 get underway. Great. Okay good afternoon everyone and welcome to our parallel session today and we have Helen Lockett from the Open University who I've just been speaking to and I'm really looking forward to seeing what she has to say about Open STEM Labs and we have enabled the chat so you can type in the chat everybody and please feel free to put some questions in there. If you do have a question if you could put a Q at the beginning that will help us find it when we're looking for it in the chat but by all means please do comment on it as well as we're going through and I'm just going to close down these slides and pass over to Helen and the second Helen so if you could just get ready I'm just going to stop sharing these and then I will go into our slides and get them set up for you and then we shall pass over. Thanks Vian. Oh sorry thanks. You're there. You're coming along now. There we go. Right hopefully you should see it now. Can you see it now Helen? I can see it now. Can you hear me? We can hear you fine. Lovely. I'm going to close down my mic and my camera now and pass straight over to you. Okay. Thank you. Hi everyone it's great to be talking with you. I'm really sorry I'm not there in the room with you. I think it'd be great if we were all together wouldn't it? It's quite hard doing it from home. I'm going to be talking to you today about the open STEM labs at the Open University and our experience of delivering practical learning at a distance particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic but also before and after. So in my talk I'm going to start by telling you a bit about our open STEM labs the history of them and the the way that we design our experiments and I'll pick up just a few sample activities. I'm afraid I'm not showing anything live today but I've got some nice shiny pictures to show you. Then I'll move on and talk about the reflections on our experiences in the COVID-19 pandemic period and some things that went well and some things that were pretty challenging for us too and try and draw that all together at the end with some lessons learned for the future. So I'm sure you all know practical learning it's an essential aspect of many STEM subjects. It's really important that students get proper hands on expertise taught in a laboratory environment and in conventional universities practical learning is taught in a laboratory with the staff and the students co-located together of course until this year when everything's been different for all of us. At the Open University we've existed for more than 50 years now and we've always had to teach practical learning differently because our students are distance learning students. In the very early days we used to send home experiment kits so if you were studying chemistry you might have got a chemistry kit sent to home, you get engineering kits, computer science and students would have undertaken experiments in their own home and we've always complemented that by keeping an element of face to face too so you might have heard the stories about the OU summer schools in the past and they've changed somewhat but we still have residential schools in many subjects so we have them a week block or a weekend or even an individual day. As technology changed and things moved on we've moved away from the home experiment kits in particular health and safety is quite a challenge with chemistry sending out chemistry kits through the post. So we've worked of different ways of delivering practical learning to students when they're at home and we came up with this concept of the Open STEM Labs as a digital way to deliver practical learning to our students and we do that with our residential schools they work together. So what are these Open STEM Labs? Well they're remote and on-screen laboratories that deliver practical learning to our Open University students and we use them right the way across our STEM faculty we teach bioscience, chemistry, engineering, physics and astronomy and the basic idea the picture shows it the student sits at home in front of their laptop or even a mobile device just using the web browser they connect through perhaps to a remote experiment or a simulation and they are engaging with practical work from home and the Open STEM Lab is actually a cluster of different initiatives that we have at the Open University they've existed over about a 10-year period. So we have an open science laboratory which was the first part of the lab that started in about 2013 and was mostly focused on simulated type experiments. Then we moved on to introduce the Open Science Observatories so the OU has three remote fully autonomous telescopes that students can connect to from home one on our campus in Milton Keynes, two on the island of Tenerife on Mount Hyde in an observatory there and students studying astronomy can connect to those telescopes and observe the sky directly from home. More recently we introduced the Open Engineering Laboratory and that allows engineering students to do remote engineering experiments from home and the final part is the on-campus laboratories so particularly in chemistry with the wet labs we need a real hands-on environment and that sits within the Open STEM Lab's umbrella. And we've had a couple of major injections of funding to develop this so in 2013 we had funding from the Wolfson Foundation to develop the Open Science Laboratory and we had another large funding proposal funded for the Open Engineering Laboratory in 2016 from Higher Education Funding Council for England, just a really substantial initiative. I want to talk about about the concept behind the Open STEM Labs and the sort of principles that were used to develop activities so the sort of vision statement is to bring the laboratory to our users we want to deliver it wherever they are and whenever they need it and we do it using a number of different ways of delivering experiments so we have remote experiments so the picture on the left hand side is an example of that so this is a piece of real physical mechanical engineering equipment sitting in a lab in Milton Keynes and the student through their web browser connects to it is able to control it and to receive data back from it so those are remote experiments and that's one part of our lab. We have on-screen experiments so these are simulated sort of virtual experiments but they always use real data so that's very important to us that students are only ever engaging with real data so the example we've got here is a virtual microscope and they're real specimens that have been scanned