 Good morning. Good morning. I don't have any idea why so many of you are here. So my name is Arash Vessel, my co-conspirator, Gary Lopez. I believe he's still on a plane, winging his way to this conference. He's going to be talking more about work we explicitly do within the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, or that's MIT, if you pronounce it, MIT. That's happening later this afternoon, if you want to hear about that. So I don't really have, like, a presentation. You probably saw this session was in green, which I believe means it's a questioning or assumptions session. And the thinking, as I understood it, was to have someone like me get up and say something, I guess, controversial. Or something of that flavor. And then the rest of you get to all join in in either agreeing or disagreeing, or otherwise just kind of pushing this topic forward. So I did decide it might be helpful to give a little bit of background with perhaps a few visuals, none of which were adapted for this particular presentation. So I'm just going to kind of walk you through what it is that led to this issue that I put. And so if you'd read the title, it's, you know, which license for OER? Question mark may actually be the wrong question. How many of you have been involved in OER, and in particular involved in this kind of whole issue of which license is the right license and so on? So clearly it's still a significant part of what kind of defines the OER space today. If you follow the writings of David Wiley, if you follow the writings of a lot of the people in this space, you see that probably at least everyone, there's some new posts about, you know, why the non-cursional term is evil, or, you know, why can't we just get everybody to use such as such a license, you know, surely a group of commons has got to have to share a like clause in there to make it all work. It's certainly a def, it's part of the definition for OER to have this sort of licensing element. I would say at least today that's probably the only actual defining feature of OER, is that it has this license attached to it that gives permission for people to do things. But in my opinion, especially when I've tried to ground some of these questions about, well, how do we actually produce OER that people are going to use? How do we get it into school systems? How do you build sustainable business models around the production of this stuff? Who's going to use it? Where does the value lie? Et cetera, et cetera. The licensing thing just is such an amazing distraction. It just dominates every single way that we think about, well, if this organization is going to get involved, then obviously they're going to have to use that license and so on. And then people get all tied at knots because they say, ah, but now OER is producing another one license, and we've got connections doing things in a different license, and the policies say this, and when you dig into something like the non-commercial term, you discover it's a non-standardized term. Anyway, blah. So important, but maybe we can start to think of ways to move past that. And so what do I mean by that? Well, I take the frame that the only thing that is really distinctively special about open educational resources is the ability to adapt them. It's to freely derive an adapt. You don't need a license to make them free. And for the vast majority of purposes that are kind of end users, those being students and teachers, that they might even want to do some derivations and adaptations within the classroom, they already have those rights, not writ large, but copyright exceptions limitations and various fair use clauses entitle teachers to quite a bit of latitude to make minor adjustments and do the things they need to with any resource they can get their hands on, especially if they're only going to keep it and use it within a closed setting, such as in the classroom. And so the big question is if what we're seeking is to put out a pool of resources where people really have any flavor, so that could be other publishers, that could be teachers, that could be consortia of, you know, institutions and individuals. So we're probably going to take them, change them, and then most importantly, republish them, put them back out there for anyone else to use. Then the license really needs to make that vanishingly simple. And I think the only license that really does that with no real questions asked is the Creative Commons attribution only license CC by. The public domain would accomplish that too, but it's quite difficult to get things into the public domain even with tools like CC0. There will be people here who will certainly argue vociferously and pay for a bias A as kind of a key kind of community building constraint. But is there, can we imagine a world where we can give advice to traditional publishers, to startups, to really anyone who's in the business of saying, I want to participate in OER, and I want to make OER that has CC by on it, and I want to also eat. I need to make money. I need to somehow survive, and I don't want to be constantly scrounging for the next grant, constantly sort of begging for dollars from, you know, community donations, that sort of thing. Like, how do I get there? How do I get there? That's the conversation I like to have. And just as a straw man, I'll throw up a few things. So one is that a working group that I also helped to put together, and I've just been kind of thinking through whether there's some very kind of high level guidelines that we might imagine being able to toss out to the community for anyone who says, that's the person I want to be. I want to produce CC by or, you know, otherwise wide open licensed resources. And yeah, I want to be able to do that without running foul of any problems and to also make good sustainability model decisions, that sort of thing. And so we created what is a first draft of what we're calling a decision tree, and it has legal, technical, and business issues, three separate trees. And the idea is just to try to make these issues more tractable. So that's one thing I'll throw up, and I'm not going to go through it because that's not the point of this talk. But I just want you to realize