Hey, Meg, let's do a podcast.

Sounds great. Who should we talk to this time?

Let's talk to Julian Davis in Australia this time. So one of the cool things that we love about this podcast is that it gives us a chance to not only talk to really interesting people, but share that conversation with. With people anywhere, listening at any time. And everybody gets a peek behind the curtain because why should we be the only ones who get to talk to cool people? And we met Julian Davis through the XAPI learning cohort a really long time ago, maybe longer ago than. I'm willing to admit that I am old. But Julian, I've always been fascinated with your work, with your energy, your the. The work that you bring to building out cool technolog and bringing everybody else along with you. I love that your business is called the Digital Learning Guy because there's a line on your website.

I'm just gonna. I know you know the line on the website because you wrote the line on your website, I'm assuming. But everybody else, in case they haven't gone out there yet, says I cut through the jargon and untangle the tech, giving you clear, practical ways to build a digital learning environment that just makes sense. And that is just like, what a great mission for the world. Julian, welcome. How about you introduce yourself and share the parts of your bio that I missed.

Thanks. Thanks, Megan. Thanks, Meg. It's so great to be here and talk to you guys on the other side of the world. This is great. So a little bit about me. So I got into. I've always been in tech.

And. And since then I've. What's the Aussie word to use? I've spruce about it a lot. I talk about it a lot because it can do so much. I was talking to a new connection today and he was Just saying that he said the wizard or he said something like that, and I'll take that as a compliment. But he got my passion for it because this is such a thing that can change the way we do things. It's just so, so flexible in the way that we can do things. And I will talk, I will take the tech out because people, they hear technology and you can just see them physically glaze over when you start talking about the technology aspect of it.

So you get to learn about what they do and then you can apply the tech against in their language. And it's just something that I've, you know, I've been honing over the last

number of years resonates so much, especially that excitement about Xapi and what it can do. Because I will confess, we've had a little bit of that around here too.

It's great. It's great. And I love what it can do and I want people to know what it can do.

Okay.

So that's a very, very passionate thing about me.

That's a big part of what you're doing with xapi collective and xapi.comau so talk about. I want to get into Remote Reviewer, but I want to spend a little bit of time talking right now around your Xapi work because I think that's where a lot of that comes from.

Yeah. So the collective was born out of an idea of myself and a guy called Andrew, who's down in Melbourne. I'm up in Brisbane, he's down in Melbourne. And we met at a conference and we both shared the same passion for Xapi and we both had the same mindset that why isn't anyone using it? This is such an amazing, amazing standard. Why isn't anyone using it? So I had this idea of wanting to put it out to mainly people in Australia because a lot of you guys who are giving us some amazing, amazing webinars and series. It's three o' clock in the morning for us and a lot of people won't get up for that. And having the recordings are great, but we're finding that a lot of people just wouldn't watch them. They'll sign up for them, but not watch them.

So we thought, well, let's bring you guys to us. So kicking off the Collective, we were able to set up with some time zones that were a little bit more friendly for Australia around about 10 o' clock in the morning. So someone's having their coffee, they can come and have a catch up. And we're we're starting to gain momentum, so we've started it this year. It's, we're doing it every, every month at the moment. If it becomes more popular, we'll do it over a shorter period. But we've got the likes of yourself. Megan's been on it, we've had Veracity on it, we've had Shelley on it, we've had lots of key stakeholders in the XAPI world sharing what it is that they're doing.

And the word starting to get out there and that's. That, that's great because we're getting out what it is that we're trying to achieve of getting the community together about what X API can really do. And it's also to show that it's not that scary, it's not that technical and it's not that scary. Xapi.com au is my resource is I wanted to share what I was doing with the world, so created the Australian version Vexapi and that's where I share all my resources and any tips and tricks and stories or anything case studies that I come up with, that's where it all lands. So we've got a little of Australian presence for the XAPI world and that's what I'm trying to pull together.

