the reality and the perspective of the kingdom of God and the king of all kings. We've decided to follow you, Jesus. Solidify this statement in our hearts. And Jesus did.


How to convert a USB drive, a memory card, or an external hard disk from one file system into another and back? Right-click on the disk to be converted, select Format, specify NTFS as the desired file system, and the cluster size if necessary. Set the volume label if necessary, the Formatting method, and click Start. To keep data out of converting, let's use another method with a command prompt. To do it, go to the command prompt as an administrator, enter the command cmd, and then enter the following command. Set the volume label, and press Enter again, and the converting process starts. If your flash memory card has the XFAT file system, use the Free Utility MMA Partition Assistant. To convert the card, right-click on it, Format Partition, select the file system,


No, that's real No, that's the guy's manager twice. Yeah. Yeah, if I got more three killed Why would rainwater went to interview for me if I got more three killed? Why would I ran into more three's brother at the Cowboys game? He wanted to work?  Yeah, I want to get I want to get to that Cuz and I've never really spoke this open on the mode three shit, okay?  Okay. Can we confirm that? Yeah? Yes, that's true. Have I ever interviewed Roy Lee? No, I've never talked.  Yeah, so I would never do that to Roy to yellow be easy I would never have somebody smear yellow be easy on his way up. I would never do that He wanted to do an interview Disrespecting yellow be easy Roy Lee did that was the only time I spoke to him when when Roy Lee got jumped at a club in like 2015 or 16, right? I was living in LA at the time South Central LA 70 second in central. I think Something I don't know. Um, he got Roy Lee got jumped in the club. I think he got jumped twice I think that's where it spiraled up right there. I Never interviewed Roy Lee When he died, that's when it got real not when the Pixics song when I interviewed them about the pic six Trap boy and mode three seen each other several times since if somebody was gonna die what happened. Yeah, so I know I got it People are casuals.  I don't think I think he was in LA at the time Yeah, I think I was me.  Why would I interview rainwater twice, bro? No, that's real. That's no, that's His manager twice. Yeah. Yeah, if I got more three killed Why would rainwater went to interviews for me if I got more three killed? Why would I ran into mode three's brother at the Cowboys game?  I was off 70 Highway 75 from Ross Street. I called trap boy Freddy and Dom he was he was open to really sit down with mode three. He was open. It would have been done It was it was baby Jay Prince and it was me that was all trying to sit him down trap boy was like yo, let's like let's sit down and do it Mode three wasn't a poll mode three wasn't trying to hear it at that time. This was before even Roy league. I killed So saying yeah, so it's the timeline of things if people go back and look at the top Yes, I interviewed both of them because you got to think If you interview both people You're playing both sides. Yeah, if you interview one you're choosing sides to lose Lose bro, but let me ask you this it really it touched the nerve when when when Charleston said that you you You know, that's the same thing the guy mode three kill that should hurt me too I heard you because why would you wait eight interviews later to say that? Why would you want to work with me if you if I if I did get him cute Charleston white? Why would you wait?   It was funny. It wasn't what no street She asked him you said something he was like you turn my granddaddy and he started to go into it You know the fact of I'm just going and it I didn't I didn't like I say I watch your interview So I didn't take it no crazy way wasn't like, you know But I understand what Charleston coming from to because of the fact that like we I took Charleston down Down the fast bash and one of sauce Walker's one of they camps managers was there and I was like dang I remember they was into it, but I didn't flex when I'm with you. I'm with you Yeah, so me and him was down there and I got him on that show with with a mama Scott And he was doing anything and I thought about it and I was just it was certain things It was certain ways I would handle certain things when I was with him to try to shy away from the things that I felt like he had intertwined with Yeah sauce Charleston becoming that sauce for like a year and a half before I know So Charleston has been mentioning sauce and you know, maybe one or two of our interviews I interviewed sauce for the first time in four years.  You could use me We can use each other. Why is it not like that no more? Yeah, we on boss talk one on one


Welcome to Finding and Sharing Open Educational Resources for Strengthening Community College Training Grants. So, without further ado, I'd like to kick things off to our moderator today, Yuzhiny Aghia, Workforce Analyst, COL, ETA Office of Workforce Investment, and the Division of Strategic Investments. Yuzhiny, take it away. Thank you, John, and welcome, everyone. Today, you will hear from representatives of the Skills Commons website. Like SEC, the TACC, or Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants, had an OER requirement, that's Open Educational Resources, and the Skills Commons team developed the website that the TACC program required grantees to use. DOL funded the Skills Commons website under a cooperative agreement through December 2018, and Merlot at Cal State Long Beach has continued to develop and offer the materials on the site. Skills Commons has seen a phenomenal 4.5 million downloads of materials since its beginnings, with more than half of