 As Katie mentioned, lots of food for thought also for the cluster meetings and we'll have more time, of course, throughout the day and tomorrow to digest and discuss some of the thought-provoking inputs we received this morning. It's now my great pleasure to introduce a good friend of mine, a European friend, Juan Carlos de Martín, who will moderate the next panel, which actually builds, I think, very much on the first one. Juan Carlos is a professor at the Polytechnic called Diturino, where he also leads the NEXA Center for Internet and Society, which is a sister center of the Bergen Center. Juan Carlos and his team have been fantastic collaborators over many years and it's always a pleasure to welcome him back on campus. He just spent a few months here in Cambridge and we're delighted to have you back and thanks for moderating this facilitators panel over to you, my friend. Thank you for the kind introduction. It's a pleasure to be here and we are facing this second roundtable who's going to look at the perspective of the facilitators, therefore the educators that not only use but as we heard reuse and co-create open educational resources. Now the format of this roundtable is like the first one, therefore I will give just a few brief introduction of the panelists that are somewhere in the audience and I will offer a few remarks, introductory remarks, then our panelists will have five minutes to make their point and then we will have a conversation, hopefully we will be on time so that we can involve you also at least for a few minutes in the conversation. Let me tell you who are our panelists. We're not sitting in the empty chair, they are somewhere in the first row of the audience, Katie Casely, the CEO of Creative Commons, here she is, here they are, welcome. It's nice to have you here on the front row. So, starting from my left, Joan Bergman, one of the pioneers of the flip class movement, wrote a book on the flip class, write a blog on all things flipped and he will tell us what that means. Manages a network of 3000 educators flipping their classes. In 2010, semifinalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year and awarded in 2003 the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Teaching, welcome. Sitting next to him is Katie Casely, CEO of Creative Commons, nice to meet you finally. And she's been involved in openness and particularly in education for a long time. As director of the OER initiative, the U.S. Foundation, she managed investments totally more than 100 million to harness efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge sharing worldwide. And sitting over there on the left is Alex Kozak, works for Google Public Policy, Covering Education and Copyright Policy. He also comes from Creative Commons, an experience there. And with the focus on educational resources in metadata, is now a technical consultant with WikiWorks, a semantic media wiki consulting group. And I have a thing to say about semantic web and open educational resources. Now, the kind of questions that we're going to address during this panel are the questions that you can imagine like what are the experiences of educators with OER in different settings? Do they find it useful? Are their drawbacks are enhancing or enabling good teaching? My observation will be specifically on what we mean by good teaching. What are the primary obstacles using OER? Are they cultural, are they institutional, they're personal? What are the obstacles? So these are the kind of questions that we're going to address first in the five minutes presentation and then in the ensuing conversation. But before giving the floor to the panelists, allow me an observation about the specific point that interests personally me. And actually, it's an observation, but we're going to be preceding micro-observation. The micro-observation is that it seems to me as an engineer, I'm a computer engineer, that semantic web technologies have a specific potential for open educational resources. Seems to me even without at all being an expert in the field from the technical point of view is that semantic web seems to be the right tool to find what we are looking for in this complex heterogeneous pool of resources to find similarities between different resources that seem apparently different, but indeed they are similar. So I would love to hear from maybe from Alex or from some people in the audience what they think about if they're already specific research projects about semantic web and open educational resources. That was the micro-observation. The observation which is not that larger is that it's quite clear, even though we try not to think of ourselves as always different from the past, but it's quite clear that we are living in a moment where there is an enormous emphasis on teaching innovation. So ways of doing things differently than before. Of course, innovation in education is centuries old. So think about command use and Rousseau, Pestalotsi and you and so on. So for centuries people have been thinking about how to innovate in education, but I think it's safe to say that we're living right now in these years a specific strong emphasis on doing things differently. It is to innovate. Now the reasons for this specific new emphasis or enhanced emphasis, it seems to be that I can see at least three different causes. One is that digital technology itself begs for innovation. It's particularly an innovative platform. It's much easier. It's more flexible than previous educational technologies. So it seems to me that digital technology itself is like husking for innovation. The second causes are social, particularly a mix of potential causes. There is a long strand historical strand of critique of the educational system that came out of the industrial revolution. So looking at the standardized education as a consensus machine molding minds to preserve the status quo and that's a long strand and from that strand of thought demands an offer of innovation education has come out and they're still coming out. And the second that we heard so clearly from the Joe Ito keynote is that we have a net generation that is used to individual personalized trajectories of education and they are just want to replicate that even in the institutions of education, the standards of institutions. The third point is that of the social mix of social causes is that our societies are becoming more and more