 So hi, I'm Fred. I wear two hats. I'm the product manager of Big Blue Button and I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks. We are the company that started the Big Blue Button project. What I want to do is talk mostly about AI and how AI is basically informing our thoughts about how to evolve a virtual classroom platform in a way that effectively helps a teacher teach and a learner learn. I have thought and been thinking a lot about AI and this stems from when you build a product you have to start with the end in mind and I'm going to talk about the goal of the virtual classroom and I'm going to give you a framework for how to think about AI. So when you hear people tell you AI is going to make learning easy, no. AI is going to have a different effect. My opinion if you want to achieve effective teaching and learning in a virtual class and I wrote an article early this month, early this year on it about chat GPT to kind of think through these ideas. All right. So Blindside Networks, we started the Big Blue Button project in 2007. We work with over 25 Moodle partners and we recently have done since COVID over 2 billion minutes of virtual classes. Cool. And Big Blue Button, it's a platform. It's a platform for teaching effective virtual classes and it's not a video conferencing system. There's just so much more that has to happen during a virtual class to be effective. Video is a component, but only a small component. And if you just rely on video, you're kind of like looking through the keyhole or all my students there and that it's not an effective way to teach. If it was, all those courses and classes taught using video conferencing systems during COVID would have turned out much better. Okay. So why does Big Blue Button exist? Can I get a show of hands? Who thinks they know what this picture is? Anybody? Okay. No. I'll give you a hint. Anybody? The pale blue dot. That's the picture that Voyager took before it left our solar system and sent back. It took about two months to transmit it back. That's us. That's the pale blue dot by Carl Sagan in the middle of the cosmos. That's all we've got. Right. So when you think about how can we make sure that we take care of that in a society and plan it around, what's the roadmap? Well, the United Nations or UNESCO has the roadmap. Sustainability Development Goal number four is education and education underpins almost all these other challenges that we have. So it's critical for us to make sure that education is universally available and of high quality. It's how we're going to move our planet and our culture forward. We're not doing so well. Right now today, according to UNESCO, 244 million kids under 15 do not have access to education. That's just unacceptable. And I believe in the vision of Moodle to make our planet a better place for everybody and to provide educational tools as open source. And we share that as well. Okay. So what I want to do is I want to give you and answer a couple of questions like what's an effective virtual class? How do we measure this? And how can AI help at one and two? And again, I want to make this a bit of interactive. Let's imagine you are designing a world-class online school. You're using Moodle and it'll have virtual classes. You'll start off in Moodle, you go into a virtual class and you'll come back to a class. You want your teachers and students to say that was the best virtual class that I ever had. How do you achieve this? Anybody throw out some how do you how do you get to that point? What would you do? Basically, think about that problem for a moment. How would you design an effective virtual classroom so that it was going to be the best experience people ever had? That's the challenge that we have. And we thought a lot about this. So I'm going to tell you before I talk about AI, I'm going to give you a framework to think about what makes an effective virtual class. Otherwise, when someone comes up and tells you, hey, this AI is going to improve learning, how do you think about it, right? You have to have framework, a theory of the case. The second, I'm going to show you how we as a Big Blue Button Project, the myth line of that framework. And then I'll talk about AI. Okay, so AI is about improving, improving, sorry, a framework is about a virtual class is really about how do you achieve effective learning outcomes. So we should just sit down and imagine things, right? No, there's pedagogy will tell us this. And the one way to think about it a classroom is if you do video, it's a component of an effective virtual class, but the actual part of it is much, much more. The goal of the virtual classroom is not to meet, it is to learn. So what does learning mean? Again, should we just imagine it? No, there's like 50 years of pedagogy that already tell us how our brains work, how to teach effectively. So what can we learn from that? Okay, can anybody tell me what this diagram is? It's Bloom's taxonomy, right? So it tells us that we learn in stages, our brains work through stages. And if you look at this, that middle stage is all about applying, you can't master something, you can't be creative, you can't get the skill unless you actually have applied it. And of course, this makes sense, right? It's like walking into a gym and saying, I'm going to improve my physical fitness, and I will watch and look at the machines. I won't