 Thank you all So thanks all of you for having me here today. Thanks to the David to the Open Ed 2018 planning committee for inviting me to speak honestly. I can't tell you how honored I am I feel like sort of a newcomer to this crowd and I'm really excited about Being here to talk to you a bit today. I'm particularly excited to see how many of you've turned out for a presentation That says nothing other than keynote You all have no idea what I'm gonna say and yet you're here Josh Barron challenged me to go ahead and just put this slide up as I was trying to figure out what it was exactly My title was gonna be So there you go, Josh. I did it. I did it. I Know you were joking, but yet still I thought it seemed like a good idea So, you know, I was actually is I was trying to figure out what the title for this was gonna be Maybe I'll go over to the falls yesterday and get some inspiration But as it turns out, you know, they tell you you should only go to the Canadian Falls don't bother with the US And I didn't think to bring my passport Plus I've been hearing that Actually, you have to pay a dollar to get back into the US once you're over there And frankly, I didn't want to be faced with that conundrum. You know, is it worth the dollar? Right, I hear that there's like a whole crowd of Americans over there milling about trying to figure out And the Canadians are shelling out dollars saying here you go. Okay. Okay. Go back. Please So, um, so I didn't get over there yesterday, but I did feel like at the very least, you know I ought to acknowledge our location in the title for this presentation And actually did find some inspiration in the story of a badass Widowed financially struggling school teacher named Ann Edson Taylor Who on October 21st 1901 on her 63rd birthday became the first person to survive Going over the falls in a barrel She decided that this is going to be a great way to, you know Take care of our financial situation through lots of fame and fortune And just actually here talk about a micro obsession. This is a place where you might do some research Lots of really there she is. She's already got it Really interesting stuff as you take a look at Take a look at this story a little more closely. So for example While she was taking a big risk. She actually had done her research She was making her availing herself of the most advanced engineering technologies of the day in 1901 like straps And cushions and I think that's a pillow on her head And of course, I think she's probably wearing a corset which may actually have been the thing that saved her in the end I'm not sure Also, uh, she had fully tested the barrel as it turns out She said her cat over the falls first Which I guess is why she felt obligated to include the cat in this picture of her with the barrel I'm pretty sure that cat lost eight of its nine lives that day And last but not least it actually appears if you look closely at this picture Jess That she's holding a cell phone. This may have been the first time A cell phone went over the falls as well and of course she had it so that she could snap the selfie On the way down right As it turned out, uh, less than 20 minutes after she was set adrift in that barrel She was recovered at the bottom of the falls bleeding from the head But otherwise unscathed And when they interviewed her later, she was quoted as saying if it was with my dying breath I would caution anyone against attempting this feat I would sooner walk up the mouth of a cannon knowing it was going to blow me to pieces Then make another trip over the falls Unfortunately she didn't make much money from this feat And her manager actually ended up absconding with the barrel So she didn't even end up with that in the end. I guess she kept the cat. I assume so But nevertheless she inspired a slew of imitators And this is where you can continue your research Jess. They're all sorts of great stories And actually as you know now inspired the talk The title for my talk today, which is I survived Niagara Falls and a skirt and heels now what? All right. Yeah, I whoo. Yeah, really it was a woman a 63 year old woman. Come on So as david mentioned I direct the current center for academic innovation at the university system of mariland So I work with all 12 of our public higher ed institutions in the state on all means of academic innovation In fact the kurwin center's mission is actually to capitalize on recent findings from the learning sciences and the capabilities of emerging technologies To increase access affordability and achievement for our students across the state And also and this got added a little bit later to identify best practices and facilitate not only efforts to scale Which is what chancellor kurwin who's retired now, but told me that was going to be my big job But importantly, I think increasingly Exploring ways that we can actually sustain those initiatives as well And that's going to be kind of at the heart of a lot of my remarks today Particularly with respect to to the oer work that we've all been so so engaged in But as you can see oer is actually not in my mission statement I view it as one of the many arrows in my quiver that I use to try to facilitate change across our institutions in the state And that includes a lot of other things like online learning learning and learner analytics Alternative credentials competency based approaches to curriculum design just to name a few So this is among many things that we're working on in mariland And one of the things