 All right. Thank you everyone for coming. I am Chris Shaw. I'm the director of products at hypothesis If you haven't heard from hypothesis yet today, I it's a social learning tool We allow students to have conversations about the content That they're you know that they're learning Directly in context on top of that context on top that content. I have with us today We have Alex Humphreys. We've got Nick Brown and Dan Whaley some various team guests I'll let them more properly introduce themselves here in a second Right after a few points of order and then we'll kind of get into it so Briefly if you look into the lower left, you probably have a panel and in that panel there is a chat button It's got the ones with the little Two speech bubbles on it feel free to use that to chat with each other and And you know leave your thoughts and Reactions throughout the the panel. In fact, I will prompt you to do so in a couple of times to get your your own input And in fact, why don't we go ahead and practice now? And I would love to kind of hear who's in the room and you know, where are you based? So go ahead and say hi to everybody in the meantime, there's also a Q&A tab at the top of that panel and so as you have questions and You know potential things that you love the panelists to address Feel free to bring those up and actually realize now. I'm going to show this point of order into a quick file here Yeah, this one right here Feel free to drop those questions at any time You can in fact vote on those questions if you see someone else has already added a question that you would love to have Answered and when it comes to the audience Q&A, we will pull from those and allow that the Our panelists here to take on your questions and then lastly I did mention that We'll have questions that you can kind of add those anytime if there's things we don't get to I Will go ahead and collect those and if you want happy to kind of reach out to the panelists afterwards They're nice people. I'm sure they'd be happy to answer those So without further ado, I'll kind of get into the heart of this conversation. This is our social learning across content session Oh, you know digital content and instructional technologies have enabled New ways for social learning and education in general to take place The problem is that that you'll find today is that a lot of these times these conversations that are happening are happening on in closed walled gardens, if you will where Students conversations are limited to only the content in one place and are able to take that conversation with them somewhere else there's ways to solve this and there is a coalition of of Publishers digital content providers and instructors and Technology vendors are looking at ways that we can bring a new vision of how social learning can work where you can have this Have the conversation across all content in the same way and so with that without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to our Lovely panelists. We've got Alex Humphries from Ithaca Ventures and J store labs Nick Brown that vital source and then Someone that I am paid to say great things about Dan Whaley here at hypothesis and so I'm gonna pull down our slides here and Allow our panelists to kind of Shine so why don't you guys introduce yourself? You know tell us a little bit about yourself what you do and why don't we go ahead and start with Dan? Hey, thanks Chris. Yeah, yeah, my I'm Dan Whaley. I'm the CEO founder here at hypothesis and incredibly passionate about Bringing this new open paradigm to kind of the world at at large but Also really focused on How we can transform education using these tools in the short term and So just thrilled to be here. Thank you. I think I'm on I'm next on the list. So hi. My name is Alex Humphries I'm thrilled to be here. So thank you Dan and then Chris for for having me so I'm the vice president for Ithaca Ventures and J store labs Ithaca for those who aren't familiar with it is a Mission-driven not-for-profit. Its mission is to expand access to education and knowledge and it does so through a variety of Brands and services One of the most popular of which is J store which supports Ithaca's mission With one of the most used research database digital libraries On campus at college campuses in the world J store J store labs and Ithaca ventures are ways in which that we Explore and develop the next generation of how we fulfill our mission. So those are new products and and services that fulfill our mission and One thing we've been doing over the past a few years that we can talk about more is exploring a partnership with Hypothesis where J store materials can be viewed through the hypothesis LMS app To as sort of a tunnel into J store so that it can increase the impact and Availability of J store content within the teaching enterprise Hand it over to Nick All right. Thanks Alex. Hi everyone. I'm Nick Brown at vital source I'm a VP product here overseeing our learning platforms And if you aren't familiar with vital source We do a number of things but one of the biggest things we do is we run bookshelf Which is the largest digital textbook platform in the world where we work with thousands of publishers to Aggregate over a million titles into a catalog of digital textbooks, and then we work with thousands of different institutions Both in the United States and then Increasingly abroad we have users in almost every country around the world to deliver those textbooks and other course materials to students And with a real focus on access to those materials You know topics like accessibility or near and dear to our heart as well as affordability One of the biggest things that we try and do is is save students a lot of money as we all know those textbooks can get really really expensive And we were very happy to save students over 60 million dollars on their textbooks just in this last semester alone So access and affordability is core to what we do And then we're always looking for ways to once students do have the course materials that they need once they are able to Read them once they're able to afford them What can we do to help them get the most out of those learning materials? It's another huge part of what we do Some of those things are features and tools that we develop ourselves But there's also great opportunities to collaborate with partners like hypothesis And you know bring tools to students and teachers together that we really just couldn't do alone So you know much like Alex was talking about a pilot that they're working on with JSTOR We we did pilot with some real-life teachers and students this last semester