 Yes, yes, we are recording and let's get started. So after this session, you will, at least I hope, you'll be able to distinguish between different types of knowledge synthesis and you'll know what a knowledge synthesis is. You'll be able to get a sense of what are the steps, so which steps we covered today, which steps are left over for tomorrow and Wednesday and Thursday, pardon me, and also which steps we will not attempt to cover. You will know how to start searching for other knowledge synthesis on your topic to see what has been published. This is an essential step and you'll see today how it fits into protocols. You'll be able to find frameworks to ask yourself better questions so that you can decide what is your knowledge synthesis truly about, right? What's the population? What are you trying to address? Do you have a control group? These are all really important questions. And of course, I hope you'll be able to start a protocol. So we have a lot packed into today. What we won't be doing today is talking about searching, so no searching, no searching strategies, no evaluating searches, no database selection. That's tomorrow. We will also not be evaluating sources and we will not be working with COVID-19. That's my colleague Jessica. She'll be doing that on Thursday and none of us really talk about communicating the results of the review, although Jessica has just recently published a collaboration with other researchers in, I believe it's not kinesiology, it's occupational therapy, yes. And she and her team did also obviously communicate and publish the results. So she'll be able to answer questions about that, although it is not part of her presentation on Thursday. I tend to work more with consults. Consultations tend to be the kind of work that I do with graduate students with whom I cannot co-publish. That today's session does not have a ton of hands-on work. So please keep asking questions to keep it active. The reason why it's not really an active session, more of an overview as opposed to a workshop, is because there is a lot to be done to get us set up at, let's say, the foundational level of doing knowledge sentences. But please keep asking questions, that's very, very important. So what are knowledge or evidence or literature synthesis? The synthesis come about through the process of integrating and contextualizing information from the widest possible range of studies into a single coherent body of knowledge using, and this is truly important, reproducible and transparent methods that aim at reducing bias in the selection of sources and in the evaluation of sources. Of course, we cannot completely eliminate bias, but what we can do is be aware of bias. This definition that we're talking about comes from an important document, and it's a foundational document that you should take a look at and probably try to read through. It's the Canadian Institute of Health Research's Guide to Knowledge Services. So the link is below that will be available on these slides, and the reason why that's important is that it gives us the context for what knowledge synthesis mean in the context of Canadian higher education research. Now, the reason why knowledge synthesis are so important because they provide an evidence-based position and one that tries to at least account for bias and for a systematic or producible method in decision-making, big picture thinking, so ideation coming up with new solutions, and very importantly policy design so that knowledge synthesis participate and enable knowledge translation at many levels. And this again comes from the CHR's Guide to Knowledge Synthesis, again, an important resource. What are other good companions for this? Of course, the Guide to Knowledge Synthesis is important, but many of you are based at the St. George campus. I'm based at the UTM campus, but that doesn't stop me from collaborating with a set of fantastic colleagues at the Gerstein Science Information Center. They have resources that are truly insightful, wonderful, very much in-depth, and here's one of the good links to their resources. They have a variety of fantastic pages, so I will not be addressing those pages very often today. We really skim through the field in a rather big picture manner, but I would like you to remember that there are resources in Gerstein, the resources from other reputable sources like CHR, and at the very end of the session I'll be providing you a few other links or at least places to get started if you'd like to work with librarians who are based at either UTSC or the St. George campus. I know that there aren't too many UTSC at least. So what led to knowledge synthesis getting started? It's because all of us, but especially decision makers, needed to find best quality evidence to support their public policy decisions, their healthcare decisions, and to make decisions that were simply based on the best evidence. This all started back in the 70s with researchers such as Glass Smith and Miller who were looking at best decision making in psychotherapy. And by the late 70s, early 80s, Archie Cochran and his colleagues gave rise to the Cochran collaboration, probably the most famous, the most well-known systematic review process and repository in the world right now. And the Cochran collaboration is a truly international network of researchers and others who are committed to the principles of evidence-based and systematic knowledge acquisition where knowledge is built in a cumulative manner. By the way, this comes, the synthesis and this history comes from the epicenter. The epicenter is another fantastic UK repository of knowledge synthesis documents and practices. And I'll be sharing these links throughout our session today. Once we emerge from the 90s and we get into an era where information is much more readily available online, but it also starts proliferating wildly online, we see more and more of these systematic review collaborations arising. We have the Campbell collaboration, the epicenter, and others coming up to bring us this kind of evidence-based knowledge and decision making in other fields, education, social welfare, public policy, public health. So expanding a little bit from healthcare itself. So this is another important question. I've noticed that we have added these from very many disciplines. We have added these from biomedical engineering, other kinds of engineering, public health from biology, and crucially from education and from education psychology. So what are the sources of information that you have that you can base your knowledge synthesis on? Well, of course, this depends on the disciplinary methodologies, the literatures and the epistemic cultures that you move in, right? But as you just saw in this slide, we started out offering knowledge synthesis in the health and medical area, where we have a quality of evidence pyramid. And we have to remember that a lot of knowledge synthesis still try to achieve serving up or being based on the highest levels of evidence, as seen as the 5S or the 6S pyramid. So we see that these knowledge pyramids are built on what we would call primary empirical studies. So that's the big red bar in this pyramid, and that they become a synthesis because they're built on a lot of primary evidence. Of course, in the healthcare and medical fields, we have synopsis, summaries, and even systems that can be built further on top of existing synthesis. But again, not every field will have these. What I find very useful about thinking about this pyramid of evidence is that it's not always as smooth as we see in the medical field. Here, a really great article by Morad and Paul authors published in 2016 tries to see these largely primary sources, the single studies, or slightly better backed up studies as this large, interweaving, and not really very tidy universe of evidence. And then the way Morad and others see it is that systematic reviews, meta-analysis, and knowledge synthesis in general is actually a lens through which we see the primary literature, the primary empirical literature. So it's not just something that organically grows on top of the literature, but it's something that we have to will into existence, that we have to muscle up from this primary evidence. And I think that's a really useful way of looking at knowledge synthesis. So again, the literature that you work with may not have the same types of sources and may not have the comparable pyramid of evidence. But what we're aiming at is making sure that we've included all the evidence that's relevant and all the quality evidence that you need to get the information that you need to build an answer to your question. So either get a general overview if you're doing a scoping review or answer your specific query if you're doing a meta-analysis or a systematic review. So today we have participants from education and we have just about 13 people who signed up from education and you see that there are different sub-disciplines of education showing up in this graphic. We also have biomedical engineering, public health, psychology, social justice education that's a larger team from OISI, mechanical engineering, geography. So we are moving these knowledge sympathies outside of the healthcare professions, outside of the healthcare fields where they arose and right out into other areas of applied science. Does that make sense, by the way? Does the pyramid of evidence make sense to you? Do you have any questions about that? And do you have any questions about the fact that sometimes as you move out of the healthcare areas of the information, you may need to extend your pyramid to let's say gray resources which are not formally published reports and other kinds of evidence that are outside of the traditional 5S or 6S pyramid. So as long as this makes sense to you, I'll move on, I don't see questions about that.