 So we're going to jump right into it and leave time for questions at the end. Mary Newfort, the director of the consortium, and we'll be going over the agenda. So today we're going to talk about the activities that we had from 2014 for those that missed the presentation at our conference just to give you some of the highlights of our activities. We have Susan Huggins, who is here today from Open College at Kaplan University, and she's going to talk about the Open portfolio that they've developed. We'll have a report out on the Open MOOC pilot that we've been doing this year, an update on the Open Education Information Center. We'll also talk about the Global Implementation Strategy for OER that's happening. I'll give you some highlights from the conference this year and where you can find more information in case you missed some of the presentations, and then leave time for your questions and comments. If at any time you have any questions or comments that you'd like to make, we invite you to please ask questions, jump in, type in the chat window, raise your hand, and we'll be happy to stop and talk a little bit about whatever questions you have. So to start off, we wanted to go over the highlights of some of our activities from 2014. One of the big activities we had at the beginning of last year was an exchange program with the U.S. State Department in cooperation with the Arab League and Alexa. And we had 15 professionals from across the Middle East and North Africa region come to the U.S. for three weeks to learn about OER and Open Education and to visit various universities in Boston, San Francisco area, Washington, D.C., and then have internships and placements at various universities for a full immersive experience. This program was really successful. We had generated incredible interest. Every single person who was in this program has gone home and done something in their home country, one of which is another project we've been deeply involved with. This is the National e-learning center in Saudi Arabia. And they have started a big project on open education, one component of which is to train their female faculty members on e-learning and open pedagogies. And so we've been involved in designing and delivering this program since February and it will continue through December. We also launched the Open Education Professional Directory last year. Hopefully you're all listed in it and have been able to use it for your various needs. The Open Education Professional Directory has almost 300 entries right now. And we will be continuing to refine and to work on this to make it useful for everyone this year. We also had a great program with the Organization of American States and Virtual Education and combining together to help support a portal where educators in Latin America can come together and find Spanish language resources to support their learning. And we've been taking up the open component of that. And Marcelo Morales has been working quite hard on it this year and is pretty excited about the launch of the portal that will take place very soon. We also had a really successful Open Education Week thanks to many of you who participated. We found that the level of engagement this year in Open Education Week was very high. That we were successfully able to reach over into communities that haven't participated in the past. That we had well over 100 different universities participating online. And then other universities participating through local events that some of which we didn't even know about until after the fact. But we found that this is now an event that people are planning calendars around and that has been fully incorporated into outreach efforts. So we want to thank you all for that. As one indicator, we found some really interesting Twitter activity which reached nearly 2 million people through the networks in just the four days of the first four days of Open Education. We also moved our search function over to Merlot so that we could combine efforts and make exposure to OER even greater. So Merlot is now working with us on the search which allows people to find materials more readily and to find more extensive materials. And then one of the other activities we wanted to highlight was a special collection we've been working on. We've taken Marshall McLuhan's digital materials and working with his daughter to make the transcript of his digital resources open and to make sure that they're available to everyone. So the Marshall McLuhan Speak Special Collection is just about ready to be launched. It will be launched in another week or so. And educators can take words right from him and incorporate it into their education. So we hope to be able to continue to work on different special collections this year. One of the slides that I realized did not get included in this but I did want to mention is the outcome of our elections this year. We have a new board member, Stavros, from FGV in Brazil who has joined the board. Marie Lille from UNISL also in Brazil. Unfortunately, his term was up and so he left the board. So we have a new board president, James Lapagross-Clive is the president of the board and Larry Cooperman is remaining on as the past president of the board. So we have the benefit of both of their support. Next I wanted to invite Susan to talk about the open portfolio at Open College at Kaplan. Susan, do you want to take the microphone? You need to click on the talk button in order for us to hear you. All righty. Now can you hear me? Yes, we can. Fabulous. Thank you. I really appreciate this opportunity. We are really excited to launch this open portfolio product. Can I-yes, thank you so much. And you can go ahead and go to the next slide as well. The open portfolio is a concept that