The ability to highlight and annotate content inside of our bookshelf e-reader using the hypothesis tools To some really interesting data and some some great outcomes from that first live course so certainly look forward to talking more about that and Excited for the conversation Chris. I think you're muted. Oh, that was amazing. I don't even know how that happened Thank you Alex Let's hop into the the Q&A here with you I think we have to start off with some of a special question around You know what drew you in to this This world of open social learning. Why is this something that you're looking to pursue? I'd love to potentially start off here with Dan because I think you even have a Small set of slides to talk through the slack coalition So why don't we go ahead and start with you and I'll kind of pull that up Great So the You know cut the way that this Got started for us you know, we we launched, you know, we Hypothesis story in in two sentences is you know, we Along with a lot of people has understood there to be the you know this opportunity to bring a kind of universal collaboration conversation layer to the web and what's in it and launched Built some open-source software brought it through the W3C standards process and then launched a service Using it and the first so the first users That we had were We're in the classroom students teachers that were introducing this To their to their students to be able to collaborate over text Just using the Chrome plugin and You know, so as that usage grew they started telling us What they wanted in order to for it to be better for them one of the first things that they asked for were to build this into the learning management system to have Plugins in a sense for you know, Moodle and Canvas and and Blackboard And so we we built those Then they asked for Additional things which we built but there was a Over time there was a consistent ask That they had which was more a more difficult one For us to solve for and that was it. This is great When it we're using it on a PDF that's been uploaded into Canvas or On a file in Google Drive But we also use You know platforms like vital source to deliver digital textbooks Or you know, we have publisher material that we use in a native reader from Cengage or Pearson Or, you know, we're using, you know, library materials like those from JSTOR And you know, but our teachers, you know, usually they would just point the student to the page and in JSTOR Now they've got to, you know, download that JSTOR article as a PDF and maybe re-upload it which, you know, may not even be supported by the terms of service That are negotiated and and when platforms like vital source, it may not really even be possible or easy at all to kind of download the thing as a PDF. So So why can't you know, what's your building just work there too. And these were simple asks But there's a really complex complex problem behind that. So how can you have something as this app that's authenticated inside the LMS but can also Extend over these native content platforms. And within and, you know, seamlessly without, you know, the student even realizing kind of what's happening in the background or the teacher So we started to have some discussions. And if you go to the next slide. And with a kind of a wide range of Folks in the market, Nick here at VitalSource, Alex at JSTOR, and many others like them. And realized that there was a shared interest in solving this problem collectively and that it was a shared problem that That needed to be, you know, kind of thought of in those terms. And so the idea to form a coalition to bring those shared interests together was born. We launched that last year. It's called social learning and cross content. There's a website there called select coalition.org. And it's a very simple website. But the powerful thing is that all of the members have shared a short video of them saying kind of in their own words, why this kind of shared mission is powerful for them. And I think the powerful thing for us at Hypothesis and the others have been pulling this together is that, you know, that they have shared a short video of them saying kind of in their own words, why this kind of shared mission is powerful for them. And the voices, you know, are so clear and that the reasons are ultimately the same, but the perspectives that the power is in the diversity of perspectives behind them. Next slide. So at this point we have, I think, about 22ish, 24 partners and something like that. There's probably another 10 that are in discussions in addition to this that are coming soon. And they form a pretty wide range of some of the players in this space across a wide range of different categories. Obviously, major folks that are, you know, major players in the commercial part of this space, VitalSource, Epsco, ProQuest, Cengage, etc., some of the not, you know, kind of powerful nonprofits like JSTOR, the Internet Archive, HathiTrust. And also kind of stakeholder coalitions, a daisy consortium that focuses on accessibility and institutions, UC Davis, University of Illinois and others that have people and perspectives that have really brought some value to the coalition. Go ahead. So, kind of giving you the context, basically the, we want to bring more interactivity to the classroom experience. The goal is to keep the students engaged. And that interactivity is focused on learning materials and content that is supplied by, you know, these major providers that in the space that we all know. Go ahead. And the problem is that it's, you know, when you have a kind of a, in LMS terms, a third-party application or a third-party tool that is authenticated, it really till now can only exert its influence within the narrow world of the learning management system and maybe a PDF that happens to be uploaded there. But it can't extend, kind of, outside the platform. And, you know, the, you know, so those different platforms may have their own tools, but those tools are different. And so the experience for teachers and students is different. And so we wondered, you know, can we, could we, can we solve this problem? And, you know, the answer is we think so. Just in terms of a bit of, kind of, context about who are these content providers that are out there. There's, we separate them into some, kind of, some common categories. And, you know, we think of this problem as if we can tackle the major providers in each of the primary categories and focus on them first and bringing them into the coalition and kind of engaging them in this shared mission, then we think we can solve, fundamentally solve the problem. So learning management