those downloads occurring since the pandemic really moved us to online programming. You'll hear more from the Skills Commons team in a moment, both about how to find resources that you can use on Skills Commons and how to post materials on Skills Commons if you choose that way of satisfying the OER grant requirements. But first, let me introduce the Skills Commons team. So we have Jerry Hanley, Executive Director of Skills Commons at Cal State Long Beach, Maria Feet, Associate Director of Partnership Development at Cal State Long Beach, and Rick Lemadu, Associate Director of Customer Relations also at Cal State Long Beach. Welcome, Jerry, Maria, and Rick. So first, I'll talk briefly about SEC OER requirements, then pass it to Jerry and his team to explain what OER is and why it's so important, and then to give you a tour and a demonstration of Skills Commons. To further support the capacity-building aspect of the SEC grant, grantees will build upon and contribute to the body of OER and continue to create technology-driven innovations in career training and education by licensing all work under CC attribution 4.0 or CC buy license. The SEC grant OER requirements are found on pages 11 and 70 to 71 of the SEC FOA, and the links on the right-hand side of this slide provide additional information about Creative Commons and DOL's open licensing requirements. If you have any questions about these requirements, please talk to your FPO. In brief, you must license any new content that you create with grant funds or any pre-existing content that you own but have modified using grant funds. Subsequent users can then copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt this work with attribution to you. Note that the requirements for Creative Commons attributions do not apply to proprietary work. In addition, you must post all grant-funded materials as OER, and we encourage you to consider posting them on Scales Commons, though you are not required to post them there. For other ways to meet this requirement, see the links on this slide. For instance, the Share Your Work tab on the Creative Commons site provides a list of at least 15 different platforms for sharing your work. Finally, be sure to include the ETA disclaimer found on page 71 of the FOA to all products produced in whole or in part with grant funds. Again, reach out to your FPO if you have any questions about these requirements. So this slide and the next provide some of the key FOA text on OER requirements, which we offer here for your later reference. So now I'll diverge from OER and very quickly mention another requirement, also found on page 11 of the SCC FOA. This requirement involves sharing data on the grant-funded credentials that you develop or deliver in such a way that the data can be accessed openly. FAQ number 21, which we issued in September 2020, provides additional clarification on the requirement to make your credentials and competencies publicly accessible. We'll explain more about this requirement in future TA, but we wanted to bring it to your attention now. So let's go back to the subject of this webinar. First, before developing any new content, we strongly encourage you to search existing OER repositories for material and to leverage that material where appropriate. Second, you should decide how you will prepare and post your material per the FOA. Note that because these are grant requirements, it is an allowable use of grant funds to pay grant staff or to hire outside subject matter experts to meet these requirements. Third, be prepared to document for your FPO and the program office how you have met the OER requirements. The easiest way to do this is to send an email to your FPO and the SCC mailbox with the description of how you are meeting the requirements. Finally, the links to the right offer a few examples of promising practices in preparing and posting grant-funded content. Those are products that PAC-Francies posted on Skills Commons. For instance, the Healthcare Apprenticeship Implementation Toolkit offers a very helpful introductory outline of the materials that the grantee included in that deliverable in that toolkit. The monitoring tool is a great example of program support material that around four grantee revised, remixed, and reused from around one project. Note that if you scroll down the items description page, you will see a link labeled Skills Commons Material Reused, which brings you to the original work, so a very helpful feature. And with that, I will see if we have any questions. And if not, we can go straight to the Skills Commons presentation. I don't see any in the chat, so why don't we go ahead? Jerry, would you like to take it away? Oh, okay. Thank you so much, Eugenie, and just want to thank all the Department of Labor staff who've just been amazingly supportive of our work over the many years. And I'd also like to welcome all the strengthening Community College grantees, and I wish you, thank you for spending time learning a little bit more about Skills Commons, and we are here to help support your success in your projects. I have myself, Jerry Hanley, and two members of my team, Maria Feith, and Rick Lemadou will be speaking today, and feel free to pop some questions in the chat if anything comes along. So what we're going to talk about today is just a quick overview of, tax many of you might be familiar with that grant and Skills Commons and Open Education Resources. And then we're going to say specifically, as Eugenie went through their requirements for the Strengthing Community College's grants, we'll say how can Skills Commons really enable you to easily and effectively meet those requirements by leveraging existing OER. As Eugenie talked about, the Montana example and the Missouri example of how you can quickly and easily revise