and then the student has a software environment where they can interact in the way that they would with a real digital microscope and then the final way we have of delivering experiments is through lab casts so these are kind of live lab demonstrations and we have some software tools to help us to do that effectively where members of staff are describing or demonstrating a real physical experiment and students have means to interact with them while they're doing it I'll show you another example later. So the principle on which all of our experiments are built is we want to provide authentic online practical experience to enhance student success in STEM that's the principle that all of our experiments are built on and then we have these sort of four pillars that all of the experiments are built around so inclusivity making sure the experiments are accessible at any time from any place by anyone they're all built on the open university's distance learning teaching pedagogy so they're designed around either individual or group working it might be in the context of a student led inquiry or a tutor led inquiry and always they're interactive and collaborative so we don't want our students to be able to be passive when they're working in the open STEM lab they can't just sit and watch even with the lab cast they should be engaging and participating. Veracity is very important to us so we want to be sure it's always real data from real equipment in real time and even in those virtual experiments the real data element is important if it's a scan slide of a blood sample there might be something a student can find in there that no one's seen before you know it's real data that they can study and finally authenticity we want to use bespoke teaching tools or industrial grade equipment or research grade instruments but always it should be authentic. I wanted to just reflect a little bit about the physical lab environment because we're all familiar with what a lab looks like and how we work generally together in a lab but once you start designing laboratories to be remote they actually look completely different to the labs that you would normally work in so the picture on the right hand side is from our open engineering lab and what you see is that in order to get maybe 500 students through an experiment in a two-week period we might have 15 or 20 sets of the same experiment set out at one time. We don't need the space for students to move around and interact because we don't have students there so we can use multi-layer racking to do it. An individual experiment might sit on the racks and you possibly see we've got video cameras pointing on the experiment usually more than one video camera two or three cameras so they get a good view and then each experiment will be connected up to a computing equipment at the top of the racking so it's quite interesting that a lab really doesn't look like a lab when it's a remote lab but the experience for the students should be comparable. I wanted to try to get across the scale of the operation at the OU so our open STEM labs are used in about 46 of our taught modules in the STEM faculty and within those modules there's more than 100 open STEM labs experiments that students can undertake and in the last four years or so we've had more than 10,000 individual users use the labs per year so it's really a substantial operation for us and it's embedded well into our STEM curriculum. So before we move on I thought I'd just show you a few examples just to maybe help you visualize what would happen if a student came into the lab. So if we start with a remote experiment this is a scanning electron microscope it's used on a number of our science courses so we have two research grade scanning electron microscopes and they're purchased as remote enabled. When a student wants to use one so their module will tell them the week of the course where they should be using the electron microscope or the period they should be using it. We have a booking system so they can book ahead and students can book an individual slot where they can use it on their own for 30 minutes. They connect on their web browser so this is what they would see just using a normal chrome or edge browser. They are looking directly onto the outputs from the electron microscope so we've got the large screen here where they can see observe the specimen. We've simplified the controls to make it easier for them to interact so the remote scanning electron microscope has a remote environment but it's quite complicated and you could potentially damage the equipment if you didn't understand it so our technical staff developed their own user interface to make it simple to use and protect the equipment. One of the really important things to make this multi-purpose is if you look in the top left so this is kind of an overview of the stage of all of the specimens that the electron microscope can look at at the moment. So potentially we can have 36 different specimens all loaded at the same time and then students from different modules can come in and they'll be told which specimen to work on. It means we don't need technicians going in and swapping specimens over in between different activities. Something like a scanning electron microscope is a really expensive piece of equipment and lots of undergraduates wouldn't get their hands on one in a conventional university because it's just too difficult to get large cohorts of students through an expensive device in the time that's available in timetabled sessions but of course we can run 24 hours a day seven days a week so the equipment is available to our students over such a long period we can get a lot of throughput. I wanted to show you an example of a different kind of remote experiment so the scanning electron microscope really expensive high-cost kit that we need to have only one or two at the other end of the spectrum in electronics they took the decision to have many instances of lower cost kit so this is built on national instruments technology if anyone's interested underneath and the example here is controlling a driven pendulum so when the student logs on the same thing they'll book a slot they'll connect in at that time and through their web browser they have a live video feed of the piece of equipment that was allocated to them they can control the equipment with the controls at the bottom and they'll see a trace of the outputs of the pendulum moving around so again it's an example of a remote experiment that students could control from home obviously there's a challenge with