 Thank you so much. Can everyone hear me? Yep. Hello, I'm Anders. I'm co-founder of the London-based education startup called Aula. And so what we do at Aula is we enable educators and institutions to actively engage students. We use everything the world has learned about conversational technologies from things such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WeChat, as well as everything we've learned about pedagogy and design science to basically change the way we think about co-infrastructure in education. And so what we build is a communication platform for education. I'll get to that in just a bit. But the focus of my talk is going to be on how can we learn from the way we design buildings how to design better software? So I'll walk you through a bit of sort of high level architectural theory, and then we'll move into software design. And so if we start with the buildings, if my clicker works, there you go. So this quote I really like. This is from an architect, Paul Peter Suntor. And basically what he says is, architecture's focus is on the dialogue with the issues of our time. So basically, one would assume that if you look at a building, you can infer from that building what the issues that building is trying to resolve are. And so what I've done is I've brought with me two images from two of our partner institutions. One is from Coventry University, and one is from Ravensworn University. And if we start with Coventry University, so it's a bit hard to see from this image, but this is basically a sort of seminar room slash lecture theater. It is a circle, so the academic would be in here in the middle. And what you will probably know from this image is that it's actually quite radically changing the way that people perceive the act of sort of giving a lecture or the act of teaching. Because from an architectural perspective, the students are much closer to the educator, given the fact that the academic can sort of turn around and draw in students from around the room. It's much easier for the academic to engage the students in debates, in discussions. And it significantly changes the way that academics think about the teaching, as well as the way the students think about engaging with each other. So that's one example of architectural intent. Then if we go to Ravensworn, so this is an image from Ravensworn. Ravensworn is an open plan building in London. And every time I walk around Ravensworn, I think it's quite sort of daunting how much thought has been put into what this building means for learning. It's collaborative, it's open plan. You can be in one corner of the building and do sound design, and then you can sort of see people doing architecture in the other corner of the building. Another thing that's pretty clear about this building is that students are meant to engage with each other. And the spaces are specifically designed for specific subjects, in this case, fashion, which again changes the way that people perceive that learning space, and really puts forward one of Ravensworn's values, which is to be industry-focused. So these are two great examples of this thing I mentioned before, which is that from these buildings, we should be able to infer what is it that the architect and the institutions have tried to solve? What is the issue that the buildings are addressing? And for me, it's pretty clear that the problems that the architects have tried to solve is around engagements, around bringing the students closer to the academic. Actually, when I started traveling around the UK quite a bit over the last year visiting different universities, and UK universities have spent three billion pounds on physical learning estates in 2017. So we should be able to pretty clearly understand what is the issue that UK universities are trying to solve is if we believe Peter Suntor is right, that you can actually infer from buildings the issues of our time. So let's try and think about what would these three billion pounds have been put into? For me, the answer is increasingly clear. And I think we can find it in the UK Engagement Survey from 2017, from the AGA. But if you ask students about their learning experiences, the things that consistently they are dissatisfied with or the reasons that they drop out or the reasons that they don't engage, they relate to learning with other staff-student partnerships interacting with staff. And universities know this. And universities put that into their building budgets. And in many cases, that's several hundreds of millions of pounds that goes into solving these problems. But the thing is that it's actually, this is in quite stark contrast to the average higher education learners digital student experience. So I really like this blog post from Sean Michael Morris, who's at Middlebury University in the US, which is called Beanbags and the LMS. And basically what he's saying is that the LMS is not a place you want to hang out. It's not a place you want to spend time. It's not a place you want to interact with others. It was not built for bringing students closer to each other, nor built for bringing students closer to the academic. And so if you think about that for a minute, if you think about the trends that are happening in education, more commuter students, more online learners, more hybrid teaching, more blended learning, it's quite interesting that the universities have put three billion pounds into, not necessarily three billion pounds, but a large proportion of three billion pounds into making their physical states more interactive when the digital learning experience of students for most of the universities I visit is basically a file repository. It's not uncommon for me to meet a vice chancellor who says, yes, we've invested 300 million pounds in getting rid of lecture theaters or in group work or in industry focused teaching or in collaboration. And then we teach 18,000 students from PowerPoint slides that are uploaded in like a dot box with 2000 buttons. And so this is a conclusion