and reuse, remix, retain and redistribute, those are the five R's of Open Education Resources, so you can achieve your goals for your grants quickly and effectively. And then the other one about making grant-funded products public, how do you go about doing that and how can you ensure their sustainability for use? And of course, in all these aspects for Strengthing Community Colleges, there are capabilities to do what, and it's really to enable your students to develop sustainable employment and how do you build regional partnerships from the tax grant. We've done that in a number of ways in their services that you might find very useful from that. We'll highlight key products and of course answer any of your questions. So those who may not be familiar, just remember that Tax Trade Adjustment Assistance, Community College and Career Training really looked at how do you align curriculum with industry needs, accelerate the learning strategies with online delivery, and as you might imagine with COVID, that's become an essential element for our career and technical education program, and how do you really enable that to be effective? Now, as Eugenie has said, all the materials in the tax grant also had to be Open Education Resources. And what we just want to highlight right now is why this is so important as a requirement. And when you look at the $1.9 billion investment that the U.S. Department of Labor made in the tax program, you say how can that investment produce significant return not only for the colleges who receive their funding but also when other colleges who have similar goals and needs, whether you're teaching welding in Ohio or Indiana or Wisconsin, if you're able to reuse other people's resources and enable you to achieve and deliver those curriculum faster with this quality to achieve your goals, that really can produce significant benefits and in a sense get a return on that investment, not just using that investment once but being able to use it multiple times. And because this content is now online, it's the digital format really makes it easy for people to share those things. So Open Education Resources provides you these opportunities where you, by making it public, by making it available in a library so having free access, so think about your local public library where anyone can walk in that door and have access to that material. That's something that we can help you do. And also once you have access to it, how do you use it as you wish by, and that's where the Creative Commons license that you usually mentioned too, enables people to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute the materials. So you can use it for your purposes and customize it for you. So this federal OER requirement is all about not only the Department of Labor getting a better return on their investment but also for you too as well, for your institution, so you can accelerate the ability of your project to achieve its goal, increase its use by making it freely available for others, and it also helps improve the sustainability. And as was mentioned, taking someone from round materials from round one, someone improves it, makes it better, and now everyone has access to that improved materials that can sustain your CTE programs. So the value of OER, very helpful particularly in today's environment where things are moving online, so when you're looking at the features of OER, the permission to reuse it is defined in the licensing. And so this is where Creative Commons licensing is really helpful, and we're happy to help you, and we have tools that can help you add those licenses and all the documentation required by the Department of Labor. And one of the things, sometimes people get a little confused about the difference between licensing and copyright. Remember that the authors of your materials retain the copyright of their products, but what the licensing is does, it just publicly declares that people have the right to use it as defined by the license that you select. So you still, in a sense, own it, but you are enabling people to use it, and that's what the Creative Commons license does. And again, we're happy to help you and your colleagues really go through the licensing process so you can be successful. Now once you make it, your license is available, how do you then make it available for other people to reuse it? And that's where making it available for reuse through an online public library. And that's really where Skills Cubits comes into play is we are a public library of Department of Labor funded resources. And what I'm going to do next is just do a little walkthrough. We've got some screenshots to show you how Skills Commons works. And so you can really think about how Skills Commons could be a service that enables you to achieve your goals in meeting the Department of Labor requirements, but also enabling your regional partners to take it really to use your resources and to recognize your expertise in delivering those CTE programs in the credentials, whether they're stacked in lattice or whether they're full associate's degrees. So SkillsCommons.org, the website free and open for any of you to use at any time. And so when we look at how do you achieve your goals faster, cheaper, and better, and I'll say one of the things as having supported by a number of grants over the years doing it faster is always helpful because you're often, sometimes especially early on in the grants, you're a little bit behind schedule, and saving budget is always a good thing. So that's what we're here to help you do. So what's in Skills Commons? So here is just took a few screenshots. If you're looking for a video on surface grinding, that was produced by a past attack grantee, or if you're in health care, and how do you ensure proper scleralization