we're working on to try to help facilitate change as I said Also given my background and david alluded to this a little bit I tend to view the challenges we face very much from an instructional design perspective Which I think will become even more clearer to you here shortly So the kurwin center set out to fulfill this mission starting in 2013 when I was hired a little over five years ago now And if you of course if you recall 2013 was famously called the year of the mook And if you've been paying attention Since then you know that much of the discussion in the media about innovation and higher education has been premised on the idea That a faculty would just embrace these bright new technology shiny objects Somehow we'd be able to fix everything that's wrong in higher post-secondary education today Unfortunately, it turns out that the history of technology use in education over the last 100 years or so paints a rather bleak picture Of the extent to which technology in and of itself can lead to sustainable academic transformation In fact, it was just a little over 100 years ago Shortly after he had invented the motion picture film in 1913 that thomas eddison was quoted as in an interview That the best use of his new invention would be for educational purposes because it was now possible To teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture And that books would become completely obsolete and scholars would be instructed with the eye He was so enthusiastic over the motion picture's instructional potential that he predicted that educational films would change schooling completely within 10 years Similarly on the 30s and 40s It was widely expected the combined effects of radio's voice sound effects and music might gain learners attention and stimulate their imagination So that when educational radio came on the scene pundits claimed it had undreamed possibilities for education That would resurrect the oral instructional techniques employed so successfully by famous teachers of the past like socrates You see where that got us And my personal favorite that could have been lifted directly out of new york times thomas freedman article around 2013 There will be vast universities of the air with courses taught by national leaders of the field And so these patterns have repeated over and over again in the 50s and 60s during the baby boom television was touted as an Excuse me an efficient and inexpensive way to satisfy the nation's instructional needs And in the 70s and 80s it was going to be the mainframe and then the personal computer that was predicted to provide students access To the personal services of a tutor as well informed and responsive as Aristotle So as it turns out is when traces the history of technology used in education, there's an incredibly clear pattern that emerges First the enthusiastic claims about the educational benefits. This is the greatest thing since slice bread It's going to revolutionize education education. We know what currently will cease to exist Then there's the rush to adoption the new technology bulls everyone over is they hurry to figure out what to do with it Without a set of guidelines or a foundation of research to suggest best practices And then we start to hear the implementation difficulties Logistical problems with classroom implementation little consideration given to the practicality of working with the new technology in the classroom So radio shows lasted longer than class periods And and the content wasn't aligned to the curriculum Huge expense of purchasing and maintaining these devices in schools that were already resource strapped And in some cases are actually safety issues. So in the new york city schools where the cuny folks In the early days of educational film the projectors would overheat and catch fire Kind of a problem for teaching and I can't imagine what that fire drill looked like we got Who's here? Who's staying at the Sheridan the fire drill the other night? Yeah You saw how that went Um, and of course little to no instructor training and often where there is training for instructors It's only in function. So here's how you print. This is where you go to do this thing rather than what to do with the tools pedagogically Consequently it ends up being a much larger hassle for the instruction instructors than it is to do simply do without it Then last but not least the final death knoll the research starts to trickle in research comparing technology based instructions To traditional methods that yields no significant differences Yeah And then we dismiss the whole enterprise out of hand on the basis of an underlying lack of instructional substance And go on to the next thing Does this all sound familiar We just recently went through this over the last five years or so with moops In the end the basic act of teaching really has been changed very little Over the last hundred years or so despite all the hype And the technologies that have transformed a whole range of businesses such as car manufacturing and retail the retail sector Have not had the same transformative impact on education For education like nursing and other labor intensive sectors that rely on human interaction or activities The technologies we've had available to us to date simply haven't been Capable of producing the kind of growth and productivity over time to transform the way we do business Stated differently. It takes nurses about the same time to change a bandage in 2018 as it did for them to change a bandage in 1968 Same is