the remote experiments that we have limited resource you need to keep up I mentioned this idea of electronics sometimes will have 10 or 20 pieces of the same kit laid out to get the right throughput so if you have a very large course or you want to be more flexible then the virtual experiments can be more effective so here's an example of one from science so this is an experiment to measure lung function so the students are understanding or they're investigating the effect of say age height sex and whether a smoker or not on your lung function so when the students run the experiment the idea is they come up with a hypothesis maybe you know what will be the effect on lung function of being a smoker they set the parameters as they want them and press start they get a kind of live video with really nice sound of the person performing the experiment they're using a spirometer that is the medical equipment that you use and then they get a trace of the equipment running students can then investigate the hypothesis by rerunning as many times as they want now of course this kind of experiment is scalable to as many users as you want so we have found this really useful for some applications but even though it's a virtual experiment we use a real data set of 7 000 individuals who all performed the experiment it's a published data set from Australia and that's embedded in here so as I said before the students are using real data and then the final kind of activity that we have are the lab casts and as I said before lab casts are kind of live demonstrations so the picture here is one of my colleagues undertaking a lab cast it's in one of our on campus laboratories and we have it set up as a studio so we have three or four fixed cameras that are already embedded in there it means that we can have cameras on the presenter and on their hands and in detail on the specimens that they're working on and we generally present these in pairs so that there's one person actually doing the experiment and another person supporting them and interacting with the students on the chat because it's really important that students are part of it so they can maybe ask questions they can respond to queries and we have a sort of widget set where they can engage with quizzes as well so they feel part of it so the live lab cast is another way that we can deliver practical learning to students it's not hands-on but it's giving them that practical experience and we record them and make them available afterwards but student feedback is that they like to be there on the day and they like to feel part of it okay so I spent quite a lot of time talking about open STEM labs and what the concept is but I guess the main purpose of today is to talk to you about what happened to us in the pandemic period and the things that we got right and things that we found challenging so what happened in the COVID-19 pandemic well I'm sure like everybody here we had this huge challenge you know university campus was closed all of our face-to-face teaching was postponed and of course open university we're a distance learning institution so I'm sure the effect on us was less than others but nonetheless in STEM subjects we do have face-to-face teaching and we had to face that challenge and even for the open STEM labs our campus was closed we had no access to laboratories to set up equipment or resolve problems we had to manage with what we had at home so how did we respond to this situation well the open STEM labs really gave us a head start with being able to continue to support our students in practical learning any experiments already set up we could leave running because they were designed to run 24 hours a day already so we did have a substantial number of activities that were up and live and running we left them running we worked really hard on communicating with the students because we just didn't know how successful we'd be at keeping them running and we knew we couldn't fix some things if they went wrong so we worked on the columns and warned all the students that everything was at risk but we were trying to keep things going as an example in our open engineering lab we had 24 experiment kits online at the beginning of lockdown and that meant that for giving students one hour slots we had kind of 500 experiment instances a day that could be available for student use and we had hundreds of students on modules go through those open engineering lab experiments through April May this year something we really benefited from was the design of the labs that the people designing the labs originally they wanted the equipment online 24 hours a day and they knew they couldn't provide um technician support out of ours so they built in automatic equipment self checks that were run after every student use so typically that's once an hour and then a more substantial reset in the middle of the night every night now we designed these to run on weekends I guess over Christmas maybe nine days but we had no idea that we might have to run them for potentially 60 90 days with no one being able to go to campus to have a look and I think we surprised ourselves at how successful they were at keeping equipment online one of the things they're designed to do is to email the staff if something's wrong with a piece of kit and they would also automatically reallocate kit from something else in the pool if a particular piece of equipment went down so our technical staff working from home could monitor things and there were certain things that they could resolve but we did know that if something went wrong with the hardware there was no way to recover we lost a small number of pieces of kit but generally things were very reliable and we carried on working I wanted to talk a bit about this graph which is quite interesting I'm sorry it's all a bit small to read but essentially it's the cumulative number of users of open stem lab over a six-year period so on the bottom we've got the dates and it sort of starts 2014 and runs up to end of July this year and then on the vertical we've got the number of users and what you see is after a sort of slowish start in the early years typically we have 10,000 new users a year every year using our labs and that's a mixture of open university students and some external users so the blue dash line is the beginning of the lockdown at the end of March so the bid in the circle is the usage of the lab after lockdown and what you see is not only did we keep going but actually we registered a lot more users than we would have expected in that period and actually