procedures, especially when you're looking at COVID, for example, where you won't have to recreate these tools, but you can reuse these and what you're trying to do, or how about a whole online course about business communication? These are all set up, and this particular one is materials organized in a learning management form, such as Moodle, that you can download that entire course and upload it into your learning management system. Or you might even want to look at individual units for an environmental sciences program on sustainability, and so you can preview it, click on that link, and you can see what it looks like. And then if you say, boy, we can use that, then you can download it, it'll download onto your computer, and then you can edit it because it has the Creative Commons license, which allows to reuse, revise, and remix, retain the new copy, and redistribute it as you wish. So again, the value of that Creative Commons license and open education resources. So hopefully that just gives you a little sampling of the types of materials, those are all instructional materials, and we have over 65,000 materials in the Skills Commons Library for you to download, and as I mentioned, we have instructional materials, but we also have program support materials, and many of you are working in consortiums, and how would you set up articulation agreements between multiple colleges, right? So those type of resources are available for you, and I see Jenny Newby has asked a question around, if you're a consortium with multiple colleges, do the individual college have the license or the consortium? And Jenny, when you're looking at licensing, it's often the author of the material licenses, they have the right to define who gets the copy, so that's what copyright is about. Now when you then license it, then you're able for everyone in your consortium to use that. Now you also have a choice of whether you want to license it all by the consortium, and that's something we can talk about, but it's often around who the author is, because they're the people who determine the licensing, all right? So program support material, as Eugenie mentioned, we have in Montana a wonderful example, a toolkit for setting up an apprenticeship program. There's curriculum, but also how do you develop those apprenticeships within your industry sector? So those type of materials are also available for you. Now how do you find all these things, right? It's just not a pile of files that you have. We've organized it within the North American Industry Classification Scheme. We also have it by SOC codes and SIP codes, so there's lots of different ways, and the picture, the little diagram there, the industry wheel, each color represents a different industry sector, and if you click on one, then it expands to have all the details, and then you just roll your cursor over the black box there, and you'll be able to find all the materials in that specific area. So this case, this is around in manufacturing, and you have computer and electrical product manufacturing. So click on that, and then you get the 81 materials that are available. You can also browse through a more traditional outline or site map type layout. And of course, we have search boxes like every library would have, so if you're typed in manufacturing, then right here you have over 1,300 materials, and you say, I don't want 1,300 materials, let me begin to start narrowing it down by different industry sectors, and so that's what's on the left-hand side of your searching is all the industry sectors that manufacturing is, and you just click on one of those, and then you can find the materials in your specific area. Now, Skills Commons also breaks materials down by what type of materials? Are you looking for an online course, or are you looking just for a module, or are you looking for a syllabus, because you're trying to figure out how you would design a new course and look at what someone else has already done, or it might be you have a program and what are ways that people have recruited people, or what if there is some video that might be out there? So there's a whole set of types of materials that are available, and then you can say, all right, I want machining manufacturing, and then I want to look for hybrid courses that are available, again, to narrow it down, and then we also have it organized by credential type. Is your program within an associate's degree, or is this a certificate program, or whatever it might be, and another thing you can filter by is by institution who originally created this. So you might find there's a campus, you might be in Wyoming, they might be in Ohio, and they have a similar program, so you might be able to look, let's see how they organize it, because there's a lot of overlap between what we're doing. So all these are ways to help you quickly and efficiently find materials that you can reuse and revise rather than creating it from scratch from the beginning there. And I'll say, give a heads up here, and if you have any question, we have 1-800-RIC-LUMIDU. Rick is our master librarian, he knows the collection really well, he knows how to find things, and he's very good at helping you, being able to get the resources and use it, how do you add the licensing, all those type of things to really make it easy for you to do. And once you narrow it down, you click on the title, and I'm just giving you an example here of how do you install fittings on water supply lines, right? And normally that would be in a hands-on environment showing people how to do it, but now they're in COVID, or you want to do some flipping the classroom to help the students learn more about this before they come into your lab. Well, you click on this, and I just put the red box around, here's a PDF, and I'll