 Welcome everyone. My name is Jeremy Friedberg and this webinar is entitled Beyond D-Learning Online Teaching Platforms. Over the next 20 minutes I'm going to be talking about the concept of what a platform is and ultimately its implication for the education system specifically for teachers and students. But just to give you a bit of context about myself, I'm a scientist. I've been teaching at the university and high school level for many years and I'm an educational game developer and currently I run a educational gaming studio here in Toronto, Canada called Sponge Lab Interactive. But before I jump in here, let me I want to give you just a context of platform and ultimately what I believe it means and and how it's being used in the education system. But just for analogy here in the computer gaming space and the commercial gaming space, platform is a delivery vehicle. It's a delivery vehicle for communications and content. Now around the world there are a lot of individuals and organizations who make game content, computer games and ultimately they have to get those games out to users and it's the platform that does that. So Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, these are these are platforms for delivering game content. The iPhone, computers, Macs, PCs these are all platforms that developers use to create games and get them out to their users. And in order to measure the success of these platforms they're tracking a whole variety of metrics. They're looking at user engagement, duration, scores. They're also looking at things like revenue, where that revenue is being generated, who their demographic is, what are the things that they're doing. And so they track a lot of information, understand ultimately the success of those platforms. The education system has their own platform. It's really very much the school and the system that that school is connected to and it functions kind of the same way. Users engage with that system, their teachers, their students, administrators, parents and ultimately they engage for a very long time and they do a whole variety of different things in it and we look at the success of this platform and we have a different set of metrics that we look at to judge how well the system is working and ultimately how well we're doing in the system. And those things include attendance, they're looking at exam scores, standardized tests, they're looking at graduation rates, the different disciplines they're graduating in and ultimately they are used to understand how well this platform works. Over the past 10 years we've seen a lot of changes to this particular platform. With the advent of e-learning and a whole variety of technologies that have been infiltrated the school system, it's changing and we're in kind of a state of flux and we're trying to understand ultimately where this change is leading us to but what can it really deliver for us? Because there's some pretty powerful things that are happening and that we're really just on the cusp of. To give you a sense of where I'm sort of heading with this, it's a concept called blended learning and it's based on a sort of a core principle that the individual learns in a very unique way. That really there is no standardized way to teach. That every mind is very very different in how it acquires information, how it processes information and what it can do with it. And this concept of personalized learning is quite amazing that we're evolving to a point where we can actually tailor both the approach and the outcomes to a particular individual. And this is really maximizing our ability to understand some very important things that ultimately we want to get out of our education system. And perhaps I'm on my own on this but in terms of evaluating the outcomes of our education system, we really want students who can think critically, can acquire information to be creative about solutions. Critical thinking and creativity, in my estimation, are of the utmost importance that we should be fostering inside the education system and ultimately what a student should get when they leave the system. That's a very personalized trait and it's very very hard to achieve. Now in our current education platform it's very difficult to really personalize things. And I'm generalizing here but the idea of one teacher with 30 students at a limited amount of time per day, it's very difficult to truly understand how a mind works and ultimately how do I craft the approach around it that's tailored specifically to that individual. It's very difficult to do that. But with blended learning there's a whole variety of technologies and systems that are coming together and they're converging that really have the ability to live on this concept of personalized learning. And what it's doing is blending a whole variety of different technologies from mobile to computer systems to the internet. Cloud-based computing allows for this massive storage of data and access to that data at any point and access to content. There seems to be almost no restrictions. Yes, some of it is open and free, others you have to pay for it, but getting at it you can get it whenever you need it. This kind of approach is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week no matter where you are. You just need to be connected to the internet. What's driving all of this is the analytics and the data. Because when you're engaging in all these different systems you're creating so much data that when you analyze it you can actually start to get a really powerful understanding about a user and not just their performance and engagement, but their culture, their learning culture. How do they consume content? When? What works? What doesn't work? When is their mind most optimum in terms of learning? And this analytics is really starting to deliver right across here into this concept of understanding who this user is and what works best for them. Now the one last component to this is game-based learning. I'm going to touch on this a little bit and then I'm going to talk about what I'm going to move into, what the platform this approach, this platform approach is, and some of the issues that are around it, but game-based learning is