we came up with, I guess maybe about 24 months ago. It is a product that we developed actually in-house that helps learners track and manage their open courses, which we think this is a great tool in the open world. You can access it at the link that's provided in the slide right here. Off to the left you'll see Maximize Your OEC Experience with Open Portfolio. You just simply click on the link and you are directed directly to the portfolio. What is very unique about the portfolio, not only is it free and open to anyone, but you can also, as a learner, create multiple learning plans. You can create it by topic. You can self-organize it. You can create professional topics, topics of interest, or maybe even topics that are discipline-related, such as topics in higher ed to help you prepare or strengthen your academic skills. We also have a series of what is called Suggested Learning Plans, and these are learning plans that are pre-populated. We have faculty that will go through here and make some recommendations about various courses that together will make up a particular learning plan, such as business management is one that's huge that has the most users in those particular topics. We also have health management, entrepreneurship, humanities, and information systems. If anyone would like to see a particular learning plan with particular courses, you're welcome to send them directly to me and I'll get them created for you if there's a certain grouping that you use the most. Right now, this is made up of the collaboration between us and Open Education Consortium. So right now, the courses contained in the Open Portfolio come from courses that are listed on OEC website. This slide, I just wanted to show you right quickly, is really the robust of the word search here in the Open Learning Portfolio. If you just simply enter a keyword in the keyword area, click search, it will search by title, keywords in the description, et cetera. We also have an advanced search where you can isolate it by institution, by language, or even by category. And again, if there's categories that we can help you with that you would see a little bit more defined, please reach out to me and we'll work and see if we can get it added for you. And the last slide, another aspect of the Open Portfolio that we thought was very useful to the learners is to see who else was in the particular courses. We have the ability on the little drop down inside of each course, you'll see a little drop down that says learners. And you can select the little drop down to see who else may be studying that particular course. You can message back and forth within the community, within the Open Portfolio, without having to go outside and fill out other mailboxes, so to speak. But you can see who else is in the courses. We have many other features in the Open Portfolio. Oh, I'm sorry, there's actually one more slide. Under the About Us tab in the Open Portfolio, we are soliciting feedback. And we would love your honest feedback and we would love users to get in here and share with us how they're using it, where they're using it, and if they find it beneficial. This is a product that we are testing with the Open Education Consortium. And we would love your feedback. So complete the survey. It's only about six questions. And give us your honest feedback. We'd love to make this a tool that we all can use and help us manage our open learning. If you have any questions, my email is on the last slide, as well as our Twitter handle at Open College at KU. And thank you for the opportunity. And I really, really look forward to everyone's comments. Great. Thanks, Susan. Do you have any questions for Susan right now? You'll also have an opportunity at the end of the meeting. And if I can follow up, we'll be sponsoring a webinar on July 15th. So stand by for an announcement and more information on the webinar. We'll be actually giving a detailed demo inside the open portfolio so you can see more in depth of how it works. I do see a question. Do we want to address these now, or shall we just say at the very end? I'm going to go ahead and address the ones right now. And then if they're more at the end, we can take them then. But I think if people have questions specifically to your presentation, best to do that now. Yeah, absolutely. There is one for Amy. She was just asking about course content. That's something you would work out with OEC by loading your courses to the OEC website because we're just pulling directly from there. We're not dealing with content in the open portfolio per se. We're using the content that's already on OEC. And yes, there are ways for faculty to contribute. And James, I couldn't agree more. I think in this world right now, let me read the question. James just made a comment. He said that this portfolio tool is very timely and will fulfill a need for learners. And we were thinking along the same pathway is that in the open world per se, there is no way to really track and manage all the open learning. And if you're like me, I've got lists here and lists there, but no collective way to bring it all together. So we think this is step one of particularly a project that could be very beneficial to open learners. So again, I'm very interested in your feedback. You are welcome, Amy. And if that's all the question, do you have my email, please feel free to reach out to me. I really look forward to your feedback. Great. Thanks, Susan. I'm interested also to see what people do with this and how we can improve it and make it easier for people to collect and eventually assess their learning. Yes. Great. So we'll move on then to a report out on the open MOOC pilot that we've been doing. And I wanted to throw up a slide that we put up here last year in our