 Thank you, hi everyone, that's my introduction done. I work at the Open University in England in the Learning Experience and Technology department. So today I'm going to be talking to you about OpenSTEM labs. Okay. I'm just going to go through with you what OpenSTEM labs is in the first place because you've probably never heard of it. I'm going to be walking through the recent development we did. It's August-September time this year, earlier this year. ac rwy'n gilydd i'r cwmhyslwstogawr o'r labu ac unrhyw o'r cyfnodau i'r gwneud o'r gwneud, oherwydd i'n meddwl o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r chyfoddol. Felly, mae'n gweithio? Mae'n gweithio i'r cyfnod i'r 2013, ac mae'n gweithio i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Mae'n gweithio i'r Llyfrgell Mwgol. Mae'n gweithio i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, mae'n gweithio i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, battu'n chyfoddol am ar gyfer leolau ac y tro sci-meddliadau yn ypa yma yn y labu i siaradol yn ofises 2020. D printing o'r u drovell o'r dda iddyn nhw hath o acceptable ar gyfer o'r unun sunkwm, wedi cael amdedig fit ystudiat Şirfa. Yn ddim ent went生hau yn Llyfrgell cofio ar gyfer ar cyfnod o'r Llyfrgell a llunio ddangos heligredig yn gwneud hyn. pre-university students and undergraduates as well and so the aim really of open science lab when it was first released was to provide practical facilities that enable interactive and collaborative learning of STEM subjects so group work is is possible through this platform. We wanted to achieve an inclusive approach to practical work without requiring students to attend a physical lab and we also wanted to enable our students to learn through remote interactions with real equipment that is based on campus and therefore exposing our students to a range of practical equipment and tools in a realistic setting which increases the utilisation of our teaching and lab resources. So what do we provide? Well we do have real pieces of equipment on campus that students can connect to remotely via the Moodle hosted platform and they can conduct their experiments so this is an image of a pendulum that we've got sitting in our lab. I'll go into that a bit more detail in a bit. We use virtual scenarios for students to study using data collected from live experiments so they can enter their own parameters into different virtual pieces of kit and they can determine their results. We've got real data to compare and contrast different samples for example rocks and fossil imagery or microscope slides of cells and plant life. We also use quantitative data sets videos samples that sort of thing and then we also record live lab casts from our lab so students can watch experiments happening live which are also recorded so they can come back to those experiments at any time as well to support their studies. So this is a list of all the equipment and kit that our students can connect to depending on what course is there, their studying and as I said some equipment and pieces of kit are available to other students as well. Just to call out there we do have a Mars landscape on campus which is essentially a big shed full of sand that's sort of mapped out to look like a Mars landscape. Students can work collaboratively to to navigate a mini Mars rover across the landscape to support one of their assessments. So as I said it was redeveloped just it was just released at the end of August this year so why did we update it? Well it was 10 years old and as you can see it does look like it's 10 years old and it was using X Moodle code base theme an old course format model but really want to align with current user expectations. We know they've got a lot higher since Covid lots more people engaging with online learning and the old site really was clunky and not suitable for our students anymore. Accessibility reasons so the old platform wasn't fully accessible so it's now been updated so that it is accessible according to the current WCAG 2.1 guidelines. User expectations as I said usability you know wasn't an intuitive site to use we've now made it a lot easier for our students to find the experiments and it also wasn't mobile friendly you know what we're offering is science any time anywhere so we need to be able to make sure that whatever devices our students are on they can access these experiments. So with regards to scalability and flexibility well when this was first introduced there was only a few experiments since then we've now got over 200 different interactions for students making it quite difficult for not only the tutors to find their information but also the students so we need to future proof that and as more experience are being added we need to make sure that we can facilitate that for our faculty and flexibility so we've made it a lot easier for our faculty to be able to add experiments and edit experiments dynamically giving them more control over their content. So if you're at the Moodle Moodle in UK and Ireland Sam Marshall the lead developer on this project did do a presentation about a lot of the technicalities to do with this development. Caviar I'm not giving technical information out today I'm not a developer but if you were there that's the QR code to this presentation in case you missed it. So what's changed? Well you'll notice that it's changed from open science laboratory to open stem labs and that's to incorporate the vast number of experiments we now have that sit under the whole umbrella of stem rather than just science. This is a Moodle site home page we didn't have that before as you can see it's been highly customised using a theme plugin and so we now have four distinct labs within this site so we've got a science observatories, the open science lab, open engineering lab and open health lab. We have a lab page which is a Moodle course page and this is where we showcase all of the experiments within those labs. This actually hasn't changed too much because we have to be very aware of the fact that we had these existing experiments that needed to be ported across quite simply to reduce the amount of development required. So the only thing really we've changed here is the ability to add favourite experiments. Again it's something that users expect really when they come to this sort of site to be able to find their experiments that they like really easily and it also helps our tutors out