another component here. And why it's in here amongst all these other things is because game-based learning has the potential to offer something that we've really never had before. It has the potential to both teach and assess the characters of critical thinking and creativity. And game is, it's a very loaded word and it means a whole variety of things to different people, but really a game is built on some very core principles. Whether you're talking about an educational game or a commercial game or playing soccer, they're all based on the core principles. A simulation, a playable simulation with objectives and challenges. Now this is nothing new. We've been doing game-based learning in the computer space for a better part of 40 years. And it kind of works like this. In the late 60s when people started to train pilots, they were interested in the concept of, well, I'm less interested about whether or not they can take off and land the plane. Yes, that's very important skills to have, but what I'm really interested in is when they are at 32,000 feet, something goes wrong. Can they stay calm? Think critically of what's going on and be creative about a solution and do it in three minutes. And so game-based simulators were developed to actually do this. And they both teach and assess those characteristics in one shot. And they do it over long periods of time. And it turns out what actually happens in those types of environments is directly related to what happens with those minds in the real world. There's something very powerful there. And so game-based learning is a crucial important component to this process. And what started in training pilots is really filtered into almost every aspect of professional training. Almost every area of military training, from multiplayer sub-cruise to ground troops, is actually trained through simulation now. Doctors and surgers, oil rig workers, it seems to be across the board because of the power of the data you can get out of it. Now to think about this, there is a game, we think of it as maybe a hook or a really creative way to communicate information, but ultimately a game is a powerful data collection tool. A data collection tool that when you start to analyze it starts to give you a true understanding, a very honest understanding of how this particular mind works and whether or not this mind is similar to other minds. And it's just opening the door to what we can really start to understand and how it's going to augment this system. But I want to talk about one more aspect of game. And this is an important component because there are two fundamental areas of development you're creating, any kind of game, whether it's a game like soccer or a commercial computer game or an educational game, for that matter. There's two fundamental components, there's the simulation and this is where the communication actually happens. This is in soccer, the simulation is the field, the pitch, the players, the ball, the rules, put the ball in the net or it's the alien ship and you have to save humanity from innovation, whatever it is. But the simulation is there to communicate the content. We do this in educational gaming as well. It's the surgical environment that you're simulating that you're doing a routine gallbladder surgery. And so this is where the communication actually happens in the simulation. Another part of game design is the gamification. And this is a very important element to the design. So it's really looking at that user and ultimately, why do I care? Why should I play this game? I'm not just talking about in game, but I'm talking about engagement with any structure. These blended learning solutions, you want to have things to happen. You want to change behaviors, you want to foster engagement and communication. And there needs to be something in there that actually is motivating that user to engage the system, self-reengage as well. That's a tricky thing to do. Now commercial games, you'll see a lot, well, we'll just throw some points in there, give you some badges. And to some degree, to some users, that actually works and works very well. But with others, it doesn't work at all. And so what's very difficult and challenging but educational game design is creating a very delicate balance between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. You do that right, and you've developed something pretty powerful. But when it comes back to blended learning, we need to create structures within this that actually allow users to want to be in here. And it's very much an exercise in human psychology, but there's elements of social mastery. And a whole variety of things, I'm not going to go into now, but it's a very difficult thing to actually achieve. And it's something that I've been working at for many years to try and understand and design effectively. So bringing this all back to platforms, all these things are happening. And they're all sort of converging. But really, a lot of people are having difficulty trying to understand the impact of this. And ultimately, what do I do with all this? And it's no different. You know, we've been building educational games for quite a long time. When we bring them into school systems, the single biggest problems educators have is not that they don't like the game or think it's great and what it can do. It's just what we do with it. How do I connect it to this textbook that I'm using to this social classroom experience that we're having, the laboratory, the field trip? How do we stitch it all together? And that's really been an element that's been missing, is stitching, bringing it all together. Because you're no longer just at the school, you're everywhere at any time. And that's where the platform comes in. And platforms is the vehicle to actually not only communicate the stuff, but to actually stitch the environment together. I'm just going to flip out of the presentation here into a browser, and I'm going to introduce you to the Spongebob platform. And you can access this at Spongebob.com. But this is probably a better part of four and a half years of research, looking into the nature of platform technology to deliver personalized learning and blended learning experiences. And