 Hello everyone, I welcome you in the first live stream and as far as I can see we have five people here. So I'm ready to answer any questions about the virtual linguistics compass, about linguistics online, we've got classes, well and even about robots, so any questions, I can't see anything in the chat, but maybe questions are going to come up pretty soon. Well, if you're interested, let me say something about the virtual linguistics compass. The whole thing was started in the 1990s, believe it or not, before we produced the website which originally was called linguistics-online.com. Before we started that, we produced CD-ROMs, maybe some of you still know what CD-ROMs are, CD-ROMs with linguistic information. They were pretty popular, we had a course called Introduction to Linguistics in English and in German. On separate CDs we had a course with Muton de Groyter, Interactive Introduction to Phonetic and Phonology, and later we produced the CD for William LaBos Atlas of North American English and for the Big Varieties of English Project with Ben Courtman and Edgar Schneider. From these CDs and the knowledge we gained through these CDs, we generated more and more linguistic content, and as early as 2001, we started the virtual linguistics compass and first of all transferred the components we had created for the CDs to the newly founded virtual linguistics compass and our initial idea was to produce online classes as many as possible. Let me look at the chat. Hi, welcome to you all. Any questions? So that was how the whole project started. And the first course we produced, the first true course started in 2003 and it was the course History of English. The reason for such a course, which was a true online course, was simple. A colleague of mine went into pension and we didn't have anyone else who could teach that class except ourselves but I didn't like the idea of teaching such a sort of static knowledge. Not many things are changing in the historical development of English, maybe only the linguistic insight about it and so we produced the course online and the success was enormous. Now, in about 2004, we had material to produce more courses and the next one we started was an introduction to linguistics class and then of course phonetics and phonology because honestly, I can't see anyone teaching phonetics with full sound support from several languages these days. There is live in class. You need technical support in order to produce sounds in Arabic, click sounds and all sorts of realizations of phonemes, multimedia is much better than what we can do in class. So that was in 2004 or 2005, we had three courses, a phonetics course and a introductory course and we had the History of English course. And these courses were modified and became better and better and then after a certain time around 2008, we asked ourselves, what shall we do in class with so much material now on our online platform? What can we do in class? Are we still delivering content? Well, the idea was possibly not. Why should we deliver content if it's there digitally? This is ridiculous. Today in 2021, it's even more ridiculous if someone tells you what a phoneme is. It's all there. It's on the web. So why not? And so the idea was to develop a new teaching learning concept and this teaching learning concept for which we were awarded many prizes here over here in Germany is called the inverted classroom concept. So the inverted classroom concept simply says content delivery is digital, content acquisition is self-guided and that's always the first step. And after that, we meet in class to discuss things. Let me illustrate this on the basis of the topic, let's say the phoneme. Everything about the phoneme, the physical view, the functional view, what are minimal pairs, Troubert's course approach, Daniel Jones' approach, even the Quaternay's approach about the psychological view of the phoneme. All that is done digitally. Students go through a digital learning unit. Today we call it topic. Now, once you've done that, it doesn't make sense to repeat that all in class. For what reason? It's a waste of time. If it's there digitally, you don't have to do it in class. So what did we do? We first of all thought, well, we could give some presentations about different topics. We could solve problems. Well, our first approach in around 2008, 9, 10 was simply was criticized by the students because we overburdened them with too much work. A year later, again, with our three courses, Introduction to Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, History of English, we did not introduce new topics. We simply repeated what we offered online. Students' evaluations were bad. We were criticized heavily and we were criticized heavily because the repetition of something which is there digitally is that waste of time. So what did we do? We developed what today is known as suggestions for in-class activities, questions, questions feeds, competence training and so on. And so that is today the basis of our learning units. If you enroll to any course on the Virtual Linguistics Campus, enrollment is free, registration is free, I will say something about it in a second. Then you see the idea that each learning unit, first of all, is introduced by a sort of guideline which contains our guiding questions called how to proceed. And it is finished with a suggestion for in-class activities. And that's the concept, the inverted classroom, digital content delivery, self-guided content acquisition and in-class, subsequent in-class training using data, using the Internet, of course. So whenever you go into class with me here on campus, you would have to use your smartphones or your computers in class. And we do research, we investigate, we analyze data and so on. Before I say something about the Virtual Linguistics Campus, let me comment on what Sarah Issa has just posted into the chat. Could you please give lessons about Lambda Calculus? I believe the few videos on YouTube regarding Lambda Calculus are clear enough for us as students. Well, I could do