as well trying to find their experiments that they're working on. And the use of dynamic capabilities as well to edit experiments and lab information so that it's just quicker and easier for us for our tutors and for the faculty to be able to edit those experiments and this is not just relevant for this page it's across the whole site as well. And then we have the experiment page where students can actually access their experiment. So really this is sort of a different coat on the same information. Again we really had to be mindful of the fact that we didn't want to be doing too much to this to move it across. However this is something that we're going to be looking at in the future to change how this looks and feels for our students as well. So just talking about the user-centred approach really that we take so historically with this sort of kind of massive redevelopment and refresh accessibility sometimes gets left towards the end and so really we've consulted with our accessibility experts right from the beginning and our UX designer so that we didn't take the approach of doing all the developments doing accessibility audit and finding actually there's loads of problems that need to be redeveloped and so when we came to do the accessibility audit at the end it was fully compliant the platform itself was fully compliant and we knew that we could release something that was suitable for all of our students and when we're talking accessibility we're talking neurodivergent students as well as those using assistive technologies and just sole keyboard users as well. We also get our content designers involved they're extremely good at using the right language that calls to our students so in all of our guidance we have to be very mindful of the fact that we not only have OU students but we have students coming from outside of the OU that might not know the OU speak as a which is all acronyms by the way I don't know if you've ever seen any OU sort of paperwork and so there as I said really good at listening to what students say listening to how they describe a science experiment and reusing that language so that it makes sense to them and then we've had faculty engagement again right from the beginning to identify what their problems were so that we could create a solution that's right for them but actually showing them their development every couple of weeks so they could be really clear about what they were getting at the end and not surprising them with something that wasn't right for them at all. We also did some external testing with our external research partner so we asked our UX designer to make a working prototype of the page and then we got students not only OU students but actually other students that are interested in STEM subjects to test the page we gave them a list of tasks to be able to complete and we observed them completing those tasks to make sure that what they were trying to do was easy for them. They also used something called an emotional response tool so here you can see the sort of a heat map where the dark green are the most popular answers to the questions like green being the least popular and the main thing that came out of there was they felt the site was trustworthy, clear and professional what it also highlighted to us where there were certainly areas where students struggled to complete some of the tasks and so what it's done is give us a really clear future roadmap of what we need to look at which includes filtering capabilities, the possible use of templates when it comes to the experiment pages so that they're really consistent from experiment to experiment and again use of language in the guidance for the experiments themselves. So when it comes to complexities or something like this again I'm not I can't list all of the complexities because there are hundreds of them but I suppose one of the main ones is that we have multiple user types so as I've been saying we have students that come directly from their courses there are you students they have their logins we needed to make sure that the two systems spoke to each other from our main course pages to the open stem labs we have students coming in from other education institutions and we have students that come in from the just informal learners so we have to make sure that all the roles and the permissions for those are were correct and thankfully we have an excellent developer that has done that for us we also have to therefore make sure we've got lots of paths into and out of the different labs and the homepage so use of the logo at the top really clear use of the breadcrums there and then also a drop down menu so students have got really easy ways to be able to navigate around the site and again as I said making sure the guidance and the wording on there is really clear so students actually know what they're landing on when they get there there's also multiple different experiments which sounds quite obvious but the fact is we have we have experiments that are available within the platform themselves we have pieces of kit that are access to via various different URL routes we have all of their content that are is available on the stem faculties own servers so that causes lots of different problems when it comes to accessing all of those and the security that there is around that which is why we had our stem colleagues involved really early so they can be involved in the user acceptance testing to make sure all of these experiments worked right from the very beginning we also use a booking system so students can book their times onto the experiments and this in itself is a really complex development so we have instances where students can book one piece of equipment on their own they can book a piece of equipment with other students or we have 10 pieces of equipment that can be booked at the same time by individual students so that in itself is a massive headache which is why I've decided to split the developments into and this is actually something that's coming later on in the year so this is an image of the old or the current I should say system and then the content so none of the so whilst the platform itself we own the moodle platform the stem faculty actually only experiments in the content so again it was about being really mindful about what they have and making sure that it ported across accurately in a way that was again going to work for them and their students