 Alex Cohen was slated to be here today. He couldn't make it. He asked me to give this presentation on INTER, the National Training and Education Resource. It's the infrastructure for next generation learning. I'm from SRI International. We're the developers of the inter-platform. DOE is the sponsoring agency for this effort. So I'll start with, that's probably fairly familiar to all of you here, what our current state of education is. We don't do anything like we did about 20 years ago. We're still teaching our kids the same way we did a century ago. The lecture format is seen as largely irrelevant for today's students. I found it interesting in earlier presentation today talk to students, current college students, about e-books and their response was, why don't I print out all the pages. So you can see basically some of the reasons that, you know, we have become some of the highest non-completion rate for students to start a tertiary education program. The issue isn't that we don't know what to do. We actually do know how to train and educate better. We know that higher levels of interactivity raise the student retention. We know that that helps understanding. So the issue is, is actually applying this knowledge into a format to make, to improve overall learning. So, and as we just heard too, simply putting the same material online doesn't solve the problem. The current methods to produce online immersive education are expensive. There's little to no interoperability of online resources. They're costly to maintain and update. We have platform wars, standards wars. Schools have firewalls that prevent content sharing. All of these things are things we're trying to address with the ITER program. So what is ITER? We're a discovery, delivery, and content creation tool for immersive learning that's kick-starting a new ecosystem for education and training. I'll go into a little bit of detail of what this is. So some of the issues we're trying to address, first of all, is search, being able to find out what's out there, not only within your own online resource, but in other online resources across the country and even around the world. Once you know what's out there, how can you share and reuse that content? Currently, we're not doing that. We also want to reduce some of the technical problems and some of the standards wars and see how a lot of this comes about. But we always have many competing standards, so the solution is we'll have a universal one and now we basically just add a standard. So our objective with ITER is to develop the tools for creation and consumption of educational content. The platform is web-based. It reaches across platforms. It's intended to be easy to use, easy to create, and easy to extend. So specifically what's new is that we have an open source platform for broad acceptance so that it's freely available. We have a flexible architecture that I'll show you so we actually have can accommodate single as well as multiple instances that can be interconnected. It's open source so basically it pays you go for the services you need. If you don't need those extra services or if you have free content, the platform itself is free. I'm free to take the instance, set it up yourself, put your own courseware on it. Basically though, there's a huge potential savings to license costs to the government institutions as well as students. We've created the ability to do 3D interactive simulations within the browser, so there's no plug-in or download that's necessary. How was that done? HTML5? Yes, with WebGL. Oh, WebGL, sure. And to complement that, we have offering tools for the 3D content. That's also an open source product we call CUDA. We provide deep search, distributed search, and deep content search so you can search across instances for courseware and content that you wish. And we're beginning to support mobile applications so we can do field training or reference in the field on a mobile platform. To add flexibility to the content, we are starting to integrate with game engines so that you actually can have a game engine as the source of your educational content and then we pull in the results so we can track student progress within the platform. We're also supporting open standards and want to create a community of interest for further platform development. So essentially we have the community of developers working together with common open standards to further the platform development. So what kind of game engines? Right now we have the vicious game engine was integrated initially. Vicious? Vicious, yes. Not open source, it's proprietary, but it's one of our partner agencies creating content for the platform right now. And we've also added social media tools so we can, users can rate courses, students can rate courses, we also have a rating system so the subject matter experts can have knowledgeable raters for individual courses. So what does it do? We have a group of users right now, the initial instance would be hosted at the Department of Energy, they're looking for some online courseware, they go to the DOE intersite, we're currently integrated with both Ilias and Moodle as learning management systems, they find the course content. Within those they take the online course that reports out their progress, fairly standard kind of environment that we have now. Well what's unique is that we can actually replicate this across other organizations. Other organizations can take copies of the interplatform integrated in with other learning management systems and this shows Blackboard that isn't integrated as of yet, but that's certainly a possibility as we have another user looking at Sakai right now. So you could have multiple instances looking for their individual courseware. So again that's not terribly me right now, what is though is through a registry you can actually find courseware at alternative instances. And so if you're at DOE and you find and you're interested in a course that perhaps is offered at UMass Start month, you get onto your DOE site, search for that course, you find it at UMass, you take the course there, the results are reported back to you local instance and vice versa. As I mentioned we also have an authoring tool for 3D content creation and what this is, it's intended to be able to import 3D models and with the expertise that we would expect an average high school teacher to have in dealing with computer interfaces, they could actually animate the 3D tools and make them interactive within the browser so that you could import a 3D model in this case it's of a house and have doors