that's available, it's published, anyone who wants it, I'm happy to have it, and it is itself CC by. And I would encourage everybody to tear it apart, right? If there are things in it that you're like, whoa, that's the wrong question, that kind of thing. And if you want, we can talk through it. The other thing I would point to is trying to even further simplify this question, and this is not the greatest or simplest guide, right? But to the extent that an organization is not so much into this whole more academic side of what's the right license for the right purpose, but just needs to know, can I even publish something at CC by? What rights do I have as somebody who maybe has repurposed something or has contractual obligations, that sort of thing? And so starting to think about whether there are flow charts that simplify that decision process and guess so that this whole issue of hand-bringing over the license can be lessened and they can move on to things like, okay, what are the appropriate technical formats that we can use to really honor when the license allows or what are the kind of business models we can design that allow us to do this without basically sinking the ship. So one proposal I have, and I don't have this thrown up in any nice diagram, and some of you may have read this, is something I was calling dual publication model. The idea behind dual publication is that an organization might produce resources they understand to be core to their business and there's various reasons why adapting those resources might actually be a bad idea. And I say that in the sense of all the various value ads that might have been put in. So for example, maybe it's been aligned with standards but if you start changing the resource, the alignments break, right? Or maybe it's been rigorously evaluated in the classroom setting and efficacy results come in and people say, yes, it works, but only if you don't change it, right? Only if you don't then go and start tearing it apart. Now all bets are off. We don't know if it works anymore. And so you could imagine there would be reasons why as an organization you might not actually want people to change at least a version of it. Think of it as a branded version or a trademark version. And you would say, yes, we think this has a lot of value and maybe you want it. Ah, this organization wants to be part of the OER effort and fundamentally believe in it. Could it be that they could still publish that version not with an open license or at least with a more restricted license? But then decompose it into all of its component parts and publish those separately, the dual publication part, in formats and under a wide open license that remove any guarantees. So we don't really know what you're going to do with this. We can't promise anything. But here it is. It's yours to change. Go for it. Have fun. Is that a model that actually might bring more people into the fold? It provides kind of a way through this issue of, oh, do we have to license everything one way openly? Or could we imagine licensing some things one way and some things another way and trying to make sense of that according to the business loans we have? So I think, I'm hoping that sets up enough of the dialogue and if I need to, I can say stand up and throw some flames at people to open it up. And it's kind of a weird question in our assumption that you're all facing need. Really, there should be a giant circle or small groups or something but we'll see what we can do. Yeah. I have some faculty back on my campus store. Older, probably close to retirement age anyway. And they're not really interested in how can I see the most money out of this. They've also gotten rid of the idea that their lecture notes is going to be the next textbook. But then they do have some really great materials that they let people use. One of their fears is that they're going to release the material into Creative Commons and then another company is going to pick it up and then turn it into something that somebody has to pay for and then their name is now associated with the work that somebody has to pay for. And the whole reason why they released it was so their students could have it for free. And they want to lower the cost of education if they're giving away for free. So, I still have these handful of faculty who are really suspicious of these licensing models. Sure. I have all kinds of things to say but someone other than Cable will respond to that. Do you have something? Are you going to respond to that? Yeah, I am. No, Andrew. I would just tell them that students don't pay for anything anymore. They don't come from music or movies or textbooks that they don't have to use. If it's freely available online, then the Google search will find it. I mean, I could bundle Wikipedia and try and sell it door to door but I probably wouldn't have a ton of success. So, I would hope that argument wouldn't be like a mitigate factor for professors to share their knowledge. There are other factors, maybe, but not that one. It's free to people. Someone else? This is another question rather than a response. Yeah, any other thoughts on that? So, let me throw this out. I understand. I'm with Open Study which is a for-profit and we partner with many wonderful OCWs and so I completely understand what the faculty are getting at. And it's not that for-profits will make money out of them free by selling them free, but for a for-profit to exist, you have to make some kind of revenue. So, when you layer on revenue-generating products or services and then you come back and the faculty says, here's somebody else making money out of something that I slayed over and I created, is that appropriate? I think that's the question I'm under and I'd love to hear other thoughts about this because on the one hand, how do for-profits survive without making money? That's what you said. And so, we really want to find a way to do that, respectfully. I'm also a faculty, so I understand that. Very respectfully, so that we all survive in this ecosystem because we have to have an ecosystem, as Jim said, with non-profits and for-profits and everything else in the field. Any other thoughts? Well, it sounds like a part of