>> Good afternoon, this is fantastic.

Welcome to the...

Which union are we?

The Texas Union.

My name is Lorraine Haricombe

and I am the Vice Provost and Director

of the UT Library system here at Austin.

And it's my pleasure today to welcome you

to the kickoff of our launching event

of what we call The Year of Open.

Phil Long, so why don't
you, everybody knows Phil

but here he is, Phil
Long and I arrived here

a few months apart I believe.

And somebody's already
dubbed us partners in crime.

(crowd laughs)
I'm not sure

what the crime is, at
least we're open about it.

So I just wanted to say thank you

to Phil and his entire team
who are co-hosting with us.

We are doing this together to
put on and bring speakers in

such as you will hear
about in a few minutes.

To launch The Year of Open here.

I am a very strong advocate
as is Phil and I'm assuming

all of you to learn more
about the open agenda.

If you have this sheet, you'll see

some of the upcoming events
for the year of 2015/2016.

There are a lot of events external

to the academy that's helped drive it.

The urgency and the momentum around open.

Today we'll learn more about
open educational resources

from the guru, I believe, in
open educational resources.

And there is some national event

just earlier this month that makes this

a very, very timely opportunity for us

to have somebody like David Wiley here.

Next year the funding agencies will begin

to implement their policies
and plans around open data.

Another opportunity and another reason

for us to get with the open agenda.

I want to make a plug
here for the libraries

because we are going
to be very key partners

and stakeholders on this
campus to lead these efforts.

If you need, if your
faculty or graduate students

and you need help or
support in understanding

what those compliance issues mean for you,

please contact the libraries.

Colleen Lyon is your contact or consultant

within the library but, please feel free

to contact your librarian in the library

to make sure that you learn more

about what these might mean for you.

Especially if you're receiving grants

from some of these funding agencies, okay?

I also want to let you know that we have

an institutional repository
called UT Scholar Works.

We will launch the new one soon.

And that's the repository for you

to put scholarly articles
in an open access repository

that will be accessible to the world.

We would love for you to do that.

We would love to come
up and work with you.

Speak at your department meetings,

or other groups as you deem fit

to learn more about the services

in the libraries that we
will be offering to you

and over the course of
the next year and beyond.

So with that, I just want to again

say thank you for being
here and thank you Phil

for the idea of Year of Open with us.

You will be seeing a lot
more around this topic

over the next year and now I'd like

to call Phil to introduce
our keynote speaker today.

Thank you.

>>Well, I'll be brief because
I'm very eager as you are

to hear more from David.

I'll simply say if you wanna read

a lot about his bio you
can go to davidwiley.com

and you'll see that he's been engaged

in this area for several decade plus.

And currently acts and serves as the CEO

and Chief Academic Officer,

Co-founder and as Chief Academic
Officer of Lumen Learning

which is a company that's dedicated

towards increasing student
success through the effective use

of open educational
resources and open textbooks.

But I just wanted to
point, to use one anecdote

'cause I ran into David at a conference

that he sponsored back at BYU.

Which I have to say I was bereft

of the fact that I got up in the morning

and failed to get my cup of coffee

when I came to campus and if you know BYU

you know that would be
a tough thing to find.

But I knew there was something
that was worth following

with respect to this guy when he published

a graphic that showed
the inverse relationship

between learning objects,
at the time was a big deal,

between learning objects
and their re-usability

and the context of those learning objects.

And there was this lovely
inverse relationship

that if something was
built to be really valuable

in a particular context, its
re-usability was next to nil.

And vice versa, if something was built

that was particularly generic
and not particularly useful

for anything, then it
would be used everywhere.

And I thought well someone
would have put that out

on a graph in a paper and then make

a very salient argument about
what we need to think about

with respect to open educational resources

is someone I certainly wanna follow

and I have ever since,
and it's my great pleasure

to introduce David Wiley
to give us a talk today

on the future is open and it's now.

(audience applauds)

>> Thank you, and thanks
for the invitation.

Any time Phil calls me to
go anywhere I wanna go,

so this is fun, thanks
for, and Phil recommended

this title and I think it's a great title

particularly for the
work you're trying to do

here between the joint
work between the library

and between Phil's unit.

I'll say of course that the talk,

all the slides of course are
open educational resources.

You can take them and
reuse them internally

for whatever purposes you might want.

Maybe to burn to stay warm during

winter or something like that.

Open UT is the hashtag, if you're tweeting

my twitter handle is @opencontent.

Just to clarify I'll wear a
couple of hats during the talk.

And I'll try to be specific
about when I have which hat on

but you know my primary full-time hat,

let's see if we can make
that stop happening here.

My full-time hat is in my
chief academic officer role

at Lumen but I do still have
two other hats that I wear.

Until just two years ago
I was tenured factory

in the graduate program
on educational technology

at BYU, where I'm still an adjunct

and still have a research
group there that I run.

So I'll make a few
comments with that hat on

and I'm also the education
fellow at Creative Commons.

So when I talk about the
Creative Commons piece of that,

of this work I'll put that hat on.

If I move around, do you
have trouble hearing me?

>> No.
>> In the back, are you sure?

If I use my teacher voice I'll be okay?

Okay.

So I wanna start out by making
an argument about education.

I wanna try to connect education broadly

to as Lorraine said the open agenda.

I think that's a good phrase, I wanna try

to connect these two things together

by suggesting to you that education

is a very particular kind of sharing.

And if you think about
what we do as educators,

we spend most of our time trying

to share the things that we know,

the things that we know how to do,

the things that we're capable of doing

or excited about doing with students.

We're trying to share what we know.

We're trying to share,
hopefully we're doing a good job

of sharing feedback on
work that they produce

that when they hand in to
use that we look through that

and a lot of that feedback
tends to be critical

but sometimes hopefully, we're
also sharing encouragement

with students and trying to
persuade them that we believe

in them and that they're
capable and they can do it.

We're sharing the passion that
we have for our discipline,

trying to persuade people

that they should want to be economists

or they should want to be physicists

or they should want to
be educators like we are.

And when it's at its
best, education is really

about sharing part of yourself.

So not talking about sitting
through faculty meeting.

Not talking about hunting
for parking spots.

Not talking about the rat race

of pulling your tenure binder
together and stuff like that.

But the actual educative
acts that we engage in,

all of them are acts of sharing.

And I'd go so far as to
say that if there's not

any sharing happening there might be a lot

of administrative going on but
there's no education happening

if there's not sharing happening.

So I wanna try to connect
those two ideas in your mind.

Several years ago, there was
this technological advancement

called the internet that was invented.

You've probably heard of it.

But the thing I think that's interesting

about the internet is if you look at,

you know the internet
gets compared to the press

a lot of the time and I
think that's a good example.

Because what the internet has done,

if you think about say
in the library context,

if you think about books, 'cause really

the printing press decreased the cost

of making a new copy of a
book by orders of magnitude.

And when they're smaller they're easier

to distribute and to move around.

And you know the internet
did the same kind of thing.

Has made it today that you
know 300, 500, 800 page book

as an epub costs
essentially nothing to copy

and essentially nothing to duplicate.

And so that's pretty interesting.

When it costs nothing to make a copy

and it costs nothing to move that copy

from here to there, then that gives you

much greater capacity to share
than we've had in the past.

When in order to share a copy of a book

I had to go cut down a
tree and do something else

and print it and ship it and warehouse it

and get it to you, then it's harder for me

to want to share copies of books

with a thousand of my closest friends.