first quarterly membership meeting almost exactly a year ago on why we were doing this. Why did we think that open MOOCs was a good idea? One of the things we thought at the time was that our members were really interested in doing MOOCs but didn't have the opportunity to participate in the current offerings or wanted to perhaps cast it out before committing fully. We also thought there was a real need to leverage existing OER and to put it in a way that it could benefit from the interactions and the opportunities that presented in a MOOC platform and to make them really fully open MOOCs. So we decided to do open enrollment as well as open content. We decided to go with edX because they were using open source software and they were also aligned with the ideals that we have as a community. So to update you on what we've done then in the past year, we ran the pilot with eight courses from universities around the world. So we were able to do this in multiple languages. So we worked with the National Chatsen University in Taiwan, Hokkaido University in Japan, and a Rundle Community College in the U.S., Tufts University in the U.S., the Test India Teacher Education Program in India, which is a collaboration between Indian universities and the Open University of the U.K., and the Polytechnic University of Madrid. You can see from the screenshot that several of those courses are either starting really soon or are actually going on right now. The pilot phase actually took longer to develop the MOOCs than we had initially anticipated. So many of those MOOCs have started since March of this year and going on through early fall. We decided to survey those who had participated in the pilot and to figure out what it took for them to actually make MOOCs out of their OER. One of the criteria that we had for doing an open MOOC was that it be based on existing open educational materials. And so we asked them first about the time commitment and we found that the time commitment is quite significant. They reported that it took a lot of time for instructional designers, for faculty, and for course facilitators. For those that didn't redo the video parts of their OER courses for the MOOCs, it only took about 10 to 20 hours of editing their videos to get them ready. But for those who decided to go with new videos, they spent well over $100 shooting and editing new videos for the MOOCs. And the MOOCs are generally fairly short. They average length is probably four to five weeks long. So this is not a full 15 week semester course. Project managers who just oversaw the process and kept things moving on the campuses averaged about 10 hours of work as did the higher level administrators. We asked about their re-use of OER and it really varied from institution to institution. The reported use of OER was between 25 and 100% new content that had to be made. And when we look at the 100% new content that had to be made, what that really meant is that they took the existing OER materials and basically remade the videos to make them more MOOC friendly because the videos that they had were primarily classroom shops and other things that weren't as useful in the MOOC setting. What we found was that lower cost of making the new MOOCs was correlated to reusing OER. And that's one of the things we have thought at the beginning. We'll see costs in just a second. That the new content again was primarily new video made specifically for edX's requirements and the MOOC platform. And that everybody had to create at least some new content. It wasn't possible to just use what was existing because edX has particular requirements that had to be made and that was primarily new content specific to the edX platform. We asked them about the cost in dollars and it depended on the extent of the modification of the materials that they had. The range was about $6,500 US dollars for universities that re-used much of their OER content to well over $100,000 for university that re-shot all of their video and created most of the material based on their OER but re-did it entirely for the edX platform. This is inclusive of staff time and other resources but obviously the extensive video work was the most expensive. And one of the things that we have found is that as the edX MOOC platform evolves and the requirements change, that the increase in requirements is directly related to an increase in time and cost for the university making the MOOC. There's also of course impact on the consortium itself. And one of the things that we have found is that the format of the existing OER has a big impact on how well it incorporates into edX. So different formats sometimes are harder to incorporate into edX and we have to work a lot more with the university to get it correctly rendered for them in the platform. That the overall process is quite involved and because it's evolving it requires a lot of communication and a lot of time back and forth. We were a bit surprised by the amount of time it actually required for the OEC staff. Just for the basic level communications didn't include reviewing the courses or any course design or even troubleshooting the platform itself. That we spent at least 40 hours per MOOC just discussing with edX and with the university on how this would evolve. One of the things that we have concluded from our pilot is that we do think that the open MOOCs are a really valuable contribution. But then in terms of our organization we won't be able to continue to offer them for no cost to our members because we have to at least cover our staff time. So one of the things that we are grappling with right now is the right way to do this. If we want to have a membership that would include MOOC support which would be at a different membership level and a different