>> So my name is Dave. Good day everyone.
Today I'm going to talk to you about teamwork and
collaboration with 500 students, on and off-campus.
So I come from UNSW Sydney,
a big Australian university.
We have 65,000 students.
Our engineering faculty has 17,000 students,
that makes just our engineering school
bigger than the whole of Stanford University.
We've got classes of 500 plus.
In fact, this is my own class of engineering students.
But that's 500 islands.
Five hundred people looking down.
Taking down notes from a document projector,
consuming PDF's, watching canned content.
So here's a challenge.
How do you get 500 students to work together as a single team,
as a learning community,
whether they're on campus or off campus?
I'm going to talk to you today about
Modern Digital Education at UNSW.
Well, the first thing I wanted to do
was digitize and integrate the system.
I replaced the document scanner with digital ink.
Just like this surface pen here,
I'm using it as a remote.
Then I started streaming my lectures live.
Live produced over YouTube.
Students could comment even if they're off campus,
and get an answer from me straight to the camera.
In 2017, I switched to Microsoft Teams.
I told the students, "Hey, we're going to use this new tool,"
60 seconds later, they started posting.
They've logged in, downloaded the app,
no change management required.
Engagement and rich communication followed,
engineering diagrams, mathematics code.
Students taking photos with their phone of engineering structures.
Even taking photographs of handwritten mathematics on paper.
I use channels for weekly content, like lecture notes.
Here's a channel for Week 11,
tabs the Week 11 notes, and there it is.
But this is more than just aggregation of material into one place.
It also creates a data schema,
and you'll understand that in a minute.
I could embed and share my OneNote
using class notebook right into Teams.
These notebooks sections created by the channel.
All of these inking done live,
just like we are now,
but working together and collaboratively.
Those 500 students, they all own the notebook.
It's being synced in real time.
Then Stream launched on Office 365,
and I used it instead of YouTube to livestream my videos,
but now I had all of the same power at the back end,
but I also had analytics and content control.
I could even embed lecture clips inside the OneNote notebook,
inside teams, all on a single login experience.
Student documents could be created natively in teams,
whether they're on an iPad any device at all.
We've got more than just the final document.
We've got the entire version history and the telemetry.
Our learning management system turned into an app for
teams embedded natively within that environment.
Forms became the fastest way to make a quiz.
I could even run full power engineering software, as a tab.
The single integrated solution resulted in
a 900 percent increase into
the number of student posts per student per week,
and massive increases in engagement.
But you know what? I actually created my own problem.
We couldn't keep up with all of the questions.
Sometimes we would miss them,
and you know when one student reaches
out and asks a question and you miss it,
that's a lost opportunity to connect with that single person.
So I want to talk about leveraging AI for a second,
what's possible with an integrated system?
Well? Meet question bot.
Question bot is a bot that
we created in order to solve this problem,
and it was built by partners who are right
here today, Antares Solutions.
So it's a simple value proposition, right?
Students tag the question bot,
it looks at which tutorial group they're in,
looks up who their TA is, tags it,
TA gets a notification on their phone,
answers wherever they're at,
and question bot closes
the service ticket by being told what the correct answer was.
So it's actually keeping track of question and answer pairs.
It's helping everyone connect,
and every Q&A pair is there inside the specific topic.
Of course today, if it doesn't work on mobile, it doesn't work.
So question bot is actually creating
a study resource for the students, filtered by topic.
It's not a textbook. It's made out of their own collaboration,
their own discussions automatically.
In fact in the first two weeks alone,
question bot created 200
high-quality topic filtered question and answer pairs.
Now imagine six times that.
So I used Q&A maker,
a cognitive service on Azure in order to train the AI of the bot,
and within a couple of weeks,
it started answering questions on its own.
But not just that, question bot was also able to direct
the students back to the conversations where
their peers had been talking about similar problems.
That's reconnecting people and building learning communities.
So there's another problem,
a lot of students would upload photos for their questions,
and there's no context within the question that
they've asked to build a high-quality question and answer pair.
So I started putting QR codes on all of the learning material,
and using a vision cognitive service,
question bot was able to see
what questions the students were working on,
and say, "Hey, I see you working on question 4.1."
Pull relevant information from its own knowledge base,
deliver more useful assets to the students.
Remember those lecture recordings that were on Stream?
Well, it's a SharePoint asset,
and question bot could find it there with no configuration.
It's able to search the transcript,
and if the answer to
a student's question happens to be in the lecture,
it can deliver a timestamped video link to the exact second.
So using graph API and bot framework,
we built and deployed this with just one developer in eight weeks.
You know the firehose of conversation turned from
a problem into a digital asset for us and the students.
So lastly I want to talk about closing the loop.
We've leveraged this value that we have.
We've leveraged all of these digital assets
and we've integrated our solution.
How can we turn all of that data into new material?
In fact, by integrating all these systems,
I have very highly structured data on SQL.
I can create a one-click Power BI dashboard
for students to get their marks.
So maybe, a student might think they
did poorly in this particular topic,
but because of the data there,
they can see that they were actually in the 75th quartile.
Maybe it was just a tough question,
and the dashboard reflows on mobile.
So I used 2017 data to train
an Azure Machine Learning Model to
correlate all of the information against student performance,
and using a Database of competency ranked resources,
thats every single topic against every difficulty level,
and an algorithm on .NET,
we automatically assembled
500 individual personalized optimized study packs
for every student based on
the prediction of not only their exam result,
but their exam results for
every individual question two weeks before sitting in,
and uploaded to SharePoint with
personal access one-click in teams, pretty cool, right?
So we built a learning community.
Five hundred students, they're working together,
and doing that we managed to achieve
a satisfaction ratio of 99 percent.
That's because we're personalizing
the experience for every student.
We're actually able to identify at
risk students by Week 4 of the course,
when they could still drop it.
When it still matters.
I reach out personally to
every one of those at risk students to say,
"Hi, how can I help?"
What about that challenge,
five hundred students working together as a team?
Well I ask them, do you feel part of a learning community?
100.0 said yes.
But the most valuable thing in that room, it's the people.
Every student has got 499 other
brilliant young people there, to collaborate with,
to work together, to create new material,
their own course, creating rather than consuming.
But what's really interesting is
this thing Artificial Intelligence that we
think of as being inhuman.
It's actually allowing us to
achieve an incredibly humanistic goal,
creating people together, personalizing their experience,
and reaching out to those people in need.