look at the weights, I won't lift them. No, you have to do things. You have to exert yourself. And if you continue down that road, what you really want to do is have a virtual classroom like this. So this is our framework for a structure of an effective virtual class. You start off the beginning with some building relationships, because you have to make students feel comfortable to make mistakes, right? Mistakes is part of learning. It's how we learn. You would do a little bit of review at the class. This is you, the instructor. Make sure you understand where the students are on their learning journey. Introduce the material. The main segment I'll talk about in a moment. Summarize the content, ideally get them to summarize it, and then talk about next steps. During the main segment, you want to have small chunks, right? Micro learning. You want to create a scaffold so that you can get students to apply what they just did, right? So think of this in contrast to where you're typing stuff into AI and it's telling you the answer. No, you want students to apply themselves because if you work your brain, that's how our chemistry works, right? You have to think, you have to apply yourself and struggle is good. So these applied learning is a way that you actually climb Bloom staircase, and then we have this cycle which we have called, we call it the virtual cycle of applied learning. You apply yourself. You exert effort, right? You struggle a bit, struggle is good. You get feedback. You get that level of understanding, and you keep doing this. And what you want to achieve from the student's perspective in your world-class online course is they come to the virtual class and they realize the more I apply myself, the faster I learn, right? And so what does it mean to do effectively apply yourself? Well, again, there's a theory for that. Velosky's sown of proximal development. What a name. And it basically says, okay, am I, yeah, thought the internet had got me. You have this task which is either too easy. If I asked you what 2 plus 2 is, everybody would say 4. If I asked you 475 plus 376, I always wait to see if someone just yells out the answer. There's a zone in there where basically it breaks down to at the lower end and the higher end. So at the lower end, these are things that are achievable by yourself. You could sit down and figure it out. You struggle a bit and struggle is good. At the highest end of the zone is the things that you can achieve with assistance, right? So think about you're in a virtual class right now. You're not by yourself and that assistance can be from the instructor, the teacher or from your students, right? So what's that theory based on? Well, that's social constructivism and that's what Moodle is based on. Moodle is based on a theory that we learn better by working with each other. Why? Because we're human, right? Humans learn best from humans. I can have things that help me set up an environment but at the end of the day, I have to apply myself and I want to learn and I will learn best with helping. That's what the zone of proximal development tells us. Okay. So all of that, I want to boil down to the one phrase I want you to remember. If you want to have an effective virtual class or effective learning any classroom, you ideally want to create the most space in the class where the students apply themselves and get feedback, right? So think about any time that you work with somebody and you have this really great experience, right? They probably helped you over some block and maybe you didn't even know what you didn't know but they helped you over the block. You reached a level of understanding and the brain chemistry shifted and then you internalized that. That's the experience that you want to get out of a virtual class. It's not a passive watching hour of someone talk, right? There's pieces of that that are necessary to create the scaffolding but you want to be apply yourself. Okay. How do we implement this feature? How do we implement this framework in our product? This is what's guiding us, right? So that we're not building a video conferencing system. We're building a virtual classroom. And we look at it as like a before, during, after. So you're in Moodle. You go into Big Blue Button and afterwards the recordings are available. So we took the virtuous cycle of applied learning and we just basically said, how can we help the instructor? Well, you build in tools for the applied learning, right? Every time I hear somebody use a video conferencing system and describe how they take students to this website to do this type of interaction and that website, it's like, that's because your platform has no idea what you're trying to do. It's just sharing bits. It doesn't know what the goal is, right? The goal is to learn. So we provide built, we built in capabilities. The teacher can get the students to apply themself. Those generate analytics and then we give the analytics back instructor live so they can see who's struggling to give them feedback in the moment. So some visuals. This is from the product. So in breakout rooms, for example, you can get students to go into breakout rooms. We'll automatically capture the content in breakout rooms, bring it back to the main room and we give the instructor the ability to monitor the breakout rooms as well. You can open them up in individual tabs and