 Right, thanks everyone. I know I'm standing between you and some ice cold buckets of drink out there. So I will do my very best to entertain you, not with another story of shiny ed tech, because that is when I started off five years ago. This is a story of a creative disruptor who was themselves disrupted by the process of changing culture and practices where I work and the creative disruption of me is mostly this person's fault. This is Dan Murray, who saw me arrive at the University of Edmond 2018 saying we must do this great thing that has some code and some keyboards. And over time I've learned very much that a keyboard only takes you so far and people take you all the rest of the way so it's been a bit of a journey and the point of today is for me was to share with other people who might be trying to create something that is a slow process that involves people and that sometimes it's just a little bit harder to do a simple thing than you think it is a lot more packed into it. So this is a sort of a behind the scenes look at what happened. The spoiler alert is that back in the 90s, some smart people thought the internet had arrived. Let's put some equipment in a spot and let students access it using a web browser. Simple. It's taken a little while for the internet to deliver on the bandwidth that we need there. But the reality is that today on most city centre campuses 2018. Oh, these slides got mine to their own, haven't they? That's very exciting. Is that things are pretty crowded. That was my experience as an undergrad and that's often the experience of undergrads at many universities you go into campus and you're absolutely rams the labs are full all the time so we must be doing an awful lot of practical work. But the reality of it is that if we take data from something like 450 courses in an engineering school that I won't name because I wouldn't embarrass anybody but they happen to have some publicly available data. And it turns out that if you're being charitable about 3% of the experiences experiential. That's not enrollment weighted so it's a little bit pessimistic that number would increase if your enrollment weighted it. And to address that people have embarked on spending big money like Sheffield spent 90 million to get a head on practical work for stem Birmingham spent 40 million just to get the same number of square meter student hours. So 40 million to keep up and just change the environment you're teaching in 90 million to do more. That's pretty expensive. So some colleagues and I, including Ann Marie and a few others around the country got together to figure out what on earth we should do about this. Can we do something that doesn't involve building buildings. And can we do something that opens us up to the adjacent possibilities yet another concept that I've been disrupted by that might help us handle some of the existential existential crisis coming in education. So we wrote that in 2019. It took about a year to get published by which point everybody thought this was a pandemic response but actually we were thinking about it for normal normal life. Meanwhile, I was carrying on working out the heart of the new system that I would build the Edinburgh that would allow us to connect students with equipment. My dad came up with the design of a wooden box we did a prototype we put it in the office of the technicians and nothing happened. 20 rolled around and the teaching labs were vacant. And I had a couple of technicians who are really enthusiastic and were able to use their spare capacity to build 50 of these experiments. They started off in my living room. Then they moved into my office in the fire department got a little bit upset about that much wood in the room, even though they recognize that books had a similar combustible load. Then they moved into a classroom which was fine until we needed to put students back in the classroom. In 2020 we were able to deliver practical work that was about 80% of the credits on a third year course of 250 students. But we had a we had a housing problem. I eventually managed to find a room on campus for these. That was a bit of a bit of a thing in and of itself. But this is where we started to pick up on one of the themes and the paper that we'd written together and that was the estate's efficiency of doing things this way, you can do it very quickly. You don't have to wait seven years for building. But there's about 150 times the efficiency. So square meter and a foyer versus about 150 square meters in a teaching lab. And that works out to be about 100 grand a year saving on running cost for the same amount of practical work teaching for one square meter in a foyer, compared to what you would need to deliver that amount of teaching in a traditional manner. So that started to attract some attention internally. And gave me the opportunity to fulfill part of my personal mission to make campuses exciting and interesting again you know we kind of lost that feeling of universities being a place where you went to find out something that was different or interesting because we had the internet and democracy and this is a good thing. But I thought we could do with surfacing and making visible what's going on so making campus spaces more interesting required a different kind of box. So this is where we had to co develop something with the Central States Department so that they were happy to put this in a public space that people would need to evacuate through to get out of a building. So even the transparent front on that is fire rated the rest of the box is sealed we've done fun things