competitive both at individual level and also among nations and therefore we are looking for an edge and we all think that education is an important instrument for being having a competitive advantage and this demand for being competitive is causing a demand for innovation. Finally a third cause besides the digital technology and the social factors is that there is an increasing pressure to contain educational costs in the U.S. and in Europe although with a different framework and different needs and therefore this demand to contain cost is also asking for new ways of doing things saving money and potentially doing even better than before and somewhat related is that there is a clear view that education could be a new market and therefore as we all know startups and other entrepreneurial activities are starting to enter the field because it's a potential new market. So my contribution to the conversation after your presentations is that maybe we need to devote at least some time thinking about the relationship between open education resources and teaching innovation. How open educational resources should be to favor different kinds of innovation? Do we have specific needs? Do we have to do something to facilitate this connection between teaching innovation and open education resources? Now even my observation is over so I can give should we go in this order? Yes? What about listening then to John and his presentation? Well I'm John Dorgan and I also am a teacher so I have to stand up so the flip class whenever I go around and speak now I've got to give a brief introduction to what the flip class is. What are you flipping? What in the world? I'm a flipper, right? So what is a flip classroom? Well six years ago myself and another teacher Aaron Samms we teach at a small actually I've left the school but I taught at a small school in Colorado in the mountains of Colorado and we stopped lecturing. We were high school science chemistry and particular teachers and I have not lectured in six years except to groups like you guys. So what did we do? Well we asked a simple question. What is the most valuable use of our face-to-face class time? Okay the story started our assistant superintendent she came back she came back from a break and her daughter was in college her daughter said I love these videos or these these podcasts that my professors make. I don't have to go to class anymore and that's when Aaron and I said well what's the value of class time? And so then we said well what if we stopped? So we did. So there's a value to direct instruction. You asked that question what's that best use of our class time? We said you know it's the kids really need help when they're stuck on problems. When they go home from to school and they're at home and they're doing problem 15 and they're trying to solve the problem and they're stuck what do they do? They call a friend they give up or they cheat. That's what they do right? Those are the three choices. When you have a flipped classroom when the kids watch the videos as the primary direct instruction at home and they come to class when they come to class the experts there when they're stuck they raise their hand. In fact it's even better than that when they're stuck you actually know they're stuck and you're there and right there when they need it. So now there's also a lot of misunderstanding about the flipped classroom a lot of people think the flipped classroom is just that everybody's always on the same page everybody you know probably heard the Khan Academy and sort of their thing we were actually flipping our classes three years before Khan was known about what he was doing so that's sort of one iteration of a flipped classroom but there's probably eight or so different ways to flip a class so something to kind of keep in mind. So what can be time shifted is the big question out of the classroom to increase that value of that face-to-face time. I would argue that direct instruction piece okay so we stop and then what happens in the class is magic. I can tell you story after story of students who who took responsibility for their own learning students who were successful who weren't successful for we've got a student who was was failing out and then came into our class and now is majoring in engineering at a major university I mean just story after story of just powerful student interactions. So our quick story is that we were recording our lectures live we discovered some software that was screen casting software we recorded it live this is in 2006 we push start stop we posted the internet we did it for our students because in our school actually the reason we started the flipped class okay selfish reasons small school the mountains the closest high school to our school 45 minute drive 45 minute drive then upwards of two hours last period of the day no kids are at school because they're at the basketball game or whatever we were spending hours and hours and hours tooting our kids after school and devoting our time for all the classes that they missed we started recording our lectures so we wouldn't have to stay after school true story but then all of a sudden these mushrooms and that's when we recorded the lectures and then we had that aha idea we had this idea we noticed our students were totally frustrated and wanting to give up that's you know they go home they give up they cheat and all that kind of stuff and that's when the idea to flip our classes what happens in the classroom that's Aaron by the way the teacher is no longer the disseminator of knowledge right they interact with kids their job is to walk around interact with kids we did 50 more experiments okay hands-on activities we were able to help people's like Matt Matt's a story Matt's a kid who gets lots of attention in all of his classes because he's he's not very successful at school but he was successful in our classroom why because he got the individual attention that he needed the flipped classroom personalizes education and so what we did um after one year of having a totally successful we had results that prove the result where we decided to flip it even more and we did flip to mastery so we took the direct instruction we still left that out that's why it's red in a circle practice and apply when they got to the end they had to do mastery it's a long story on how this all worked but essentially when they got to the end of the unit if they