just jump back and forth between to see who needs help. We have this visual assessment. You can have multi-user whiteboard and you can have the students, can you please point at me where France is? And they can't see each other's pointers, right? So you're getting them to think and you visually see how is the class doing. So it's a type of formative assessment. Are they getting the concept? Can I move on to the next? Have I built something that I can build upon? And the other is we have something called smart slides where if you upload content and we see a question mark with some comments after or some ABCD, we just say, hmm, I think you're trying to do a poll. Well, rather than make you type that poll in, we already have the text and memory for screen readers. Let's just generate a poll. So we'll give you one button and you can create a poll and when you do that, the poll will go to all the students and you get the responses back live. Okay, you've got them applying themselves. You're getting them to get you feedback, but we're also doing analytics, which means we're aggregating all that into like a dashboard. We call it the learning analytics dashboard. It's live during Big Blue Button. And what it does is it tells you where students' activities are, like how much effort they're putting forward, right? Because effort is a proxy for learning. We're not measuring learning, we're measuring effort. So the example I always give is here at the bottom. You've been doing some poll questions. You kind of got a sense of what the class is doing and you see that Sam isn't responding to all the polls. So imagine as a teacher, you say, okay, I need everybody to respond and Sam, don't worry if you get it wrong. Make the effort. This is how you'll learn. And Sam would be there like, what? The teacher's aware of me? Yes, because you're not relying on webcams to see, we're going to give you the data based on their activity. And that's the difference between us and a video conferencing system. Okay. So now I've given you a framework to think, like maximize time for applied learning feedback, a bit about how we implement that. And now let's explore how AI. So now with the framework, we can be a lot more precise, right? Like we can sort of think about, okay, if this is an effective virtual class, then we can ask ourselves, how can I improve teaching and learning in a virtual class? And let's go back to this. So if you look at this, you can start asking the question at what points along the way can AI assist the teacher? And if you ever hear someone say AI can make learning easier, I want you to really think about, okay, wait a minute, our brains are the same. They haven't changed, right? We have to think, we have to struggle, struggle is good. It's how we learn. If there's no struggle, there's not a lot of learning that's going to go on, right? If you don't apply yourself. So first thing is, well, you can pass in information from Moodle that's going to help the teacher identify which students are struggling. And an example would be if when, as Moodle has more analytics, right, as a better understanding of where students are on their learning journey, that information should come into you as an instructor during your class, like why manually look it up. So we've been exploring this. So this is an example like imagine and be glue button. You have like a little warning sign next to a person's name. And you click on it and you get something that says, okay, hey, that person, you click on their name, there's a message that came from Moodle, like they're missing the last two assignments and there's a link that comes back. So the system is helping you understand where students are so that you can better teach them live in the virtual class. That's because it understands the goal of the virtual class is to not to meet, it is to learn. And we're trying to achieve this as a first step through sub-plugins. They're still work ahead, but in the built-in integration with Moodle, so big blue button is in the core, we're adding the capabilities for sub-plugins so that we can easily extend the capabilities of big blue button in Moodle without having to like modify the core of Moodle. It's like how the quiz modules and other modules do it. So we want to innovate faster and get more useful information out of Moodle. Number two is, well, you can generate quizzes based on the content of the slides. So I showed you a few minutes ago smart slides where it kind of figured out there's a question there and there's a couple options. Well, with a large language model, if the instructor is like staring at the slide and wondering, are the students getting it, they could ask them a question and say, okay, I'd like to generate that you could use AI, which we could send the data in the background to a large language model. And because of the open source language models, you can imagine this not going to Google or elsewhere and generate a poll question. And it would do it on the fly and you could regenerate it. And then you could just say, get the information back from the students, use a learning analytics dashboard and see if the students are learning. So this is not making education easier for students or learning easier. Learning should be challenging and effortful. You have to think. You need to get students to think. This is saving the instructor time so that students