I put smoke bombs in them and set them off and send the videos to the fire people and say look it keeps all the fumes inside so if something did go wrong and melt. The foil won't get smelly. That was the sort of thing we did to get that okayed. That was 2021 at this stage we're now trying to grow the activity. We get to 2022 we've got around about 50 of these containers. You'll know they've got some nice vinyl covering on them that make them look like shipping containers and that's a nod to the idea that we're shipping these experiments to students but actually shipping marvels using the digital to do that using an infrastructure that we built in the house. The contributions to get us to this point the direct contributor counts well over 20 people and then there is a myriad of other conversations that needed to be have that touch on a lot of different parts of the university so got to know lots of things in place and drawn on the enthusiasm and apple type for novelty and also just the the trust of colleagues to take these remote labs into some really high stakes situations like a class 450 students in our first year combining four different disciplines we can't put that all in one room for a lecture. We don't have enough space to give them practical work in a teaching lab, yet with remote laboratories, we are able to run everybody through scheduled practical work and two afternoons in a week. So, there's some really great things that we've been doing there, because staff have been coming together with our team of technicians, PhD researchers David Reed in particular and crossing a lot of organizational boundaries in terms of the way we're working together rather than the fall of somebody has a spec and then someone else makes it and sends it back. We've had academics technicians PhD students in the room regularly batting things around changing things iterating things and that's been really good fun. In terms of what the life cycle of a new idea looks like we're all really familiar with externally funded things. You have a year writing a proposal and trying to get it funded and then you have about three years to deliver and then after that everybody disappears off to the next thing and you have a zombie that you try and keep going in some way and that's typical of many remote lab projects. Okay, so I wanted to build something that could be funded from the kind of money that academics tend to have, which is your annual lab maintenance budget so it needs to be something that doesn't require a couple of million to get started it needs to be something you can get started with a few thousands. So, I had picked remote labs to the University of Edinburgh in my interview for the chair position that I hold, and I started in 2018 and started working on it. But it wasn't an official activity as it were it was just something that I decided to do on top of the other things that I was doing. The pandemic came along and we had the two technicians the gray bars in the middle there got stuck into things, and I had a PhD student join as well so that was the core team that delivered the first teaching usage. Since then, the school has funded a new type of post we actually the technical services manager Sally Morgan and I had this great idea for how we could change what we were doing change up our practices in the technical school. And turn one post the schools willing to fund into two different posts 50% of the time with a new, a new job title a new job description that better suited our aspiration for change. So, both of the people involved got promoted, and we brought in a new person. This year we move on a little bit I've actually finally been brought out to do this for the first time in five years so five years of just being agreed tasking as it were. Now that's formally agreed for 40% of my time and there's another second I've got for one year. That's related to this, and we have a second post the schools funding so it's just this thing it's taken a little bit longer than I thought to get this going I thought I was going to walk in the door chalked ran Marie and she was going to spin learning we've been teaching around and dump a half a million quid into building a system that was a gleam in my eye. Reality is that you have to sit there and hold your space justify the idea and wait while people say yeah I'm not sure I get that yeah and show not much interest in it, or even dislike in some cases. But the one thing that's been really gratifying about this process is that generally people come around to seeing how it's useful for them. So I was on a conference called earlier on in the year. I'm sorry it was an online conference where a former colleague of mine said that when he had seen me doing my previous remote labs he thought it was a dumb idea. He had since then got into doing it himself and was saying that you know it's been a few years walking around thinking it was a silly thing to do but now he got involved and I thought it was a great idea. So sometimes an idea just takes a little while to land. That's how this one fell. How does it prepares for the future. Well, we've all been worrying about authentic assessment for a little while now. No surprise there. The kicker of course is artificial intelligence has come along and made outputs completely useless as a form of assessment because if the system can produce the outputs for the students and then we're using AI to market and what's the point of the humans and that that's all a bit stupid. So in the years of tradition goes out the window. Oops, awkward. What do we do now. I don't have all