I kind of love that because when we built the XAPI cohort, of course we built, built it in our time zone, but it was really a combination of, hey, folks, it's not that hard. You can actually do it right and you can see other people doing it and share all these resources. And I love that you really took the. I can see other people doing it by putting it in your time zone and making it contextually relevant to you. So I think that makes I, I, it's just a different layer of that than I had ever really appreciated. I know you over the years have gainfully showed up at very dark, very dark times in your day to, to present, whether it's the learning, innovation, Technology, the LIT group or XAPI cohort or XAPI parties. So I appreciate that so much.

Oh, it's great. I love talking about it and I love hearing what people are doing with it. So when I, you know, the cohort was fantastic because it opened my eyes to what it could actually do and this, that was a real driving force behind where I'm going and what I'm doing with it.

Awesome. Awesome. Megan, I know earlier you said we're going to get to remote reviewer and so this is the time that we get to do that. And also the first time that we've ever had the chance to do a product or tech demo as a podcast. We're experimenting a little bit here. Thanks for agreeing to join us in this experiment. But more than just the demo itself, we don't have that visual format here, but we'd love to know what is the why behind things. Why? Remote reviewer.

What problem did it solve that you found out that this is the solution that we should go to there?

Well, it grew like anything, it grew out of a problem and just in a conversation with a work colleague who was talking with someone who was actually doing visa applications, and assessors were traveling overseas multiple times a year to go and assess people. And to me, it was like, why aren't you recording it? Or there's no way of capturing the evidence. Well, hang on a minute. There actually is. And so that's how the idea was born. And it just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew. And it's grown into this application now that does so much more than what it was originally designed to do. The principles and the concepts are still there of being able to capture evidence using xapi.

So external to your LMS or your SMS or your CMS and all the S's, it can be external to that because it's using xapi. So it does solve that problem, that it's not just a tick in the box anymore. It's actually demonstrating that somebody did something and that's what it's capturing and it's interoperable.

So. And that's kind of. Well, I mean, you know me, I get pretty excited about interoperable data, but the. I'm so much fun at parties. So what I love though, right, is you're, you're, you're doing something, you're capturing something that otherwise wouldn't exist in the learning management system. We would never think to do this in the learning management system. We would do it on paper. It would be, you know, filed somewhere.

It would be done in person. And. And here we have just a ton of opportunities. So do me a favor. I've seen a demo of it. Meg's seen a demo of it. But for people who've never seen a demo of it, how does it work? So if you could, like, break it down, like the flow between the person being evaluated and whoever is reviewing that process, like, what's their flow? Then we'll get into the how it works on the back end.

Righto. So it's a relatively straightforward. So you would have. There are Kind of three players in this game. Okay, so you've got the administrator who would create a review. Then you've got the person who's actually going to review it. And then we'll call it the candidate, because that could be a student or it could be a worker, it could be anything. We'll call them the candidate.

And an administrator would go in and set up a review. Now, that review has a couple of layers. Inside the top layer is the activity. So this would be what it is that they've actually got to do. So this might be how to make a coffee or how to do sanding or how to put on a life jacket. And then you would have a task set underneath that of the actual steps that they have to do. And that's, that's actually quite important because that's how we will actually measure that they've completed that particular activity or that particular review. And it's also where AI plays a bit of a role, which I'll talk about in a minute.

Once that the review has been created, it's then sent off to the candidate. They'll get an email and a QR code where they. Or a link that they can click onto and it takes them directly to a page where they can see what it is that they have to do. And then they can record directly from their phone or they can upload a video or in some cases upload a YouTube clip of what they're actually doing. And once they've recorded that, if they're recording it on a phone, it just gets sent straight up into remote reviewer, the person who created the original task. So we're going back to the administrator, they get a notification to say, hey, candidates uploaded the video, it's ready to be reviewed. You need to assign a reviewer to it. So that's where they go into their bucket of people who can review it.