here at the end of July we've already got 10,000 new users in 2020 which is as many as we had in 2019 and I think there are a few reasons for that I think one is that we carried on everything as normal and we had some new activities come online this year anyway so we had additional users we would have had additional users anyway I think another reason is that because we couldn't offer face-to-face teaching we did some reallocation of practical learning and so some face-to-face residential schools became virtual and they picked up activities from other courses and they delivered them again so we had more users for that and the final reason is that we offer some resources externally for free I'll talk a bit more about it later but we try to encourage external users to use the labs and I think we got quite a lot of external people registering either just for personal interest or from other universities so it's a real measure of I guess the success of the labs that we kept going not only at our normal rate but at a higher rate of course not everything went smoothly and we had quite a lot of challenges too so I just thought I'd summarize some of them of course one of our challenges is that we weren't able to set out any new equipment for activities that were due to start while the campus was closed and unlike most conventional universities with that sort of fixed academic year of October to June where things perhaps were ramping down through April-May we have new modules starting rolling program through the year so we had modules starting in April in May in June and so on and so any activity that wasn't physically on the bench and switched on we had no way to get in and do that so we did have some courses that ran without their practical learning like everyone we had staffing challenges everyone was working but they were working from home and depending on their access it could be very difficult to resolve student problems in a timely manner so we again we tried to manage communications with students I think students were pretty sympathetic and we did our best to keep things going but there were certainly issues with with supporting students one thing that was really frustrating is that we didn't always have a consistent set of backup resources for live activities so some of the practical experiments if we could only have had a video of someone running the activity that we could have shared with the students that would have made a reasonable substitute but if we didn't have it we couldn't create it and it meant that for some of the courses we just weren't able to offer anything and I think that's really frustrating to us because it's quite a short thing to do because we had no expectation of this situation happening we didn't have them in place so that's a real lesson learned to make sure that's done as soon as every activity is created and it's also true for for data sets for students to analyze we were better on that we had that for almost everything but again we didn't always have it in the right place in the right format and the final challenge for us is always have this rolling program of new activities coming on stream and it meant that we weren't developing the activities for the new academic year because we weren't on campus so we've now got a challenge to try to get our schedule back on track to get the activities live for our students who are joining us this October I thought I'd pick a few successes I think it's nice to to see some positives that happened during this really really difficult period the first one is perhaps lucky rather than by judgment but we were able to launch a new remote experiment during the lockdown period this is an experiment that had been under development for about six months before the lockdown happened it's an experiment to explore planetary atmospheres using real space hardware areas to develop for our physics courses so there's a there's a valve somewhere in this piece of kit that OU research staff developed and is being used on a real space mission and they embedded it in a student project and the experiment was just about set up and tested by mid-march so it was live at the point that the campus closed but it had never been used by a student so the staff took the risk they did a testing and they took the risk to try it with a live student cohort they've been able to run it successfully for the whole cohort through the April May period and we had several hundred students go through that so that's a real success I think no one could have predicted the reliability that that experiment would have you know it's a mechanical electromechanical experiment using gases there were lots of things that could have gone wrong another success is really down to the creativity of some of my colleagues so colleagues in the computing department use lots of labcasts for their teaching and usually they would use that labcast studio that I showed you earlier campus was closed they said why can't we do it from home so here's my colleague John Rosewell he's sitting in his dining room he managed to rig up a multi-camera system so that from home students could see a camera on him and on the networking equipment that he was demonstrating the staff that would usually have run the labcast and all of the software from home from campus were able to run it from home so students could still do use the widgets to do the remote quizzes and they were able to engage with it very much the way that they would have done on campus albeit with low-cost cameras and lower cost equipment but that was a real success and it was an individual drive that got them through doing that I wanted to talk a little bit about free learning and some of you may know that alongside our talk courses open university also offers quite a lot of free learning we have a platform called open learn that we use for that the university as a whole there's a lot of marketing around open learn during the lockdown it was used quite extensively by people at home trying to educate their children the government also directed people for skills development to open learn so we had a lot of new users but for the open STEM lab we have a open learn astronomy course that uses our open science observatories so that's those remote telescopes they talked about on tennaree and we publicized that course during lockdown and we had a huge number of new students register and they were able to continue to use the telescopes during lockdown we just lost a very short period I think two or three weeks when spain's lockdown was so severe that they banned all