But when I can do it
for essentially no cost

then I have this great capacity to share.

And in as much as
education is about sharing,

then the internet gives us
this really unprecedented

capacity for education as
well, except when it doesn't.

So let me tell a brief fairy tale.

Well, maybe not fairy
tale, maybe morality tale.

Maybe it's a parable, I don't know,

you can tell me what it is later.

But it's a story about this beautiful land

in which people lived and worked

and they were all happy
and had a good time

with the things that they were doing.

And one day this young man invented

this new piece of technology.

There's still four chairs in the front

so you can come in through this door.

Invented this piece of technology

to make it easier for people
to move around the kingdom.

And he called it the automobile.

And it revolutionized
things in a lot of ways

but it had kind of an
impact on the kingdom.

And people looked at the
impact it had on the kingdom,

they were kind of unhappy about that

and they said we really
have to kind of get this

under control because the
automobile's gonna be the death

of our lovely kingdom so they said,

let's take some of these places
that are already torn up,

let's just completely tear them
up and we'll build something

that we'll call a road
and the trade-off will be

we'll tear up small parts of the kingdom

to make these roads but
the deal is whatever it is,

whether it's a truck or a
car or a this or a that,

any big thing with a motor
that's gonna take you

from here to there whenever
you're gonna call it

has to stay on the road and
that's the deal that we'll make.

And that seemed like a great
deal and they built roads

and people wandered out
and it was wonderful.

And a few decades later,
a young woman had an idea

for another invention which
she called the airplane.

And the airplane had this
really revolutionary potential.

And she attracted some money
and started building them.

You know, built a facility and
started producing airplanes.

And the day before her inaugural flight,

the police showed up at
her house and told her,

"We understand about the
airplane, it's very cool,

"we're very excited for what you're doing,

"we just want you to
remember that the law says

"all the big things with
motors that move you

"from here to there must
stay on the road, okay?

"So enjoy driving your
airplane on the road,

"but if you take it off the road,

"you'll be breaking the law

"'cause that's what the law says."

So what's the moral of this story?

The moral of the story is
that long before the internet

was a glean in an engineer's eye,

there was this other old
antiquated law called copyright.

And if we go back to our table,

you know, when you think about
the four groups of activity

that copyright regulates, two
of them are actually producing

copies and distributing those copies.

So that in some kind of
really interesting way,

the primary technical
capabilities of the internet,

everything that the
internet allows you to do

is actually regulated or
prohibited by copyright.

So that puts us in an
interesting position.

How to get the plane off the road?

How to get the plane into the
air without breaking the law?

So I wanna talk about
open educational resources

in this context and start
with some definitions,

you know, so which open?

If I ask you to define open,
there would probably be

as many definition as there
are people in the room

so I wanna tell you when
I say open what I mean.

I think there's a common
misconception that open means free.

And I say I think that's a misconception

because actually if you think
about the entire internet

if you think about when you go to CNN

or you go to National
Geographic, or you go to BBC,

or you go to wherever you go,

the entire internet is already free.

You don't have to pay to
read the stories at CNN,

or pay to watch videos on YouTube.

So free is actually kind of uninteresting.

Free is assumed, free
is the starting point.

But if free is the starting
point, then what is open?

I wanna suggest to you that
open is free plus permissions.

And by permissions I mean
copyright permissions specifically

so I would give you this
two part definition of open

that for materials to be open,

you need to have free and
unfettered access to them.

You don't have to pay,

you don't have to give out your zip code,

or your email address
or create an account.

You can just click on
the link and go to them

and that with those free
materials you are granted

perpetual and irrevocable
set of copyright permissions

in a strong legal sense.

Yes?

>> [Woman] So if you say unfettered,

would you call cookies fettering?

>> No.
>> Okay.

>> But that's an interesting conversation

that we could have after.

Yeah, if you've used a
website hosted in the EU

in the last year, you're getting
a lot of cookie information

in your face, but...

The particular sets of
copyright permissions

and I should have said, sorry,

thank you for raising your hand,

I should have said if at some
point you violently disagree

or violently agree or something,

please feel free to interrupt me.

Otherwise, being a professor,
I will just speak unprovoked

until the bell rings and
then we'll all be done.

Okay, so free and
unfettered plus permissions.

So what permissions?

We call these the five R permissions.

So retain, reuse, revise,
remix and redistribute.

So I need to be able to make and own

a copy of whatever it
is I'm talking about.

Not streaming access to
a movie like on Netflix.

I need to be able to download,
post, own and control

my own copy forever.

I need to be able to reuse that
copy in a wide range of ways

including opening it up and
making some changes to it.

Maybe the video was done
in English originally

and I need it in Spanish.

I need the right to dub over top of that.

Maybe there's a big example
about the mountains of Utah

in there that I don't like
and I wanna be able to take

that photo and the
accompanying paragraph out

and put a new photo
and a new paragraph in.

You know, maybe I've got three or four OER

that I wanna combine in
some way to create a mashup

and whatever I've done,
whether it's the verbatim copy

that I've made in the first place,

or my revised copy or my mashup copy,

I need to have permission to
distribute that to others.

A show of hands familiar
already with Creative Commons.

Awesome, okay.

So not much more to say there

than except that Creative
Commons provides you

with a very, very very easy
to use and of course free

set of licenses that you
can apply to the videos

that you create or chapters that you write

or lecture notes that you
create or whatever it is.

You can put this Creative
Commons license on your material

and that tells everyone yes, this is free

and no, don't call me, don't email me,

don't ask if it's okay
if you do X, Y and Z

because I've already gone out of my way

to put the Creative
Commons license on here

to tell you you have
permission to do these things

so just go knock yourself out and do them.

The point of the Creative
Commons license is

is to take the friction
out of that process

so you don't have to contact me,

you don't have to ask my
permission because ahead of time

I have already granted you the permission

by putting your Creative
Commons license on there.

Just a quick point to make
that of the five Rs retain

is really the fundamental R.

I have to be able to have my own copy.

If I don't have my own copy,
it's pretty hard to revise

and remix.

So the five Rs.

Contrast, if you will,

and I wish I could take
credit for this word,

it's not my word but it's one
of my favorite words ever.

Contrast open with faux-pen or fake open

in which you have free access
which is probably gated

in some way, but you're still working

in an all rights reserved context

or maybe a context where
the terms I've used

put even more constraints on you

than just typical copyright would.

There was a long time...

What's the right word to say that?

When you look at affordability
initiatives on campus,

a lot of times the first place
in affordability initiative

will be to the library because
there's a lot of material

in the library that's
already been paid for

that students can use for free.

But what you'll see is that, you know,

with commercial resources,
they're expensive for students

and faculty and students get
no permissions with them.

Library-based resources are
better in that they're free,

but you typically still
have very restrictive

all rights reserved copyright
plus crazy terms of use

but open educational
resources kind of get you

all the way there in terms of being free

to access and use and giving
you those broader permissions.

Two parts to the definition
of open educational resources.

Educational resources that you have free

and unfettered access
to that give you these

perpetual and irrevocable permissions.

So at the risk of,

I mean, Phil wants me to
be slightly provocative.

I don't know how good
a job I'm going to do.

Maybe one of the things
I'll suggest to you is

that if you're teaching a class

where you're using the internet
at all in your classroom,

if you're having students go to Canvas

to grab materials from there, use that.