just show you an example of a few pages in this PDF of here's how to install fittings in water supply lines, and so it shows you step by step, how do you have to go about doing this. Now, being able to have these resources that you don't have to recreate can save you, again, time, and these are all free for you to use, so it's no cost to use it, and it's free for you to then go in and edit it, so you can use it for your particular program, so freedom of cost and freedom for you to revise it and customize it for your needs. So with that, let me just, I'm going to pass it over to Rick right now, who can just share some of his comments about the support services that we can provide you to help you reuse, revise, and remix, retain, and redistribute, and as well as supporting you on achieving the licensing and other aspects to it well. So Rick, I'll pass it over to you. Thank you, Jerry, and hi, everyone. Just wanted to make you aware and just to kind of assure you about this task that you guys are, you know, have taken on as projects under the Strength and Community College brand. We've done a lot of work with, as you can see with the TAC program and DOL, and as a result of that, we were able to develop a set of FAQs. We can ask questions around, you know, just what Jerry was showing you, how to download material. If this is a different format, it's not in a PDF or a Word doc, what do we do? How do we download that? So I would encourage you, if you're looking for material to download from Skills Commons, and you see a file that looks a little, oh, I'm not sure about that, check out the FAQs in our support center, and it will provide you, I would think, probably with 99.9% of the questions, you know, with the answers to those questions about how to view a file, for example, if it's an LMS export and you're in Blackboard and the original file and Skills Commons in Canvas or vice versa, we have ways to help you with that. If there's an zip file and you want to look in a folder, how do you do that? We've got helps on that as well, and you can see about the SCORN packaging and story lines and things as well. But if you have another question that's not answered there, please don't hesitate to ask and to reach out to us at the support at Skills Commons, and we'll get an answer for you. The next slide here, just around revising and making over some of the content in Skills Commons, if you're interested in doing that and you want to learn about, you know, reusing it and creating your derivative of material in Skills Commons, we've got lots of great examples in Skills Commons, and here's one from, you know, a grant project in Ohio at Northwest State Community College using a Word document, and then they just basically rebranded it and put it on their own CC by license, and then there was also this one as a content makeover, so a little bit more interactivity, not just a simple Word document, but this is some interactivity with a document and creating clicks through and things like that and just kind of making it more interactive and a little bit better user experience, and this was more around a brochure and things like that that this grant project used. We can also help you with the learning management system makeovers and things like that, so don't hesitate to reach out and ask us. We're here to help you, as Jerry has already said, to help you be successful in your project. With that, Jerry, I'll turn it back to you. Great. Thank you, Rick. And again, you know, the idea around the makeovers, right, is how do you take something you already have and make it to what you want. That's kind of the key aspect of the value of OER, again, is being able to not have to start from scratch, but if you can save 25, 50 percent of your time, then you have that extra time to do all the other implementation that's going to be important for you. So, thank you, Rick. Now, one of the other services that we also provide, we have something called Skills Commons Plus, where we have partnered with Odigia to create a competency-based education platform that brings in the Skills Commons OER and allows you to streamline the instructional experience. So, rather than going from a file to a file and opening this or going to different parts, it kind of integrates all that learning experience for that student. It integrates formative and summative assessments. It provides you dashboards on student performance, so you can really look at and evaluate the development of their competencies and it integrates into your LMS. And we're beginning to work with foresight community colleges in North Carolina in implementing Odigia with some Skills Commons resources to provide that. So, if that's something that's important for you folks, we're happy to talk with you about that as well. Now, once we're able for you to create those resources and license them as OER, then what are things that you need to do to make them publicly available? And there's lots of ways to do it and we would like to recommend that Skills Commons can be a very cost-effective way for you to achieve that grant requirement. And one of the things about it is it really does make it publicly available. What I'm showing you here, this is old data from our home page on Merlot. And since Skills Commons started, we've had almost four million downloads of materials and we're reaching almost seven million combination of views and downloads of these resources. So, if it's put in Skills Commons, it's going to get viewed. You're going to end. The other aspect is because it's open education resources, literally every country around the world has access to Skills Commons content. And obviously you can see the US is the highest users, but you're seeing people around the world are using it. So, if you're looking at building institutional