of the answers but one thing that we can do that helps take us to a new place adjacent possibilities again. We have a system that has data flowing between the students and the equipment live in real time video data we know their interactions as research we've recently submitted that shows if you can reflect back to the students what they're doing. There are improvements in certain aspects of what's going on there. I can share that information with people separately on another occasion when we've reached a certain point in the publication process but long story short we're already seeing the benefits of having a rich data stream. And that for the future I see it as an opportunity to assess process. How many times in engineering do we say to the students you must do an iterative process. How many times do we think they quietly just build the end product and then fake the iteration to get to the end product because they know that getting most of the marks is all they need. Then they hit industry and they generally have to iterate. Oops, awkward. This is the sort of thing that could allow us to start looking at ways of assessing the iteration by making it a lower cost process to find out what's going on each of those stages. Final slide. Just to point out I'm not trying to show off that we built a thing and that we want to be the only people that have it and it's the unique selling point for us. This is entirely open source. The hardware, the software. Now I appreciate that just putting the stuff out there isn't enough. There's quite a bit of capability and capacity required to adopt something like this. And the school have been encouraging me to find ways to both help our sustainability but also grow a community of other users as well. So this is something that my management are very, very keen to see us spread around and doesn't need to be badged with the Edinburgh logo. It's the idea here. My idea is that we should be able to share this as widely as possible and by being open source it should be customizable to suit whatever environment you're in without having to rebuild the thing. Like, you know, if you buy in shiny ed tech and you want to change one thing about it, you have to rebuild the entire system. Whereas if it's open source, you just have to build the bit that you want differently. So that's driving some of our interest in making it open source. And I will look forward to having conversations with anyone that would like to find out more about this or even just the process of doing a new thing. So thank you very much. Any questions. Yeah, wins the beer. Sorry. Uh huh. So what you do, well, this is a cool thing. You can access these from anywhere. So being physically present with them is not necessary to interact with them. So we could use these from here. We could use these from anywhere in the world, but we put them on display so that you get this great melding of this invisible online space with the physical reality. The previous wooden boxes actually had a solid section and intermediate section and open section to reflect that blending of the online and the physical worlds. So mobile phone laptop wherever you are just connect away you go. So at any point in time, any of these things spinning. They're doing it. Yep. Yeah. Yes. Oh, and these boxes. Okay, so we're doing stuff to do with mobile phones here stuff to do with robot arms here. You know, like if you've got a robot arm that's doing a thing, you don't want it like let's say picking up a cup of coffee. The coffee in your face you don't want to dribble it down your front. You don't want to take it so long to get the coffees cold and don't want to be so fast it knocks your teeth out so we've got to teach the students how to trade off all of those things so we've got these just to do that. Over here we've got some bridges we don't want bridges to fall down we want them to survive the wind so we can learn about stress and strain. And over here there's some orbits and pieces going on with radio waves. So we've started with the three more addressable disciplines in engineering so far with the experiments the idea is anything that you can connect to electronics you can do. And we have a new PhD student who's working on three different chemical engineering area chemical engineering experiments now which has got fluid in them, which adds to the fun. And we wanted to build up to the having the extra risk of fluid by building capacity care. The a in the title of esteem is that I have been provoked by others to answer questions such as how are these relevant to someone studying divinity. In which case you can imagine a quantum physics experiment in the way in which a measurement might influence something that is otherwise a superposition of possibilities could address some interesting metaphysical considerations as well. So if you look at the proof of the policy you can look at half life. So what was that for the cat in the box to be fair. There's enough cats on the internet. Me putting a one in a box I suspect I need to have a close look at the ethical form. Cat cafes right okay ideas another day. Yeah, so, so the idea behind is whatever is needed and each experiment has different interfaces that show up different aspects of it to different audiences. And it's all intended to be. But it's harder to make them low cost. So that's the bit we've done here. You can also hook these up to more expensive things, the expensive talking up expensive equipments easy thing, doing it in a low cost ways by the challenge challenges. And that's what we've embraced with this one. Right that way.