When you make the choice to adopt

traditionally copyrighted materials

and you put those on the internet,

you're making the choice to
drive your airplane on the road.

But when you make the choice to instead

of adopting traditionally
copyrighted materials

to adopt openly licensed materials,

then you're actually able to
get the plane into the air

because at that point
everything that the internet

technically allows you to do,

technically gives you
the capability to do,

the open licenses of OER
give you permission to do

so that you can actually leverage

the full technical
capability of the internet

in the service of teaching and learning

which you can do in the context

of traditionally copyrighted materials.

So I wanna talk about adopting OER

and you know, just again
to be clear on definitions.

When I say adapting OER, what do I mean?

In the next several slides,
I mean taking the syllabus

for whatever course you're teaching

and where it says required
textbook or required materials,

you delete whatever was there before

and you replace it with
open educational resources,

so we're not using OER
in a supplemental way

where we're saying hey,
go buy this $130 textbook

and here are these free supplements to it.

We're saying actually to take this class,

there is no cost, we're not
even asking to you spend money

on a textbook because
we've assigned OER in place

of the textbook we were using before.

And particularly I wanna talk

about kind of high impact
adoption on the student side.

I'll talk from the
student perspective first

and then from the faculty perspective

and then even a little from
the institutional perspective

just to try to run
through some of the impact

that adopting OER can have.

So let's talk about adopting OER

and improving student success.

Now, grumpy cat fans in the room?

Yes.

So grumpy cat says you
get what you pay for.

And this is the...

I think this is the
default assumption, right?

If I buy a $100 stereo or a $1,000 stereo,

the $1,000 stereo is a nicer stereo.

If I buy a $10,000 car or
I buy a $100,000 Tesla,

Tesla is a nicer car.

There's this up and to the
right assumed relationship

between cost and quality that says

the more I pay the better it is,

you get what you pay for.

Faculty, in particular, will be very quick

to admit yes, I believe
there are materials online

which claim to be educational in nature

and which are openly licensed, but...

If they're free, they must be garbage

'cause you get what you pay for.

Nobody would share under a free license,

under an open license anything
that was worth it sold.

So I wanna show results of
a couple research studies

with you that kind of switching hats now,

my group and I'll share a
URL to these in a minute.

This is not in print yet
but it's been accepted

in Journal of Computing in higher ed

and you can get it digitally
but it's not in print yet.

But this is a study looking at the impacts

of open textbook adoption
on learning outcomes

for post secondary
students, as the title says.

Very descriptive title.

So this is looking at
about 15,000 students

across 10 institutions in 50
different undergraduate courses

about 130 teachers teaching
those different courses.

And I think I said 10
institutions already.

And this is not the
tightest research designed

in the history of mankind
but it's pretty good, right?

So it's not an RCT but
it is quasi-experimental

with propensity score
matching to make sure

that we actually are
comparing apple students

to apple students across
treatment and control.

Looking at post test, using post test

as our measure and looking
at completion rates,

C or better rates among
students and also the number

of credits students enrolled
in this term and next term

because in some early survey work

when we asked students what
do you do with the money

that you save from the
faculty assigned OER

instead of a commercial textbook,

take said I take more classes.

I said okay, well.

There's probably a way to figure that out.

Let's go and see if that's true.

In this case across all
these different institutions

it's a very small set of common data,

we're able to get about students

in terms of just age, gender and race

but nothing more like Pell eligibility

or interesting variables like that.

But this is a table from the paper

and what you'll see here
in these three columns

are completion, you know,
the number of students

actually making it out the
door on the last day of class,

this is C minus or better
as a binary variable,

either they received a C
minus or better or they didn't

and this is course grade
as a continuous variable

kind of from zero to four.

And the blue squares
are cases where students

whose faculty assigned them
OER outperformed students

whose faculty assigned
them commercial textbooks.

The two red squares are
where the commercial textbook

students outperformed the
open textbook students

and the NSs are all no
significant difference.

And I apologize if I bounce
back and forth sometimes

between OER and open
textbook because to me

an open textbook is just a bunch of OER

that you've pulled
together in such a manner

that you use it to replace the textbook

that you were using before.

So I think about an open textbook

as just being a collection of OER.

But anyways, you can see only in one case

that the students whose
faculty assigned them

commercial textbooks do better.

It's frequently no significant difference

but in several cases,
students who were using OER

actually outperformed
both in terms of how many

made it through and
completed and the grade

that they received in the course.

And in some ways even more
interesting is looking

at the number of credits that
were taken by the students

whose faculty assigned
them OER versus students

whose faculty assigned
them commercial textbooks.

It's about a credit and a half more

that students who were assigned OER

taking per term than
students who were assigned

commercial textbooks so
that's pretty interesting.

Now, in a separate paper
that we supported this work

but we didn't participate in the research,

we're not named on the article.

This is at Mercy College in New York

which is a four-year private looking

at their college algebra success rates.

And so you can see here, there's
a pretty distinct pattern

between fall and spring
or fall and winter,

I don't know what you call it here?

It's just summer and summer
and summer and summer

in Austin, right?

(audience laughing)

Yeah, okay.

'Cause, you know, you get
these kids in college algebra

and many of them pass and
the ones who don't pass

show up again in spring to try again.

So this is a very different
kind of group of people

than this group is, but
you can see, you know,

from fall to spring, and the
years are commonly colored,

you can see that typically
spring is a much lower

success rate than fall.

But what you'll also see
here is that starting

in fall of 2011 when they were still using

a commercial bundle of a textbook

and an online math practice system

that generates problems algorithmically

and you answer them and
it gives you feedback

about whether you got them right or not

and you can get all the
practice that you want.

You know, so this was
a very expensive bundle

they were using and then in
spring term of that year,

we switched them over and helped
them move to open textbooks

and an open source online
math practice system.

We did that in a couple of sections

and it worked really well
in a couple of sections

so then in the fall of the next year

they flipped all 28 sections
of this course to OER.

And you know, you can
see what happens here

and it's even more dramatic, of course,

on this other side because
they had more headroom to game.

But among that spring group
you're look at 48% pass rate

before and 77% pass rate after,

so it's pretty significant improvement.

This was published in EduCals Review.

And now the paper with
the world's worst name.

I will buy a milkshake
for anyone who can help me

come up with a better
name for this framework.

It's really a way of looking
at return on investment

in terms of student success for the money

that we ask them to spend on
educational materials, okay?

So again, if I was asking you
to buy a more expensive stereo

I'd expect to get better sound out of it.

But just in terms of, you
know, quick framework,

again, here is our grumpy cat
kind of up and to the right,

this is our default
hypothesis, but the more money

I'm asking you to spend
on these materials,

they must be better materials,

so if I'm asking you to spend more money,

more of you should be
completing with a C or better.

You know, so if I spend a
little bit, learn a little bit

it's one thing, if I spend
a lot and learn a lot,

that's another thing.

If I spend a lot but don't
do well, that makes me angry

and if I don't spend very much

but still have great learning outcomes,

then that's really exciting to me.

So, you know, taking the past two examples

so the Mercy College example
started out at about $180

with a 48% pass rate and three years later

they're doing a $5 fee on that course

to support hosting and
maintenance of that online open

math practice system and some other tech

and the pass rate moved up to 77%.

As a single example.

If you take the data from the
first article that I showed

and go back to the bookstores

across all those 10 different
institutions and told

that numbers for what the
textbooks in those courses cost,

what students were asked to pay,

then you get a distribution, again,

of students whose faculty
assigned them OER,

and students whose faculty assigned them

commercial textbooks and you'll
see a couple of things there

that are interesting.

