 Social learning across content is a collection of organizations seeking open and sustainable ways for content to be used across platforms, especially in support of teachers and students working around and with that content. We started reaching out to people we knew to see whether this concept made sense to them and the feedback was really positive, so the idea was born to form a coalition. Social learning across content is a group of some of the biggest content creators, providers, platforms, and stakeholder groups in education working together towards cross-platform social learning. We'll work on technical best practices to align content platforms with the needs of social learning tools and how to give users the best experiences. What this initiative represents to me is this idea of trying to bring the best of the web and the good things we've done on the web around connection and sharing and being able to collaborate and work together and mirroring that with educational technology or educational content and finding ways that we can make educational materials and the process of education more rich and fulfilling and powerful for students who are learning. The group of organizations participating in the social learning across content coalition will hopefully work collectively to improve discovery, access, and engagement with content within learning management systems for students and faculty. Social learning has always been social but not necessarily in a technology way, so the help you get from the student next to you in class to help explain a topic is something that has always happened in the physical space but hasn't always been orchestrated in the virtual space, so getting students to work together and help explain and help students along the learning journey is something we need to foster across the whole ecosystem. It's a way for users, for my own personal and my company's goals, academic users to help them collaboratively read, learn from, and learn from each other as they go through their academic materials, communicate with each other about that, provide feedback to each other, and learn not just from their instructors but their peers. It's imperative as we move into increasingly virtual and cross-domain research projects that we have access to a full reimagining of how we utilize educational resources. So a coalition that makes available the interaction that students have with learning materials and enables faculty to reach in and coalesce those interactions from across a wide variety of what are currently product silos and contained gardens is an essential element that allows us to have a broad imagining of what our students are learning, what our gaps are, how teachers can improve their instruction, and how we deliver adaptive learning to the broadest imaginable community. We have signed on to this effort for social learning across content to help address what we're seeing as core needs of users. Learners of any discipline have to navigate a variety of platforms to do their work. There are learning management systems and publishing platforms and aggregator platforms, and it's kind of a bewildering of variety, especially for undergraduate students and the user experience. A lot of these sites might provide similar tools and similar functionality, but you really have to kind of learn each one on your own. You have to then find a way to integrate the work that you're doing outside of those platforms with the work that you can do inside those platforms. It just becomes really complicated. It feels like we're placing a pretty big burden on the student, the user, that that distracts them from doing their actual work. What we're seeing is that students who use multiple services to do their coursework need help from all of the organizations that are participating in this effort to help connect the dots among those platforms. You know, we've seen on the web a movement towards consolidating and monopolizing certain kinds of behaviors, and I think it's important that the education community really gets behind the idea of open standards so that we can make sure that it's easy to build new applications, new approaches to things, but also so that we don't kind of limit who gets to play in that space. We believe students and faculty should be able to access digital learning solutions as seamlessly as possible. It's always going to be a multi-platform world. However, it should not seem that way to the learner. For us to have the kinds of interaction that this coalition is moving forward to provide an interoperable layer for enables those students and those faculty to be able to lay their hands on learning in a way that takes barriers away from students that have had to struggle through one portal or another portal without being able to knit together threads of information and knowledge that are vital to that understanding. We see learning happening across more and more digital tools and applications all the time, and it is vital from our perspective that institutions be able to design their learning and understand their student experiences across the digital tools and applications wherever the learning is happening. What we see is this coalition that has been brought together is focused on ensuring that that content, no matter what platform you're using it on, what device you're able to have that uniform environment and from a faculty's perspective or student's perspective, you can be anywhere you need to be in a very virtual or in-person learning experience. The goal here is to build quality products that meet students where they are and then using standards so that the tools are as intuitive as possible and align with course goals. In education, for example, we see that disabled students' service offices, which provide assistance to students, could annotate textbooks and add the information that a student with a disability needs that isn't present in the publication. We are participating in Slack to help establish interoperability standards amongst the community with an emphasis on OER textbooks. A key limitation we've had in the past was establishing a shared authentication infrastructure to enable students the seamless access to the power to personalize and to collectively annotate the textbook content. So for EPSCO, we're participating in this coalition because we've embraced standards like learning tools, interoperability and wholeheartedly believe that streamlining the workflow for faculty and students will most definitely lead to improve outcomes. Standards can really help us all kind of make the technology fade into the background and really bring the learning to life in a new and modern way. The ability for us to have the content integrated into the system but the functionality kind of ubiquitous across those different implementations is a huge advantage. So things like hypothesis allow us to bring context to the content but not be tied to the modality at which you're digesting that content. We think that training individuals, people with disabilities, to use this technology is one area that we'd be working on. And then providing guidance to schools and universities and to anybody that might be adding annotations to documents to assist people with disabilities. So I think what's happening here with this new social learning effort is beginning to apply these tools that we have available to us, these open annotation standards on a variety of material that will unlock the accessibility of this to more and more people and allow them to share with each other their reflections on the material, enhance it, make it more useful to other people and just generally contribute to the overall process of a collaborative learning environment. Well, most importantly, we want to make sure that teachers and classes are able to study the materials in JSTOR that they have rights to without jumping through needless hoops. Once that is possible, I can imagine all sorts of new options and tools that we and others can build that leverage that access and support of educators and learners from shareable syllabi and reading lists to classroom annotation. I think we have an obligation to work individually to overcome these. And I think collectively we have an obligation to work together to address common problems that are really inhibiting the ability of individuals to learn and produce high quality work. So it's a lot of shared interest. I mean, that's the bottom line, I think, is that there's so many people out there doing these common kind of activities. And I truly do think that there's strength in numbers and that we can do more together than we can apart. If your mission is to, has anything to do with trying to be a benefit to the world of education and learning and collaboration and just trying to help humanity grow up, then the question I would turn around and say, well, why aren't you participating? Because because this is an obvious direct path toward those goals. I'd encourage others to join the social learning across content effort for a few different reasons. Creating a cross-platform solution for social learning benefits students and instructors by establishing a consistent, easy to use experience. The work will improve learning outcomes for students. And it also will make just learning more active and visible and collaborative. But it also benefits publishers and content creators and those platform developers who are interested in education as well by focusing on compatible and interoperable solutions. It will simplify product development and hopefully speed the time to market for the products that we're all building. The coalition to assist essentially in flattening access to information involved in pedagogy is a strategic goal that a university like ours sees as one of the required elements of the next generation of education. I would start by inviting them to think about where education is going to be in 10 years and asking them to think about what it's going to take between now and then to get there. And I think nobody believes that we're going to be using fewer digital tools or less digital media and the way we design and deliver education. I don't think anybody would argue that learning is going to be less social than than it is today. And I think that it's a big strategic question about how to get early in the process of transforming education to achieve that vision of a more social, unified, digitally mediated, efficient, student driven and institution led learning ecosystem. I think it's critical for organizations to get on board with this project. We would really love to see that happen. At the end of the day, it's to the benefit of all of our users and we just see that as a win all around.