membership due structure or if we would want to have some type of a fee that would be associated with offering a MOOC through OECX. And we would really love to hear your comments on this and how we can support the open MOOC movement but also make sure that it has a positive impact on the organization. So if anyone has comments on that now we'd be really happy to hear that again and we can discuss at the end. Hi Mary, this is Steve Crescent. I would think you might be able to do both is to offer a membership level that includes the MOOCs and also maybe offer a null card option. I also had a question that you might see in the chat window there which is how much of the format adjustments that had to be made were related to policies from the edX group side and how much are related to technical requirements of the platform. Thanks Steve. Yeah, I should have mentioned earlier that I have a very strange thing happening with collaborate platform and the chat window gets so tiny I can't actually see it. So if you do type something in the chat window that you want me to respond to please signal me so that I can figure out how to read it. So yeah, so getting to your question Steve, a lot of the modifications were actually based on the changing requirements of edX. Certainly we found that some of the video for example that was shot in the classroom was harder to chop up into the small segments that the platform works best with. But it really was about the requirements of edX to have captioning and to have transcripts that go along with the videos that required quite a bit of additional work and editing and reshooting on the part of our members. Okay, that's helpful. I mean we're working with EdCast so we have an install of open edX set up for ourselves. But if anybody is looking for captioning service we use a service called FreePlay which is actually relatively affordable if anybody wants any more information that I'm happy to provide. Great, thanks. Any other comments or questions on the open booth pilot? All right, we'll continue along with the rest of the agenda. So the next thing we wanted to talk about was the open education information center that we've talked about in previous meetings. And Nina was going to give us an update on that. Can you guys hear me okay? Yes, we can hear you. So the open education information center is now live on the constitutional website. On the top menu bar you can go to resources and you'll see the menu for the information center. Now the purpose of the information center is to offer a place where people can come and find all sorts of information on open education. And there are three things that the information center offers. It offers information on open education, a calendar of events related to open education, and the discussion forum. Let me show you what it looks like. So the open education information center has information on open education organized for five different stakeholder groups. There are faculty, students, administrator, policy maker, and researchers. And you can see the submit information, submit info button where anybody from the community can submit the kind of information that they have. Now I'm going to choose a topic from the faculty section which is technological concerns. When you go into that page, there you go, when you go into the page for technological concerns, you'll see that information is organized in the format of questions and answers. And at the bottom of each page you will see a button that says join discussion or start a discussion. So after reading questions and answers on a certain topic, you can either start a discussion with other people or you can join the conversation that's already there. Now unfortunately we found a bit of glitch in the function earlier today so we hit it for now. But in a couple of days it'll be live again. So this initiative is still a work in progress. We'll be inviting the community to contribute content and more content are being uploaded as we speak. Now so that's all for me as it's probably much better for you to browse through the pages rather than to hear somebody talk about it. Please go to the consortium website, visit the information center, let us know what you think, and we'll have the form function up there very soon so that we can all talk about stuff. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Mina. Mina said one of the motivations that we had for doing this was that we found that the interest in open education has become much more nuanced and sophisticated over the past several years. And for one thing there's not much room for people who are rather experienced with open education to really collaborate, ask questions of each other and find out more information about what people are doing. So we tried to organize this open education information center by role rather than by topic so that you can go in and find the information you need for the purpose that you're looking for. And we do appreciate any comments and feedback so this is the beta version. It's being launched now for feedback and comments and we'll be consistently improving this over the next few months so that we can have a full hard launch by the time the new school year starts in Europe and the U.S. So the other thing we wanted to talk about today was the global open education implementation strategy. We're not going to have time to get too far into the document but it's also inviting your comments and your feedback. This document will be sent out to the wide open education community this week. We're planning to send it out on Thursday. What happened was there was a group of OER professionals who got together in Washington, D.C. from around the world earlier this year to discuss the state of OER globally and how we could advance