I think the first is that the lowest low

and the highest high are further out

for OER which I think says

that there's a greater
variability and effectiveness

among OER which I think we'd expect.

You'd expect more kind of homogenization

in the commercial materials
because they all run

through very similar production processes.

But this average is further to
the right than this average.

And actually you might
not be surprised to know

that if you take these OER out

and plot the best fitting
line though that cloud of dots

at the top, it does not
go up and to the right,

it goes down and to the right.

So openedgroup.org is the website

of our research group at BYU.

And my colleague John Hilton
who's another faculty member

at BYU who kind of owns this project

we call the review project.

And so the review project gathers up

all the empirical evidence
on what are the impacts

of OER, what are the impacts
of OER adoption by faculty

on students.

And just to give you a
quick summary of this.

This tells you how new the field is.

Right now, there are 11 peer
reviewed published studies

in the review, just about 50,000 students

in those 11 studies and the
looking at outcomes like

C or better and completion
and things like that.

93% of those students are seeing the same

or better outcomes than
their peers who are assigned

commercial textbooks as opposed to OER.

Yes!

>> Your examples so far have
all been in sort of math

and business every time it
tangles for humanities or maybe--

>> Yes, so that study that had
the 50 undergraduate courses

in is all across gen ed.

If you look at...

There's a lot of math that,

oh, okay, so there's some
bio, business, English, math

and psych in this study.

And you'll see that most of that effort,

most of the focus in OER to date has been

in the general education kind of band,

introductory kind of classes.

Because the foundations that
have historically funded OER

have said if we're gonna
spend $100,000 on this,

how can we do that in a way

that impact the most students possible?

So it ends up being the
highest enrolling courses,

the gateway courses, things like that.

But there is, you know, art
appreciation, history of music,

things like that that do exist.

Let's see where did we leave off here,

I think we left off there.

In peer reviewed studies of
perceptions of OER quality,

it's about evenly split
between professors and students

that have responded to these surveys.

When you ask them and it's
worded differently for students

than it is for faculty, but
when you ask them questions

about the quality of the
OER, you know, it breaks down

in essentially this way.

If you ask a student who's just
finished a course using OER

and you say and now imagine
you're doing a survey

at the end of term, imagine
next semester there's a course

you're required to take
in order to graduate,

there are multiple sections of it offered,

they're all at equally desirable times.

One of them uses normal textbooks
like your other classes do

and one of the uses all online material

like we used in this class, OER,

which course would you register for?

So those kinds of indicators
of their perceptions

of quality and what
they would like to use.

So maybe this is the
most interesting slide

of the whole presentation.

This is super fun to play around with.

I'm sorry, the URL's at the bottom,

I should put it at the top,

but it's impact.lumenlearning.com.

And this is an interactive
calculator where you can go

and play with several variables
to estimate what the impact

of adopting OER might be.

So it starts out with a set
of institutional settings,

we can move these sliders
back and forth to make

the kind of context match your institution

or particularly the course
that you're thinking

about replacing commercial
textbooks with OER.

So what's the textbook currently cost?

How many students are gonna use it?

You know, are you gonna
levee some kind of course fee

in order to support whatever
effort is being made

to make that happen?

What percentage of students
have passed it historically?

What's the cost for in-state credits

and out-of-state credits,
things like that.

So you kind of set up how
things work at your institution

in that course and then there are

these research-based settings

where we've taken kind of
the results of our work

and use those as defaults here.

So what will be the increase
in the C or better rate

among OER users?

What will be the decrease and
the drop rate among OER users?

Things like that and
again, they're all sliders

so is you think our estimates
are too conservative

or too aggressive, you
can play around with them.

And then it aromatically kind of generates

five or six graphs looking
at kind of total text

it would cost the students.

This metric we call throughput
which is really interesting.

You know, the percentage
with students who were there

on day one who graduate
with a C or better.

Not the percent that
graduate with a C or better

after all the ones that are scared off,

drop at the beginning of the term,

like how many of them
that started on day one.

Here's that mad, glad,
sad, rad whatever the order

of that terrible name is graph here

and there's more that.

So you can play around
with this and look to see

including further down
there's some financial stuff

on the institutional side.

What's the impact on
revenue from the bookstore?

And where do we make up
that revenue somewhere else?

Go ahead.

>>  I really like, those
are some very clever tools,

thank you for sharing that.

I do have a couple of
questions 'cause it seems like

it could have a pretty big
impact with a tool like this.

Do you control it all for
sort of how course grades

are determined or the level
of difficulty at exams

in making inferences?

Or things like, you know,
people who maybe are more

knowledgeable about educational practice

using OER resources?

And so there's been lots
of variables at play--

>> There are a lot of
variables at play, right?

So frequently, teacher and OER adoption

are perfectly confounded.
>> Right.

>> Right?

So really that you could
theoretically have somebody teach

with OER and teach two
different sections differently

but typically once somebody
starts using OER, they're all in

so those tend to be
interrupted time series studies

where you compare the
teacher to herself, you know,

previously so you try to control it

for teacher effect that way.

Depending on...

I don't think I have it,

no, okay, I don't have it in this deck.

Probably the most rigorous
of these studies we've done

was actually in high school
with open textbook adoption

in place of commercial textbooks adoption.

The state tracks a lot more
data and the state also

administers a state standardized
test at the end of the year

so, you know, in that study,

it's got the same kind
of setup as the first one

I described here, but
instead of three variables

we're controlling for,

it's 17 variable we're controlling for

including whether they're
English language learners or not,

if they're special ed designation or not,

reduced lunch or not.

What did they score?

What did the students score
on the previous years?

Science exams.

>> It's just random assignment
>> It's not random assignment

because this was a
district-wide move to OER

so really it's interrupted time series.

No, it's the district that did compared

to the same district the
year before when they hadn't.

So that's how you're
controlling for teacher that way

and then also controlling for teacher

for that individuals teacher's
contribution by using

the average score on the state
standardized science exam

that students in her
room received previously

which is a ton of control in
that because there's more data

better data and what you'll
see again across earth science

bio and chemistry is either
no significant difference

or actually on the IRT scale scores

under state standardized tests,
the open textbooks students

outperforming the commercial textbooks.

>>  Is that cited
on your posted review?

>> It's on the...

It was in ed researcher, so
if you go to ed researcher

and it's in open access, of course,

so if you Google ed researcher and Wiley

and Utah open textbooks
or something like that

you'll find it.

But I didn't put it in this
one because I didn't imagine

you guys would care about K-12.

But because of the quality
of the data are better,

it's actually the tightest of all the--

>> Yes, get a look at K-12
>> of all the studies.

Say it again.

>>  I understand your decision

but it's also get into K-12

because they do have better data.

>> Yeah, they do have way better data.

Okay, so--

>>  What's the role of taxpayers?

>> Yeah, well, don't even.

Okay, I'll start talking on my pulpet

if we get onto the taxpayer part of that,

maybe we can talk about that at the end.

So at this point, hopefully,
I've persuaded you

to at least consider the
possibility that when students

use OER they might, they
at least don't do worse

than they do when faculty
assign them commercial textbooks

and it might be possible
that they actually do better.

If I can just have brought
you along to there,

I'll be really happy and feel
like I did some good work.

So if that's true, how does that happen?

So I wanna talk about
patterns of OER adoption

or types of OER adoption
for just a second.