and the experiments themselves so I'm not going to go to all the names but this is just gives you an idea of the number of people that's been involved in this development to get it released so it's a huge piece of work and so just to give you an idea then of the labs and the experiments really just to have a walk through so the open sign that the qr code here goes to the faculty website if you wanted to find out more about the lab itself and then when the power point slides are shared you'll be able to see the link there as well to the science lab so this hosts over 100 practical experiments and engagements and it's got over 100 000 hours a year of time table and investigations for OU students so this is an example here of an A level virtual microscope activity A levels are pre-university levels so hopefully if the technology works it's a little video so this is open to the public they can access this there's over 93 different sections of animal plant tissue that students can explore they can magnify up to 20 times there they can take measurements and then they can record their data download the images for their records and then the open science observatories so this has just a small number of experiments at the moment and they're centered around our two optical telescopes that we have in Tenerife so again as I said acronyms we're really good at them coast and pirate we also have two weather stations one that is on Tenerife and then one in Milton Keynes so that you can compare different data sets of live weather at any time and we also have an observatory as well based at Milton Keynes campus that students can book time on to and use so there's the images of the telescopes there these are used so these experiments are used to support core OU teaching but we do also offer free badged open learn courses um and so you know students registered with open learn can also access these telescopes book time on them and get their images as well afterwards then we have the open engineering labs so there's currently over 31 experiments there and it serves over 600 students as well so unfortunately I can't show you a demonstration of this one because it's available for OU students to support their teaching so as I said earlier this is a pendulum activity and this is actually an image of the pen one of the pendulums that's on campus so there's different levels available for students depending on what they're studying and therefore different activities that they can do um but essentially students can use the interface um within Moodle to be able to input their data and then they can use a webcam to see what what reaction that has on the pendulum and then they can again record their results change the parameters um and use that for their studies and that's supporting our engineering modules and then finally we have the open health labs so these mainly are experiments using our health sciences and other related qualifications um so we've got lots of examples of virtual cell and tissue microscope slides using real imagery we also use real health data to examine behaviors of disease um so for example you can look at external factors on health such as smoking and there's a really cool activity where students studying particular modules can grow bacteria in a lab in different environments and see the reaction that it has in those different environments and so this is an example of a spirometer activity and again this one is open to the public but it's also additional activities are used to support some registered students as well this uses data collected from over 7 000 healthy subjects and so what students can do here is enter different age height and gender parameters and they can see what the lung function is of those different parameters and compare those data sets and they can also compare data from a smoker and a nonsmoker so they can see the impact as well that that has on lung capacity okay so that's it from me thank you for listening a bit of a whistle swap tour but um i'm here to answer any non-technical questions thank you excellent hey baba hi um i'm wondering do you have anything about the chemistry of physics there are yes so there are at the moment but because again this was open science labs and we've now got these new labs um a lot of those experiments are currently sitting under the open science lab because of the way that it was set up initially so that was a course whereas now the courses are now being split into the four different labs and so they will be moved across into different areas so there are ones to support all of those subjects but it might just be sitting in the open science lab at the moment okay so another one to follow up um is everything is preset or can a teacher instructor set up an experiment for the student can teachers set up the experiments did you say is that so play with all the parameters decide the solutions whatever so you saying can students set up experiments no no no for the students can the teacher set up the experiment the chemistry experiment set up the solution the measurements oh yes so we do have um yes so not the teachers themselves it's done by the faculty um and then these sort of tutors will that be there to support um but we do have uh again physical chemistry we've got sort of a chemistry lab and we've got the physical chemicals which are set up and actually we do have teams go in to reset all the chemicals in the morning or you know whenever it's been used so yeah thank you thank you just wanted to see how it's integrated with the grade book or how the data will be published to use for the research or is that the students data yeah yeah so at the moment it's exportable into csv files or it's a copy and paste so we don't use grade book oh you don't know it's it's it's um it's exportable either as i said csv or it will be something that they can copy and paste into their own just one for follow-up it is integrated with external website or is it just inside model the the whole open lab that you have so the open labs is moodle but it is available externally yeah thank you yeah so linking up to his question is actually um for where the simulations are or the yeah the simulations are are they publicly available in like downloadable formats that you can either put somewhere else or they are all accessible online no they're all yeah so none of them are currently downloadable um so they're all accessible via that platform