Pick someone. They get an email saying, you've just been assigned a review. From there, this is where the fun begins. So the reviewer will go in and the first thing that happens is that there is. This is where the AI comes in. There's two parts to this. The first part is, is that you can define your own evidence rules, right? So these could be. You need to demonstrate that.

That it's current. You need to demonstrate that it's clear the video is not obstructed by anything. It demonstrates that it's the. The actual person doing it. So they've introduced themselves or something. That gives you a probability score of whether that is going to be compliant or not so straight away you can tell if it's a really, really low score, you'll go, well, I'm not even going to bother looking at that. So that's a time saver straight away. And then you can send it back to them and to the candidate and go, you need to resubmit it.

It wasn't, wasn't clear or whatever it was that they were doing. The next thing you can do is you can hit Review AI which will actually take all of the task set items that I just spoke about and match that to the video that's been uploaded. It will give you a probability score. So it won't actually score it for you because that's always the human in the loop. The human in the loop always has to finalize the review the assessment. So it will give you a probability and it will give you a jump. So you can jump straight to that point in the video and have a look of whether they've actually completed that task set or not. If you want to, you can draw all over the video and add comments on the video to of if you want to give them the candidate feedback.

And you can go through the whole process of doing that. And then once it's done, you set it as complete, give it or not complete, depending on whether they've successfully completed it or not. And then from there they'll be able to get an email and a unique code that the candidate can go in and view that feedback as well. So it's a complete link. They'll be able to jump to the different parts where the comments have been stored, where any markup on the video or annotation has been done. So they're able to go in and have a look at that feedback as the. As the complete loop. That at a high level is how remote reviewer works from one end to the other.

Okay, super, super cool. What are some of the. So let's connect it back to xapi. What are some of the XAPI statements like that you are sending at each one of those points?

Right? Okay. Yep. So the very, very first one is initialized that that is just a given. So I've, I've dovetailed into the video profile. So this always worked off the video profile. So the. Because I know when I was building it, the forethought was that well, if you want to put this into a bi tool or something, you need to know what the rules are. So I built it around the video profile so it picks up the play to the seeked the volume, the Paused any of those, it picks all of those up.

It also adds a comment. So anytime that a comment is added, that comment is captured in the object description. I think it is in job description and within an extension. So there's a quite a number of extensions inside the X API statement, particularly for around the video. So it tells you that the platform and the frame rate and all the technical information that you may actually need as well. And there is a little bit of the review metadata in there as well. So that that also travels with it wherever it goes. So it's capturing commented, it's capturing all of the video play.

And something that's pretty cool actually that came out of this was because the video is being seeked back and forward. If a reviewer decides to just scroll to the end and say yes, they've done it well, you've now got evidence to show that they actually did a full seek right to the end as well. So that comes up in the reporting aspect that you can actually see that whether a reviewer was doing that or going backwards and forwards and really analyzing the video. So there are quite a number of statements in there and there is actually I do have a profile up on the app as well that you can go in and have a look at what the profile is and what the different soon to be put up onto someone's profile server I would imagine. And oh yes, We do, we do. So yeah, that's where it comes up. So it's very packaged, it's very, very tight, but it is dovetailed off the back of the video profile.

So you talked about how, I think you gave one example at the beginning or you gave a couple, you know, putting on a life jacket or you know, it's these like real world application type of things where somebody needs to like see you doing that thing. Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, examples of when remote reviewer is the right tool to be used for it and also you know, how it kind of solves that problem of scale. Like we need it to be consistent. We need to be make sure that you know, one reviewer is getting, giving the same kind of feedback as another reviewer. And it's. We're not having a totally different experience because a different person came in to review. So I kind of asked you two different questions there but applications,

yeah, good questions. So I'll start with the reviewer side of it. So right now the reviewers can only be added to a company. So they're within an organization, within remote reviewer. The reviewers sit within the organization. So they've been vetted. So they would have to be vetted to be added to that organization. So you would make sure that those people are actually, they are consistent in what they're doing.