And yes, it was pointed out to me recently

that I have some kind
of fetish for frameworks

where all the words start
with R-E, I understand.

(audience laughs)

I'm thinking about trying
to rename this one.

But basically, you know,
when you adopt OER,

there are kind of three
ways of going about that.

One is a kind of naive
substitution strategy

where I was using this
textbook and I'm gonna go grab

this open textbook and I'm
just gonna use it in STEM.

A second is realign and
I'll talk a bit about that

in a second, I'm gonna give
examples of all of these.

And then rethink is
really asking questions

about how open interacts with pedagogy,

which I think are some of the
most interesting questions

for us as faculty.

So, you know, I don't want
to say that replace is bad.

I don't wanna speak bad about replace.

But when you think about
the whole universe of OER

that are out there, and there are a lot,

Creative Commons collaborates
with Yahoo being in Google

on a count of all the material
on the public-facing web

that use a Creative Commons license.

And in 2014 that count
was 883 million items,

so by now we're probably
about to a billion items

that are out there and
available under an open license.

And so replace strategy
absolutely saves students

a ton of money because
you're asking them to use OER

instead of asking them to
use commercial textbooks.

But if you go there and kind of stop,

I think about it as
like going to the buffet

and then saying I really
like beef and broccoli

and just piling beef and
broccoli onto your plate

and then going sitting down and not doing

like not getting any ice
cream, not doing anything else.

Like that's acceptable to do,

but there's some kind of
sense that you're missing out

on kind of broader opportunities.

Realign and this is where
Lumen does most of its work

with faculty and with institutions

is it really starts with
the process of going

back to your syllabus and
saying let's just all pretend

for a minute that no textbooks exist,

no textbook has ever existed,

just look at your syllabus and
see what are the six, eight,

12, 18 learning objectives
or learning outcomes,

I don't wanna get in the
middle of a holy war,

what do you call them here?

>> Outcomes.
>> Outcomes, okay.

What are the outcomes on your syllabus.

And then for each individual
outlets make that outcome list

into the table of contents
for what we're about to build

and for each outcome let's
go find two or three OER

that you think with your students

and the way that you like
to teach will support

that kind of learning
that you wanna see happen.

And just build up a textbook replacement

by aligning ROE with the
actual outcomes that you claim

to care about at least
according to your syllabus.

Coming back to K-12, the Utah work,

the work we're doing in Utah.

So we have a...

It's been going on for seven years now.

Open textbook science, open
textbook initiative in Utah,

we do math, too, but
in the science context

we get the teachers together
for two days a year,

we get them together
in January for two days

and they look, we bring
about 120 together,

kind of 10 to 12 per a discipline

'cause we're graders three
through 12 right now.

And the people in the biology
group sit own and talk

about what worked well for you last year?

What didn't seem to work?

Like what part of this didn't
seem like it was supporting

what we wanted to support?

And what new OER have come
available in the last year,

like what was new in plus
biology that we could out

or what did NASA release
about life on Mars

or whatever it is.

And every year they pull together

a new edition of the textbook.

And the thing that's really
fun about it is you would think

that in a state, in K-12 or a
textbook review has to happen

that you could publish new
editions of a textbook every year

but when that book goes
up to the state board,

and by the way, it's the state
board that runs this program,

but when the book goes to
the unit in the state board

that does review an alignment review,

you open up to the table
of contents and says

Utah state science standards
outcome one page one,

outcome 1.1, page four,

outcome 1.3, like literally the standards

are the table of contents.

And so that review that
normally takes hours and hours

for a traditional book
takes about 15 minutes

for one of these books because it's built

around the standards.

And you can do the same thing in higher ed

with your learning outcomes.

I like to think about
it this realign process

kind of as furnishing a room

and so here's a room, it's
already furnished, that's great,

but maybe I hate this table
and I hate that painting

and I wanna pull some pieces,

like I can take it as a starting place

and I can pull out the
things that I don't like

and replace it with other
things that I do like

and there's a whole
catalog like of tables.

And there's a catalog of paintings

and a catalog of couches,
and I can just go through

and pick the one that I
like and build something

that I think my students
will actually really like.

And that sounds like a lot of effort,

but even in the higher
ed context we do that

in a two day workshop and you
come out with time to spare

typically on the other
side of that process.

But rethink I think is the
most fun of all of these.

So the question really
here is if I can assume

that all the materials I'm
gonna be using in my course

are openly licensed,

what can I now do that
I couldn't do before?

What's open to me as an educator

that was not open to me before?

So I tend to go to assessments first,

I mean, I'm a old instructional
designer and tech person.

And so I like to make this distinction

between first what I call
disposable assignments,

these are assignments like

you know, two page response papers,

so I can make sure that
you read the chapter

before you came to class

and you as a student look
at writing those pages

and absolutely hate it and
you as a faculty member

look at grading 50 of these two pages

and you absolutely hate it.

And I call them disposable assignments

because there's an implicit agreement

between you and the student
that as soon as you've marked it

and handed it back to them,
they're gonna throw it away

and that's the sum total of the value

that it added to the world.

So when you think about
assignments based in OER

I think we can do something
that's more interesting,

something I call renewable assignments.

So two examples really quick.

Are we out of time yet?

How are we doing?

We're okay.

I wanna make sure there's
plenty time to talk.

So this is my kung-fu assignment

and this is one of my
favorite assignments to give.

The kung-fun assignment
is to go back and find

either go find some openly licensed video

or go find some old public domain video

and re-dab the audio over top of it

in a way that makes that
video teach a different lesson

than the video was
originally meant to teach.

And I call it the kung-fun assignment

because you know, in the kung-fu
movies the mouths are never

actually matched up with
the audio that's happening.

So you just kind of own that,

so I understand that your
audio is not gonna sync up

with the person's mouth, that's fine.

But so this is in a social media class.

This would historically
have been, you know,

write a two page paper
about blogs and wikis,

describe how they're similar,

describe how they're different,

demonstrate to me that
you actually understand

what blogs are and what wikis are

and what the difference between them is.

But so this is a kung-fu
assignment goes to a small group

of students to get together and go out

and find this footage and this
is a Kennedy and Nixon debate

and it's only about four
and half minutes long,

if there's more time, I'll play it,

but if you search for bogs
versus wikis in Google,

you'll find this right near
the top of the YouTube results.

And this video is just so
awesome in so many ways.

First, because of the bad kind of attempt

that actually doing Nixon's voice

and going Kennedy's voice
that the students do.

But more interestingly,
like they chose this video

because so Nixon is on the pro blog side

and Kennedy is on the pro wiki side

and for Nixon's part in the debate,

he talks about how, you
know, wikis are a problem

'cause anybody can edit anything,

anybody can do anything, he prefers blogs

because the author and owner of the blog

can control the information
that's presented to the public.

He's just created a blog
called the Watergate blog

he says where he's putting
out the official narrative

of here's what really happened
and people are allowed

to comment there, but you even
have control over comments

because you don't want
internet predators, you know,

kind of hoodwinking you and whatever.

And then Kennedy, of course,
is all about Kennedy's saying

that he's about freedom of
speech and freedom for the people

and he'll guarantee that
every citizen has access

to every wiki and anyway, so
Nixon does this whole thing

about control and access and then Kennedy

closes the debate by saying,

now think really hard what,

think about wikis and think about Kennedy

and what is the ultimate
most perfect thing

that Kennedy could ever
say about wikis ever?