from the edgy calls and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation report on next generation digital learning environments which basically says, the LMS has been highly successful in enabling the administration of learning, but less so in enabling learning itself. And I think it's for the audience at the sort of conference that's here today, that might be sort of quite obvious, but it's definitely not obvious in the way that universities allocate funds to the issues that their buildings are trying to resolve. So the question we asked ourselves at ALLA is, can we design online learning spaces for engagement? And in order to do that, I think the first place to go is the places online where people engage the most. So how many people are familiar with Slack? Just a quick, quite a good proportion. How many people are familiar with Facebook Messenger? Decent proportion. So basically Slack is a team based, is a team communication platform for companies and Facebook Messenger is sort of a social chat-based application for the world. And so Slack has about eight million users. It was released in 2013, which is quite, it's probably one of the fastest growing enterprise companies in history. Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion daily users. But that's not really what's interesting about these chat-based applications. What's interesting are the lines that are below that. These eight million daily users on Slack, they spend an average of 320 minutes per day, which is absolutely insane for enterprise software. It's like the world has never really seen anything like that before. 200,000 developers are building applications for Slack. And you see the sort of the same thing with Facebook Messenger. 17 billion photos shared per month. It's just like these numbers are absolutely mind-boggling. It's basically changing the interface by which students engage, sorry, not students, humans engage with technology. It's more than 10 photos per user on Facebook Messenger per month. And there's a significant proportion of the humans on planet Earth. It just sounds like a bit crazy. And there are 300,000 bots that have already been developed for Facebook Messenger. So we actually do, we are starting to know how to engage people online. And so why can we not use these sort of lessons and technologies in education? Why can we not use Slack or Facebook Messenger? And I think there's been a few examples at this conference that you can actually do that and some people have done that quite successfully. But similar to how the learning management system was not really designed for engaging people online, these cat-based applications like Slack were not really sort of designed for education. Yes, you can get a few academics to teach their students with great results on Slack, which is fantastic and I think we should get a lot more of that. But just imagine you're running a university with 20,000 students, the summer is coming close, and you have to roll over 5,000 courses with content pinned to channels, right? It just doesn't really make sense at institutional scale. So what we've done at ALRA is trying to say, what can we learn from Slack? What can we learn from Facebook Messenger? What can we learn from WeChat? And how can we apply that to help educational institutions solve the problems that they also try to solve with their buildings? And so I'm not going into too much detail about these sort of interfaces. It's quite simple, ALRA consists of spaces, which is for a module or for a program. In that space you have a feed, which is where it's sort of the beating heart of the class. Educators can make announcements, students can have discussions, a bit similar to what you would know from Facebook group or Slack team. There's material, which is where the academic we set up the content of the class. And then there's direct messages, which is for real-time sort of private communication. So from our pilot, we see close to 100% reduction in email communication between students and academics, and we see a significant sort of takeoff in the organic student engagement inside of these spaces. And the same thing on mobile, as you would sort of expect, you swipe right, you have feed, you have material, you can scroll in your feed. So basically to see like, has there been an announcement? Has there been a discussion? And people will use these as online learning communities for students. You swipe left, you have your direct messages for group work, instead of sending emails to your academics or for the academics to be able to easily get in touch with students. So it's very hard for people to sort of understand the product just from seeing it on the screen like this. But if there's one thing sort of to remember from what I just showed you is this law, which is one of my favorite laws, it's from a person named Mada. He used to be a professor at MIT. And this is his 10th law of simplicity, where she says it's a law that encompasses all other laws of simplicity. And what it says is, simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. So what does that mean? Well, one great example of this is this thing called the iPhone. It's pretty obvious, one would think that phones need keyboards. Like because you need to be able to type in letters and numbers and other things. But now we know that that's not really what makes phones meaningful, because it's the interactions between human beings that makes this thing called the iPhone meaningful. So that's a great example of sort of understanding how to make something extremely simple in order to make the product more meaningful. And that's essentially what we've tried to do with Aula. That's what Slack has tried to do with chat-based communication in the workplace. That's what WeChat has done for China. That's what Facebook Messenger has done for people all across the world. And that's the power of these conversational technologies. And you'll see that that actually leads to sort of quite radical implications. If