true for faculty right takes us about the same amount of time to mark an essay today as it did 50 years ago In the 1960s william bommel called this the cost disease And I think I finally understand this this may be way too much economics for early morning on a friday at the last day of the Conference, but let's let's try this just for a minute With technological innovations in some sectors and this would be the top row of this chart Productivity increases at a rate similar to or even greater than the raise it rise in wages for the workers in that sector This of course results in a decrease in the cost per unit But in other sectors education being among them The introduction of those same technologies In the when when those same technologies are introduced the wage increase the wages increase But the productivity does not see i'm still stumbling over this The wages increase, but the productivity does not in that lower arrow Which results in an increase in the cost per unit? So while you know again I realize this is way more economics than you want one of the really interesting observations that bommel made in all Of this was that when this happens the industries in that upper row Start exerting serious pressure on that bottom row to become more productive Which for higher education at least translates recently into you're not producing enough X graduates to meet the workforce needs of the 21st century and the ones you are graduating Don't have the skills we need So we start seeing this additional pressure exerted on us as a result of this This difference in the way technology affects our level of productivity So i'm sorry i'm feeling like a Debbie downer I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but the technologies that have revolutionized other industries and whole such great promise for transforming higher ed Won't ever lead to meaningful change unless we find a way to break this cycle So how do we do that? How many english majors in the room? I told somebody yesterday. I was going to do this. I love this experiment See we all managed to find a job. Look at that Somehow thank you. Yes. Thank you very much Um, so so for me, you know, there's an awful lot in a word. Um, so let's take a look at our definition of technology for a moment As the average person to define technology and they're likely to point to some device right their cell phone their laptop the Big screen tv on the wall Something something like that But as it turns out if you look up the word scholars actually view the term more broadly to mean Something like this the application of our knowledge about tools techniques or systems to solve practical problems So in addition to the fact that terms meaning is actually much broader than most people realize There are a few things about this definition that might jump out at you First of all on some respects Technology is almost more of a verb than a noun, right? It involves Some sort of thing tool technique or system. Excuse me. It's it's not just that It's the application of how we use the thing that's key Second note that what's actually being applied in the definition is our knowledge of the thing not the thing itself This suggests we must have a keen sense of the affordances or action possibilities the thing provides upon which we might capitalize I'll explain a little bit more about what I mean by that in a minute And third the definition presupposes some practical problem that must be solved or that a need that must be addressed You could even almost say that in the absence of that need It really almost can't be called a technology at all So let's take a minute and walk through this together What's a practical problem we're trying to solve today in higher education? I think in a nutshell we can mostly say at least in my experience at the public institution level It's about how to do more with less You guys are all aware of the pressures on higher education today during the past 10 years since the great recession of 2008 And its aftermath have created funding shortfalls and altered campus revenue streams Shifting higher education from what economists perceived as a public good to much more of a private good instead The great recession decimated state budgets and while we have finally have had financial downturns before In the past higher ed usually recovered these dollars eventually But not this time Only six states have had higher ed budgets returned or Returned to or surpass their pre recession levels in 19 states expenditures per student are at least 20 Lower than before the recession leaving higher ed institutions scrambling to find some alternative sources of revenue Part of that revenue of course is coming from tuition increases, right? So there was a recent study at temple at a temple that found for every $1,000 in funds cut by the state Colleges are raising tuition by about 300 dollars I don't know where the other 700 dollars is coming from but nonetheless Tuition is is continuing to rise And at the beginning of the last decades college students who went to public universities paid for about one third of their education Today in more than half the states they pay for most of it It's just a 10-year difference But the longer term effects of the recession have been more profound and less obvious In a trend that's been widely lauded The proportion of high school graduates who go straight to colleges increased from 63 percent in 2000 to about 70 percent now According to the u.s. Department of Education. That's great good