it as a coordinated group. And so they got together and thought that there were several opportunities that we had. Those included demands for OER, the supply of OER, and the capacity of the movement as it stands. And we put together a document based on discussions that we had over a couple of days that talked about the areas where we commonly agree in general in the OER movement. This includes our values and the importance that we attach to OER for the future of education. And areas where we have divergent views and that includes things like what's the next big priority and is it more important to do this in higher education or K-12. We looked at overall strengths and challenges that the movement faced and we summarized all of these up to form a snapshot of where we are in the global movement. So looking at where we are now, the opportunities that we have moving forward, we thought that it was a great opportunity to figure out where the opportunities are for collaboration to be able to implement OER worldwide. And that's the document that we have that we want your feedback on. It's about a four or five page document right now. There are a few of us that have been working on drafting the document based on live conversations that we had both at that meeting and then a number of follow-up meetings held at various conferences around the world including one in BAMF. We want this document to be useful like the Cape Town Declaration or the Paris Declaration and really both stating what the movement is doing right now but also in figuring out what we need to move forward. And we really want your feedback on that. This will be sent widely Thursday, but if you'd like a pre-look at the document, I'd like to get your comments in first. I've included the link to it there. It's tinyurl.com slash OER implementation. Please take a look. Include your comments. If you have extensive comments or edits that you'd like to make, you can send to any of us on that drafting committee and we'll be happy to incorporate that in. We're also happy to talk to you individually by Skype or by email if you have particular comments or concerns. So please do take a look at this and let's make this useful as possible for the moment. All right. So we also wanted to take just a few minutes and summarize the Open Education Global Conference that we had in BAMF this year and to give you an opportunity to see where you can find out more information about the presentations you missed. So our conference was held in BAMF just about a month and a half ago. It was a glorious location, very well coordinated, and everyone seems quite pleased with being in Canada. We had fantastic international representation this year. We had 37 countries represented. These are the top 10 number of people, which included Canada and the United States, which makes sense from a geography standpoint. But then the next number you see is from Saudi Arabia. And this we attribute to that project that we did with the U.S. State Department that we talked about earlier. But also the Netherlands, United Kingdom, South Africa, Slovenia, Taiwan, France, Indonesia, and Mexico rounded up the top 10. So you can see it was a really interesting mix from around the world who all came to Canada. We had wonderful presentations, very good, very professional. We had a lot of comments about the level and the quality of the presentations this year. We were able to capture almost every presentation and we have put them up on the website. So if you'd like to visit the ones you weren't able to attend or if you missed BAMF entirely, you can get a feel for what the conference was like. If you go to the conference website, you'll see it under presentations and the links are right there, highlighted in blue. You can also find selected presentations done with Openpraxis, our partner again this year. We were very thankful to have them do a special edition on selected conference presentations and papers. And they are available online at the Openpraxis site. And so we've come to the point in the discussion where we'd love to hear from you, your questions, your comments, your input, your feedback, or any projects that you're working on that you'd like everyone else to know about. So the floor is open. Mary Lou, this is Una. I wanted to answer a question that Buddy asked earlier. He asked what the average enrollment was for the OECX MOOCs. And it's interesting. The average, I would say the average enrollment was about 3,000 for the MOOCs that we've run thus far. We've run about five or six now. There was one exception to that, which was the business MOOC from Anna Rundle. And that one actually, the enrollment was 13,000. So there's a couple of things to be aware of. Number one, enrollment is not the same as retention. And only one of our developers at this point has actually looked at retention. And that's Tufts University, which offered the biology of water. And they actually had a very high retention rate for their course. And they'll be offering that one again in July. And they'll be offering it part two in September. The thing with the business course that was offered from Anna Rundle was actually a very good intro course. But we know from some of the statistics that Edex has shared with us is that learners who come to the platform are looking for courses such as business and engineering. Those tend to be the top ones. So courses like that do attract more attention. So that's why the 13,000 I think is a little bit of an outlier. And we don't have the retention numbers yet from Anna Rundle, but hopefully we'll be getting those. So on average, with that exception, they were running about 3,000 in enrollment. So I hope that answers your question. Hi, everyone. This is Susan. I wanted to just jump in for