you remove all the obvious things from a learning management system, you build integrations to add things on top and you just focus on the meaningful things which for us is the conversations. Then you actually end up with something that seems quite radically different. It also has similar to the rooms I showed you from Ravens Point and Conventry. It has radical implications for the way that people perceive teaching and learning. So if we go back to Ravens Point, what you will see is that actually the way that Aula is designed is not that different from the intent of the architects at Conventry and Ravens Point. It's an open plan. You can get in touch with all the students. You're never more than one click away from another student. It's built for collaboration. It's built for actively engaging students. And that changes the way that the institution operates. So Ravens Point is rolling out Aula to all their students now they have about two and a half thousand students. So these are the results from the pilot that ran this year. And I think particularly the staff and the internal survey in the top left corner is quite telling, which is that 80% of students say that Aula makes you feel part of a community of staff and students. So these are residential students, commuter students in London, who actually think that the institution has enabled them to create communities online which we know from research has quite significant implications for student retention and satisfaction. And the other side of that is the course leaders so that Aula has made it easier for them to connect with students and to encourage them to engage with the content of the course. Which is absolutely essential for the institution in order to create a more sort of distributed digital campus, if you will. And so these are obviously the service staff so to make things a bit more sort of legit. I just took a screenshot from the analytics engine this morning. So Ravens Point has two and a half thousand students. Three hundred students have already started their course. And so over the last week, I think the things that are noteworthy are is that one is that we continue to see the high adoption of messages so about 200 messages were sent primarily between students and educators, meaning no emails. There were 128 posts that are crossing students, 80 new comments and quite a few reactions. So actually, for an institution that's moving away from LMS that was primarily used for content, this is a radically different experience for those students who are having their first week. And on top of all these engagement comes the engagements with YouTube, with Patlet and other integrations that are used on the platform. Similarly, if you look at the bottom graph, what you'll see is that, so the top one is mobile adoption or mobile unique sessions, the bottom one is web sessions. Yesterday, close to a hundred percent of students at Ravens Point used a mobile app. Half of them used desktop applications. And I think these are some of the differences we're starting to see when people start to focus their infrastructure on conversations rather than on content. So can we design online learning spaces for engagement? We think yes. Do we have the complete answer? Probably not. But we are almost 100% sure that the answer is to be found somewhere in between conversational technology and everything we know about pedagogy. Thank you. I think we have a few questions for us here. Yeah, we've got some questions coming in. Yeah, one. Oh. I think one. So can you do your magic? What are the main differences between this and Microsoft Teams? They appear to look quite similar. What additional features are there? Good question. So the biggest difference between Aula and Microsoft Teams, I would say it's around the idea that Aula actually replaces the learning management system. So when we work with an institution, we do it in multiple phases and the LMS will actually be phased out. So when we set out to build Aula, we thought, okay, we can maybe integrate this in cameras with the 12 or blackboard, but we saw a significant difference in engagement stats between those spaces that where the educator had moved the LMS to the background and the ones where we tried to integrate Aula inside the LMS. So the biggest difference between Aula and Microsoft Teams is that we focused on replacing the LMS. Could Microsoft do the same thing? Potentially. But I think the thing with Microsoft Teams is that it was primarily built for team communication. So it has a lot of the same problems that something like Slack has when it gets to institutional scale. It's not built for learning analytics. It is not that Microsoft thought, okay, we need to make our turn it in integration very, very good when we do this thing. We need to make our lecture recording integration very, very good when we do this thing. And maybe they will get there, but that's definitely not the case right now. I think another thing that we've realized at a more practical level is this is what we do. We focused just on this. So when you work with Aula, there's a product and there's a plan. We've actually, we are rolling this out. We have an implementation team and that implementation team is focused on enabling institutions to roll Aula out at full scale. And that's not really how it works with the sort of Microsoft Teams. So I think from what we can see, I sort of hope we get Microsoft Teams as a sort of bigger competitor because that sort of tells the world that that's where things should go. But I think currently that we are more, it's more than move away from the LMS that we are sort of focusing on, at least from the conversations we have with universities currently. Any other questions? Any more questions? Just follow, I think, can I just check? Just make one last check. Do we have Chris, Nick or Valerie here? Yeah, you are here. Okay, right, okay. I just wasn't sure if you were here or not. So thank you very much, Anders. We'll just, thank you and we'll get rich.