open, windows open, open, closed, dense, all sorts of things you might do in that house exported into a learning management system and the student could interact with that directly. We're also adding performance-based assessment within the 3D environment. While we also support fairly traditional bubble type tests within a learning management system, all those results are recorded, reported out, we have a 3D performance-based assessment capability. For example, one of our courses, we started actually supporting the weatherization assistance program, training workers to weatherize houses and one of the courses we have is a practice test to do a pressurization test on the house and so the student is given a house model, a realistic 3D model of a house and is basically told to prepare this house for a weatherization test and what they have to do is make sure all the doors and windows are closed, they have to open events, turn off combustion appliances and essentially an open-ended problem unscripted, they can go through any room in whatever order they want, look at the vents, windows, doors, do whatever interactions they choose to do based on what their instructions are. When they think they're ready and that the house is ready for the pressurization test, they go ahead submit their results and they solely on the 3D interaction, the system scores their practice test and tells them what sorts of things they want, what things they missed, what vents they didn't open or close or windows or combustion appliances and so forth. So it is truly 3D-based performance assessment all within the browser. So we support both traditional and advanced training materials, so as you see here, your content is in PowerPoint style loads, we actually have a PowerPoint importer, we have standard bubble type test knowledge checks within the learning management system, we also have flash, video, audio, we're working also with the National Center for Accessible Media to have our platform 508 compliant and all those capabilities are built in within the inner platform and the learning management system that we modified for it. One of the goals of our sponsors is really to make this, I mean kind of the itunes of training and education. So this is a screenshot of just some of the sample courses that are available on our platform right now. So as you see you can search for individual courses, we have icons there. Within the current version of the platform there's also rating systems and number of stars for the course and the idea is to basically use this as a sort of itunes site to find courseware of interest, courseware to meet certain requirements for certification or training, take those courses, have the results reported out and actually use this as part of a job or job retraining program so that people can be qualified for assembly for initially weatherization jobs but any sort of middle skill type jobs. We started in, this actually started developing this in December of 2009 and as a result of the work we've already done we've gotten quite a bit of attention starting with April of this year, the platform was announced by the Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman at the White House Forum on Transforming Federal Lighting Management. The following month we were incorporated into DOE's strategic plan. Our primary sponsor, Michelle Fox, was awarded a service to the citizen award by the Association of Federal Information Resources Management. Followed then by June we were included in President Obama's Advanced Manufacturing Initiative announcement at Carnegie Mellon in which Inter is mentioned for using or use in training the next generation of manufacturing workers and as a result we were then endorsed by the Manufacturing Institute to train half a million manufacturing workers by 2016. From that a number of announcements from Secretary Chu related to the Advanced Manufacturing Initiative and some press coverage of that and then just a little over a week ago, I guess almost two weeks now, Michelle was awarded the Innovation Gold Medal in Division I from the Fall Chief Learning Officer symposium for the work that we've done on Inter. So we're getting quite a bit of attention. I can tell you our last prototype release was in September. We're looking for our next major one in March and as I say shortly this will be actually released open source and the 3D authoring tool is out on the Google open source site. So actually I'm running a little ahead but Any questions? There's contact information from Michelle, Alex, and myself. Yes, plenty of time for questions. That kind of is a little bit late, but I was curious. So the courses that are developed to run Inter platform, are they interoperable to any other platforms or are they tightly coupled to the Inter platform? No, they're actually fairly interoperable there. We started with Ilias as our learning management system so all of the materials that actually SCARM compliant and that was intentional to support reuse. And we also have a PowerPoint import capability within the platform so if you have PowerPoint style notes we can import them that way. Based on compatibility with other platforms I guess would be the issue between Ilias and the support of Google. And I'm not terribly familiar with interoperability issues are with SCI and others. So that's open source, the platform itself? The platform itself is open source, yes. How would you envision individual institutions utilizing this system for instruction at an individual college for example? Well we're actually starting that right now with some community colleges. And the initial model was that the college would set up their own instance on a server. It would be open to their own students. They would choose themselves whether or not to connect in to kind of the inter ecosystem and share content with other colleges and get content from other colleges. That would be up to them. We also know we're supporting our initial prototype instances in the Amazon EC2 cloud. And so one of the community college systems we're working with now is very interested in actually starting their instance in the cloud so they don't have to worry about the local IT support. And so they would have their own identified instance within the cloud accessible to their students and again they could decide whether or not they want to enter the inter ecosystem and share content with others. So it would really be their choice. Thank you. Yes. Source code languages? Java. It's written in Java. PHP and Java is what we're basing on. Okay. Other questions? Okay. Thank you very much.