did not master the content they had to go back and get it done the right way and so now we have an asynchronous environment where the kids are working at different paces but they actually learn the content and we think the flip class is a it's a piece of the puzzle to solving the problems of education I think that if you take um flip classroom you take universal design for learning and you take problem-based learning and you merge them all together I think it's a very powerful mix I think it's a huge stepping stone as as we've shared this with teachers all over the world now it's a stepping stone for that teacher if you got a teacher who stood up in front of his class for 20 years and that would be me and lectured and that was me and then you decided to show them all you gotta do is make these videos when you make the videos it's that stepping stone to that deeper stuff I mean when we when we first started it was all about the videos and then we realized later on there's better ways to do this in fact that's where the open internet resources we think it's a tool tool for better learning okay so why do I think that flip class is working I think it's because it's a it's a grassroots educational reform movement starting from teachers and going on up okay flip learning and OER I think the flip videos don't always have to be made by by teachers so as a teacher myself we made all of our own videos you don't have to make your own videos however I do believe that teachers should make their own videos the big question people ask how do kids get access to the you know the poor schools we had like 20% of our kids who had no internet how did we solve this problem six years ago we gave them dvd they put in their tv they pushed play simple I think the only thing getting in the way of increasing flip learning is actually professional development I mean we need to teach teachers and I think that's gonna be important our book comes out this summer just announcing here now that we are starting the flipped learning network a nonprofit starting actually this week so we want to provide professional development opportunities conduct collaborate disseminate research etc so if you want to learn more about that I'd be glad to chat with you individually afterwards resources there's some websites up there for you if you're at all interested in the hashtag on Twitter thank you so I did this as a ignite talk it's going to be my first one so this is going to move me every 15 seconds keep the keep it moving so first of all just on my overview OER game on is this kind of the point in time for OER right now is this the moment that we must seize and thinking about the Wikipedia the blackout the sopa and Pippa there was something that the community could rally around instead of the community just rallying against something is this a time when we can begin to rally for something and many places of the world social media obviously is being used we know how it's been critical in the Arab spring we now how know how the open information flow has been critical to make sure people have a voice and that their voices are heard and continued to be heard through time in places like Poland and this is a Alex Tatarski who's our CC lead a Creative Commons lead in Poland he's been working hard with governments to make sure they open up resources that are used in the public for education and so now textbooks will be openly published under Creative Commons license just yesterday the World Bank announced that they would be opening their repository under Creative Commons license as well the research repository so how much while this is a big deal when does this become a norm when are these the beginning inflection points where we begin to change what's happening as a typical society Encyclopedia Britannica has been talked about a lot it's no more last print versions have been printed they really fell off the shelf once they announced that there was a high demand because groups wanted them but the world has changed and Wikipedia is now the place where we all get our information but what we don't know when we go to Wikipedia is that there's an underlying infrastructure and that underlying infrastructure is the open license so people don't know that the ability to remix reuse and translate is based on the open licenses which is really really critical but for many people copyright is a little fuzzy an idea say this in the law school of Berkman Center right not all of us are lawyers and law the law is not always accessible to all so how do we begin to actually help everyone understand in a much better way what copyrights about in that regard not only about understanding copyright we have to be able to find the gems we have to be able to find OER search and discovery continues to be a problem so we have the learning resources metadata initiative where we're beginning to set standards for tagging education content whether it be free or not and tied to this is also the issues of accessibility I know Hal Plotkin is here and he's rallied this cry for a long while with respect to open educational resources if we make our content accessible universal to design for learning then we have an ability to step into the mainstream in ways that we didn't previously the common core standard that you let noted yesterday is another mechanism that we can all use to make sure the content's aligned it's tagged appropriately and again quite findable these are all mechanisms that we can harness these are structural things that can take place here's a student using a camera to videotape this isn't what we typically see in the classroom while we talked about the flip classroom just now this isn't what happens right we know kids are not engaged this way and there are mechanisms that are really critical to make sure it happens so as we move to alternative forms of credentialing as we move to badging whatever it might be or the project portfolios these are going to be critically important in these new days about what joey talked about when we think about learning we have systems particularly in cal k-12 that are very controlled and calcified it's really hard to bring this into the edge so as we think about it a creative comments we're thinking about what are some of the essential elements of a school of open so that we can begin to educate the world about what openness means and be able to create those materials so people can easily