providers like Canvas and Blackboard, EBSCO and ProQuest and the aggregators, OER providers, publishers, archives like JSTOR, e-text distributors like VitalSource, and then journals and other kinds of scholarly sources. Go ahead. So the end product of this is a coalition that will work together. The goal is to first, you know, kind of come together and agree on what we think the obstacles are, work on ways of eliminating those obstacles, and then do some POC, some proof of concept in terms of doing this multi-party or cross-party integration. Obviously, we at hypothesis are doing some, but this is not limited to us. There are other tool providers and others that we want to see, you know, many integrations flourish. The problem doesn't get solved if it's only a single vendor solution. And our kind of mantra here is to work in the open, show our work, publish our findings, and make this kind of a free to participate, no barriers, no tolls. Go ahead. We have a really simple set of asks for the coalition participants that we've put forward, and that is number one, if you agree that you agree with the vision and enabling this, focusing on the end user, enabling consistent experiences, explore to invest in kind of exploring what that would mean for yourself and the work that you would have to do to undertake this kind of vision within your own platform and prioritize some of that to collaborate openly with others and agree to be public about your involvement. Great. Cool. Thank you so much. Thanks, Dan, and I think that's a great segue into the other folks on the panel here are people who have made those commitments to this open vision. And so why don't I turn it over to Alex to hear from you. What drew you to social learning, open social learning? Thanks, Chris, and thanks, Dan. I think I'll do a similar thing to what Dan did, which is sort of tell a story over time. So just thinking about very broadly Ithaca's mission and our mission, it is very deeply important to us to increase the impact and usage and engagement with the scholarship and content that we have because we believe education and informed population are the bedrock of democracy. It's absolutely vital and we think encouraging that is deeply important to our mission. We started off two and a half decades ago showing that content that many people didn't look at or see, which was the back issues of journals and was so that there was value in it if we could make it easily accessible and digital and available for everybody. And we've been successful enough that there have been a number of studies that open access content on JSTOR drives significantly more usage when it's on JSTOR than when the same content is available on other platforms. And we want to continue to take advantage of that and continue to increase the kinds of engagement that students and learners have when they're dealing with academic content, when they're learning new ways of looking at the world. I believe strongly and we believe strongly that annotation and social learning is one really exciting tool as you're doing that because it creates a community around the actual content. Acknowledging that learning is not a solo activity that you do alone, but it's a social one. It's one that you do in a classroom. It's one you do standing on the shoulders of a long lines of other scholars or researchers learning on things. You could even say scholarship itself is a form of annotation and that every scholar is commenting on the work of the scholar researcher that came before him or her. So we first partnered with Hypothesis like five or seven and a half years ago in 2015. I remember sitting in a room at the UT Austin. The dog's name is Betty. Thanks, Chris. In UT Austin with Jeremy Dean and we built an interesting tool that combined the ability to use Hypothesis to annotate canonical poems from the Poetry Magazine with scholarship that was about it. It was a way to demonstrate that students and learners weren't just consuming the scholarly discourse but could be a part of it and could orient that around the primary text. The scholarly discourse doesn't happen over there. You as a learner are part of it. We think libraries which both house and preserve scholarship and the scholarly discourse and all of the knowledge that we have. And they also act as a tour guide to that discourse to any student who comes to their campus. We think because of that twin role, libraries are an ideal partner in exploring how to use digital methods like online social learning to help students in today's world. Thank you, Alex. Nick, anything resonating so far? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the ways that Dan kind of framed the challenge was around how do we drive that degree of interactivity and engagement with the content. Hypothesis is a really great way to do that. I'd say that mission is what drove us to social learning absolutely. We're always looking for more and different and better ways to drive that interactivity. If you go back in time in vital sources history, one of the things that we've seen jump out through the data, I'd say loud and clear, is that if all you're able to do is give the student what I call a print under glass textbook experience, right? They're not going to use it very heavily. They might not even buy it. They might opt out of it. They're not going to get a lot of learning impact out of it. And you're not really taking advantage of all the, you know, affordances that being in a digital world gives you to help those students learn better. So, you know, we're always working on what we can do to further that student experience. A nice example that's in a different part of what we do is we recently spent a lot of time and energy building out a new tool that allows us to automatically generate with AI some formative practice questions and layer them into the text study experience, right? That's one way to drive interactivity. You read a little bit of content, you reflect and see did you understand what I just read or do I need to go back and reread? Hypothesis is another great way to trigger that same kind of moment of reflection, that little moment of learn by doing that we know, you know, is proven by learning science is going to have a positive impact on the student learner experience. But instead of doing that with formative practice, we're able to do that with your peers and with your instructor and fostering that kind of social interaction. So that's absolutely what drove us to wanted to do a partnership there together. And then, you know, the other interesting thing that I think is worth sharing is we've had the ability