news The bad news is unfortunately one in five will quit That's partly because schools have historically focused more on recruiting students than on keeping them unfortunately Our efforts to improve retention have had only marginal effects up by 2.6 percent at public institutions and only 1.3 percent at private institutions since 2011 Most of those who leave as we know are among and and just spoke to this eloquently the other day Most who leave as we know are among the most economically disadvantaged and the data are chilling A child born into a family in the highest quartile of income has roughly 85 percent chance of earning a college degree Whereas a child born into a family in the lowest quartile has less than an eight percent chance of earning a degree Additionally our student demographics are changing dramatically as we saw on our student panel today, right? Most of us attended College with a very different looking set of colleagues and peers at our institutions than we see today The non-traditional student is becoming the new normal with nearly one half of students Who are currently enrolled in higher ed now fitting into this category? According to the national center for education statistics the 17 america million americans enrolled in undergraduate higher education Look like this one in five is at least 30 years old One in four is caring for a child about half are financially independent from their parents A quarter take a year off before starting school Two in five attend a two-year community college before going to a four-year 47 percent go to school part-time at some point And 44 percent have parents who have never completed a bachelor's degree Across the university system in maryland a full two-thirds of our students now are transfer students That's a very different population than even just 15 or 20 years ago That we're coming in as new first-time students to our institutions And unfortunately way too many of our institutions are adequately addressing these changes in demographics Particularly with respect to these students competing constant tension between the obligations and education their their life obligations and their educational obligations This sends these students the message that this place is not made for me In particular, we need to move away from thinking in terms of simply focusing on education for students formative years You know that we're gonna we're gonna polish them up and send them on their way by providing fairly linear A fairly linear path to a degree and then then then launching them The needs of our new students in the rapid pace at which jobs and careers are changing calls for us to move away from a once and done All-or-nothing product to instead providing an education that sustains learners throughout their lives Rather than simply opening doors to potential entry-level jobs Universities are seeking ways to offer enduring educational experiences the on ramps and the off ramps of professional development and retooling when necessary These are the things that can support our students and alumni throughout their careers and the demands that these new students are putting on us But how do we do all this while our budgets are shrinking at the same time? So if finding ways to do more less that with less is the big practical problem Then what do we know about the tools that we have available to us? the key to understanding What the tools provide is in having knowledge is knowledge of what I uh spoke to earlier something that psychologists call affordances And affordances the relationship between a tool and an individual that affords the opportunity for that individual to perform an action So what the heck does that mean? For example, a switch a switch affords flipping a button affords pushing a knob affords twisting The way each of these light switches is designed affords different actions without those actions having to be explicitly stated Affordances of a tool can be used both to suggest and also to help shape an action And in some cases the tools affordances can actually also create barriers to action This is the cover-off of donald norman's new not new book because this is ancient Donald norman's book on the design of everyday things. I love this And in some cases the tools affordance excuse me Another example of a tool's affordance creating a barrier to action. This is a tough room in which to Teach a flipped active learning class for example Right So without understanding the practical problem for higher education today and the affordances of the available tools The next step is to decide exactly how we will make best use of the tools And to figure out how we avoid the temptation to use the tools to do things in the same way We've always done them in the past This functional fixedness as psychologists call it was illustrated by mayor's two-string problem back in 1931 The participants were required to figure out a way to tie two strings together Even though when holding onto one string the other was out of reach A variety of objects were laying on the desk in the room And in the suggestion was made that one of them held the solution to the problem As you can see one of those objects was a pair of pliers and as you can imagine most participants grab the pliers And use them to try to extend their reach towards the other string Which didn't work because it wasn't it still wasn't far enough In fact getting to the answer involved thinking about the other affordances of the of the pliers Anybody have a clue what one of