use and repurpose them we're joining with as an example the peer to peer university which has a platform where we can begin to place this content and make it freely available so teachers can begin to teach their students learners can learn about open licensing and what it means and we begin to be have a way to begin to scale because right now it's one on one and it's often face to face when we think about higher education how do we disaggregate the teaching and research university what does this mean now when teaching is can be deployed in different ways and research happens in new ways what is this what does this mean for universities such as particularly the r ones as they think about the traditional mechanisms this is a group of scientists from mendeley there's an incredible group of scientists who no longer want to just use the peer to peer traditional processes that take so long for their science to get out but they've come together and created a platform and been very careful and thoughtful about it so that they have revenue generation as well here is a new model Udacity what a higher education university institutions thinking about ways when classes used to be held inside the university now they're somehow being exported and they're being provided in new ways we also have a mitx coming up what does this mean for the university and lastly how do we think about the broader policies how do we begin to share those policies how do we begin to collect them as a community so we begin to set the stage going forward thank you so i i could have i could have done a whole presentation on all the stuff that google has to offer an education and we have u2 bdu we have apps for education we have google search but i i sort of intentionally didn't do that i'm happy to talk about some of that stuff during q&a but i really wanted to avoid that and think about the web or generally so so i consider myself kind of an advocate for the web i'm not a google advocate i work for google but i really care a lot about the web and i want to plus one what joey said it's probably good they didn't let me design the plus one button because that's what it would look like but but i want to plus one everything joey said i think he's absolutely right that the web opens up huge new opportunities to do things in a completely different way so and here are a few of them like the web lets us reorganize a lot of different stuff how we come together as a community how we engage and share ideas how we engage in politics how we transmit culture how we investigate the world i mean go down the list right so here's a few data points from k-12 just kind of leaving aside higher education for now college students are right now 10 times more likely to take an online course than k-12 students i kind of i take that not to indicate that we need a lot more online education k-12 i mean that's sort of an unsellable question but this points out that the higher education context is so different from k-12 right now we have so much more adoption of the web and and the internet in that context and why is that so between over a period of 25 years almost every oecd country substantially increased spending often spending per student and but very few achieve significant improvements in performance so i take this to mean that we can't spend our way out of this problem we have increased demand on education system it's increasingly required to get a high quality job so with these new demands what are the tweaks we can make to the system to make it more efficient so 91 percent of teachers in the us have access to computers in their classrooms this is from a survey done by pbs in that same survey only 22 percent said they had the right level of technology so although they had access they didn't really feel like they had the right level of technology they didn't have the right tools this is this is that same survey so look at look at what the breakdown is of the top tech resources used in the classroom do you notice anything about it they're all online resources right it's the web the web is what teachers are using it is the most useful tool so education is stagnating a bit there are new demands put on it and we need systemic tweaks to make it more effective teachers need more useful tools as you just saw in the survey and the web has been the web has been the most useful tool so far so let's make it even more useful and so this is kind of how I approach the question of OER right what do teachers even need to know about OER they're already using the web why you know do they need to know about copyright licenses and new models for collaborative development they need new tools to get things done in the classroom so the question for us is how can we make the web more useful right like how can we as a community make the web the most useful resource to teachers and students or learners around the world so some ideas really big scale really really big I want to be able to go on the web and find anything I need to know that's simple any topic any anything I need to know I should be able to find it and not only that it should be really really easy to use extremely easy and and so this uh there's a a third point a genera generativity right so what are the new things you can do that you couldn't do before part of this is is sort of the semantic aspect of things how can you pull in resources from different different repositories are there new ways of collecting data about ways students are engaging with these resources can we feed that back and to sort of a generative system uh so what are the new things we can build on top of this so what the one question is should teachers ever hear the words copyright license right they want to use the web they want to make their classroom more effective they want to teach people in new and different ways should they have should they have to worry about copyright status that works that's all I have thanks okay please come back to our wonderful chairs now we have um about 15 minutes to just have a conversation on the points and let me try to kick started with a question to to john because you mentioned that you presented the flip classroom and you talked about the timeshift shifting of the direct lecturing and so the videos and you mentioned that you think it's better if the videos are recorded by the teachers themselves which strikes strikes me as is very credible but somehow is in contrast