 Good afternoon. We're here to share our absolute enthusiasm about the transformation that is happening in geoscience, teaching and learning, afforded by a virtual microscope. Behind this proposal are the four traditional Irish universities that have been teaching hands-on practical skills over centuries. Our task is to transform and translate this knowledge into the digital age. For this we have partnered up with the Open University, an internationally recognised leader in distance and e-learning. The faces behind this proposal are these. Today we've got here Theresa, myself from Trinity, we've got Simon from the Open University, Julian from UCD and Shane from Nuig Galway. Basically this slide encapsulates what we feel this G-Lab is really affording us to do. A virtual microscope is not only an enhancement, yes it's substitutes and augments a traditional microscope, but because we can direct students to a point on a thin section as we will show this affords a transformation in learning and teaching. Self-guided investigative study and for the first time peer group and learning on the virtual microscope. So we'll go through what, how, outcomes and impact and I'll hand over to Theresa. So what is G-Lab? G-Lab is a transformation. We are converting the traditional microscope from just being a magnifying glass into an investigation tool for students to learn by themselves. We can familiarise the students with the thin section of rock like this one I'm handing here or the one you have on the screen before the practical. When you stick a thin section under the microscope, the biggest area you're able to see is that black circle. So only up to four millimeters in diameter. So you don't have perspective. It's like if you feel, if you find yourself in a city like this one or a city like that one or like that one, you have no idea where you are. Only if you are able to zoom out from this image, you will realise you actually are in Dublin or in Cardiff or in two. So by being able to zoom in and out from the thin section, same as in Google Earth, our G-Lab is going to make the students be able to familiarise with the thin sections at different scales before they come into the lab. Therefore, when they come into the lab, we no longer will be a troubleshooting clinic. We will convert ourselves into an investigative session. Not only we can familiarise the students before they come into the lab, but also we can guide them better. So when we have a look at the thin section at the very different parts of it with a traditional microscope, we might be missing the most important bits of it. With G-Lab, we can actually share with our students a link that directs them directly where we want them to look at. For example, this image here which is a transformation process of one mineral into another, which they have a look at before in lectures as a quantitative process and they are able to see life in a rock, the frozen process throughout this vitro microscope because we are able to tell them where to look. So first of all, we familiarise them with the thin section, then we can guide them through the thin section and then after the lab is finished, we can ask them to do more at home. So for example, last year we asked 23 students to make 10 measurements of angles on a thin section and they can do that with G-Lab as well. They are able to measure these angles and then we asked them to put the results together. So they shared the results with each other and they built this diagram in which they saw that all the angles were the same and they had to discuss why this was happening and what kind of process on earth would provide them with this result. And then it was them who came to us and taught us what they had discovered. So we inverted the classroom and they were learning by themselves and pea discussing and pea learning. So we can familiarise them before they come into the lab, we can guide them better and we can ask them to discuss and learn and come back to us and teach what they learned. So what is the intention here? What we're going to do is to take 40 years plus of understanding a pedagogy. Each university has its own teaching collection and experts who spent many years teaching that. So that knowledge we will take, we will digitise and we will use teaching in the future. So it will become a much longer time scale. What we're going to do is convert or expand the existing collection that we have with Trinity to make it a complete Irish collection. What most universities, my experience is what most universities want is their own rocks digitised. So if you are in a particular locality you will tend to teach with rocks in that locality. We intend to employ an education assistant for the time scale of this and the point is the assistant will gather that information, will begin to create tutorials online and using the two parts of our platform to create this collaborative system that will allow the four universities to be able to work together and do something which has not been possible before. I'm from the Open University, I led the project Create the Virtual Microscope. Virtual Microscope is not unique, there are many virtual microscopes out there. This one is the only earth science one and we have several different collections. I'll explain a little bit about that in a second but it's very important that it makes these samples available to students that they wouldn't normally be able to get to and it makes it a very different experience. Virtual Microscope is a platform, it's a HTML5 app for those who are technical. You can look at rocks in plain polarised, cross polarised, you can rotate the samples which is a key point. The aim of the Virtual Microscope is to help students to learn to identify, classify, in other words to learn how to see like an earth scientist. It's a similar practical skill that we teach in other areas of science. The reason or one of the main reasons for doing this was that there's an old adage that the best geologist is the one seen the most rocks. It's that observational skills, it's not something you can pick up from a book. So you can look at these two pictures and they look like quite nice pictures but to a geologist they look quite different because we spent far too long staring down microscopes. So at the top there you have a basalt erupted from a volcano 55 million years ago. This happens to be from Giant's Causeway. I didn't knock the piece off Giant's Causeway by the way, that isn't a museum. And it's a particular style of rock, it has particular features, random blazer plagioclaves. The one at the bottom has random blazer plagioclaves, roughly the same grain size, the same mineralogy. But that one is from the moon. The point is the students can study moon rocks just as easily as Giant's Causeway. Because it is online and we built the system like this, it has built in analytics so that we can see what the students are doing. So on the left, yes, left, you can see the Trinity Collection. It's a series of about 18 rocks from the teaching collection at Trinity, which we digitized a couple of years ago. On the right is what they've been doing this year. So I can tell you which days they had their main petrology teaching classes, which days they were doing the exercises that Theresa was just describing to you. We can see what times of day even they access, how many students are access. I know that the average students are on an average of 9.24 minutes. It's just quite a long time, given that that's the average. It does help engagement, because you can expand beyond that Wednesday