I'll just go to the footer here. For those who are interested, this platform is very much a research tool. And we've been studying not just game-based learning and how it's used and what works well, but we've been studying the efficacy of using these types of tools and technologies in classrooms. And we have about 250 teacher contributors around the world who participate in these studies and give us a tremendous amount of feedback. And so if anybody's interested in getting involved in that project, please let me know. And we can certainly get you connected. But what this platform is designed to do is a number of things. First and foremost, it is open and free. It is a community-driven platform. Spongebob has developed the technology and it's really, there's a number of things in the background here. One is engine technology to efficiently deploy and deliver very rich content to meet your internet connections. But it's also been designed to be accessible to any device you connect to. And to really look at these issues of people coming from mobile devices, from desktop computers, from everywhere all over the world. And how do we let them integrate seamlessly into one system? The platform itself was designed to integrate with current technologies that are out there. So it integrates with learning management systems. It connects to content management systems. And there are contributing, content contributors that come from all over the world, from individuals, organizations, teachers, and students. It's quite, it's quite interesting to see how we can actually bring people and converge them into one, into one common system. So it's designed as a fully HTML5-compliant site and it connects a whole variety of technologies together. And when everything starts to filter into one place, it now brings us to the core question of how do I start stitching? And so we developed a number of tools. And within this system there is Explore, My List, My Lessons, My Classes, Community, and My Profile. And then I'll, I'll, if I have a few more minutes and I'll talk with the overall overarching game that's sewn into the fabric of the site to foster engagement of behavior change. But on the Explore page, this is very much a tool to help me rapidly find content and the significance of that content and how it connects to other bits of content. Now within here on the Explore tool I can refine by language, subject area, displays, thumbnails, but I get the content broken down by utility. And this is a very important point because everybody's utility is completely different and it even changes throughout a day. So we break content out by graphics and images, games and simulations, animation and video, linked animations of video, shared lesson clusters, and that'll become more apparent after I show you the lessons tool, lesson plans, quizzes, case studies, e-books, e-text publications, and even physical products. So science related products give you a sense of this. We even have on here like things like laboratory equipment. This is an important, an important component that these physical devices are as important as the book, as the game, as the simulation. And all of this, this is still content to us in our perspective. So let's just say for example just to highlight I'm searching for something like animals, there we go, and the system gives me back something that I need and I'll find something here. Here's an animal cell and it gives you an indication of authorship and this is, there's content from all over the place here, it's a graphic, it is vetted. So you get a vetted description of what it is. A tool to find all the related materials within the system very quickly and if you happen to be using a physical resource like a journal or a textbook, it actually starts to connect it directly to it. So if you happen to be using this publisher's book, it goes great with this book and these two chapters. This is important, this is an important point that it's already in a very quick step it's converging a number of different medias and tools together in one step and this is alleviating some of the some of the frustration many teachers have right now because the top resource teachers worldwide are going to for digital teaching tools is Google Images. But you have to wade through all the stuff there to find anything good. Once you've found it, is it valid? Am I allowed to use it? Ultimately how do I use it? So the Explorer tool allows you to find things very very quickly and see their connected significance and everything within the system is intimately stitched together in a number of different ways. But once you've found something you can click on the plus sign and add it to my list and my list as a tool is an aggregator. It lets you find and remember everything that's real important to you and your teaching but lets you then define them as unique clusters of content and these are what we call lessons. It's a unique package of content for a particular utility. And through the my lessons tool, this is when you can start to work with this content. Now I'm not going to have time to go through every feature of the site. There's quite a lot and it's almost an entire other webinar but I'll just give you the highlights of this that when you create a cluster of content you can actually control its status and you can keep it private, you can share it, you can do a number of things with it but you can actually start to manage this cluster, you can rearrange the order of it, you can customize it, put your own content in and around it and even save hard copy versions of this for if you're ever going to be offline. But once you've packaged up this particular content you can present directly with it. So I can be up in front of a group of students, they could be remotely anywhere. We can all be looking at this at the same time or at different time intervals and at any point I can zip through the content and I can pull open what the creator of this content has the notes they put in and I can actually participate in real-time dialogue in and around this content. Some pretty powerful tools on the fly but what's interesting about this presentation window, it looks pretty basic but what's happening in