with this idea of a common pool of resources that you can simply take and adapt and reuse how do you see this tension between doing something highly personalized and having a common shared of resources one thing that i've noticed with teachers as we've trained them some some are very good at making videos and some frankly are not and so that is a problem um but our videos are out there on youtube and we've had a number of teachers who are using our our videos and i can think of one guy brett wiley in dallas he says you know john your john and erin's videos are better than mine but my students like mine better because it's me so but i still can envision i wonder if there's a sort of a meshing of it what if what if there was a way that you could have a two minute introduction i've done this okay so i taught astronomy and earth science i'm a chemist right so i'm teaching i don't know astronomy so i found some astronomy stuff and i found some experts so i would do a two minute intro and then i'd pull in videos and then i'd cut and splice and i was technically good enough technically to do that and then my kids watched that but i was in the video so to speak at the beginning and then i turned it over the experts so i wonder if there's a way to just you know grab here and there and i i chose youtube videos i found other teachers videos and i spliced them in so i think that's a way to kind of bring that in and i didn't think about the copyright when i did that we won't tell you don't tell anybody good thing and have you ever tried to present the same topic with different videos with different speakers different teachers one thing that was interesting is our students and when we first started making the videos i did unit one we actually made them simultaneously so i we both did the same videos and some kids came to me and said i like mr sam's video better than yours and vice versa and that was fine it's like okay there's another teacher you want to learn from i'm okay with that another thing that we've noticed too is that is it was all about the videos at the beginning but then we started to discover some some oer things like the fat stuff that i she spoke here earlier or i got stood up and span that the phet stuff from university color at boulder they've got these online simulations they're amazing and those will teach things because they're interactive the kids would get it with a smart board and the kids would get up and play with that and we said you don't need to watch the video you get it move on skip the video so the videos aren't be all and end all it's just one of the resources some kids said can i just read my textbook mr bergman i said sure i don't care how you learn it i just care that you learned it and one more thing how do you capture the feedback that you can have when somebody is watching a video meaning when you're doing a direct lecture like now like you can see a blank face and you realize you just use the word that that specific student doesn't know so you stop say okay what what is it that you didn't get and i'm sure that something like that happens with videos too and it would be wonderful if there is a way of tagging a specific part of the video say just saying i don't know this word i don't know i didn't understand this statement do you see that this is useful i mean that is one of the problems with the flip classes that there's that that direct interaction but what we did very low tech no tagging when the kids came to class we would talk to we talked to every kid in every class every day and we would have this a small group of one or two or four kids and we'd say all right ask us a question from the video so we didn't you know but quickly we realized which videos we made were not very clear or wish miss misconceptions kids had and so it was just a conversation see class was a conversation it wasn't a dissemination so um we didn't have a way to tag it and all that kind of stuff it could be done we'd love to have somebody figure out how to do that technically we weren't technical that way so i'm sure there's a way to do it though so gary i don't want to be necessarily that the people for the conversation but um you mentioned the word that critic commons is doing and alex is saying actually something along the same vein but he's saying why should teachers let's hear about copyright license at all so if we can make it invisible um if we can make copyright invisible i'm all for it i have as long as we're working within the framework of the law that's what we care about as long as we're giving teachers and organizations choices so that they have the freedom to choose but we don't have to make it um an onerous process and so i think that's one of the barriers we really have to think hard about and how to reduce because right now you create a lesson plan you create a video and then the copyright you know adding the copyright or the creative common license happens after it's another step and then you have to look at it you have to understand what copyright is and you have to kind of understand the licensed chooser and and there's an education process so before we can get it into the classroom we have all sorts of hurdles that have to be overcome for the teachers who are very busy who carry a lot and so how do we think about systemically um letting that information be shared how do we make copyright which is always been traditionally more the concern of the producers who were the publishers prior to us all becoming producers how do we make it very easy very digestible in a complex situation because copyright law is complex is alex so you i'll pick a specific thing that you wrote in one of your slides when you said that education is stagnating don't you think that it's applying this concept of constant progress meaning a constant evolution for education is just like saying you know classical music famous analogy classical music is stagnating since the 18th century there's no improvement i was being a bit provocative with that we do make improvements things things do improve we have we have new tools we didn't have before but i think we haven't seen the kind of fundamental shift that you would want to see in this new digital age we have like the rules of the game are changed and we haven't seen the education system rapids arms around it say yes we want the web we want to use this stuff so i get i get your point of course meaning that