reputation and visibility of your programs, Skills Commons can help you achieve those goals as well. So, looking at Skills Commons as your public library, you upload it and we showcase it. And the way we do this, we have a freemium model, that there are free services that we provide. You can create an account for free and people are free to use all the open education resources. And the premium part of the freemium things is that we have a number of feed-based products and services. We can help you in the organization storage and showcasing your project. We can provide technical assistance in licensing, quality assurance. And I'll explain some of those if you need any help in uploading. We have single uploading and batch uploading. If you have a lot to do, employ your partnership develop. So, this is our freemium service that we're really happy to help you achieve in this.  And we will provide, I'll call it preferred pricing for our friends of the Department of Labor. So, and what these costs are going to be realistically are going to be determined by what the services that you need. So, we're really happy to have a conversation with you about what your needs might be and come up with an affordable service for you. And what are those things working through if you're going to use skills comments as your strategy to make it publicly available and disseminate it. We have a whole process of how do you do it? We set up an account. We help you prepare your materials for uploading. And this is like, you know, if you're moving from one house to another, thinking about how do you package things up. So, when you get it to the other place, it's really easy for you to use it once you're back there. So, once we help you prepare, how do you contribute it? If you need to edit it, change it. We can help you with all those things and really enable its dissemination. So, we have that process all worked out. And we supported over 700 community colleges in the tax grant in doing this on over 256 programs over a five-year period that we had there. In preparing the uploading, ensuring that your WCAG 2.0 AA standard on accessibility about Creative Commons licensing, packaging for learning at a learning management system. We have tools, and Rick mentioned that already, and also around quality assurance. So, we can help you do that. And we have tools to make it easy for you to build the Creative Commons attribution tool there. And on uploading, as I mentioned, singles or batches. And whether it's learning materials or program support, we have user guides to help you do that. And again, these are freely available for you to use. In our support center, again, Rick had mentioned FAQs, guidelines, handbooks, videos, all these things that we had to produce for all the tax grantees. And since there's so many similar requirements for the strengthening community colleges, many of these are very useful for you too as well. And so, here are some examples of pages about meeting accessibility requirements. And we've actually developed an easy to use checklist on accessibility requirements that we built with CAS, which is a national organization supporting accessibility. And then if you're looking for quality of online materials, we work with many of the organizations that you might be familiar with here. And now what I'm going to do is pass it over to Maria, who will talk not only about how we can function as a library, which I've talked about already and how you can reuse it, but what are all the additional services that we can help you in making your project a success. So, Maria, pass it off to you. Thanks, Jerry. Some of you may already know that Jerry has been at this work for literally decades. In fact, this morning in a meeting he mentioned that he wrote a paper regarding who we are in 1980. So, he's been thinking about this and doing this work for a very long time. And much of the work that skills commons, the premise around skills commons, is based upon the philosophy that Jerry and colleagues from the OER frontier have really spent some time refining. Skills commons was designed as a community service tool. And we kept that design intact by providing basic content management services that are affordable. And we give, as Jerry mentioned, several projects preferred prices to those basic services to help ensure that content is easily found and able to be revised and reused by many. And your IT department is going to love the idea of not needing to purchase more servers to our cloud space to house all of this fantastic content that your project is developing. We also offer service tiers such as customized portals that are really well suited for state-level workforce development initiatives. And many of you are working within projects that include schools from across your state or potentially even multiple states. So, being able to create something that will provide bridges between employers and education is critical. We can help you fast-track your project success because we have been there. We know that those challenge points are there. And we also get the clock is ticking. We've got service tiers that include professional development and TA for instructional designers and instructors. We've got curation oversight using content from skills commons, which is the world's largest collection of workforce development OER, as well as partnership development strategies and implementation leading to those long-term effective relationships between education and industry, which is not always an easy thing to sustain. We know that. We have also developed a series of courses called Jump Start to Successful Instruction. And this one began as a course designed to help industry subject matter experts acclimate more quickly and effectively to classroom teaching. So, we've all probably