 Hello cure everyone excited to share my story with you So my story begins with my father. He was chief of staff of the National Security Council for President Reagan This is his birthday on Air Force one His claim to fame was bringing email to the White House Pretty incredible My claim to fame was bringing fashion to the White House Let's just get a little closer look here Notice the collar notice the shorts you can't even see the shoes here, but really an impressive outfit overall So about 15 years after this photo was taken. I was home for spring break and my dad said let's go out to lunch Let's get some lunch Nick So got in the car and we started driving across the river into Virginia Started to get a little bit concerned as we headed towards a specific exit and it turns out that my father had set up an interview for me with three of his friends at the CIA so On this very seal right here, we proceeded to have a father-son fight. I Said dad, I don't want to be a spy. I want to be a teacher And by the way, I'm going to New Zealand to study poetry and Maori education So he said in his angry voice How will you make a living as a teacher poet person whatever and then sort of confusion set in New Zealand, what is that all about? Sure enough. I turned down the CIA and I came to your beautiful country and I immersed myself in New Zealand poetry anybody know who wrote this poem right here any any New Zealand poet in the house This is an Alan Kernal poem One of my favorite poets here will do an open space on New Zealand poetry for all you Kiwis later and Immersed myself in Maori education one of my favorite movies here whale rider and Had a little bit of fun as well. This is me falling down the mountain Mount Tarnaki here But I came back to Washington DC several years later and I couldn't find a job and I started to wonder was dead, right? Was my obscure knowledge of New Zealand poetry and Maori education making it hard for me to get a job in Washington DC So I teamed up with a group of fellow nerds And we were all really excited about the fact that 30% of the role had access to Internet 90% had access to mobile phones But even more than that we looked out across the world We saw all these people working in disaster human rights food education who were hungry for new types of skills and Generally, these folks don't have access to graduate schools too expensive And it's quite expensive to put also trainers on planes to go reach them. So we asked ourself as a group What about online learning as a group? We took hundreds of courses Khan Academy Code Academy Coursera you to me Udacity you name it We took it and we tried to build a better model for how online education could be done So we got together practitioners with animators Educators and programmers and we built my company tech change Ten years later. We've reached a hundred thousand folks in almost every country of the world and one of the largest providers of e-learning for the social sector Working with all kinds of phenomenal organizations large and small And every corner of the world on things like responding to Ebola or climate change or refugee resettlement So what is our special sauce? Well at the heart of our model is this idea that we want to co-create learning experience with our communities And that means where others are trying to scale a lecture into something that self-paced We look at the workshop and we think how do we get the workshop all its interactivity and community To scale and that's what we call web shops. That's where we live For us that means a really robust training platform great content and really strong facilitation We also believe that building relationships alongside side skills is the key most of the time you take an online course You're getting better at skills for us. It's about creating community in small groups like this We're also very keen to ensure that pedagogy shapes Technology not the other way around pedagogy meaning how we teach too often. It's the technology that determines it So for us that means creating our own platform to allow for that and doing really neat things So this is a course we taught on blockchain for international development I know there's some crypto enthusiasts in the house and we gave everybody a wallet a crypto wallet and we used a Token called sterolumans to actually exchange value between and among participants when they saw a comment They liked or they attended an event and so forth so new ways of thinking about how we can engage people in courses Data data data let the data drive decision-making For us we are capturing data on everything that's happening inside of a course and we're using that to inform What content to show how to connect people more intentionally and we're getting really clever about actually mapping the social fabric of an Online learning community and giving things like empathy scores to try and get at some of those soft skills that are so important So the last thing I'll mention here is that good online teaching really matters We're working hard to actually train more digital teachers out there in the world today So why am I here? I'm here to reconnect with this incredible country to learn from you all and to find Collaborators who are excited about the model for online learning that we bring And hoping to build some of the best online courses the world has ever seen and in case you're wondering dear old dad Tech change super student has taken and completed eight courses He's also paid for them, which is important Entrepreneurs, I did not give any free courses And he loves New Zealand so there you have it. Thank you all enjoy your coffee break