there is a potential we're still far from fulfilling the potential and i would resist a little bit the the attitude of saying everything is changing because some fundamental things in education are not going to change john it was mentioned in that personal connection they want to see the video of their teacher so some fundamental facts of education will remain the same but we have room for improvement and that i guess to your point yeah i think that's right i think we have you know down at the micro level the classroom level a lot of things will stay the same a lot of kind of the practices will look similar to what they had before but at sort of the systems level how all that stuff happens and the infrastructure that enables all of it will be completely different okay any comment you want to make with respect to each other's presentation i would say that when we're thinking about the process of educational change especially with the in relation to technology so often the technology is given and taught to the teachers here's a piece of technology you need to know and they don't know why okay you must start with a pedagogy you must say this is how this will help this is what we'll do for thanks for kids and then they'll say oh now it's important that i learned this technology staff development has done two teachers not with them not from teachers even it's from on high oftentimes and that's that's never going to work i'd just like to jump in i mean one of the comments that i picked up from you is that the flip classroom was created because it solved a problem you could use it because it solved a problem so how do we use oer to solve a problem for teachers and if teachers aren't picking up oer then it isn't necessarily that's something that matter with oer but there's some barriers to those steps so what is it that's constraining it we have to look very nuanced at the situation below and then just kind of a last point is that if we think about education it is the one industry where the productivity has not increased in for 100 years right because we've been using essentially the same techniques and so when we try different things in the traditional classroom we're not changing any significant levers and we're getting little marginal changes so if we really want to have significant changes we need to look to some of the work like the open learning initiative Carnegie Mellon where they were actually able to use the online distance classroom in a bit of a blended model so you still had access to a teaching assistant but the student could go through personalized instruction going as quickly as they wanted if I wanted to you know consume that information in about a week and you took two weeks or you took three weeks whatever it might be we could accelerate it and it didn't have to be an 18-week semester because we've always had an 18-week semester because the calendar is built on a gregarian calendar that we no longer have right so there are some ways that we can be think we can be thinking about changing some of those structures it's very hard and some of the public institutions or some of the institutions that exist you're not going to get those quick shifts and so you're going to have to experiment on the side and kind of let that bubble up one comment on that and it's it's important to recognize that the issues that the barriers that OER faces aren't just unique to OER and we'd often talk about how you know what what what's keeping OER out of the classroom a lot of the times other you know ed tech online learning all these other types of ways of doing learning that might not be open they face the exact same barriers and we do ourselves a disservice not thinking of it as a broad movement towards the web and as a broad movement towards using more technology and focusing too narrowly on just this this one segment of it that has a certain sort of model yeah in fact I was about to ask what are the main obstacles to the adoption of OER but more generally of technology is it cultural is it economic when you say that only 22 you know actually Alex 22 percent of educators think that they have the right level what do they mean by that do you can use I don't I mean I'm not sure what they mean but I have some guesses so the question is what are the barriers to getting getting more technology more useful technology in the classroom and I one of the things I would say at least in K-12 is we just don't have a really functioning market we don't teachers and students don't have the chance to choose what tools to use in the classroom if you're a teacher you know what's going to be useful if you're told what to use if you're told what textbook to use if you're told what tool to use there's a chance I might not be useful but you have to use it because you're told to use it so if we could give teachers and students more opportunity to have a say in the kinds of tools they were using we would see a lot more useful stuff out there actually without being at all an expert on international education but one of the OECD countries that actually improved considerably is Finland and the Finland approach is giving a great degree of freedom to teachers and I wonder if that extends also in choosing the technology they want to use in the classroom I think particularly if you think about the K-12 segment we're thinking about a lot of control the teachers are very controlled the textbooks that they use and the materials that they use are controlled the testing is very controlled and so there aren't degrees of freedom for the teachers to innovate and so it's a very in many ways locked down system that doesn't allow the system that you're describing in Finland so which means that we need the changes at the policy level like changing the state level and keep going I would say that teachers would love to have that openness to do a lot more choice but you're right they don't have it okay well because from from Europe the perception is that in the US there is a much greater degree of freedom because in Europe with this ministerial tradition with a ministerial national program curriculum that you have to follow and from from Europe looking at the US seems so much more so much freer so it's not there is a lot of choice at the university level I mean there it's a it's almost a completely different landscape right different ones so and I would also say that there are pockets of innovation there