seen that experience where we bring an adjunct in and they know their content beautifully, but they've never taught it before. And so, they struggle when they get into the classroom and as a result retention isn't always as strong as we would like to see it. This course helps to jump start those skills early and get them in a place where they can be effective more quickly. Since that time, we've developed three full courses, one for higher ed settings and one for CT, which is also high school appropriate and one for industry trainers. And each course has three sections and each section holds 10 to 13 interactive models and those modules. Those modules include self-checks and reviews and they each take about, on the average, 17 minutes to complete. So, it's not a huge time commitment. You can deliver these Jump Start courses from our site or you can download and customize them as some of our clients are doing with good success right now. So, let me go to the next slide. Thanks. By helping you affordably and quickly, the content management requirements via a project shell space and still common. So, that's what we would do. We would create this space for you to be able to upload and that kind of describes what our base service would allow. We feel we're doing our part to sustain DOL's return on that tax investment and in doing so, we help projects like yours sustain that OER as well. So, from faculty support and customized portals that allow industry and education to create DOL ways into these curated collections and partnership development and tools to assist in teaching and learning online, DOL Commons offers you that expertise and the resources to help projects be successful. Here's a good example. We've been, we've worked, we've done a lot of work with Ohio and I know someone is here from Ohio, a couple of people are here from Ohio today and we are always impressed with the work that comes out of Ohio. The OMA, Ohio Manufacturing Association, has a portal that we have created for them and the association members customize the collections and these collections have been curated by industry experts out of Ohio. The portal is branded so that it has that OMA feel to it and analytics are used for continuous improvement efforts. So, this is a potential design that can be used at the state level. If you can imagine advanced manufacturing libraries that all manufacturers and educators that are in this business can access and easily find what they need would be a blessing. And so, Jerry, it's going to talk with you just a little bit more now about the online teaching and learning pieces that we have put together. We have a sizable collection thanks to the pandemic. I don't know. That's probably not the blessing, but good things have come from the pandemic and this is one of them. Jerry, do you want to talk a little bit more about that? Jerry, are you muted? There we go. Thank you. Yep. I was muted. So, thank you, Maria. And everyone, just those resources, I'll say particularly the jumpstart that helps your industry experts become more effective at teaching your students so they can transfer that expertise and get those students engaged effectively so they have a better chance for retention, completion of their certificate, getting better jobs, and getting higher pay because they're more qualified. All those are critical metrics that the Department of Labor measures there. So, by looking at these tools that you can bring into your program without all this effort by being able to reuse and revise it is really helpful. Now, what I'm showing you here, this is another example of how we've used templates to create websites that help CTE programs quickly transition when they had to go from hands-on to online and bringing all types of materials. And again, this is just a quick, you know, screenshot. And if you get the PowerPoint, you can click on it and then you can go see these things. So, we talked to various CTE programs, something like the Technical College System of Georgia and because I've worked in Georgia for many years and they said, Jerry, you know, is there a way that you can help us just get some of these online resources available about how do I teach online and how do I help my students learn online. So, we pulled together open education resources and I'll give one example that came from the California Community Colleges. They built little tutorials to help the students be prepared for them to be successfully learning online. How do I manage my time? What's the technology that I really need to have? So, all these short videos designed for students and they have another one for teachers. And where do I get access to the career and technical information? We create a little website to find that stuff. So, these are tools that if you would like to as well, we know how to do these cost effectively. And as you can see, branded for your institution or your system, however you would like that to occur. So, in conclusion, we're coming down to the end here is that strengthening your capabilities is around to achieve the grant requirements and the open repository, like where do you store your stuff to make sure it's publicly available. And when you do it in Skills Commons, every material stored in Merlot has a metric of use that's automatically generated. So, you can take a look at are people using it and use those metrics in your reports. It also helps us scale one of the challenges often when you're working in consortium. And even though you might be coordinated at a kind of a top level, sometimes the faculty don't always connect with one another across the different institutions. By having a shared library, that's a place where they can look at each other's materials and then create derivative works for themselves. So, with those services that we