They are potentially over here that they do have an assessor qualification if that is what they have to do is they actually do have that assessor qualification and based on the RTO standards, that registered training organization standards we have here, they must comply to certain rules and regulations which I'm sure you guys have got over there as well. So the company would be, or the organization would be responsible for that to make sure that that is consistent. As for an example and this is one I use, so if you go to the website, you'll actually see a little screenshot of remote reviewer. Well, that's actually my son, so I'm allowed to use him because he is my son. But he, he did, he's recently finished an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker and at one point I was telling him about this software. So he's, he's, he's more hands on than he is techie. So it was just yes dad. Yes dad, okay dad.

But I said can you record yourself sanding something? Right? So he was just, just doing a sanding, a timber sanding task. So, and that's all I told him and he, he went away, sat his phone on the, on the corner of a desk, filmed himself putting all his correct PPE on making sure the vacuum because it's like a sander with a vacuum on it, making sure that he had ear protection on everything on like that. So it was a very, very simple thing to do. But I could clearly, clearly see what it was that he was doing. Now advantage of this was that if, if he had to demonstrate this for college or, or some sort of vocational college, an assessor would have to travel out to him to see that and watch him do it and sit there with a checklist and ticket and ticket and ticket. We don't have to do that anymore. So it cuts down on your travel time dramatically to use another scenario mining. So Australia is a reasonably big country and we've got a lot of remote mining sites.

If you have to send someone out to assess an apprentice for doing some, some work that starts to get really, really expensive. So by having video or remote reviewer to have a supervisor film them doing a task and then the assessor might be in Sydney or Melbourne and be able to review it, that's a huge cost saving and you've got the evidence there straight away. It's not just the Supervisor going yeah he did it. I saw that there's actual evidence and completion data there to show that they actually did complete it. So that that's how, that's how it can work and there's so many different applications of how this could actually work

well and that's really cool And I think you mentioned something there that I want to kind of dig into because you said it's not just completion data like I can pass an elearning course. I can pass just about any elearning course that I've ever right but that just like with a scorm completion all I get check yep completed and no evidence that I can do anything at all. Actually I am a certified spray tan applicator. I took the elearning I have I have never touched a spray tan applicator but back in the day

part of

research for a project I took the elearning and a while we had my completion certificate on the wall just to prove it how useless a completion certificate could be right. And they're very important in some cases but there's not actual evidence of competence. So it's kind of what I'm. I'm loving there. And as I think about competence I think about skill taxonomies and all those tasks and steps and what are I think it. It may be easy to I I. What I love about this is it feels if I were an organization adopting this if you feels very easy to start with a one off and get an incredibly powerful quick hit demonstration of capability like this is amazing. But if an organization wants to use this embedded in their processes scale it up do they have to do a fair amount of like identifying really good SOPs standard operating procedures for things and skill taxonomies and stuff is is

And you can link that that particular task set to multiple activities. So it could cover different tasks as well. You could have generic ones like correct demonstration of ppe for example, that can cover multiple different activity types. So as. As far as the taxonomy goes and those kind of things that there is, there's a little bit of setup to begin with. The clients that I've worked with have found it relatively easy using the AI compone that was in early childhood. They found it quite easy to map to the early childhood units and be able to. To pull those in and create a list of some may only have two tasks sets in them, some may have 10.

So it all depends on what it actually is that the activity is that you're trying to achieve. You don't want to overcomplicate it. You know, I would. I wouldn't appreciate being sent a task list of 20 things that I had to complete in one video. I think that just becomes a little bit too over the top for a candidate to be able to complete. So you have to find that. That balance.