the other affordances might have been? You probably already know I see use Go go with it It is close. It was actually the weight So the solution was to tie the pliers to the string and set it in motion like a pendulum so that it could be reached while holding the other string Looking very differently at the tool and understanding the other affordances that it provides This problem in education is perhaps most uh clearly illustrated. I think by this photo that uh, Larry cuban discovered in his research on constancy and change in the classroom I know it's a little fuzzy, but can can you guys tell what this is? So, uh, yeah, it is an airplane Um, it first blush it appears to be a fairly traditional classroom, right? I mean she's standing there in front of a chalkboard under a clock The kids are all dutifully paying attention to her and they're nailed to the floor desks But it's an airplane This was a unique opportunity in the 20s to teach geography from the sky But what have we done with that airplane? Simply replicated what we always do in the classroom. The kids aren't even looking out the windows, right? And can you tell she's pointing at a globe? In the absence of knowing what to do with these tools and thinking through the affordances and really examining What's possible what these tools make possible? We have a tendency like you know educators aren't any different than everybody else We have a tendency to use the tools in the same way. We've always used them in the past So let's apply this idea to our recent experience with MOOCs as one more example thinking about MOOCs. Um, like that parapliers What's the one affordance we've failed to really capitalize on? Any guesses courses not so much. I mean, you know, we're making lots of courses Online wasn't such a big deal even in 2013. I can remember them going on and on about oh, we're going online It's like we've been doing online for years. What are you talking about? And i'm not even going to get into the open discussion with you all I mean, this is just you know, not the crowd to talk about MOOCs and um, they're used to the word open here In my mind, I think the one Affordance we've really missed out on is the massiveness piece Now sure. Yeah, we we we took massiveness and we used it to think and thought about it only in terms of scale How are we going to scale education? How are we going to reach the masses? How are we going to, you know, Make make it that much more accessible for many many more learners and that's been terrific But I think unfortunately one of the things we missed out on is something that uh, George Siemens and Stephen Downs have been talking about in terms of x MOOCs and c MOOCs So what they suggested was yeah, sure go ahead to the x MOOC is the the What we will call a traditional MOOC right now Go ahead and use the scale part of massiveness to increase access to learning about core skills and concepts And some light application those kinds of things Then you use what we know about the affordances of a face-to-face environment To bring students together. We're a teacher will help guide students in authentic project based application of the skills and concepts That were introduced in the x MOOC and then lastly Design something called a c MOOC that capitalizes on how the massiveness brings folks together to do things like crowd sourcing solutions to wicked problems And building community around doing Think differently about the affordance and what that is making possible In terms of education and the things that we are trying to accomplish So you know where this is going right? I have to bring it back How are we doing with OER? Well, just like the massiveness of MOOCs that was going to scale education and make it affordable and accessible to the masses The freeness of OER has been the thing that the media and the popular press has jumped all over We've made huge strides in saving money and we have improved access But have OER's really begun to change the way we do things Or are we simply replicating what we've always done in the past swapping textbooks for OER's and calling it a day Now I know you all know better But I will tell you on Boots on the Ground what's happening in our institutions Unfortunately at the implementation level generally speaking Higher ed is giving into our inclination towards functional fixedness once again And I'm concerned about that Please don't get me wrong. I love free stuff just like everybody here And we have made tremendous strides in saving lots of students lots of money and Believe me, I'm the first one to lead with this message as well. I was talking to somebody the other day and they said Yeah, but people really like the free stuff No question about it. I've done the same thing particularly when talking to state legislators That's actually how we got the money for our textbook cost savings act in 2017 That was passed by the Maryland General Assembly you tell them that we can save 20 students 20 million dollars a year and boy do their eyes light up That's the governor by the way In the yellow tie Yeah, I need to be fair because this will I always talk about I'm going to go to bookstore jail This is going to send me to real jail. I think It was a very hot very long day And he was literally saying let's move this along as they were snapping the picture So I'm looking forward to my next opportunity to be at a bill signing and get a better picture But as we really dig into what it's going to take to scale and sustain oer Adoptions at our institutions. We're