have, helping you enable it to achieve your goals at a faster speed and less expensive for your institution. And because materials have been developed already and tested and developed and if you remember all the materials and attack grants were built in partnership with industry already, that you can reuse those and build in those workforce alignment materials into your and take advantage of it for building your quality into your programs. So, with that, we've finished up our overview and I realize this is probably more like window shopping before you do your real shopping, right? You just get to see what's out there. And we were happy to have one-on-one conversations with each of you around what we do and understanding it, how it aligns with your needs. People who may know me, I have a motto which is give a gift and not a burden. And what that really means is that we, in order to know what will be really valuable to you in helping you be successful in your grants, we have to understand what you need so then we can really package these resources and services that will help you be successful. So, with that, I'll pass it back to Eugenie for any final comments and also happy to answer any questions. You just want to pop your questions in the chat. We'll be paying pay attention to that and be able to respond. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you so much for providing such a wealth of information on OER and on Skills Commons. And yeah, I don't see, are there any questions? I don't see any in the chat, but please feel free to put them there or, John, I don't know, I guess we can't, speakers, sorry attendees can't unmute, but please feel free to put a question in the chat. Unless you're dialed in, I guess, then you could ask your question. If you're dialed in right now and you'd like to ask a question live, you just have to press star six to unmute your line. Don't think you're dialed in, otherwise you just have to enter your question in the chat. Okay, thank you for that clarification. So, yes, if anybody would like to ask a question, but, you know, always feel free to reach out to your FPO, to the program office, and then, you know, we can also, and of course the Skills Commons folks directly, and we can also put you in touch with them.  And we just really appreciate the time that they took today to, you know, illustrate some of these key OER principles, and, you know, sort of what it really does, can mean in practice. So, I think with that, not seeing any questions, again, I just want to extend a very big thank you to Jerry, Maria, and Rick for this, for your time, and for all this information, and also a very big thank you to all the attendees. And we wish you a good afternoon, and a very, very happy holiday season. So, thank you so much. Goodbye.


which was not working properly due to age factor it has shrink a little bit so Vaike Mishra was normally we came here we had a long discussion with 2-3 meetings with Dr Vaike Mishra they are given an estimate also and to have a second opinion went to different hospitals even to the government hospital also but finally when everything was fine here budget wise also because it was a big you can say surgery has to be taken place that is called tagging and his experience Dr Vaike Mishra so we all, my family members my wife, my son and our son we all decided that finally we have to go here only on 27th she was admitted here 28th surgery was done very successful as per the schedule as per the budget also and we are happy and today we are getting a discharge finally and she can walk now as per the recommendations recovery will be done in 2-3 days only and it is done only and she can walk until bathroom and she had a walk also for 1-2 minutes she is taking diet also and all medications are done very properly I prefer this hospital very much and I liked it and my wife is in government job so that's why we are on a CGSS panel also finally we are very happy we recommend everybody for Dr Vaike Mishra as age advances the risk of heart surgery becomes more and more considering this aspect I would like to highlight a 90 year old patient who came to us with the history of breathing difficulty we investigated and found that patient had severe aortic stenosis with calcification of the valve now considering her age and fragility if we have asked for conventional open heart surgery the risk would have been tremendous to keeping this in mind we opted for a newer technology to treat aortic valve stenosis which is Taur that is a catheter based perpetaneous treatment of aortic valve disease we carried out appropriate investigative procedures and found that patient definitely need replacement of aortic valve but she do had some issues like calcification which was extending into the left ventricular cavity which may procedure more difficult we planned the surgery with perpetaneous routine cath lab and we did a tower which lasted for 3 hours after procedure patient was shifted into ICU the best thing for this case was that we carried out the procedure while the patient was awake we did not put on to the ventilator which is advantage and because of this we could able to shift the patient into ICU in a fully conscious conditions she remained in the ICU for 2 days 3rd day she was shifted into the ward and after 5 days we could able to discharge these patients now this is a technological evolution which has given us opportunity to treat these complex heart problems in a patient who are in a geriatric group particularly this patient was 90 year old and she had a very uneventful outcome hence our effort in Manipal hospital is to utilize these development in the area of heart problems like tower like robotic technology like mineral access bypass surgery and mineral access well repair and replacement thank you