can spend more time trying to apply what they're learning and get the instructor feedback to see how they're doing. That's the North Star. The third one, we generate a lot of recordings in the virtual classes. But we don't believe students are referring back to these virtual recordings. Why? I mean, the information was there. It's hard to search, right? It's hard to index. You can't find things. So you imagine you use a language model to summarize, like text to speech, read the slides, figure out the keywords and then index that. So if a student wants to find out, okay, where did we talk about Pythagorean theorem, they could get to exactly that part in the class and review it. Another one is if you have content that's generating the class at the end, spaced repetition, right, so you could use AI to create quiz questions that go back to the students between like this Thursday's class and next Thursday's class and just have them recall the information, right? Again, you're exercising the brain. These are like small workouts. Okay, so now I have a question for you. If the virtual classroom used AI to summarize a lecture at the end, would that help learning? Anybody? Yes, it would. Okay. Do I hear a contrarian opinion? Could we do better? You are on the right track. So research shows that taking notes during the class is not as effective as at the end of the class taking the notes and trying to recall what happened in the class. So a more effective use of AI would be is have the platform ask the students for like, what are your two key takeaways and have AI help filter that for the instructor so they could see if these are effective and then summarize those back to the students. So you get the students to spend two minutes thinking about, okay, what was the most key two key points in the class? And then the platform helps you organize that and give it back to the students. That is a more effective way of AI. So this is where I come to when you hear someone tell you AI is going to do this for you and that for you and that for you. Think about you're working, you're walking into a gym, right? You're working out to improve your health and fitness. You can know about how the body works, how nutrition, you've got good sleep, you have all the right equipment, but you still have to pick up the weights or you still have to do the exercise, right? Our bodies haven't changed or minds haven't changed, but you can have a teacher or a coach there that motivates you. And now this is getting closer to where I think AI can liberate the teacher in some way. Right. So the question was verify the accuracy of the summary and that's correct. That's why I said the students will give you the feedback. AI can help filter it, but before you show it to students, the teacher can vet that to make sure that this is correct, right? So the AI is just assisting the teacher. The students said, you know, like, I'm tired. Okay, the AI can probably figure out that's not a summary of the lecture. But the goal is to assist the teacher by creating poll questions on the fly by vetting the summary for the students and maybe get to a place where you generate activities. But you are not jumping in in front of the teacher. AI should be an assistant to the teacher. It does not replace the teaching. AI should be an assistant to the student. It should not replace the student. If we ever get to that point, we're going on the wrong path. Okay, so I'm going to I'm now going to put my mind forward and I'm going to say this is where I think the future of teaching and learning is kind of headed towards in steps. And I call this personalized artificial general intelligence tutor or pageant for short. So imagine you do have an assistant that understands where you are and helps you on an individual. Like just think of what show of hands how many people had a tutor throughout their educational career. Okay, a tutor like a personalist, somebody who came in and said you're struggling with something like could be a math problem. And they basically said something like this. Look, I see you're struggling. Don't worry. I'm going to help figure out where your gaps are. I'm going to get you to overcome those gaps of knowledge. And I guarantee you that you will be able to do this problem. Okay, the tutor doesn't walk in, take the piece of paper, write the answer, give it back and walk out the door. Right, there's no learning there. So this is where I think AI can really help the student and the teacher. So I'm going to go back to pedagogy for a moment. You have two states. I want to learn this. And with effort, I get to I get to a place where I mastered it, right? Seems like a straight path. No, it's not. So you think about like climbing bloom staircase where you get to mastery, you do this over a series of times, we'll call them learning workouts to use the analogy, right? So you have to do things, apply yourself, apply yourself and then you get to a mastery. It takes time. Well, let's say you want to do a task. There are probably some prerequisite knowledges that you need to know. And in this knowledge, you're going to be at different stages and bloom staircase, right? So this is the problem we all run into. We're learning something. We don't know what we don't know, right? So think of the time in your past where you were struggling and you're just hitting the wall over and over