also coming to terms with what a huge lift undertaking oer curation adaptation creation and sustainability is going to be We're coming to realize that the care and feeding of that oer puppy isn't so free to our institutions Who as we've already discussed are already increasingly resource strapped Several of us are working now to figure out what oer is going to cost our institutions in terms of actual dollars in human resources Expended in the curation Adoption digital rights and accessibility compliance creation of new materials and maintenance over time And while it's going to take us a little while to really understand what that figure might be for the sake of argument Let's just say we come up with something around 20 25 dollars per student per course. Let's just go with that for a minute What happens when the publishers are finally able to get their offerings of copyrighted materials down to 25 dollars or even less? What then will the value proposition of open be and how do I go to my faculty? My administrators my regents my legislators and build a case for why we should go with open Instead of these materials Do we just pack up and go home at that point take our barrel put the cat in it and leave? So let's go back to our definition again for a moment. What else do we know about oer's in addition to the fact They're free now. This is the audience should know the answer to this The five rs, right While being free is awesome oer's can also include free copyright permission It allows others to engage in these five r activities as all of you know And what is so knowing that knowing that as is the affordances that we're working with what is the practical practical problem We're trying to solve For higher education for my mission. It's all about student success It has to be at the end of the day about student success And two big components in helping students succeed. Of course is providing access And making it affordable no question about it. We've made great strides with oer in those regards But achieving this goal requires that we work to increase access affordability as well as achievement We can't leave that piece out of this It has to be integral to what we're talking about with respect to student success And unfortunately these three things form the corners of what has been come to know be known as the iron triangle problem for higher education That's because it turns out they're pretty closely linked and have a fairly reciprocal Relationship to each other for example to improve achievement You often have to put more money in the systems or be prepared to see higher education become less accessible to students Conversely cutting costs in higher ed eventually leads to cuts either at access or learning outcomes So these things have a tendency to move reciprocal I won't be able to say that you know what i'm saying Now the open movement as I said has made huge progress in helping to improve student achievement as well Don't get me wrong. I know about the work many of you are doing around open education open pedagogy They're all proving to be very promising And at least we have been working with a hypothesis that having access to instructional materials on day one of class Should help as well Although if you haven't had a chance to see the ed surge article this morning that covered Phillip grimaldi's presentation yesterday You you should take a look in which some of his research has been suggesting that providing access In and of itself may not be quite enough to improve student achievement interesting interesting article But what happens when we further capitalize on the five hours part of being open? What happens when we we take that affordance and look at it differently? Just like george seamans is looking at the massiveness of foreign affordance differently What happens when we begin systematically engaging and revising remixing redistributing to improve student achievement in our courses? What happens when we couple oer's with the data? We need to understand what's working and what's not working for our students Then use what we know from that and from good design to create materials that we then later We evaluate and redesign again is needed I've recently come to the realization that the open part of oer may actually be a super affordance That can help us to address access affordability and achievement simultaneously If we're willing to build on the successes We've already realized based on the free part And usually affordances these affordances to also change the way we are currently teaching Using data more effectively to assess the impact on student achievement and then redesigning when we discover we haven't gotten things right That to me is the value proposition of open That's the answer to the faculty When piercing comes in and says I have a $25 solution for you This is the stuff we should be focusing on next So what i'm talking about here of course is a continuous quality improvement loop, which is Not a term often uttered in higher education trust me. It goes along with return on investment We don't say those things. We also don't advertise on billboards and you know all these other things It's suddenly now we're starting to do And don't get me wrong. I'm not being naive This kind of change to a process in which we get faculty to engage in continuous quality improvement is going to be another heavy lift But I think this is the direction in which we need to be heading Now let's come back to that not so free puppy for a minute. By