He says, "Ask not what
your wiki can do for you,

"but what you can do for your wiki."

Now, if you've ever been to
a wiki that somebody set up

and said oh, we've got this great project,

we're gonna make wiki and
everybody's gonna come contribute

and 99 times out of 100, nobody comes,

nobody contributes anything,

it really is about what
you can do for your wiki

and a wiki that's healthy
and vibrant and interesting.

So, you know, this was
a homework assignment

that otherwise would
have been three separate

two page essays about how
blogs and wikis are different

from each other, but instead
got published on YouTube

and now has been viewed over 52,000 times

and is used in classrooms
I hear people tell me

that they use this video in their class.

And this is just an assignment
that they would have done

and would have been thrown
away but they did understanding

it was gonna go online
that people could see it,

that it could be used by other people

and they're like wow, there's...

We actually need to do a
little better job with this

because real humans are
actually gonna see it

like I'm not a real human, right?

Real humans are actually gonna see it

and it just turns out to be
a terrific piece of work.

Another example here.

This is project management
for instructional designers

which is a course I used to teach

when I was still full-time.

There is no textbook in the world called

project management for
instructional designers, right?

I think this course has offered
at like 15 or 20 colleges

total in the country,
there is no book for it

and I will fully confess.

I was complaining to a
friend of mine one day

about there's no textbook for this,

I found this open textbook
that I was really excited about

but it turns out it's
very business-centric,

all the examples are about
getting so many tons of rebar

and concrete to Singapore
and they're coming from here

and there and you're
managing the logistics of it

and something else and it
just wasn't what I needed

and my fried, bless his heart, got in,

we're in the car, complaining
about, driving somewhere,

complaining about, he
basically backhanded me

'til I drove off the road and he's like,

"You moron, it's an open
textbook, like fix it!

"If it's not what you
wanted to be, fix it!"

And so then I started staring
down the idea of editing

this entire textbook to make it

from a business project management book

into a project management book
for instructional designers,

I'm way too lazy to do that,

so it's kind of caught between
a rock and a hard place

and then I realized what
is the solution here.

Assign the students to do the work, right?

So I've taught this course a
couple of times in that format

and here is a summary of some
of the things I've changed

and if you go to this page
and scroll further down

you'll see more of the changes,

but in the first
semester, students went in

and they found all those,
you know, on textbooks

there's a little yellow or
blue box kind of pullout

for having a little case study inside them

so there's one group of students said,

"We're gonna fix all the
case studies in the book."

So in week one, in class when
we talked about week one,

we talked about the topic
of whatever week one is.

Introduction to project management.

Then they went back and for
the homework they got together

and they rewrote drafts
of all the case studies

that were in chapter one and
that's what they turned in

and that's what I graded by editing it

and sending it back to
them and we kind of went

through revision cycle on that.

And over the course of the term,

that team rewrote all of the
case studies in the book.

And if you think about how
well you have to understand

a principle to be able to
pass an end of chapter quiz

versus to be able to
rewrite a new case study

that actually exemplifies the
principles that are involved,

it's very good work.

Another group of students did
a series of video case studies

where they found three project managers

actually in different units on campus,

project managers who manage
instructional design projects.

And then for each of the chapter topics

asked them to talk for three
to five minutes on video

about a story about, you
know, tell us a time when

interpersonal problems blew up
a project that you worked on

and the importance of people
and personal relations

on a project.

So now at the beginning
of each of these chapters,

there are these three video cases

that are right at the
beginning of each chapter.

Another group went through...

Everybody hates this class,
nobody wants to take it

but it's required, so I
start this class by saying,

"If you earn the PMP certification,

the project manager
professional certification,

average salary for a person
with this certification

is $106,000 a year.

Then suddenly all the
students care about it

and at least for a half
an hour are interested

in project management 'til it wears off.

(audience laugh)

So, you know, one time when I said that

the question became well, how like

where does that exam happen

and how much does it cost to take

and how do I prepare for it?

And I didn't actually know the answer

to any of those questions,
I just needed the propaganda

about how much money you made
if you had this certification

so we started digging around and found

that there are a couple of,

but it's like the GRE
or one of these exams.

There are prep books for
them, but they're giant

and they cost like $120, $130 a piece.

So this one group of students got,

we got some from the
library and I acquired a few

from Amazon but we got all
these study books together

for the exam and then one
group of students went through

and restructured the book
and wrote new introductions

to each chapter saying,
"This chapter is covered

"by these sections of the
test, there are typically

"this many question on this
subject, blah, blah, blah."

And turned this book into a
free book that you can use

to study for the certification now

as opposed to having to
go buy $120, $130 book

to study for the certification.

So, you know, it's not
end of chapter quizzes,

it's not the kind of assessment
that we're typically used to

but the students get way more
engaged in doing this work

and you, as a faculty member,
as you're grading the work,

you feel like you're doing
something that's more valuable

to the universe than maybe
what you were doing before.

And the most fun thing of
all is after I did this

the first time around, each
time I taught it after that

I told all the students
on the first day of class

congratulations, you all just
received an A in this course.

Aren't you happy now?

Now that you have your A,
I want you to understand

that you're actually now
the rest of the semester

you're just playing for
reputation among your peers

because we're gonna break
up into these project teams

and every week you're gonna
stand up and show your progress

in front of god and everybody in the class

and everybody's gonna see

the kind of work that you're doing.

And so at the end of the
semester now I ask students

two questions.

Was your grade ever in
doubt in this class?

They say no, you told us
we were gonna get an A,

my grade was never in doubt.

Then I say was there any
class you took this semester

that you worked harder
or spent more time on?

And you see the gears
just kind of grind to halt

and they're like they
figure out that they've been

hoodwinked somehow, like why
did I waste all this effort

on this no, I worked harder on this class

than any other class
but I knew I had an A,

why did I...

They just almost break down,

you know, you can see
that they can't figure out

how they got tricked in that way.

But they invest in this kind
of work in a different way,

even when they know that
their grades aren't...

I wouldn't do that with every group,

but with this group, I could do it.

So, you know, the common thread

between these two pieces here,

this is all public domain video

and this openly licensed textbook

are that you can only give
these kinds of assignments

because you have those five R permissions.

Without those five R permissions,

you can't do this kind of stuff.

And so I think there is a very
strong argument to be made

for faculty from a
pedagogical point of view

that choosing OER over commercial textbook

actually expands your academic freedom

in terms of what you can
pedagogically in your class.

Choosing a commercial
textbook prohibits you

from doing this.

Choosing OER opens it up to you.

Just very quickly 'cause I feel
like I've gone on too long.

We don't have a good study
that actually demonstrates

this yet, but looking at
the studies that we've done

and the studies in the review project,

I feel pretty confident in this hypothesis

that just swapping out an old textbook,

an old commercial textbook for an open one

will result in very small
changes in learning, if any.

There will probably be no
significant difference.

Realign will actually get
you some moderate changes

and it will get students who you thought

weren't paying any attention at all

will say things unprompted
on their end of year

smiley sheets that they fill
out at the end of the course.

They'll write comments like

the things that I've read for this class

were actually related to the things

the professor talked about.

Who had thought?

Who had thought?

Okay, so that's high impact adoption

in terms of student success,

just two quick slides on
improving affordability,

we don't need to beat
this point home anymore.

There are a thousand
versions of this graph.

This one's from the Economics
showing textbook price

is up 1,500% over the last 40 years

compared to consumer prices
for other kinds of things.