what you're selling is convenience and a part of what, you know, it's open. So, if you're selling convenience by packaging pieces together and somebody wants to buy that convenience, well, then hand that at it. But if people want to go out and find the individual pieces that are out there and openly available, they could go out and do that. And I think that you could make that case for faculty members, and I suppose you could make that case at any time. If it's open, it's open. And you're going to find a way, I mean, any businesses would all sort the business model, but it seems to me convenience is really what you're selling. It's not the best kind of argument, but one of them is that the for-profit publishers aren't any better. You know, we are. Example I, in my space, which is in legal publishing, is a couple of guys who had written a treatise and decided they didn't want to do an update west, or it was Thompson, said, well, we'll make a lot of money. Did an update, put their name on it, they sued saying, well, that's not our update, but our name is on it, and won. The point being that the publishers sometimes will want to make money off of the author's names and will take license that way, which is no better than OERs and be stealing your material. I guess my answer to your question is, yeah, it's a messy world out there. I'm giving my ignorance. Doesn't the non-commercial option in OER take care of that problem? Indeed, and in many ways, that's part of the problem, right, which is that a typical reaction to what I would say is a fairly common scenario, I think many people are grappling with this at the institutional level, is, oh, yeah, okay, it browses the wrong way when a for-profit comes and leverages the work that we were giving away under a good graces and then makes all this money. How do I stop that from happening? And inevitably that drives you to adopt these more restrictive licenses. And that's where, that's what we've seen again and again and again. And so my question to the group is, in addition to these kinds of responses, is there a way that we could confidently assert that you just don't need to do that? Can you still put it out with a license where there aren't these restrictions and yet there's something about either the way the license works, for example, the attribution requirements are often brought up as a mechanism where by someone might see that the book's for sale, but because of the attribution requirement, maybe they see right there, by the way, there's a free version of this right here, but you don't have to buy the book if you just want the content. For some people that seems to be enough for there are other ways of getting around this. When I've said the race to the bottom and the licensing department. Yeah, so I guess I thought from the title of the talk that you're asking a different question here, do we really need to care which license each? That's a good question. And I think there are two reasons why the licenses are important. One, the one we're talking about now is it provides assurance to somebody who's thinking about putting their content out in the open but has concerns. License protects them in whatever way they need to be protected in order to do it. The other is to foster certain kinds of characteristics to encourage more reuse, to create sustainability models and so on. And in the latter case, maybe I'm behind the times in terms of the research, but my sense is we don't know anything about what works. I mean, the sustainability, rather the derivatives is a good point you brought up some points about problems with derivatives to start with. I would add to that if we have a plethora of derivatives that are floating all around in no canonical copy, there's no real blessed source control the way there is no source here. At least there could be, but there largely isn't. So what are the relationships among these derivatives and are all derivatives equal and how do people know which derivative they want to use? So I guess my feeling is for now let people use whatever license makes them feel comfortable putting things out in the open and then do the research over time to figure out what impact a particular license chose and has on sustainability. Now, there will be particular cases where you're trying to accomplish something, you're doing a sustainability experiment, or you have a particular relationship with your authors and you need to choose something for one reason. I'm not saying there's never a reason to pick one license over the other. I'm just saying writ large. I don't think we know enough to carry it. I fundamentally agree with that as well. I think at some level that's sort of the flip way of interpreting the question which is maybe we should just stop worrying about it to use whatever makes sense to you and don't get too involved in it and the real issues might be actually about, as you said, management of copies. Sort of the technical infrastructure that allows an adaptation ecosystem to grow and thrive and people make sense of what's even out there. And then we just kind of see whether we, that drives us back to reconsidering your licensing question depending on how that falls out. Yes? An additional nuance to what Michael just said, I mean, this is the line of choose whatever license you want. But what I've noticed from MIT over here and I've seen the legal environment with regard to our activity change and morph since it began 10 years ago, when we started out we thought we're more of a publisher, we have to think like publishers, we have to behave like publishers and license like publishers within the CC license we chose. Now I see the legal environment responding to us as more of educators. So we are being afforded more of a regard and allowance of our behavior in this space as educators. We do take advantage of a lot of the protections that individual faculty members have in the classroom because our activity is so clearly in line with teaching and learning. So choose whatever license you want. Take the ground you want and I think the legal environment will comply to you. It might take longer, but eventually it will get there. I'm curious to hear about what you mean by that. That's a very