inside of our bookshelf platform to share your notes and highlights with a peer, or if you're an instructor to share your notes and highlights with the students in your course since 2007. No one uses it. It's not, it's not, you know, built with the same kind of intentionality around the user experience and, you know, around the kind of clarity of what this is for right that the hypothesis has. It's kind of attack on it's a bit of an add on in terms of the feature set. It doesn't have the same kind of capability of horizontally delivering the same user experience across a lot of different kinds of content modalities. You know, it doesn't have the usage and I'm not surprised it doesn't have the usage right it doesn't have the smooth LMS integration where an instructor can create kind of rich and robust assignments around participating in that engagement. And, you know, this is one of those places where, sure, we could go spend a whole bunch of time and energy and engineering time and work, trying to build that, or we can figure out how to do a partnership with someone that solved a lot of those problems together. Solve some problems for teachers in that kind of horizontal way across content that we might not be motivated to do and deliver a better user experience for teachers and learners by integrating rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. You know, so there's there's a lot that kind of draws us to this, you know, feature area in general. And then also it's just a really nice way to plug some specific gaps that we had in terms of our own capabilities where let's let the experts build that part and then and layer it into our products to get the right thing out to our students. If it's okay, I want to just like chime in or shout Hallelujah to some of what Nick Nick was just saying. I love the metaphor of you know annotation, you know, we're looking at the document under glass. You know, when you look at, you know, we've done user studies where you're looking at researchers or students engaging with their material, and it is not under glass it is it is a physical act to grapple with the thing and to gender terror and to make physical comments and to really move between books and all of that. There is a really roll up your sleeves and kind of get messy engagement that happens in the analog world. And I think too many of the, you know, first forays at annotation and and and all of this tried to make it too clean and too neat and I think one of the things that social learning and the the classroom annotation that is being done now is it allows for some dynamism and messiness and and and operating in a variety of different ways that I think is really exciting and that that stands on that benefits from the fact that is cross platform and doesn't, you know, I have this set of tools for J store and I have to learn this, you know, where it's like jumping between WebEx and zoom and go to meeting and all of that. There's a little bit of friction there that causes difficulty every time so a common standard is a benefit for all. Speaking of messiness that seems like a good segue to talk about the classroom and pedagogy and things in practice so, you know, Nick, a vital source you have the luxury of working with, you know, hundreds of thousands of institutions and thousands more instructors. I'm curious to know what are some of the best practices that you've seen that are taking advantage of this ability to conduct social learning across content. Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, one of the things that I think is a bad habit we can fall into you know when when you work with textbooks is starting to think of them as you know, it's just this single monolithic packaged up thing and you're going to deploy it in a different course or to a particular institution they're going to teach that textbook just the way that it's laid out just the way that it's structured and it's this kind of monolithic block and a blob. And it's always a mistake when you think that way right, sure that the textbook publishers went through a lot of work to kind of craft what they believe is a nice view of the curriculum and craft a helpful and useful flow through that material. But when you get out there and you actually talk to faculty, they're breaking it apart and they're slicing it together and they don't think of it as I'm just teaching this textbook right, they're teaching their course and that may have an assigned textbook. They may even use most of it in the order of how they go through it in the published work, but they still think of it as their course right and they have a lot of intentionality around how they use that as an effective teaching tool. And I thought that the instructor that we worked with for our pilot with the bookshelf and hypothesis integration this last semester. She had a really, really great view. Sorry, I've got a three year old here with a police car doing a quick interruption. Henry, I've got to be talking on this. Okay, can you hand downstairs. Hi Henry. It's okay we'll be here when you get back. Hey can someone come grab Henry. Oh, my two and a half year old. Sorry, one second. Thanks to granny. Okay, so sorry, I was saying the faculty member we work with Dr. Alison Bernays at University of Minnesota. I thought she had a really great kind of point of view and mindset around how to use our tools together to effectively teach around the textbook right she wasn't just saying. Hey, thanks for this tool I'm going to drop my students into this user experience like have fun or go make for annotations or go you know do this. She really thought a lot about how it fit well into our course how it fit well with her teaching and learning goals. She had a really just thoughtful approach right she she even was challenged this last semester with teaching the same course with the same textbook in both fully remote asynchronous modality and asynchronous modality where she had her students kind of coming in for remote zoom lectures. And she kind of crafted the hypothesis and annotation experience a little bit differently for each of those courses right with some really discrete goals and kind of discrete types of assignments and types of how she wanted that social annotation to play into the course right. So I just thought it was a really nice example you know we're talking to her I just learned a lot about the pedagogy of her course right about what she wanted to do, but how she saw these tools fitting into her teaching and learning. And you know what she did was able to choose able to take some in class exercises that in her in person courses had been really