My favorite way to think
about textbook price

is to put it in this context.

So to get one month of streaming access

to basically every movie and TV show

and every song ever recorded
cost me about $18 a month

or for one month of streaming access

to a single biology textbook I'll pay 20.

That's the way that students
get 20 bucks to spend,

what should I do with it this month?

That's kind of the math
that they would do.

And I think unfortunately the...

You know, our approach which
has been totally good-hearted

and wanting to do the right thing,

trying to find any way
to make it less expensive

for students when you
think about all of our

kind of textbook affordability strategies,

they all end up being what you might call

disappearing ink kind od strategy.

Because at the end of the semester,

either we're buying the book back,

so the students don't
have access to it anymore,

they're just renting it
so they don't have access

to it anymore at the end of term.

They do a subscription
where they get a passcode

that works for a 180 days

and then they don't have
access to it anymore.

It's a kind of ebook with DRM inside of it

that deletes itself off your device

at the end of the semester

so you don't have access to it anymore.

With all of our traditional
affordability strategies,

students end up not having
access to the material anymore

and it is not lost on them
that on the one hand we say

to them this bundle of
courses is so important

that we absolutely will
not let you graduate

unless you take them.

And 'cause you'll never need
them ever again in your life,

sell your book back at the end of term.

I mean, which is it?

Is it so important you
shouldn't be allowed to graduate

without it?

Or is it so meaningless
that you'll never even

need to refer back to it in the future?

Because it can't be both.

It can't be both.

So doing it at scale.

Doing it at scale was really interesting

because now, what we've
seen in the last two years

is the emergence of this
idea of an OER-based degree.

And the OER-based degree
is a degree program

where a sufficient number
of elective courses

and all the required
courses are flipped over

to use OER so that a student can graduate

from a degree program
without ever being asked

to buy a textbook.

You know, the first of
these was a Tidewater

in Virginia.

Decreased the cost to
graduate by 25% in one year.

So I met Daniel DeMark
who's the provost there

in December of 12 and we
launched this in the...

Oh, oh, animation.

We launched this program
in the fall of 13.

And if you look at the
in-state tuition rate

for 61 credits, this is
a two-year degree program

in business administration

and you put textbook cost on top of that,

for the students who entered
this program in the fall of 13

it was literally 25% cheaper to graduate

than it was for students
who entered in fall of 12.

That work went so well

that the Virginia community
college system got together

and said we need at least one
of these OER-based degrees

at all 23 community
colleges in the not state,

in the Commonwealth.

And so other schools started doing

this kind of work, as well.

So northern Virginia, which is very large

now has their Open
General Education Project

where students can either
complete the gen ed requirements

for a two-year degree,
or a full two-year degree

which is the gen ed transfer degree,

so do all your gen eds
at the community college

and then transfer up.

In the last two years, 8,500
students have save $1.2 million

and their internal data,
this isn't our data,

their internal data says the
overall student success rate

is 9% higher for those
students that are using OER.

You know, one of the
really interesting things

that we did in Virginia
is that all 23 schools

in the state of Virginia use Blackboard.

Let's all have a moment
of silence for them.

Sorry, are there Blackboard fans?

Okay, anyway, not only do
they all use Blackboard

but they all use a
commonly hosted Blackboard

that's run by their central office.

And so we work with the central office

to put this OER courses
tab into Blackboard.

So now regardless of
whether you're at Tidewater

or Germana or Sergeant Reynolds,

whichever college you're at in Virginia,

when you log into Blackboard,

you see this OER courses
tab at the top there

and if you click on
that, it'll take you over

and show you a list of courses
for which OER are available

to adopt instead of commercial textbooks.

And you can jump out
to a public facing link

with just the materials and see
what the materials look like

or you can jump in to see the
materials already built out

as a textbook replacement
inside Blackboard

and it's about three minutes

from the time you see this screen

to the time that your own
Blackboard course shelf

for this course is populated
with all the course material

so that you can use this instead

of your commercial textbook.

I said I'd say something
about institutions,

so I'm gonna say two things
about the institutional impact

of the OER adoption really quickly.

This also isn't in print yet,

but it's in Ed Policy
Analysis Archives coming up

later this year in a special issue on OER.

So when students drop a course
before the ed drop deadline,

it does multiple things,

but at least two, both
of which very bad ones.

It slows down their graduation

'cause they have to sit on
the bench for another semester

and wait for it to come back around

so they can try to take that course again.

But from the institutional perspective,

it actually costs us dollars
because we refund tuition

if they dropped for the deadline, right?

So what we did was with Tidewater,

we look at data from their first year

of what they called the Z degree,

their zero textbook cost degree,
their degree that uses OER.

And we looked at the
difference in drop rate

between the kids in these OER sections

and the kids in the other
commercial textbook using sections

of the same courses in the same
semesters, fall and winter.

And if you do the math on this,

there'd be 182 students who won't drop

who would have dropped
times the percentage

that are in-state versus out-of-state

and the figure whatever
the tuition rates are.

It ends up that Tidewater will not refund

a little over $100,000 in tuition

because they made this move

to this OER-based degree program.

Oh, in summary, I'm almost done.

If you also think back to that slide

from the very first study
I talked about that had

the number of credits that students stake

where the students were assigned OER

take a credit and a half
more than the students

who were assigned commercial textbooks.

That is a credit and a half
more net new tuition revenue

from students that you
didn't have before either.

So in summary, very quickly,

water open educational resources,

they are resources that are free

and that grant you permissions

to do interesting things with them.

It can be done at scale.

As we're seeing now, there are...

There's probably about 30
institutions in the country

that either have already
completed this process

or in the process of
transitioning to degrees

where you can graduate
without ever being asked

to buy a textbook.

Student success can be improved
when you do it this way

and students can save a lot of money.

Faculty have a broader range of things

they can choose to do pedagogically.

It also happens to be good
financially for the institution,

as well, so I would argue
that this is a win-win-win

kind of thing and we ought
to be doing more of it.

So having said that, I hope
there's still some time

to have some conversation.

(audience applauding)

>> This is the chance for
you to ask questions.

Are there any that you would like to refer

and ask a question?

>> Not all at once!

>> So I was kind of having
a hard time keeping up

how this model kind of
naturally go into the humanities

especially in classrooms
where we don't typically

have textbooks.

So a lot of humanities
classes and maybe English 101,

you have your rhetoric, I don't know,

maybe have a great English speakers.

But beyond that, you don't
typically have a textbook

and the things that we end up,

I'm taking about, you know,

just thinking about literary study

the things that we tend to look at

are inherently in the
copyright and can't be shared

by many for many reasons, right?

Same in history, and you
can there are concepts

and perhaps you can achieve those outcomes

by focusing on the things
that are readily available

so that you can do a little bit of that

but there are things that we
study in certain disciplines

that are not freely available.

>> Where the object of study
isn't an idea, it's an artifact.

>>  Exactly.

And that the part of what you're
studying is a conversation

around that object, as well,
and you know that has worked

historically and all of those
things are still meant to be--

>> Under copyright, yeah.

So that's a case where you
would fall back to your library

to say if I can't get...

'Cause ideally you get open
access to everything you can get

or excuse me, now I'm mixing my metaphors

'cause open access is a technical
term in the library world.

Ideally you'd uses OER for everything,

there are instances when you cannot,

when you can't, dropping back
to like library resources

are at least free to students
even if they have permissions

with them, so you'll
package those together.