that, but we found out that the videos we have produced on more general topics in linguistics are far more popular. So if we serve students with specialized topics, then we have to have specialized courses because all our videos are linked up with the courses we offer via the Virtual Linguistics Campus. We have two videos on predicate logic and two videos on propositional logic. So they go into logics and meaning and the representation of meaning. Maybe, Sarah, you look at them first and you see what you can do with them. But of course, Lambda Calculus itself is a topic which is a little bit too specialized in order to become a single part of our efforts. So first of all, I would postpone that perhaps. Okay, we welcome a few users here from the Philippines and okay, that's it. But now let me say something about the Virtual Linguistics Campus. I don't know whether you have created your account on that international open educational resource platform which offers content on almost every area in linguistics. The Virtual Linguistics Campus Internet address is easy to find. Just type in into Google Virtual Linguistics Campus and you find everything you need. First of all is an open educational resource platform. That is everything we produce, text, images, videos, animations, whatever. All these things can be reused without asking for copyright regulations. All you have to do is quote that the content comes from the Virtual Linguistics Campus. That's it. Well, and then that's the first thing to make content, linguistic content available to the world. I personally can't see why linguists introduce topics like consonants or vowels in class. If you have the option to listen, to see animations, to do all sorts of things with that stuff digitally. So that's available to you first of all. For this reason, registration on the VLC, as we call it, is free. Secondly, the courses which are offered on the Virtual Linguistics Campus are also free. They are open and there's no restriction as far as the numbers of participants is concerned. And there are no fees whatsoever, but the courses are fully certified. They are certified, not in terms of credit points, because credit points first of all are internationally a little bit different. And secondly, only universities themselves can certify things. So what we do is in our certificates, you will be given specific type of information about the workload, the workload in hours. So that's the next thing. Certificate in terms of workload. And all our courses involve a workload of roughly 90 hours to 120 hours workload. So they're much more complex than the ordinary short internet courses, which rarely are more complex than let's say two weeks or so. Two weeks and four hours per week. These are real courses which you could deliver on campus. The courses we offer, well, it's the full undergraduate program in linguistics, introduction to linguistics, speech science, that's a course in phonetics. What else have we got? The nature of meaning, course on semantics and pragmatics, words and word structure, our course on morphology. Then the course, the structure of English, a course on English grammar. In the history of English, historical linguistics, psycho linguistics. Currently we are planning a revision class for exam students. And what else do we have? Well, then of course our big fieldwork classes currently available, Welsh and Japanese. We're working on Arabic linguistic fieldwork exploratory courses online. That's unique in the world of online linguistics. No one else has got such a thing where you can explore language by applying linguistic methodology without knowing the language, without even understanding the native speaker. That is possible and that's new. So we invite you to register to become part of the virtual linguistics campus community, which has a long tradition, as I said at the beginning, more than 20 years now. Full experience of a full linguistic background. To say something about my background. Well, I'm as a linguistic person at the university. I'm now retired. I was retired last year, but I still work on robot projects, working with humanoid robots. I spent three years in the United Kingdom and half a year in the United States. My teachers, my teachers were David Crystal in England, Mike Garmin in England. I had classes with Peter Roach and Trudgill. In Germany, my teacher was Eckhart Koenig. I was heavily influenced by a German politician called Klaus Knutzmann. And in America, I cooperated with William LaBeouf. So I learned a hell of a lot from these people and being there was simply wonderful. And when David Crystal returned to Germany in 2014, the first thing he did with me was a video on motivations about becoming a linguist. Do you find that video in our channel? Just look for it. It's a fantastic video. It shows the expertise of this man who I admire for his linguistic background and who I also admire for the way of teaching linguistics. And I hope that my way of doing things via video and also via the natural linguistics compass come close. They will never reach the expertise of David Crystal. So much I wanted to tell you. I can't see any further questions. So if you don't mind, we can say goodbye at this point unless there are any questions. Next time, perhaps in a month or so, let's see how many members our Facebook group has then currently we have more than 20,000. The virtual linguistics compass has almost 2,500 registered users and our YouTube channel, 88,000 subscribers. So if you want to help us, just advertise for our material and once more, it is free. The videos, for example, on the YouTube channel are all in the Creative Commons license, which means you can use them freely. You can show them in class. You can put them into your presentations or whatever you want to do. You can only show parts of them. Absolutely free. That's it. That's what I wanted to tell you. I will now leave this live stream and save it and put it into our channel and then other people can watch it too. So thanks for listening and thanks for being with me. Bye-bye.