really successful for her in the past. Move them into the textbook right facilitated by the hypothesis layer, and have that be a really effective activity for her students, while also kind of reclaiming some of that class time and using that for some other purposes as well. So it was just a really nice example of, you know, someone who didn't just kind of hear about some technology and blindly adopt it, but had a really kind of mindful thoughtful approach to like, how do I implement this in practice with my students in my courses with the way I want them to learn. And I think the data showed that she did a really effective job that the students really got a lot out of it, and we're really deeply engaged with both tools. And Alex, I think you have an interesting perspective because the library serves as an educational resource as well as a resource for numerous other stakeholders. How do you see these things working together. I almost pulled the Chris. Whatever we're going to call it now. I mean, universally, I think. So first of all, just say I'm not a trained librarian. So I can't or speak for speak for librarianship but I can, you know, I can share what we, you know, what we've learned is we're working with librarians and, you know, my experience is that libraries are very bustling places they're not quiet reflection in a carol they're bustling places to gather and their their places to gather their particular kind of place to gather on a campus, either virtually or in person, you know, way back when I was a student the groups that met in the library were were the study groups and the book groups I'd I'd meet with my Russian studies group. We'd meet in the library there were social gatherings, but they weren't frivolous they were centered around books or knowledge. You can almost call them a form of analog social learning. And so it only makes sense that as those affordances turned to digital that libraries are play a central role and, and are a supporter of that and I think there are two aspects of libraries that are and librarianship now that are particularly relevant here. And the first is just many libraries are libraries are one of the places on a campus that are inherently cross disciplinary. They, they provide support across the different disciplines and so if you're interested in learning, you know how a historian does a particular thing or how a chemist does a particular thing that's within the discipline but as you there are many skills. It's very important to have that cross disciplinary pollination and many skills that span across those disciplines, whether that's a research skill or writing skills, or, or, or in introductory digital skills like text analysis or data literacy and libraries are increasingly providing those skills and I think there's an opportunity for them to both use social social learning to provide those skills and have that be one of the sets of skills that can be provided. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way that's really quite. Yeah, illuminating to see it as a horizontal skill developer. Yeah, and using and leveraging and increasing the value of the content that they already have they care a lot about the adoption rates and the usage and the of their materials it's not only about, you know, the shelves are fine but they want to disseminate that information and so, you know social learning is a way to increase the impact of the collections that they they they license and buy. If we, if Betty has anything else to say, or if Nick or anything else to add to that. The next few questions I have are really open to anyone. I'll potentially pick a couple people but please feel free to jump on those and respond to your peers. And just a quick reminder from the from our audience. We also have the Q&A panel and so if you also have your own questions or your own thoughts to jump in feel free to drop those too. So let's move into this concept of the open part of social learning. Why, why go open why pursue a standard for this. And Dan you spoke at length about the slack coalition so you're probably the king of this. I'd love to kind of get your thought. Um, I mean, the reason, you know, we, you know, a lot of times, you know, we as, you know, vendors, trying to provide solutions. Think that the only way we can win is by doing something and then building a wall around it and protecting it be so that nobody else can take advantage of the thing that we built. Because we put so much time and energy into it and maybe some money and and, you know, that's that's the kind of the mentality, build and protect and only share, you know, when you know there's a there's a toll paid. But I think, you know, the the open source movement is a, you know, increasingly a thing that is showing all of us that there is a kind of a new kind of thinking that there's a way to build shared things standards and to push for kind of shared values around interoperability and inclusiveness and and still be successful almost, you know, by leveraging that openness as, you know, a form of commercial value and and, you know, kind of community value. So, you know, where we start, you know, first from our perspective as kind of lovers of the web. And, you know, the web as that thing that came from a bunch of commercial implementations of online service providers, like a well copy serve. And then all of a sudden, you know, we were gifted this incredible thing which is just radically transformed life on earth in a way that never would have been possible if all we'd had was, you know, a bunch of these, you know, kind of little siloed, you know, OSPs. And I think we, you know, our goal was to try to, you know, see, could we, could we bring that same thing to to thinking about on the social side. And because we want to see that that big outcome to, you know, we're citizens and humans that, you know, on the planet just like everybody else, where else. So that's that's kind of the thinking behind it is pretty simple. And, you know, just delighted to that some people seem to agree and we're making a little progress. Nick is back channeling me about he's just jumping ready to jump on this question so I'm going to pass it over to Nick what what thoughts did you have. Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, I think, you know, Dan talked a little bit about, you know, the, the value of open and the value of standards and things, you know, one of the things that we've, I'd say just had a long history of success with and it's going to be the right kind of strategic choice for us every time we've approached it is going going open and going towards standards right so we helped write the spec for the EPUB three book format and you know, we're really big champions for for driving adoption of that across publishers which is a win for students in terms of accessibility a win for students in terms of the the flexibility and interactivity that content. It's been a great, a great win for us. We've been huge huge huge proponents of the standards coming out of formerly IMS now now one ed tech, you know, things like learning tools interoperability we have millions of students that have products using LTI every single month. And, you know, we, you know, students would not have the the, you know, seamless access and degree of, you know, flexibility getting into all the tools that they they use. If that standard hadn't taken off and if that that hadn't really reached the adoption it has. I'm one of our founders, Rick Johnson is actually the sitting board chairman of one at tech. We leverage those same kinds of standards to pump caliper data feeds with near real time data about what students are doing in our platform back to the institution so that they have that data for analysis and potentially early intervention. Again, like riding on that standard, you know, help solve problems across the ecosystem in a way where, you know, we, we can aggregate that data and try and say, Hey, the only way that you can see this data is if you come into a vital source dashboard or like download our data visualization or something that's just not as powerful as if we can get you the data, the way that you want it where you want it using open standards so that you can kind of color in that whole picture of the student journey, all in one place as the institution kind of I'd say where that data belongs specifically. So, you know, that's been a like a, you know, a few different ways we're kind of riding on those standards and building in the open has been really helpful to us. And like I said, you know, every time we go there. It's been a helpful, helpful, helpful tool for us. You know, one other thing that I think is kind of worth, worth mentioning. You know, a little bit related to the open side of the spectrum is, you know, the complexity and the challenges that the institution and the faculty has to deal with when things aren't open. So it can be really, really hard to manage an effective program, or be an instructor trying to decide like, which of these thousands of tools do I want to actually use in my course to achieve my goals in the course that I'm teaching this term. And, you know, I think when you end up with all of the small kind of walled gardens and silos that talking about, you're just making the job really really really hard for the instructor and really really hard for the institution to teach the courses effectively and manage their platform effectively. So, you know, if driving towards things like, you know, one coherent way to do something like social annotation, it's just going to simplify the picture. People are going to know where to go. They're going to know how to use it. They're going to know how it adds value to their content. They're going to know how it adds value to their student experience. And I think that's trying to simplify that maze and that complexity is definitely something that we work hard on at VitalSource, and I think standards has been a really nice way for us to do that. There's definitely still room for us to improve them. Can I chime in on that because, I mean, I think hypothesis standards-based openness, the openness there is just one of the key reasons why we want to work with them. JSTOR and Ithaca have been working really hard over the past maybe half decade to provide open and available infrastructure for libraries and institutions. For instance, we have a program called Open Community Collections that offers libraries the ability to host and provide access to their library's special collections freely right on the JSTOR platform, embedding it where people are already doing research so their special collections can reach more people and have a bigger impact and we're providing that infrastructure. We have another program to expand access to the content that we have that we started during the pandemic called expanded access where libraries and institutions get access to all of JSTOR's content, regardless of the number of individual collections you might own, just because of how difficult it is to get content digitally. We're looking to extend that permanently beyond because the pandemic is not receding. For social learning and annotation, I couldn't agree more with Nick's statement about all these walled gardens and individual programs just carrying a huge burden for the individual learner and teacher, creating a lot of friction. You're having students having to learn five different auth systems and ways of logging in and navigating when what they should be learning is the course materials. And so if there's open standards that allow it to interoperate while JSTOR's publishers can get the usage and traction that they need so that there's some credit there. So I think there's real opportunities and so I'd love to see this growing into a full archipelago of mission and community minded open standards based platforms with hypothesis being really central to that. Can we change the name of the coalition to the social learning archipelago? I think you should. I think that was a missed opportunity and I'm really disappointed. Yeah, I mean, because the alternative is all of these individual programs are going to create, you know, we'll be sort of fighting against each other and that leaves room for much larger organizations who might not share our community standards to essentially become de facto standards. And that can hurt all of us. Any thoughts, Dan? I think we've, I mean, I obviously resonate with what they've said. I think we've covered this one. I want to take us into a slightly different direction that is somewhat adjacent to having an interoperable social learning layer, which is a concept that's many are probably familiar with as OER open educational resources. It's almost kind of like an interoperability later for the digital content itself. I'm curious to hear from, you know, you folks, how does OER fit into the broader publishing landscape and how do you see it working here within the classroom? Alex, what are your thoughts? I don't know that these will be especially well thought out, but I want to, you know, I think it's worthwhile to go back to something Nick said earlier where he talked about, you know, how teachers engage with textbooks and as not, you know, word from on high that must as a set of