afternoon between 2 and 5. So the second part of the platform, so I should emphasize the first part, that's an open university, it's an open educational resource. We're using the same software in the site, which is open, as we use for open university students. In essence, part of the sustainability is the fact that we use the same system. The second part of the platform is Blackboard. We have what the intention is that we'll create a master module in Blackboard, which can be then pulled by anybody in the system using Blackboard and all the Irish universities are using Blackboard, so that they can use the teaching materials that we create, fit it into the particular module that they need it for. So there'll be the possibility of using samples from any of the collections, creating materials that can then be shared, reused, and obviously once they're digitized, they are lasting. Those glass slides, if you drop them, they break, and they honestly do need repairing and replacing, whereas a digitized system can last for a lot longer. The idea is we'll maintain a set of guides to the different samples. These can be updated, we could even add to them, and the value is longer lasting, because once it's digitized, you can use and reuse. Okay, so I'll go on to talk to you about key outcomes, and all this I think we'll achieve in the first 15 months. We'll have this permanent shared resource, we'll have staff trained in the use of the digital microscope. Simon's just pointed out there'll be lower costs, we won't be breaking slides or having to maintain the microscopes as much, but the main thing will be transforming the learning with what we hope will be improved learning outcomes, and I'll just take you through a few slides here to show what things are like now and what they might be like in the future. Here's some photos of a typical microscope-based geology class, and there are the students in blue and the microscopes in front of them, and the oranges, the staff member in charge. Now, under this circumstance, the staff member can tell the students what to do, and a little bit, they can talk to each other, but of course each of them looks down their own microscope. They can't really look down their friend's microscope very easily. If you notice in the top picture, they don't even have all the same microscope. So, it's limited, and they certainly can't really easily ask the staff member what's going on. The staff member actually has to come along and go around one by one and say, what have you got down there? Let me have a look. Oh yes, all right. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Move along to the next student, ask them, and so on. And so, it takes a little bit of time to actually interact individually with students. If we go to this situation here with a virtual microscope now, the gray boxes indicate rooms. So, the students and the staff are in the one room together. The virtual microscope is somewhere else. Now, of course, everyone can be guided to look at the same place at the same time, as previously explained. That's a huge advantage because now students can directly ask, well, we're looking at this, what is it? And then you can move on to another thing and the students can interact with each other. You know, what's that thing in there, for example? And of course, we don't actually all had to be in the same room. People could be in separate rooms. This could be an exercise where the staff member is somewhere else and questions are coming in because the students can do this from anywhere they like. And indeed, the staff member doesn't have to be there at all. It could be an exercise where the students simply interact with each other in a peer-to-peer discussion and maybe then come back, as explained, to the lecturer in the class and talk about what they found and then move on to the more interesting bit, which is what it all means, having made observations. And of course, it might be used in a group research project as well. Again, the students, in this case, don't have to be all the time in the same place at the same time. And then, of course, there's a situation with very large classes like this, and you can see there's not enough microscopes. And so the lecturer is now beginning to panic. There is the potential with the virtual microscope, not of replacing everything that you can do with a traditional microscope, but certainly of doing a lot, as really I've outlined already. And again, once more, the staff member doesn't necessarily have to be there. And yes, I thought you'd like that. A little moon comes up. That's to indicate the students as the exams are coming around. One of the things they're really keen on is being able to access this sort of information for revision purposes. So, I hope that gives you a little idea of some of the changes it will bring about. So what are we going to do? We're going to widen the Irish and UK footprint of all this. There's going to be a significant step up in what we hope will be the learning outcomes. And this will be through various new sorts of interaction, peer to peer, inquiry-led, self-directed learning. And, we hope, expanding the use of microscopes into first-year classes, which is simply impossible at the moment because they're always too big. And of course, we've got to know each other more as a result of this, and we will do in the future. We'll be collaborating a great deal more, advising each other, sharing our students' feedback, and so on. In terms of breaking down discipline boundaries, a little bit to say here there are a few other topics that this can be applied to outside of geology, and I won't go through the details of that. And at the end of this, or near the end, we plan to give this as a presentation at the European Geosites Union in 2016. And I'll hand over. So I just want to talk to you very, very briefly about actually how we're going to evaluate the impact of this, of G-Lab. And actually, the way this is set up actually makes that pretty straightforward, because things drop naturally out from the process. And basically, we can divide this into assessing baselines. We already have baselines of how students have performed in microscopy-related labs, and we can compare those baselines with what we see after the G-Lab is implemented. So that's pretty straightforward. In terms of feedback, this gives us ample and different opportunities to collect feedback from the students, so we can collect conventional feedback from individual lab components and see how they're working over time. We can also collect online feedback from the students as well. We can also use group-moderated feedback, or we could get feedback from the lab demonstrators. The thing is that with four institutions using this facility, we can try different methods of getting that feedback back, so that we can sort of transform how we're actually developing these facilities. And the last element of that assessment of evaluating impact is actually all that data that's coming out of the website itself, the platform itself. All that analytical data is telling us how the students are accessing it, when they're accessing, who is accessing it, and how long they're spending on it. And that's something that we can calibrate back in with our feedback to actually show us a true picture of usage and how values attain from this. So I really want to leave it there, and thank you very much for listening, and this is just a summary of how this G-Lab proposal is addressing enhancements and transformations in teaching and learning in Geosciences. Thank you very much.