are teachers who are doing great things like Vicki and John and others who have found the room created the room it's not easy to do they typically have to be very creative innovative spend a lot of time to do that so it doesn't create we create these gems in these kind of shining lights that really show us the way that we can go forward but it isn't something that can be scaled and it really takes kind of that individual who's able to do it so then goes to the policies how do we free the policies to allow that kind of innovation to flourish now we have a few minutes even though they're going to be clusters and so there's going to be plenty of opportunity to discuss we have a few minutes to take to involve the audience I guess gentlemen over there yeah my name is Gordon Friedman and I've started a new non-profit called the National Laboratory for Education Transformation and we're trying to figure out these issues and the two frameworks I would say is K-12 is essentially the British Empire in the United States you know back in the late 1700s and we have to figure out how to throw off the shackles secondly I've tried to come up with a metaphor to use and I used it in a conference in Madrid actually I called the fog versus the cloud and so I've been starting to tease that apart but but anyway we're actually looking very scientifically at the issues that make it impossible to scale things in the United States and although ministries are there doing things in Europe we're still just constrained in another way so I have one question for John and maybe Alex nobody's really systematically looked at homeschoolers okay so these are people independently learning in the United States the population is large enough it's in the millions already do you guys see anything in the use of homeschooling and OER because I think that's a fascinating area I we have a lot a lot of contacts with homeschoolers at least they're interested in the idea of the flipped class where they would actually bring in experts because they oftentimes do you not have the expertise to do some subjects like in particularly what I teach chemistry oftentimes the the family doesn't have that expertise and so they've been you know emailing us and saying how can I use your videos and they want a whole program it's like I just got these videos so so but there is I think there's a potential there so I think from a from a market perspective it's really hard to reach that that segment of homeschoolers and but I think there's a huge opportunity there in that if you if there was some way to reach them at scale it's the kind of Clayton Christensen sort of disruptive innovation where you're eating away at sort of the traditional model so you could do that and I would also put in like lifelong learners in the same sort of category where it's it's people doing self-directed learning right we have time for one more question okay um my name is Esther Wajiski I'm a teacher Palo Alto and one of the number one problems with OER as I see it is that teachers are scripted today and they're not even scripted as much as they're going to be scripted because teachers are their salaries are going to be tied to test scores and teachers are given textbooks they're given tests they're given the assess given everything and they're just like okay here's the textbook here's the students now you make sure that you just pour it right in and so how do you see us getting around this it is a policy issue but it's only getting worse because we're focusing on what we shouldn't be focusing on which is test results and how does testing enhance creativity you know what about all that stuff Joey was talking about you know how are we gonna how are we gonna do it um so that's my question hard question who wants to take it I agree plus one that said and um I've been talking to some policy makers leaders superintendents um and they're curious about at least the flip classroom and what they see is I mean they love it the fact that it's increasing test scores so that's important to them but I also think it gets them away from the mode of you know straight delivery of content poured in their brains modality so at least there's a huge interest in this that I think has the potential to do a lot to at least you know you know it's it's disruptive it's not we're we're breaking the rules so to speak but it's working so I'm not sure that I can't solve all the problems in education I wish I could and I would just I would kind of repeat what I said before which is that this is not a challenge unique to OER it's a challenge unique to any sort of new model that that is sort of outside the box right and and I would encourage this community to reach out to the people who have the same sort of issues getting adoption and and overcoming the existing bureaucracy and infrastructure of our education system people are dealing with this not just in OER but in online learning and in ed tech all these new spaces they're trying to deal with this too and kind of overcome that those barriers I mean I think the power of the traditional k-12 system is it's very stable right it's very very stable and it's very hard to shift well that worked for a long time but now as you try to make changes if you just I think one of the challenges is if you just think about tweaking if you make a marginal change you're not going to get the shifts that we want so the question is actually how the system gets somewhat disrupted and because it's so stable I think actually the disruption has to come on the side and it has to kind of grow and show some of the research and sow some of the viability and then the parents and the students and the kids are going to say I want to be over there of course they're saying that already if we look at the photos if we know how kids are spending time I have two teenagers what they do inside the classroom and how they spend their time outside the classroom right it's very very different they're engaged they're talking to their friends on the facebook they're connecting they don't pick up the phone you know they only text you know and so that's how that's the world and because the worlds look so different now we can see the chasm that's there and the question is when is that going to create enough of a force to disrupt this very stable system and then how do we begin to put that into play so let's thank our speakers thank you so much thanks to the moderator