instructions as opposed to, you know, individual components of a recipe that they're making and they're making that recipe, you know, kind of on the fly because it's their classroom, it's their thing that they're cooking. And I think OER is an amazing framework that sort of reifies that creativity and an active teaching, making the teaching, all the work that goes into putting into a class, turning that into materials that you can then use, but then other people can also, you know, dive in and reshape themselves. And I think that's incredibly valuable and really, really important. And I think there's opportunity for a lot more infrastructure supporting that right now because there are some challenges because inherent to it because if the inherent goal is remixability and not taking the cookie cutter, then helping people find all the ones that are most helpful to them and navigate all of that can be really challenging. I think there's opportunity for, you know, annotation and some sort of discovery tools that make it possible to navigate that and reuse and reshare that could be really interesting. And I'll also say, well, maybe I'll stop there. I'll stop there before I get distracted. Nick, what do you think? I think that's well said. You know, I think the, you know, OER is one of those topics where I feel like the pros and the cons are quite clear, right? You know, the pros when it's implemented well, when it has the kind of properties of remixability and modularity and reuse and low cost for students certainly resonates with us, right? There's a bunch of wonderful things about OER, but the challenges around discovery and knowing what to adopt and understanding if it's high quality, understanding if it's out of date, is it well maintained? Is it easy to implement in my course? Are there all of the kind of ancillary components that go along with a textbook or a publisher courseware product that helped me teach my course effectively? Being able to kind of put together the OER jigsaw puzzle with content that's really high quality and aligned with what you want to teach can be really hard. In the cases where you can do that or where you have the time and energy to kind of sift through and find what you need or where you work with a, you know, a partner maybe like an open stacks who kind of puts a lot of that together for you. You know, it can be a really, really great win for teachers and for students. It's, you know, we don't do a ton with OER at VitalSource. I should say we do distribute some OER textbooks and materials through our platform. It's more a trend that we keep tabs on and try and understand is there a place where we can really come in and help here. You know, if someone is able to solve those problems around discoverability, around powering that kind of remix and reuse around helping instructors understand the quality bar, I can certainly see it having an enormous impact. Great. One thing that I heard that you had mentioned, Alex, is how it kind of having some of this standardized allows the instructors to essentially focus on the creative part of that process. I actually think that was something that I'm excited about when it comes to the Slack coalition for social learning and annotation is the same thing is that, you know, all the guts are taken care of. Now we can actually see more innovation in the area, not less. Yeah, what you want. I mean, you want the instructors to be able to create their own, you know, Spotify lists of syllabi, where they're essentially piecing together the materials. This is how I go about creating, you know, talking about introducing this particular material and then letting people listen to each other's mix lists. And, you know, much of that content could be open, but it doesn't necessarily have to be if I'm teaching, you know, American literature, I'm not going to stop in 1925 or whatever. So I think it's important to be able to that remix ability, and that that those standards would allow for that kind of common discovery and sharing of, you know, the T as with the teachers. The tour guide of the subject material. Well, and the shared capabilities and feature set matters to right, you know, one of the things that we've heard from folks when we talk to them about how they're using OER how they might use OER and some of their courses is they'll point out, you know, often, hey, here's a phenomenal resource, but the only way I can give it to my students is it's over here it's hosted on this website and that's it and that's all that it works. And they're asked and they'll ask us questions like how can they use that through your bookshelf iOS app so they can download it and read it offline while they're on the train. And our answer is, well, they kind of can't do that right now right it's such it's a very fragmented landscape. But they would love to have the same those same kinds of capabilities they would love to have the same kinds of capabilities. We've been talking about today in terms of social learning, and you know that that kind of join of the fragmented content landscape with the fragmented tools landscape. That's really the thing that if you solve that you're doing something really powerful. Well, we're getting closer to time here and I'd love to, you know, leave some time at the end for the audience to leave some questions as well. So I am going to move on to everyone's favorite question, which is, what is your favorite social read? What's the best piece of content that you like to read together? So someone's going to have to jump in here and talk but if no one does then Dan, you're going to have to jump in here. And what do you think, Alex? What do you think, Nick? I nominate Dan. Go ahead, Alex. Well, I don't know if this is a social read. So, you know, I just a couple of things that I don't I don't know that I would call something a social read. That's why the one reason why the question question is hard. But I'll give two sorts of examples that that might spark some things. So one, I remember last year it just happened that like a dozen people in my office were all reading virtual office nobody was in person. And The Sun by Ishiguro, which amazing new novel. Everybody should read it and just the act of everybody reading and discovering and sharing just rose and learning that together just changed our my relationship with the book. And we were doing a project at the time or having some discussions with, I don't know how many people here know, but if you don't you should. It's a Freedom Reads project, which is funded by Mellon led by a gentleman named Dwayne Betts, who is a genius. And it is a project to provide a library