granular example of the choice that we made at MIT in the beginning we thought there was no way that our activity could be considered fair use. And then we said, hang on, in some cases yes. And we kind of, success, and by success I mean nothing bad has happened. Yeah, I understand. So you said that we don't know what we work and this is where we, it's not exactly true because of course we have an older brother who is called free software and we know what works for free software and actually the discussion between CCB and CCB SA is 20 years old now because it started like a PSD versus GPL discussion. And now we very well know what works for software, the GPL one. I mean everyone uses PSD but it's, it has a mark, but it's closed, it's not open anymore. And this is how, so this is how this developed in the last 20 years to the software. People are successful in keeping open open and the software which was protected by PSD devices ended as a closed software for bright hours. So of course for educational content things may work differently but I suspect that you may also be very similar to this area. So I don't think it's, the answer for the question just choose what fits you is that easy. I mean because you really need to look forward and anticipate the results and the other question is the question of license compatibility. I mean if you want to create the, I don't know how to say it in English, sorry for that. You know the large community which is where you can freely read me different kind of content and the standardization of licenses is really needed for that and I'm really happy that there's kind of consensus on CC buy because it makes things much easier for now but I don't think it's an easy answer. So just, and I guess we could debate for a while about the extent to which sort of the open source software lesson or history applies so well to all of the content just essentially in the audience and that's obviously a very interesting debate but that's exactly those kinds of perspectives that I think kind of held the debate at this point, right? No, it's going to be this because here's a good reason or it's got to be that because there's XYZ history. I think part of what I'm hearing is on the one hand we certainly need ways of probably just providing simple guidelines to people who have legitimate reasons to think one way or another they need one license for the other but otherwise just move past it and I want to kind of throw a straw man out there and this didn't come up a little bit in the talks this morning around technical expectations. So there's a lot of stuff out there OER which has a license which entitles you to do something. It might entitle you to make a derivative perhaps even under commercial circumstances and yet when you look at the thing that you've been given the odds that you can even derive it let alone do anything particularly interesting with it are quite low and so one thing I would just throw out as a question is do you think there's any obligation on the part of an OER producer to try to match that which has been legally entitled with the format, the way in which the product is delivered such that those legal permissions can actually be engaged can actually be capitalized on and that's another question and to give a very specific example if you think about something like an openly licensed video lesson what does it even mean to adapt it adaptation in what form and what does it mean to then try and provide that in a way that adaptations are enabled and I just got to be curious to hear people's thoughts on that as it really just kind of let people do what they want It seems to me that that's also part of the question is the end product of any learning versus direction type files that you're going to talk about web based learning resource for example which you run across in the government all the time who owns what, what you can do with it and we had, at ADL we had a usability experiment with Cordra and we were actually interested in other things trying to do some more with the department of that one of the issues happens to be okay so you have a resource that's discoverable that you can use that you can maybe have permissions which is another kind of issue to use it what can you actually use out of it and you can't really use it I mean you can use it as is but quite obviously to repurpose it you don't have the right files in it so you don't really have the capability to decompose it because you don't have the natives on anything to me that's another issue I'll respond from sort of an institutional perspective a lot of times you talk about people being able to choose the right license that works for them personally when you're talking on an institutional level for say an OCW like ours from Johns Hopkins people aren't making these decisions institutions are making these decisions and institutions are very cautious even when they're think they're being bold so I would say that this question of you grant somebody a legal right but then you put it up in a format that makes it a little bit challenging is one of those bargains that gets struck in a committee somewhere that says okay we're comfortable with this license thing and we want to be able to do the right thing but we're not entirely comfortable with the adaptation can you make it a PDF instead of a PowerPoint file and that makes it a little bit harder and I'm not saying that I was even in a room for that specific conversation but those are the kind of bargains that sort of get struck with knowing looks to make OCWs or OERs even possible in the first place not to excuse it but just to need one reason why this sort of condition has grown up I think it really depends when we're talking about institutions making the decision it's a different thing they have the resources to reformat etc when you're talking to individuals about making this choice and maybe about making the choice because they can't take the thing for themselves and it's maybe healthy for individuals to think about sharing something that they're not entirely satisfied with openly so that people can make derivatives and take it further to ask them to put it into different formats is a big ask because they're