a second and let everyone know we have a Twitter event coming up in July. It's specifically on July 27th. This is a follow-on to our original Twitter event that we did during Open Education Week where we attracted well over 400 individual Twitter's focused on the subject of Open. It was called All About Open. In July, we'll be focusing on alternative course providers, which is us. So we are actually sending out invitations. You can reach out to our Twitter handle and find more information. But we're soliciting participation. It'll only be a four-hour event that day, 1 to 4 p.m. Eastern or New York time. And we invite anyone and everyone to participate and become involved in discussing the Open Alternative Content Providers. Great. Thanks, Susan. I know that people have participated in Twitch apps before, but they're really self-paced and interesting. And I found some really inspirational stuff coming from that. So thanks, Susan. We'll look forward to that. Susan, do you want to share the hashtag handle? I would love to. It's hashtag All About Open. Very simple. Okay, great. We'll put that in the chat window. Fabulous. Thank you. Yeah, and Mary Lou, I'll add on to that. Our first event was 24 hours. And it was very difficult to break away, even to take a nap. The invitees, the participants were so engaging. The discussion was just beyond what I ever imagined it would be. And it was just very enlightening to have that discussion in the virtual world. And I'm sure this will be the same, but I agree with you. It was very inspirational. Great. And since you brought up Open Educational Week, you reminded me that we have a survey going on. We've heard from several people that the timing of Open Educational Week can be difficult. And while we probably won't be able to change the date that much for 2016, we do want to look at dates that would be better for the overall community. So I just put up in the chat window a link to a survey. And if you would take a couple of minutes to let us know what would be the ideal timeframe, the ideal month to hold Open Educational Week from your perspective, you can put that on a global scale and come up with something that might work for everyone in the future. Any other comments, questions, activities that you'd like to highlight? Mary Lou. Yeah, Larry, we can hear you. Great. I just want to make an announcement that we've been working on our own Open Education platform for our UCI's website to manage open courses, download in common cartridge format, various things like that that in the past were fulfilled for smaller organizations by, what's the name of it again? It's now sort of orphaned software. Edu Commons. And so we're going to release it as open source. And we're putting in some last feature sets to it right now. But one of the questions that's being raised in the Open Education Information Center is how to choose the right platform. How can I make this easy on myself? Looking at the possibility that we both release it as open source software so people can do whatever they want with it, but also that we could host for as tiny a fee as possible an instance of it that would let people get going. So there could be a free level and then also some kind of premium support if people were interested in that. And I would actually like to find out what the state is for open education management software and whether people, particularly with new members, whether they're looking for something like this so that it would actually fill a need or whether we just, you know, as people lose Edu Commons or that they just go on to Moodle or something that's cheap and easy for them. Great. Thanks, Larry. Does anyone have any responses for Larry? Well, Larry, maybe we'll also invite you to speak at the next membership meeting and you can present more fully what you are working on and people can ask more questions then. Okay. I think there was a question from Sylvia about sharing the lessons learned from OECX and the next steps. Yes, Sylvia, we are going to prepare a report that will post on the website and let you know when that's ready so that you can look at the lessons learned from running the open MOOC pilot based on OER. Anyone else have comments or activities that they'd like to share? Okay. We want to remind you that next year our conference will be in Poland in Krakow in April and the website will be ready by July 1st. The call for presentations will go out at the beginning of September and that will need to be in by the middle of November so that we can get those a program ready and shared with you by the start of the new year. So we want to thank you all for participating. We are, of course, happy to receive your feedback and your questions at any time. Feel free to contact us, any of the staff members, or you can write to feedback at OEConsortium.org and we will get back to you as soon as we can. We appreciate your support of open education. We look forward to working with you in the future and we thank you again for your participation. Mary Lou, Buddy asked if you could repeat the information about the conference next year. Yes, absolutely. The conference next year will be in Krakow, Poland in the middle of April. The dates are the 14th through the 16th of April and we will be putting out the call for proposals at the beginning of September. They'll be due by the middle of November and the website will be up and available on July 1st. I also noticed that Ines, who is the editor of Open Praxis, has joined us. So I wanted to acknowledge her and thank her for her support and participation in the special edition. We really appreciate having Open Praxis as a partner for the consortium and as an opportunity for people to have their papers peer reviewed and published. So thank you, Ines.