Well, I'm thinking Meg and I are working with a client now where we may end up creating training that happens spread out across a very large logistics operation. Right. And it's one thing to create the training and it's one thing to say yep, everybody came to training, but that training won't happen in front of a computer. And if we want to centrally know did everybody actually demonstrate competence? We could use something like remote reviewer to have everybody get videoed and then get feedback back centrally. Or even if that feedback is done like kind of locally, the evidence of that comes back centrally back to that learning record store. So I think that that's a powerful demonstration of the power of XAPI outside the LMS spread all out. But then the power of remote reviewer to capture what happens in the real world and digitize it and make that evidence super cool.

That's that real decentralized learning and assessment really now isn't it? Is it's bringing it outside of those of the silo. That you know, still seems to be a little bit of a thing in the L and D community. Is. Is having the silo of an LMS is trying to get people to think beyond the LMS is. Is another. Is a continuing work that we all have to do, I think.

But it's scary out there. No, just.

But it's not.

Speaking of continuing work, I know you're always improving remote reviewer trying to do something more with It. What would you love to do with Remote Viewer that you haven't had the chance to do yet? What's the next thing that you're going to add to it?

That's easy. World domination. No, look, eventually, and I did talk about this earlier, which was having reviewers inside the company is eventually almost having a pool of reviewers globally so companies could tap into reviewers. So you would be able to verify yourself and put credentials up and then, you know, you can almost monetize it for the reviewers to be able to, you know, put themselves available to review content. Because not every organization is potentially going to have a specialist, but they could go out and locate a specialist and be able to use a reviewer. So that is, that is one thing that I'd like to see in the future.

Okay. Have you read the Skill Code by Matt Bean? Super cool.

I think I'm about to talk about,

talking about basically how people develop expertise and then as we think about, in an AI environment, right. How do people build expert if they're no longer doing the grunt work? Because the expert has given the grunt work to an AI tool or to a robot. Right. And. But he ends, he ends the book. Because you're feeling pretty crummy by the time you get to the. About three quarters of the way through the book. You're like, oh, man, we're toast.

But, but he ends the, the book in describing what, at the time, until you just said what you just said, Julian, I was thinking, yeah, that's never going to happen. But an environment in which people can learn, tap into experts, get feedback on their work in this interoperable global space where you can tap into experts. But we're scaling the mentorship in a way that makes that accessible for people everywhere, for people in very, very remote or isolated places to have the same kinds of access that people in other places would have. So bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

Yeah, yeah. Now you've got me thinking. Yeah,

I love.

No, I won't sleep now. I love getting these ideas because it really does just keeps the energy flowing and it's great. It's great.

So how can people learn more? How do they. How do they know? What's the pricing model? What else should people know? Where do they go?

So you can go to remote reviewer.com and I've actually, I've actually created recently an ROI calculator. So you can, it's part of the resources. You can go in there and you can have a look at whether it's a full replacement or partial replacements. And do you do any travel and it'll give you, you know, a ballpark figure on what you could potentially save over time. And a lot of it comes down to travel because there's so many people that have to travel to assess or review. So that cuts that. And. And particularly with the current fuel costings that we have, particularly where we are, I'm sure that you've got similar.

Similar increase in travel costs and everything. So it hits there as well. So it's a reduction in that as well. It doesn't have to be a complete replacement.

You can.

You can use it for 50, 25 of what you're actually doing. But there's a. There's a few case studies on there as well and how you can use it, and the pricing is on there as well. And you can sign up. There's a free. You can sign. It's. There is always going to be a free account.

Obviously it doesn't come with all the bells and whistles and the AI, but it does come with some AI. But there is. It does get you started with my life jacket demonstration is not actually me. It's. It's another gentleman from New Zealand, I think, but demonstrates how to put a life jacket on. It's something we're all familiar with, and you can work through that to understand how the process works.

I have seen the life jacket demo and I think it's outstanding. So that's awesome. That's awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I always love to see the work that you're doing and tap into your energy and your enthusiasm and appreciate that so much. Okay, so thank you. We have one last kind of random question.

All right.

I'm fascinated with the. The how humans work, the quirks that we bring to our work, because it gives me an insight into, like, the person you are. So what's a work habit or a quirk? Favorite fidget? Your weird trick. Like, what's your thing, man?