the background is that it is aggregating all types of content into one in single interface. It's a game, simulation, animation, video, images, documents, it all filters into one tool so you don't have to moving into all different places and that's been a real game changer for the users on this platform. This is one simple way to engage with everything. Once you've created those lesson clusters, the My Classes tool allows you to create umbrellas and draw users underneath those umbrellas and then very, very quickly you can create deployed lesson clusters to those users and the system will track an unbelievable amount of data for you and distill that data on a variety of things. But just to hide this, you can create as many of these as you want. So you can create a class of 30, 300, 3,000 or a class of one. So you have a very rapid tool for actually starting to deliver on personalized approaches. Again, this is all open and free and developed by our community. So once you have started to, your users are generating, you're using constant under your umbrella and generating information, the system starts to distill data back for you. Are my students engaged? Let's take a look at this. Well, now I'm breaking it up by students and I can see some variations here but I can quickly play with the data and I can look at the duration of that engagement, I can look at the time of day, I can even look at the location that that engagement was occurring. When it comes to, and I'm just going to select all the content here, just give you a sense of this tool set. I can even see a cross section of what people are, the dialogue that's happening in and around the content itself. But when it comes to games and simulations, we actually pull open a tremendous amount of information and distill it back to you in a variety of ways. So I can actually look at this particular user and it's going to give me information on their success rates within the game compared to their class and even relative success rates between themselves and their classmates, areas where they need to brush up on their understanding but it's also starting to look at their ability to solve problems and think critically and looking at those abilities over time and how it's changing over time. So some very powerful tools right at your fingertips and the system distills that they have done so you can really very quickly understand what's going on. But what's bringing this all together of course is community and there's no one organization that can do it all and this community platform approach is really making this very interesting because we have users from all different types of communities. So I'll just give you a sense here. Another piece of content here. Movement to cellular analysis. This is a video clip and you can see it's developed by a professor at the University of Guelph. Specific attribution in the description but what the site is doing is bringing together a number of different communities through the platform technology. It's bringing together teachers, students, administrators, content developers. It's also bringing in those who create products for education space, devices and tools. But also brings together in a very meaningful way the scientific community within the education community. And this is a great example of a piece of content and I can show you what this looks like. It's a piece of video content that's actually stunning. This is real research that on its own is very difficult to use as a teaching tool. But through a platform like this you can actually bring it together, connect it with other resources and then push it out to a variety of users all over the world and then use data to understand what it's doing, how it's being consumed and what the ultimate end metrics are in terms of the success of this piece of content. And so the platform is really able to bring together a number of different communities. Now I know I'm sort of running out of time here but just to touch on the game layer that's built into the fabric of this system there are credits and experience points awarded for everything users do on here. And those, the experience points they allow users to level up and that unlocks certain social features of the site and your awarded certain achievement, certain things that you do and your credits are ultimately are transient and you can redeem them in the, in under the explore page in the marketplace and actually offsetting the discount coupons on educational product. It's part of that reward system and I understand that is very much an extensive reward but the system has a whole variety of intrinsic rewards built into it and really this is an ongoing research platform to truly understand what is that appropriate balance between the two. But what the purpose of the game layer is it's actually fostering a deeper level of engagement, it's changing behavior. And what it's there to do is to allow users to take a deeper understanding and a deeper level into the tool set, into the data and to really reward the full use of this blended learning approach. And to reward this idea of personalized learning. It's a very interesting concept and really it's about using platform effectively to bring multiple different communities together in a very meaningful and powerful way. So this is kind of what this, what we do at Sponge Lab and this is, this platform is an ongoing project, it's an ongoing and evolving project and we also heavily study this. So if you're interested in getting involved with the platform, certainly have a look at it and it's very easy to find at spineslab.com and give us your feedback. And I believe in the description below here will be some contact information to get a hold of us if you'd like but at that I will, I will wrap things up and just say that things are changing and they're changing rapidly and these tools are incredibly powerful and have the ability to deliver some amazing things for the education system. It's going to take some time to figure out how to make it all work and stitch together but this is what the power of community can do for us, bringing us all together to really affect some amazing change. Thanks very much and we'll connect soon. Take care.