teachers, they're already time pressured if we're talking about sort of a change that isn't just about funding projects or large institutions with a big agenda putting stuff out there I think we have to think about what we're asking people to do because we already ask quite a lot about the license if we ask them to think about formats as well and changing things they don't have the resources to do I think also as we move ahead we know how quickly technology changes and advances I mean there are ways to alter a video you can use Camtasia and take different chunks out of it you can get a screenshot of a PDF and run OCR software and it's going to be easier to do those things just to take what you're saying did everyone hear that technology is evolving so quickly what might be a kind of unusable format today or at least to some subset people quite likely tomorrow will just not be a big deal and so would you say that then means that a publisher just need not worry about it because I think a lot of publishers have very intentional choices you just too publish in a way that doesn't make pre-exercise the license that simple and so what you're saying actually undermines this conscious decision they made which is kind of an interesting intention well I think that even figured into that and like I said it's not really even a conscious decision it's sort of just how everybody got to yes um figured into that is the knowledge that eventually this you know this is going to become more and more usable as time goes on is probably even part of that that unspoken calculation well we use that as a differentiator our my non-profit publishes open access ebooks and our definition of open is that we publish it as PDF and RTF e-pub and a download so that downstream users can take it and re-create new ebooks and then we use it as a differentiator to our funders, our members to say we're different than the commercial publishers that only publish a closed BRM version of e-books therefore continue to fund us one of the issues that institutions have is the obligation of our accessibility and that dictates a lot of our formatting choices that we make not actually the requirements so that's not to push this in that direction but that's an element of the formats that we should publish in well I was just going to ask all of these covers I think hopefully the people's notion of the IP is probably vetted into the files that actually we're talking about and the things that you mentioned all of those degrade integrity so that's fine so anything you do that is given the fidelity of the original it's a one step removed from ownership and the actual ownership is embedded into the production into the native files of whatever it is that we're talking about and that's a cultural issue and until you actually bridge that gap I don't think we're going to have a lot of partners you're always going to be trying to do a workaround to get to how can I do this how can I calculate this you can't tell you whatever it is whatever tool you want but that's not the real issue I would kind of like to change the conversation because I think one thing that OER licensing does which is a mistake in my mind is that it makes the assumption that there is one version ultimately the good version and it licenses that and I would love to see an environment whereby the version is a community version and then you get around this does it belong to an individual does it belong to an institution instead it belongs to a community and a community that works together to show what parts of that version work and where even in the keynote today there are things like we want all this research we want to discover what works the one thing that works I don't believe there is one thing that works for every student and if we can move the culture to develop community resources instead of I'm the great physics professor from wherever and here is my great lecture or my great notes I think that it would just be a much better environment and it's a community thing I hope not but who knows just to pick up on what you're saying we're doing an open course library and the Washington Community and Technical Colleges and struggle with this first we put everything in Angel our learning management system and found just what you said and you can't really get it so in the next phase we're putting things in Google Docs and Sailor.org is putting those courses on Sailor.org it's moving and I think that's kind of the point if you try to crowd it, it's not really open so you put the CC by license on it or whatever and off it goes you lose that control and have to at this point that's what we're prepared to take that it's going to change as people take it it's good is there an existence of Wikipedia like model or tool for delivery of open resources that's what I thought of when she talked about community value classes like a Wikipedia type that's like open source software community where you put up your open source software and other people can publish their changes through it so I would include certainly wiki educator wiki university and there's various other wiki media projects wiki books, wiki university but also places like connections, Kariki you could even include other larger collaborative communities where they're sort of imagining building on each other like through university and so on so yeah all of those have this kind of model so I mean I think a bigger question around what you're saying is that's a vision of the world where there's this canonical if you will set of resources upon which almost everything is built is built in this sort of collaboratively distributed curated way and then we just sort of let people do whatever off of them that's fine I certainly don't have any particular issue with that I just haven't I guess I'm skeptical that that'll actually reach the kind of scale of the sort of operational principles that you're talking about it certainly cuts out any individual entrepreneur or company that might say we have something that we think is of great value and people are just going to love it and it's going to be incredibly good at facilitating learning and we want to drive it forward maybe a simple way of saying it is to say my