of printed materials inside of US prisons. So he's creating a library of materials and it's based on Dwayne's time on the inside where he was in solitary and somebody passed him a poetry book and it changed his life. And he's now a published poet and a lawyer and an amazing, amazing man. And they did a series of roundtables. As they were trying to decide the 500 books to include in this library where they would bring together authors and writers and I got to join one of them for some reason, where we would talk about the book that mattered most to you in your life. And what is the book that you care about that you think everybody in the world should read and it was just an amazing way to get to know people and to see the diversity of those books and think about then sharing them with people who had very little access to books. It was a tremendous project and I'd encourage Ender's game that was on the list. All right, that was my, I don't know if that's a social read or not but it seemed relevant. Well, I'm just going to go with an old favorite, which is it kind of related, you know, the one of the first articles that came out. It's actually 1945 called, as we may think, talking kind of imagining both the web and Wikipedia and in a kind of collaborative annotation way before it was obviously ever invented. Which is a bit of, you know, a canonical text in our world. It's still available on the Atlantic, you know, as a public document and now has been annotated by lots of people with some really super insights and so that's definitely one of my favorite kind of meta reads. Yeah, but my other favorite one is just, you know, kind of the one that's in front of me, you know, on more of a daily basis like the thing that people are talking about today. Or, you know, seeing some of the fascinating annotations on on class text and just seeing how how the conversations are unfolding so yeah. I love that. Great. I have one more question for you all. This is a question for everyone so we'll kind of go around the table. So what's next? So what is the, you know, what's the next move that you're making in the open social learning? And how can we help? How can the audience get involved and yeah, take it away, Alex. So as I mentioned at the very beginning, we are currently working towards a pilot project similar to the one we're following in Nick's illustrative footsteps. We will be doing that pilot at a handful of institutions, universities in the fall. We're selecting universities now. So if you are at one and you want to strongly advocate for your school, then, you know, I strike a forcefully written eloquently written note may sway us. But we're selecting those now and that's really where we're putting our effort and then we hope to expand that beyond the pilot assuming that all goes well. And I'd encourage anybody to shoot me an email or reach out to me on social media with any questions or suggestions for how we move forward and do this. I'll just echo that on my side. As I mentioned earlier, we do have the integration between our tools up and running now. We did have that live in some some courses that ran this previous semester, and we are looking for more. So we're we're planning to have more courses live with the integration integrated set of tools this fall. And if you want that to be a course at your institution or a course that you're teaching, you know, feel free to reach out to me. You know, especially folks who are familiar with both hypothesis and bookshelf, which I think is probably quite a lot of folks right there's a lot of folks who have used both of our tools already. You know, that's just a perfect candidate to say, What can I do with these tools together? And I'm sure you'll come up with some some great ideas about how you could use that effectively in your course. So don't be shy. I think Chris is going to flash up my email and Twitter in a couple of minutes here. Feel free to reach out. We'd love to hear from you. How about you, Dan? What's next for the coalition? How can people help? Well, mostly there's a lot of kind of the hard work of now that there's some maybe some examples. And the partners have come together and we've done some of that kind of initial advocacy and outreach. Now we need to come together and say what are what are some of the things we've learned from these early POC's and how can we start to generalize these towards some kind of recommendations and best practices so that there is a bit of a playbook here for for others to follow suggestions for people building content platforms in terms of how to make them more kind of social ready so that this kind of capabilities can hang on them and be incorporated into them a bit easier. And so that's, you know, it's, you know, fun, fun work, but, you know, some some interesting questions ahead of us. Great. So that's all from my questions I am as it mentioned going to pull up. Quick slide. As As we mentioned, there's a lot going on. There's ways to get involved and Nick and Dan and Dan by me forcing him and that's not true. Like normal. Alex and Nick and Dan have graciously offered their contact info. So if you've heard something today that's really resonated with me, hey, I have an idea there, or I think you're missing something, or you want to be involved in one of these pilots. We'd love your feedback and love your ideas. Please reach out. And then as I mentioned, if there's, you know, things if maybe you don't get these down my bills there I'm happy to kind of pass a pass a similar requests along as well. But with that, I'd love to turn it over to the audience. If there are any questions that haven't come in yet. This is would be a great time. I think that by, like, at the very minimum, we need someone to ask what my kid's name is. What's your kid's name. My name, her, her name is Howie. Anna Howard Shaw. And she's the best thing that has ever happened. Not that Henry's not great. I can get back in here to ask some questions if the audience doesn't have any. Oh, you can get up that would actually you also have a guitar don't you sitting around that we could, and then Alex you can jump on the piano. We can take this question would be 95% sure his question would be about fire trucks. So it would be a bit of a non sequitur. Yeah, I just want to say thanks Chris for leading us through the, you know, through this exploration and to everybody for attending. Yeah, thank you so much Alex. Thank you so much Nick. Thank you so much Dan. It's been super insightful and a lot of fun. So, feel free to reach out contact information's on the screen there. And we'll look forward to hear from you. Thanks everybody.