campus all access to their observatories so even the technicians weren't there so they shut everything down but really that was a great success and it's been nice to know that we're supporting lots of home education through that process and the final thing I wanted to share was around what we've done in sharing expertise and resources during this period we've had a huge number of inquiries from universities all over the world saying we've seen your open STEM labs and could you help us in this situation we've not been able to do everything but we've tried to do what we can to support other people so the first thing we did is we created some blog resources and a showcase page so the resources are at the end of this presentation and they're in the program as well if you want to try them but basically if you go to the showcase page you can register to have a username on the site and you can try for free some of our activities some of them are always free we have some open educational resources on there so those would always be free in particular you might want to try the virtual microscopes a nice one but we've also added some of our internal student facing remote experiments that we don't usually allow people outside to use because we thought it would be great if people could experience that from outside so we've got those live we've put quite a lot of effort into sharing expertise through blogs and networking and professional groups I think it's been interesting that despite the fact that the lockdown has stopped us meeting face to face actually the networking probably it's been easier to attend some conferences than it would be in normal times and the final thing we've done is we've had to think about off developing a paid offering for some of our resources it's not necessarily something we would have wanted to do but what we found was the demand was really high and the amount of effort to support people outside was just beyond the resource that we had so we've been working on developing just a limited number of values that people can pay to use and that's aimed at international universities and also UK universities I've seen the octagonal sign so I know I'm coming to the end but I am on my final slide so really just to summarize I think the long-term investment we've made in the open stem labs did give us a head start to continue practical learning during COVID-19 pandemic but I won't say it was all pain saving and you know we had challenges like everybody else in particular our residential schools were all postponed that's been very challenging for us and we're not we haven't finally resolved how well resolve fix all of that in the future it increased our reliance on the open stem labs in the short term and we were very grateful to have that as an alternative resource we saw this substantial increase in use of our free resources during this period and I think we're going to try to find ways to help people to find those more easily and to make sure that people are aware of what they can do and we've learned some lessons I think we never in the reliability that we would need from our equipment when it was being designed so we really want to think about resilience for the future and three quick points for that firstly making sure that we always generate sample datasets and videos for all the activities at the time they're created and that we store them somewhere centrally so that they're easy to get to we're thinking about ways to support these lab casts from home you know perhaps we could have kits that could be delivered to academic staff so they could have a lab cast from home more easily rather than having to do all the putting things together themselves and the final observation relates to research that it was very clear when the lockdown happened that our teaching practical work was carrying on but all of our PhD students were prevented from doing any practical work and if we could have applied the sort of remote access approach to some of our research equipment we wonder whether we could have allowed some of our research students to carry on in fact we had one example for the remote observatories that there was a PhD student who uses those for his PhD and he did observations and made great discoveries for his PhD during the lockdown so this does seem to be an opportunity there but it's not something we've absorbed very much so I just wanted to highlight the resources that I mentioned they're also on the program so there's a blog that I wrote that really just points you to different activities that we have and to different publications that we've previously written about we're voting on screen laboratories so that's a good place to find out more and then we have this showcase page where you can connect to opens them after you can try it out for yourselves and see how you get on. Well thank you all very much for your attention I'm happy to answer any questions I'm afraid I haven't looked at the chat at all so I've no idea what's there. Thanks Helen, thanks so much well done and despite my best attempts to distract you with my octagonal sign they were supposed to be really subtle but I just want to say well we're an octagonal sign everybody well done that was really good and well done that was excellent timekeeping I have to say you didn't need me there at all it was really really great presentation as a an X OU student myself as well I was really excited to be doing this session and it's amazing isn't it I just think that's so good to do distance learning and have all of that kind of stuff available really really good and I can see that there's been quite a few comments in the chat I did spot one question which I think was from Dom and I'm just going to whiz back up quickly who said that academics teaching in this context of the OU would assume remote first for their teaching whereas in many of our institutions they would at least before COVID assume in person first so Dom was wondering how you would encourage academics who were used to in-person teaching to consider the benefits of remote labs great question and think about that I think it is definitely a really different mindset what we've been trying to do recently is to think about the learning outcomes that the student would get so it's easy to get caught up in the lab environment and the the activities that they would usually do and then panic and think well remotely they won't be able to get their hands on the kit they won't be able to plug things in the wrong way and what you need to do is to think well what do I want them to get out of it