committee is not always better in fact many times it might be a lot worse I just like to clarify I'm really not talking about a community that develops the canon because I don't agree with that as I said I don't think that there is one product that meets all needs but I think that if we have the community and students for that matter in effect curate it or provide the feedback and incorporate that as a community as opposed to what seems to be a complex way where things have to be associated with individuals in order to be derivative I'm not explaining it very well but probably because I don't have it all in my mind I like that you mentioned students that's my forte getting students to collaborate and share their class notes online freely with the world and they are creating derivative works almost as good as textbooks and almost every lecture, class every semester I mean you wouldn't believe how good study guides are or at least the ones that I've seen so I think it's interesting to empower in some cases at least a cost cutting measure students to do the quote unquote dirty work of creating and sharing these resources and they're willing to do it and they're willing to share their notes they're willing to record the lecture for you and upload it on your behalf to the internet as well students are very powerful resources I think in open ed we just haven't yet tapped into that so just a number of things, hopefully I can tie them up so just to your initial point who cares about CCB or BIASA or fair use in Japan where I'm from actually the copyright exception allows only for the reproduction not making derivative so it modders for that kind of countries with big white violence and I think it's somewhat important that for collaborative work to get certain licensing stuff done so that down the road you know somebody who contributed something two years ago comes up and say oh this is not what I meant to be a point and the whole project collapses that's not the kind of thing we wanted to take risk of is my guess but at the same so there are in a larger scheme of things I think we are talking a lot about incentive structures for organizations, individual professors and maybe some cases businesses around the resources and unless we get some really good way to solve this problem in non licensing options such as great amount of funding I think probably licensed and being a concern for a lot of people to get things incentive structure right so that we get more resources open up or we get more people involved in refining the resources and so and my sense is and I'm not very well informed on this but my sense is that even in the US we can't get to that phase of okay we got enough resources already so we don't worry about incentivizing people anymore that's not the stage we are at yet and also regarding the idea of open software versus open education I think open education is a lot more about how much improvement we can make learning and education teaching experiences so if we focus on that then it's important not just to talk about how good a material we can produce but also how usable it is for teachers learners and other institutions so one of the things that I worry about is if people start experimenting with all kinds of licenses and which happened at least to a degree in the open source world because if you look at the open open open software initiative you know they they have this review process of open licensing open licenses and they list some 60 licenses as open licenses some you know and a lot of familiar names like NASA Microsoft, IBM Mozilla all of them came up with their own version of open license that is open enough to be reviewed and approved of by this independent organization but if you think about the cost of reading licenses and think about if I can combine this resource under license A this resource under license B that's enormous and that's almost prohibitive so I think it's somewhat important to limit the range of options like staying in Creative Commons of course I'm from Creative Commons Japan so I was kind of self-serving but something like that is somewhat important is my guess I'm curious how much people so for example some people I've talked to in OCW have sort of come around to this opinion they don't necessarily see the raw material that's published by open course search partners is being generated meaning it's not like the stuff that you start with and then you'll actually manipulate it directly to create new things they see as being representative so it's there you know now people can see how we do it they can see the things we think are important decisions we make and then they can kind of use it as a model right and I think that whether or not we thought it would be generative or not as we said earlier with someone who's here what we've seen so far is the evidence is that most people don't actually seem to build directly of resources they don't adapt them from a source derive them and then republish them so you can see this clear there's a parent and there's a child you know when there's a version 1 version 2 and instead most people seem to just consume them and you never hear anything more about it and I guess is that a problem I mean does that just represent the reality of the world that most people will consume things as offered especially if they're available for free and that a lot of the sort of derivation kind of work doesn't actually depend on being able to derive the work directly or is that representative you know a real issue that we need to solve how do we get people to actually build off things directly anyway I'm an instructor and I one of my biggest issues I take but there's a huge question like where do I put it back and then how how does somebody like what's the value of what I adjusted for my own classroom like is somebody really going to have value or see the small changes that I made or the big changes that I made there's just a lack of the technology I think is missing or the I don't know what to call that but the box that we put our stuff back into for an instructor to know how to share back or the value of sharing back and would you I'm going to poke on you a little bit so you imagine that you're you've