again. It's like, why can't I get this? Well, it's probably because something that was taught earlier you need to know something and you didn't have that piece of knowledge, but you didn't know you didn't have that piece of knowledge, right? So a really good tutor, a human tutor would look in and say, where are you? Okay, here's the underlying knowledge that you don't have. Let's get that in first. If you do this, I believe that I believe in AI can do this fairly well. It can figure out the gaps in your knowledge. It can help you do it. It can give you exercises. It can check them, but it would never ever tell you the answer. You have to come up with the answer. It can only coach you and help you. And if we do that, imagine the analytics that are created, right? So imagine we're all in a class together and I'm trying to teach you, right? There's like 100 people in this room. Everybody would be at a different place in their learning journey. Today, I would just teach the room. I would go to the medium and say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and half of you would be below, and half would be above it. But if I were able to see where you're all in your learning journeys, I can start doing some really, really powerful things. So I could get a dashboard to see, okay, is this particular part that everybody needs to know, like 80% of you to have a gap? I should probably spend about 10, 20 minutes making sure that gap is closed and the next gap is closed. So what is this data letting me do? It's not changing how I teach or learn, but it's helping me teach more effectively and it's helping you learn more effectively. And if we can get these analytics in Moodle and share them with Big Blue Button, then I think we'll have a platform which, again, is not going to go into the gym and pick up the weights for you, but it's going to set it up so that you have the most effective use of your time. And that's what a personal tutor would say, trust me, we're going to get through this and I'm going to help you have the most effective. It also talks about the role of teachers. So let's imagine this world exists. What is the value of the virtual class? I would argue it increases. If on our own we can interact with someone, if we tilt the laptop and the camera sees what I'm writing and uses AI to get my handwriting and the avatar is talking to me and says, Fred, you can do this, right? When I go, I would argue that the virtual class, the human-to-human interaction becomes even more important, right? Because we're humans. It also fundamentally, I think, enhances the role of the teacher. So the teacher, I think, becomes more like a coach. Less of, I'm just going to digitally give you the information and you're going to listen to me for an hour and that's learning. Well, that's industrialized learning. I think the value of the virtual classrooms is the teacher becomes more like a mentor, encourages, you know, supports you, challenges you, rewards you, and I think a piece that's missing in our system is that make sure that you work really well with each other, right? Because that pale blue dot, the problems we have right now are not going to be solved by individuals. They're going to be solved by people that are actually really able to work together. And so I think the teacher's role is more of a mentor or a coach that makes sure people are really good at applying themselves, getting to that level of mastery and working well in teams and with groups. Would you like to introduce any questions? Yes. So to summary, I want you to have this framework in your mind, maximize time for applied learning and feedback. This is what you're trying to do as a teacher and a learner. We built a product around this framework. Learning takes effort and you should not reduce this effort. You just set the environment up so you can have a very useful and efficient effort, but you still need the effort. Thank you. Thank you. We do have time for a question if anyone likes. Obviously, you can speak to Fred and the others on the booth as well, but anyone want to ask a question now? Yep. Just one done over there. Hi, Fred. Like most people, we use big blue button when the pandemic hit because we suddenly needed a solution. Pandemic dies down a bit. Company reviews, we go back to Zoom. Listening, and I've got no issue with that, but listening to this from a pedagogical perspective, myself and my colleague here are 100% committed that we go back to this. From a costing perspective, and I know it's integrated into Moodle, but I have to ask the pricing plans, is that still a feature based on user numbers or how does that side work? Or is it just, it's now integrated, that's it? So the question is about pricing in that. And look, I'll put my big blue button hat on. It's open source. You can run it like you can run Moodle. I'll put my blindside networks hat on. We, the company, generate revenue by providing hosting. So come by the booth. We do base a hosting on concurrent session, not named user. We try to make it cost effective. And my goal is to keep focused on what I've shared here. Like I'm never trying to out team teams or out Zoom Zoom. And thank you for that feedback, right? I mean, I know we're on the right path and AI is going to make things easier, but it should never replace the actual role of teaching and learning. 100%. It's awesome. Well done.