and then try to design activities that will deliver that learning outcome I think I did see very early in the chat someone asking you do you build in errors and maybe that's something also for people to think about building errors but we try to build in ways that students can go wrong so we have definitely found that if you create a remote lab where you force them down a path and they have to do it the right way there's no way to get it wrong they're obviously not going to learn as much as if they have to find their own path and sometimes they can take a wrong tack and they have to to recover and go back but I think it is about it is thinking differently and and I won't say it's easy you know the the resources that the OU puts into those remote labs is huge you know we have a large team of software developers and technicians and project managers and academics and it's it's it's not an easy thing to do so I sympathise with colleagues in conventional universities I've not been at the OU that long and for me it was a big learning curve oh really really really yeah I can imagine yeah having having I've worked at the OU as well so I kind of been on both sides so yeah I can imagine that so great question thanks Dolbyn thanks um thanks Helen for that as well um I was going to say if if anybody does want to have a chat with Helen we've got plenty of time so um if you do want to grab the mic we can try and give you mic access if anybody because I know that Emma um was having quite a chat in there with anybody you don't feel please don't feel obliged but if you would like the mic you're more than welcome to take the mic or at least tell us that you want it anyway um I'm just going to have another little look to see if I've spotted any others um just lots of love in the room for you I'll have to go back and read it all won't I you've just done a really great presentation um really good oh Rian says really impressive I love the balanced reflection and aim to continually improve it's really incredible what has been going on um that has formed the foundations for everyone to now think differently and creatively yeah that's true I think that's the change and I think maybe in the past we thought people would just want to do this in the short term you know if other universities will go remote in the short term but what we've discovered is actually people are seeing benefits in the longer term and I mentioned a little bit about um more effectiveness of resource and that's actually really quite important you know that you can get many more students through the using an expensive piece of equipment if you do it remotely than if you have to have you know a demonstrator and a lab technician in the room with them to allow them to do it in in a timetable session so I think maybe a blended approach could be quite good you know lots of universities in the future and we've always had sorry sorry interrupt just gonna say presumably your blog post that you shared as well would kind of give a reflection on that as well does it yeah it was written quite early in the lockdown I'll have to do another one went on it's more kind of reflecting on the way we did things before rather than what we did in in lockdown I'll have to say in developing countries we've had lots of interest because what we've discovered is that obviously in developing countries you may not have access to any practical learning and you might be remote first because then you get this maximizing the use of resource but we've also talked to we have a project with Ghana where they'll do remote activities but they'll do them in the lab that might sound a bit strange but it's to do with that they can connect more efficiently from multiple labs so people will come into a space where there is internet and then they will connect to a remote experiments or simulated experiments from there so there's lots of different thinking in developing countries as well yeah definitely yeah good point there's some more chat in there about civil engineering type lab type sessions well we at the moment we don't have a civil engineering we talked about one of the challenges for mechanical engineering was you can't do destructive tests very easily we talked about doing testing but obviously if you need someone to reset the experiment every time that's an issue um I think the closest we've got to civil engineering we have we're working on a wind tunnel experiment for mechanical engineering and one of the applications for that will be looking at flow over buildings as well as flow over aero so that's probably the closest but I think activities in civil engineering could be done but we don't have that good answer and another comment by Lucy um great comment actually developing countries does access to the virtual lab require a good internet connection so it's a good question and I tried to answer it before and I garbled it I'll try it again so what we found with Ghana so with our if you think of the lung function test I mentioned would be a good example so working with people in Ghana we talked about well could that be delivered delivered to online to their school teacher training I think was the application and they found that they didn't have good enough internet so what they did was um they have some sort of local solution that I don't understand very well that is a kind delivery of internet within the campus in a local environment and then they run the virtual software locally within that environment so it's not a wide area network access it's just all local and that's why they have to come into the campus to use it because you can't rely on them having internet at home so they kind of came up with a hybrid solution to deliver local internet to let people do virtual experiments on the campus interesting yeah yeah I don't know if John Traxler's left he would have been uh oh no are you still here John yes you're still here I just wondered that that might be something you'd be interested in chatting about as well based on your your presentation earlier I heard all that he says yeah so open stem africa if you look there's a particular team working on it I think you can google that open stem africa excellent well that's really good um okay so I think I don't think there's any more um questions or comments that we need to look at and I know people are starting to kind of head off now but that was really really good I really enjoyed that thanks ever so much okay thank you very much it's been really nice to talk to you lovely okay well we shall just stop the recording and then um if people want to