done that and you've made these changes so presumably you've made the changes for some good reason you have a particular need and you had some thinking and went into that changes you made I would imagine that for someone else to come along and take an interest in your version they would want to understand why those changes were made which then I think that's a burden on you as the republisher to not just republish it but to include some neurata if you will you know well I did this because and I did this and this didn't work so well so I probably wouldn't do that again I mean can you imagine being part of that kind of an ecosystem that kind of a community or is that starting to sound like something you just couldn't possibly have time to deal with I think I mean I think the time issue is huge because I mean if I'm taking it off I could see throwing it back up there and letting people but I know that I wouldn't sort through 18 different versions of a document like I wouldn't know so that I agree with you that that labeling or that description of why the change was significant in my world is important but it is a total time like for me why not just create my own thing and then like why would I go and take something that's already out there I'll just do it myself and then stay in my own little world which I think it's a problem I don't know how to solve it and I think it should be solved as far as getting instructors you know engaging in this community we were talking about bring back free software but they have versions and it's really beautiful how you can just take and then share back and then someone else will merge your changes the ones they like at least with the main document and then other people can pull off I mean it's a nice little timeline it's actually very cool but it is funny even in free software for using that as our metaphor it's not an inordinate success I mean the average number I'm actually a friend of the Bergman Center Harvard who does research into this the average number of contributors to all open source top software is one one person and then he says if you take it that's pulling from source forage and give up he says okay let's get rid of most of the noise so he says let's just look at the top 10% most active 10% he says the average number of contributors for those it's still one and then okay if you look at the top 2% the average number of contributors is 2 and it's kind of staggering quite how much one person can do but I think it is very uplifting even if you're that one person to know that you did that so even if you're just saying thank you I think that would land an enormous boost someone made use of this in some way I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing I don't think you have to look at that necessarily as a failure all these open source problems only one person is actually doing the work it might be that it's an ecosystem there's a whole bunch of ones and they generate the ecosystem upon which the 1% of which there's a 2 and a 10 and a 1,000 the Linux, the Apache they know the big systems and I think that's kind of true in education too there's going to be millions of ones and they have to be there because there are some straight upon which everything else gets built which a little sharing happens and then on top of that a little bit more sharing maybe there is no pinnacle to this maybe it's a flat, it's a table top or a mesa of sharing I think the usability a lot and the resharing goes a lot back to the standards I mean you guys have programming standards and languages around which you develop your content in education we do not in any of the arenas like media or any kind of little snippets and things you're creating there is kind of one in textbooks and I would say in our department I teach mathematics and we there are tools available and we have used them CK12 is one where we go and grab textbooks that have already been created that we like and we can repackage them we can change a few things at our own title page, do that kind of thing and then republish our own book that comes from the resources and we've done that with several classes starting this semester but it's a format that has some recognized standards or common elements in terms of presentation and usability what was the incentive for you guys to do that? Well cost is primary we are in a community college system and to ask a student especially in a developmental math class to pay $150 for a calculator I mean they've just paid more for materials to put the entire course so to make it as free it's easy for them in terms of cost as possible and in that case if you were making adjustments it kind of fit with the way the resources are provided and the tools they have so you could make a judgment call about never mind the license we know we can get it we know we can get permission to adapt or we can have a conversation about what we would change use the tools they have and then republish back to a place that they hose and from a content perspective it's interesting when you're looking for things to mass produce for students in our minds we kind of had this conversation about is it good well it only needs to be good enough because then as instructors that's what we bring in the classroom is well this is presented this way here's an alternate method etc it has to be the best thing on the planet it nearly needs to be good enough for your purposes something that's interesting is a lot of what's been discussed especially in the second half it's really about individuals people are maybe small groups who might be working in an institutional context but we're not talking about large corporations or businesses that sort of taking the material repackaging it and trying to push it out it's really about individuals being able to play and really I'm just sort of parenting something that if Gary were here he would say one of the big challenges we face is a lot of it the way we make decisions especially around the licensing is based on this perception of what businesses will do what corporations will do we want some business entity to pick up our stuff repackage it, rebrand it and then go off and make a ton of money when you take them out of the picture