the way, I wish this is my dog cooper I wish I'd called him oer because he um he's in all of these uh presentations that I do But I am really seriously worried about this part. I mean really seriously worried Our higher educations are in no position to take on all the roles that publishers have served for us in the past And I think about some of our resource strap schools in the system I saw Catherine Cameron a little bit ago my colleague Catherine from our cop and state university for one Coppins in west baltimore where freddy gray lost his life and we had riots over the inequalities I can't imagine how they could possibly support scaling oer across the entire university Without the support of third-party vendors in order to make that possible. They just don't have the capacity for it internally We're doing what we can out of the system office and through the kerwin center to support these institutions But I don't have a whole lot of money either We've got to find some way to create efficiencies across the sector to avoid bankrupting the very institutions who are serving the students. We are most trying to help We need Access to inexpensive digital rights and accessibility compliance services Better support for curation including national standards around meta tagging and cataloging oer for discoverability More oer materials at higher levels and help with the creation of those A set of unified standards and a system for review of oer quality and peer review of content and a system that Incentivizes faculty not with money, but with a reward system similar to the citations index we use for scholarly publications Training for faculty and students and how to teach and interact with oer's We need to figure out how to support our institutions with transition plans Like for example when the bookstore goes out of business and leaves Prior to the institution actually having converted entirely over to oer We need a sustainable business model and we need more research on achievement as the ed search article pointed out earlier today None of these things are easy Undertakings in fact it seems to me like herbert simon that improvement in post-secondary education is going to require Converting teaching from a solo sport to a community-based research activity and i'm not just talking in within our institutions I'm talking about all of us All of us are going to have to pull together In order to make this work to that end the university system of maryland has been collaborating with suny and cuny On exploring the creation of a multi-stake collaboration that we're calling driving oer sustainability for student success or doers three Our plan is to leverage the collective strengths of the collaborative to build capacity To take established oer initiatives to scale and support each other in shaping national state and system-wide innovation In the areas of oer access quality research policy and accessibility My time's short so i won't get into more details about what our plans are but we met yesterday with leaders of several additional state universities State initiatives and would be happy to talk with others about doers as well But i think it's this kind of multi institutional multi system multi state collaboration That's going to help at least for our part for the higher ed part to move things forward Additionally, the maryland open source textbook initiative or most as we've been calling it I'm very pleased to report and announce that we have received funding from the hulet foundation to support Our investigation into some of these things and i i don't know if angela is in the room But tremendous thanks to angela and to there she is and to kent For the support i pledged to angela and kent that i would not come back to them for more money That this was going to be about us finding a sustainable business model and figuring out how to to bootstrap ourselves So i'm here telling all of you just like you know, i'm going to lose five pounds before the next time you see me That that i i i intend to to honor that pledge to them and i'm looking forward to working collaboratively with all of you On how to solve some of those problems So while it may feel like uh, you know, we've been over the falls in that barrel with an Edson taylor We really can't stop now. In fact, it feels to me like this is a really pivotal time in this movement Um, we've gained momentum. We've got our state legislators Interest we've got the federal government's interest. We've got to figure out now how to make this really work So what's critical at this juncture Is that we not simply use new tools to perpetuate doing the things we've in the ways we've always done them in the past Instead our work must be aimed at helping us understand what needs to be fixed and how to capitalize on the affordances of oer To best address those needs Until higher education makes this shift We're going to continue to deprive our students of the transformative power of technologies as it has done in other sectors And I believe this incredibly important oer work that you we are all engaged in collectively May be the one thing that actually Has ever had the real potential to get us there to move the needle on all three parts of that iron triangle simultaneously So despite the fact it may have felt a little debbie downer. Um, this is really more called action I'm incredibly optimistic and I think this room Here's the energy for making this possible making this happen. So thank you all for your time and for listening to me today