You know, so for a...

Oh, what is it?

It's a music...

I think it's just music appreciation,

it's like the music listening class.

The group of faculty we
just finished working with

to build a version of that,

all of the listening is
actually done by going

and getting a free Spotify account

and listening to recording
on Spotify, right?

There are some...

There's this great Open Goldberg Project,

there's so music where the
recordings and everything

is openly licensed, but
for a lot of it it's not

and if you wanna listen to Shostakovich,

then you're gonna listen
to a copyrighted recording

somewhere, right?

So it's just literally
impossible to do in these cases

where the object of study's
an artifact, not an idea.

But there's kind of a cascading,

if not open, at least free,

if not free, at least something else

until you get down to the
point where you're like

I've done everything I possible can,

you still have to go buy
a $300 textbook, sorry.

>>  But it could
actually include the link

to the copyrighted material
instead of the text

and then just create your activities

and license those as OER

or pool activities that are OER.

>> You can still openly
license all the things

that all the pedagogic
stuff that you build

around the artifact, right?

I think that's the point
that you're making.

The discussion questions
or whatever it is,

you can create all of that and open that

but if you're studying Harry Potter,

sorry, that's the example
that comes to mind,

like there is no open
equivalent of Harry Potter.

Either you read Harry Potter
or you don't read Harry Potter.

So yeah, there are some cases

where it's literally impossible to replace

what you're looking at with OER.

But there are lots of ways
that you can be creative

with kind of these
successive fallbacks to still

if you can't be open,
you can at least be free.

If you can't be free, you can
at least be really affordable,

you know, kind of back that way.

>>  I just had an
example 'cause we're interested

for open educational resources

and so like so my professor made

a lesson about memes
and taught the students

like the idea of illusions through memes

and so that was an open resource, like

they had to enclose text and then

(background noise drowns out other sounds)

yeah, you can use open
text to teach the ideas,

but then (background noise
drowns out other sounds)

>> And then your library
and can talk to you

about fair use for
things aren't copyrighted

that even the library
doesn't necessarily have

officially in collection, right?

>> Question.
>> Yeah.

>>  Hey, first of all,
thanks for talking to us

a bit more.

It's kind of a two part question, okay?

So the first part is in regards
to like the digital divide

and access to sort of
technologies to read these things,

so like you know in your presentation

you sort of described these
as like digital textbooks,

or digitally accessible materials.

And so obviously there are
sort of the capital investments

on the side of the student
to be able to access those.

If not, there's time
investments, going to the library

going somewhere where you can access that.

In regards to that access,

the second part of my question is

is sort of durability of the title, right?

Because like theoretically
if you had a textbook

and you don't sell it back,
you could keep it forever

in a way that a digital file frankly,

the digital files from my
undergraduate degree are long gone

and they're long inaccessible.

So it's possible that
they're out there still,

but that's a big theft if
you're hoping to keep something.

So can you kind of speak to those issues?

>> Yeah.

On the digital divide part,

like what I didn't say
about our K-12 work in Utah

is that it's all print on demand.

Nobody that's using OER in
grades three through 12 in Utah

is doing it digitally because...

Everybody likes to claim that
they're the lowest funded

per a pupil in the
country, Utah actually is

the lowest funded per
a pupil in the country

and has to do with
Mormons and big families

and something else, but
there are no devices

in those classrooms for those kids.

And so part of what we
do in that project is we

after the teachers do
all that pulling together

that I talked about, the two-day workshop,

we get everything formatted for print

and uploaded to CreateSpace

which is the Amazon
print on demand service.

And if you Google USOE, Utah
State Office of Education,

usoescienceoer, you can
find the page with the links

to CreateSpace where the
individual schools can go

to buy books and the books range,

delivered they range between
2.99 and 5.99 delivered.

Again, when it can't be
open because we don't have

the infrastructure, we
can at least fall back to,

if we can't fall back to free,

at least a very, very,
very inexpensive, right?

The digital divide issue is a real issue

and there are smart people
that work on that problem.

I can only work on so many problems,

so I trust that they're doing good work

on the digital divide side,
but when you can't do that,

there are print solutions
that can be really

significantly less expensive
than printing them at Kinko's

or at the campus book store
or something like that even.

What was the second?
>> Persistence.

>> Oh, persistence.

(coughs)

So yeah, so I mean, I've
got my dissertation files

are on a Zip drive, anybody
remember Zip drives?

All of these OER,

is that true?

All the ones that we work
with all start their life

as HTML and are delivered
to the students as HTML.

Because they're open,
there's no tricky drming,

concealing, hiding, locking.

It's just Vanilla HTML.

So I mean, if you had
Vanilla HTML from 93 or 94,

it might not be as pretty
as you wish it would be

but you can still read it now.

And that idea of kind of open formats

for open educational resources
is a really important idea

specifically because of
this durability problem.

So if you were...

I didn't talk about this at all,

but we develop an open source kind of

content management
platform that speaks LTI

and plugs into Canvas and things like that

to make OER easier to reuse
and you can pull entire copies

of the textbook replacement thing,

the OER that you've pulled together.

You can pull it as HTML,

you can pull it as PDF,

you call pull it as epub

which is just specifically
kind of package HTML, right?

You can pull it in I think
nine different flavors

for offline, but you can
always pull it as HTML.

And I think HTML is certainly more durable

than the Word perfect files we come on.

You know, you used WordPerfect.

The WordPerfect files we used to make

or the, you know, Word
version two or whatever

I think HTML's about as durable as it gets

and that's the native
format for all of this OER.

>> Thanks.
>> Yeah.

With the exception of the multimedia stuff

which has issues, yeah.

But, you know, you do the best you can do

and I think you'd be hard
pressed to find a format

that people can actually
use with better durability

than HTML.

Good question.
>> Any other questions?

If not, I'd like to thank--
>> Oh wait, one more.

>> Wait, wait--
>> There's more.

But wait, there is more!

(background noise drowns out other sounds)

So hopefully, that
work's already been done

'cause they're teaching a course

where some other group of
people has already done this

and it's actually been used several times.

And every semester longer that you wait,

the proportion of the course

that's already been done for
you gets bigger and bigger.

In a case where that hasn't been done,

then it really becomes a
process of sitting down,

as you know, as instructions designer,

sitting down next to the faculty member,

talking through their outcomes
and then really the best

the single best piece
of advice I can give you

is take the entire learning outcome,

put it in Google advance search

and at the very bottom
of Google advance search

there is a usage rights constraint,

we can set it to only show you results

that are licensed for
free use modification

and something else, I
can't remember exactly

what it says now.

But basically you can
use Google in such a way

that it will only return OER as results.

And if you put the entire,

don't say photosynthesis 'cause
you'll get a billion things,

if you put the entire learning outcome in

as the search query and
constrain the search

by openly licensed material,

then you can very quickly kind
of do that realign process

and pull that back together.

But you do have to be super careful

about all of the Creative Commons licenses

require attribution of the original source

where the material came from.

So if you're not, like
if you're not taking one

of our open courses and just
downloading and using it,

well, if you were, then you
would see that at the bottom

of each page, there is full
kind of citation management

of every OER that's been used on the page

and where it came from
and how it's licensed.

You have to do that yourself
kind of from scratch

and that can be somewhere
between tricky and painful, yeah.

(audience laughing)

Yeah.
>> All right.

>>  Thank you all
very much for attending.

>> Okay, thank you.
(audience applauding)