and you say okay well what kinds of bad behavior do you want to stop individuals from doing most people go well nothing really I mean yeah there's some things you can imagine people doing that's not the concern and in fact that's usually the incentive is you're imagining some teacher or some small group of people that are being self-empowered to take hold of this thing that's been on offer and do something great with it I think that's an interesting problem for the community is trying to suss apart the concerns and incentives that we imagine putting out there for the commercial space versus the concerns and incentives we have really around kind of grassroots individual individual use and I suspect that plays a lot into why licensing decisions go the way they are I think we probably have time for like one or two or come and sit so cable great from Creative Commons on the point of do people use other people's stuff I think I'm a big fan of going back to first principles if you think about the Academy at large one of the principles of the Academy is that we build on others' work we give credit when we use somebody else's work and just as an example if I wanted to be a biochemist today and I made a statement to the Academy stood up at a conference and said I'm going to figure out what the double helix structure of DNA looks like it's not out of the room because that work's been done and it's been done several times and you need to build on top of that and you need to get credit we're not interested in anything here to say that's the kind of work you want to do and yet that's exactly what we do not just in OER but with education at large we think that we all have to develop sociology one on one we all have developed videos and of course we don't so I made some statements this morning about what the federal government can do with its grants and what it makes us do is to bias in favor of grants that acknowledge that they don't have to build from scratch and use other people's high quality works I think what we can do as the community that launches projects and in many cases new OER projects to is a foundational set of statements so I'm going to be open course library Connie's gone but we started that and said our goal is to build the entire general education curriculum for community colleges and it's going to have a CC by license on it but before we even get started we acknowledge several things we're not the smartest folks out there we don't have all the answers and if we think that we do and if we think that we should build everything from scratch then frankly we're arrogant and we should be allowed to do such important work and so we're not going to start there and I'm sorry that Alana left the room from the sailor but sailor started with the same premise there are highest and low programs in their case and they said we're going to go out and look for what other people have done that we could build on and then and only then will we build new things we will build in the gaps and I personally think there's a huge opportunity for the community where we share a lot of common goals I think we all share in the common goal that if there's high quality openly licensed material or material that's in the public domain that's generally a good thing for people around the world who want to learn it's kind of a base goal and if that's true then I think we should do we should do a better job so again as an example the open course library when my physics engineering faculty started to build their course I said how do you look at MIT of a coursework they said no and I said how can you start to build OCW about physics and not having a look at MIT and they went oh yeah that's a mistake and they looked at MIT they used a bunch of MIT of a coursework they made good connections with MIT faculty into MIT projects so huge ones all around I think we don't do enough of that and I would encourage that as a best practice in any OER project to the same way that you adopted CK12 you could have said what's David's? Arizona so you could have said in Arizona we have the best teachers and faculty we're going to build our own open textbooks but they didn't they took the CK12 book it maybe wasn't perfect to make the modifications and to slice the ties of the way they want to I guess two quick comments I just want to follow up on my cable set interestingly enough depending on your student population and of course I have research across the board my students want to hear my voice they don't connect as well if I give them more generic resources created by someone else if I can find resources that are more specific to the online that's great but the reason I create so much is because my students want to hear me they don't even want to hear my colleague down the hall they want to hear me so that's an issue sorry just because I know we have one minute left so just want to say thank you for participating and my hope certainly and I hope all of you will go through this whole conference thinking about this is that more of these kinds of issues are the ways to facilitate republication of derivatives that's a big challenge people have right now what are the ways that we can kind of obviously ignore the license in the service of trying to get to these other more compelling challenges that we have quality control how we actually get adoptions into districts how we actually bring people together to leverage existing material regardless of who they are and so forth I would think that at this point there's enough as Cable put it quite eloquently there is a shared baseline perspective that we all have on this and while the license issue is certainly an interesting one it too often comes in the way of oh because it's this license you can't do it or oh you're really making the wrong choice nobody's going to do X, Y, Z with your stuff and maybe it's time to kind of move past that a little bit actually saying you know let's yes that's there but let's move on let's think about these other things how do we get people to do things we really care about and we might through research then be able to backtrack our way to say ah yeah this this licensing issue is a real impediment I feel like it's backwards anyway