Right.

I've got two. Okay. I've got two. So the first one is I'm a tragic 80s kid and I love 80s music. Okay. So when I.

When I'm.

When I'm building something or doing something, I zone out to a lot of 80s glam rock. And so I'm a very big Bon Jovi fan, so I kind of zone out to that and that gets my answers. The other one is in my spare time. In my spare time. I'm actually a motorcycle safety instructor and I love riding motorbikes long distances. I did. I rode from Brisbane to Sydney and Back on the weekend just because. And I solve the world's problems when I'm just stuck in my helmet and.

And it's all connected through Bluetooth to my phone. And if I get an idea, I can go, hey, Siri. And then I won't say it because my phone will go off and then it'll start. I can start putting notes in there of things. So that's. That's. That's how I solve some of my big problems, is going for a ride.

I love it. I have that in that image in my head right now of you taking voice notes to yourself. Walmart is like, okay, what kind of bike do you have?

Nice. Nice.

Yes, yes, yes. And if I'm not taking notes. Yeah. I'm listening to Bon Jovi in the. In the helmet. So kill two birds with one stone.

Love it. Love it. Well, Julian, thank you so much for joining us. I kind of. I wish that everybody would go to remote reviewer.com because we've seen it. It's fabulous. I think people will get a sense of it here on the podcast. But I honestly, like, everybody needs to go there and check it out, because when you did your demo of it for us for the lit cohort that we are doing right now, and Vexapi Cohort.

Lit cohort, I guess we'll call it, I just. I was, like, on fire afterwards. I was like, oh, Megan, like, this is so cool. This is so amazing. We gotta, like, tell the world about this. So I think. I really hope that everybody will go check it out, because I think there's a lot of different applications that it can be used for and so much potential. And I just.

I wish that everybody would take it and run with it and use it in all the ways, because there's so much there. So thank you for sharing with us today and thank you.

Thank you for having me. It's been great.

Yep. Look forward to seeing you in places as we go forth.

We will.

All right.

Thank you very much. Thanks, Megan. Thanks, Meg. Appreciate the time.

Okay, Meg, how did that go?

Oh, Megan, it was good, but also, like, so frustrating because Remote Reviewer is awesome in so many ways, but you only, I think, fully understand its level of awesomeness. If you can see that demonstration and see how it works yourself. I mean, Julian did a great job of describing how it works, but, gosh, I wish there was, like, a visual component or a demo to this. Although there is. I mean, people can go. We had Julian on our Lit. Lit cohort. So people can go to torrancelearning.com lit and find our lit library and watch that demonstration there.

Of course, they can go to the website and check it out for themselves and sign up for their demo. So, I mean, it's not like all opportunities are lost, but it's hard. It's hard to have this visual thing and then we're just, you know, talking about it in. In a podcast. But. But good. It was good. It was great.

It was good, right? It's always good to connect with him. He's so excited about his work.

Right.

And he is. Is just as giddy about X API as we are, so that's kind of fun. And there's only so many people on to get this excited about a data standard, but, you know, and it's. It's funny because I. I sit there and I'm like, reflecting on us and it feels like, like, wow, this. It's like all of a sudden they're publicizing the software and, and that might be an interesting flow if you're, like, listening to a bunch of podcasts, but it's really more about uplifting people who are doing really good work. And I'm so impressed with the thoughtfulness that he has put into this, and I'd love to maybe continue to have more conversations with people about the why and the what and the how behind their products. That might.

Might be an interesting place to take the podcast.

This is Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance, and this has been a podcast from Torrance Learning. Tangents is the official podcast of Torrance Learning, as though we have an unofficial one. Tangents is hosted by Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance. It's produced by Dean Castile and Meg Fairchild, engineered and edited by Dean Castile, with original music also by Dean Castile. This episode was fact checked by Meg Fairchild.