 Hi there. My name's Norman Beer. I'm the director of the Open Learning Initiative here at Carnegie Mellon. And I'm going to take a step back briefly from talking about open access to research and talk a little bit about open educational resources, or OER. Before I dive into this, how many of you have heard of the Open Learning Initiative? Fabulous. My work's done. I'm going to sit back down then. So maybe a quarter of you haven't. Let me give you a quick tour. I'm going to start off talking about OER or Open Educational Resources, the notion that we have educational assets that are out there and are available for use, licensed in such a way that other educators and students can access these materials for free and that they're able to reuse, revise, or remix them. So when I talk about the Open Learning Initiative at heart, what I'm talking about is a research project around the creation and improvement of open educational resources. When you talk about the OER community, generally, tracing back the history of it, folks will look at MIT's open courseware project as the place where this really got its start. OER purists don't believe this. If I were at an OER convention, I'd get beat up for saying so. But generally, in the popular imagination, the Yulet Foundation back in 2001 was looking for ways to promote better access to education. And one of the mechanisms they were trying to do to facilitate this, providing MIT with a few million dollars to take any resources that MIT was willing to put online and make publicly available. So this ended up being a collection of quizzes, lecture notes, slides, really anything that an individual faculty member at MIT was willing to stick on the web. This was heralded at the time of the popular press as something amazing, something transformational. MIT's gift to the world. So when I first got started here at CMU, I was unaware of the rivalry that existed between MIT and CMU. Standing in front of my first class actually mentioned some research out of MIT favorably. I got booed by my students. So I've since learned to put a little venom in my voice. So this is MIT's gift to the world. After this announcement in the press, representatives from the Yulet Foundation showed up here at Carnegie Mellon and said, hey, see this project that MIT is doing? Are you interested in doing something similar? And the answer they got was, no, MIT seems to have that covered. And we're actually not sure there's a lot of value in just sticking some random quizzes and things up there. Folks from Yulet said, oh, OK, and jumped in a car and went back to the airport. And that would have been the end of it, except that they happened to be visiting us on a certain Tuesday in September, back in 2001. And by the time they got to the airport, there were no planes flying anywhere. They were stuck coming back to Carnegie Mellon and hanging out with us for about four days and asking, all right, if the access thing is not interesting to you, what would be interesting? Well, access is fabulous. We feel that the dissemination of knowledge and learning is core to what Carnegie Mellon is and does. But we want it to be effective. And so this question of how do we take these materials and put them out there in a way that's effective is really important. And we'd like to do this in a way that's going to really leverage Carnegie Mellon's strengths. In this case, strengthen cognitive science, well known expertise both in technology and how human beings use that technology. And lastly, our strength in bringing together strange multidisciplinary teams, mashing them together and seeing what kind of good work they can do. So this was how the open learning initiative was born. The notion that we were going to attempt to build courses, online learning environments, leveraging learning science and current affordances of technology. Put them together using a research-based approach and see if we could actually build online courses that can enact instruction in that time for independent learners. So the hallmark of this approach really has been a research-based approach. It's this question of not just using our instincts of how students might learn, but rather using what we know about human understanding. Or as we develop out these courses, trying to answer questions about individual disciplines. What is it that's really hard for a student to learn about stoichiometry? What are some specifics in understanding cellular automata? And what are some methods that we can apply from the sciences to build out a course that might teach this? And then at the end of this, authentically evaluating it. Other hallmarks of this, team-based approach to design. An obsessive capturing of data, because we're doing this online. Every student learning opportunity, we are capturing data about how students interact. And at the end of this process, taking an authentic scientific approach to evaluating, was this effective, was our hypothesis about how students would learn correct? Or do we need to go back to the drawing board? What this produces is a set of courses that are open educational resources. And this open component is fairly important to us. Why open? First and foremost, the access agenda was important to our funders, and it continues to be important to the university. But you get something else with open that I think is often overlooked. In order to do real research and authentically advance our understanding of how human beings learn, one of the things that we need is more data. We need a bigger end. And by putting these materials out there openly and freely, you very pragmatically are able to get a larger data set, and you're able to more rapidly advance the work that you're doing. Now at this point, 12 years later, the open learning initiative has roughly 40 courses, been used by thousands of faculty members, millions of students. And all of these courses are openly licensed. In the OER world, that generally means creative commons licensing. And one of the major pieces of work that we do at OLI, beyond building and researching these courses, is actually provide education into creative commons licensing. It takes an awful lot of work to convince folks that, yes, you can retain some rights while still licensing them out to the world. In addition to the courses, we've also spent the past 12 years doing research into this work. And I think most of the speakers that were here before me have done a really nice job of talking about ways to provide open access into that research. Our work is available on our website. Our work is available on the university archive. And we continue to publish as possible in open access journals, although I can't claim that we do it exclusively. The last component has been all of the data that's come out of this work. We have over 65 data sets representing these 40 courses. And we continue to create new data sets each semester, which are published in the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center's data shop tool. And so you've got this tremendous resource of a data set of student interactions that have been tagged with semantically useful, excuse me, which have been wrapped in semantically useful tags about what exactly we were trying to accomplish with this student interaction and what might have occurred as the student moved through the system. So all of these materials are openly available to researchers as well. This open access to data has actually been one of the more interesting things that we've worked on, in part because you've got some real challenges in how you initially structure your protocol to allow for longer term open access to researchers that wanna dive in when you're dealing with this much student data. So the Open Learning Initiative has a number of resources that are available to you. The courses themselves are available to you as educators, as students, and as researchers. The actual data that we've created is openly available to anyone that's interested in performing this research. Our publications are out there if you're interested. And lastly, because of the work that we've done, we're also available to provide guidance on creative commons licensing. If you've got questions or interested in how it might apply to your own work, please feel free to look me up. Lastly, I think this is a question of why, why are we doing all of this? And the fairly specific reason in the open education community is actually going to borrow, right now, one in seven human beings on the planet does not get enough food. So, if you were able to build a food machine, and the food machine was non-rivolous, and was not gonna do any harm to farmers, would you turn on the machine differently? Is there anyone that wouldn't turn on the food machine? Good. There are reasonably moral people standing here in front of you. We have a learning machine. And one of the things that's amazing about this learning machine is that the more that we use it, the more effective and more efficient it gets, because that's the joy of these resources when promoted in a research-based way. We live in a world where the demand for education, for effective education, is just completely outstrip the supply of it. And so I think to not make use of this machine, particularly when you're building these kinds of materials for your own students, is fairly criminal. That's it, thanks for your time.