 Good morning everybody. Thank you. It's really an honor to be asked to speak at this conference. This is always my favorite conference and let's just give David a round of applause for the great work that he did. This is all current. So those of you who know me, you know that I have a strong distaste for waste that hurts people for models that cling to power that where it no longer makes sense and they cling to power because they can. And I have probably the strongest distaste for fear of examining models that prevent innovation from happening. There are my notes. And so, excuse me, I'm interested in the boring, in the mundane, in the policies that hide all of that, those barriers that prevent us from getting the funds that we could unilaterally do really great things with. I'm interested in the boring policies that prevent us from providing education to anybody in the world who might want one. And there are many and we're going to discuss them today. And so the title of my talk is the Obviousness of Open Policy because I think oftentimes we don't think about that some of these things are obvious and that we aren't in enough communication with our policy leaders who are setting policy and creating legislation and local policies about the obviousness of some of the things that we take for granted. And so my goal today is to make explicit what should be obvious not just to us, but to everybody else and to have significant policy implications. These slides, so you don't have to take any notes, they will be up on slide share after the presentation. And just slash C green. So I start off with looking at a few things that are obvious. This was actually in a hotel room that I was at recently. This one here, this is my favorite. I don't know if you can read this one, but it says, it says, no diving shallow water. I could have used that one last night at two in the morning when the fire alarms went off. So all humor aside, some things are obvious and some things are both obvious and important. And so according to the World Food Program, there are 925 million undernourished people in the world today. That means that one in seven people on the planet don't get enough food. So that made me ask the question and others, I should give proper attribution to my friend Wayne McIntosh and I think he stole it from somebody else, is if we had a food machine that could feed everybody in the world and the marginal cost of feeding everyone was zero and it didn't do any harm to farmers and the net result was that everybody in the world had plenty to eat. The question is to us, should we turn on the food machine if you were voting? So let's take a quick vote, should we turn on a food machine if we could feed everybody and the marginal cost is zero. So it's obvious, yes? We should do that. And I believe and I think many of us believe that in fact we have a learning machine at our fingertips and it's within our power to turn it on, but it needs public open policies to provide ongoing sustainable funding and to effect necessary cultural change. Without the policies we can't turn on that machine. So I've got a very simple dream, I think it's many of your dreams as well, that everybody in the world can attain all the education that they desire. That should be something that we strive for. But it will require that we share the educational resources that we produce and that we spend the public funds that we have wisely. And the world needs this dream to come true and quickly if we're to meet the global demand for higher or tertiary education. Many of you have probably seen Sir John Daniel speak, he's the president and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning and I'll let you read the slide here. So ask yourself is it likely that we're going to build and open, what does it say here? Require more than four major universities, 30,000 students each to open every week for the next 15 years. Is that likely in this economic climate? Is it even likely in good climates? Most of us would say yes. And yet that's the demand of public higher education globally. So the good news is that this isn't just my dream, many have this dream. Many in this room have this dream. And in 2006, Kathy Casterly and Mike Smith at the Hewlett Foundation wrote at the heart of the movement toward OER is the simple and powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the web in particular provide an opportunity for everyone to share, use and reuse it. And we're collectively grateful that there continue to be outstanding leaders at Hewlett and at other organizations. These are pictures of some of our friends that couldn't make it here, Barbara Chow, Vic and Kathy. And it's not just Hewlett, we know that the Open Society Foundation is an ardent supporter of both open access and OER. Shuttleworth believes that rigorously, if we're rigorously open about our ideas and our practices, more people will copy them and make the world a better place in a shorter period of time. We heard from Josh yesterday, Gates has made significant investments in OER in requiring open licenses on many of its grants and they believe that every little life has equal value and that education is a significant part of that. Our host, our friend, David Wiley, who reminds us that if we're not sharing, we're not teaching. UNESCO, whose participants in 2002, expressed their wish to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity. OECD's OER project that asks why OER is happening, who's involved and what the most important implications are of this global movement. Creative Commons, where I work, our job is really to make it easy to share so that others can realize the full potential of the internet. Universal access to research, education and full participation in culture to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity. And as you all know, CC licenses make it easy and both legal to share and as we all know, the core part of any OER definition is that the thing that you're sharing is either in the public domain or has an open license that allows others to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute that thing. And as we play with definitions, as we often do, what I always come back to is that the fact that it's either in the public domain or that it has an open license is key. We're looking for both free as in free beer and free as in freedom. Sailor Foundation, anybody's been looking at this. This is quite an impressive site, believes that everyone everywhere should have access to a college education and their site serves as a zero cost alternative for those who lack access to educational resources. You just heard from Mary Lou. OCW envisions a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so anywhere. Cape Town Declaration, first sentence in the Cape Town Declaration says, we're on the cusp of this global revolution and that educators worldwide are developing this vast pool of OER on the net, open and free for all to use and that these educators are creating a world in which each and every person can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. Our open access colleagues spark right to research and all of the universities, libraries and faculty who share their creative works seek to return scholarly publishing to its original purpose to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge be built upon and not locked up somewhere behind a paywall. And the list goes on and on and on. I originally had about five times as many slides and screen shots so apologies if I didn't get your logo up. But the point is this open community is large, it is passionate and it is strong and we share that common dream that everyone, that everyone everywhere be able to afford and access an affordable education that is educationally and culturally appropriate and opportunities to gain whatever knowledge and training they desire. So no surprises there, right? We share a lot of those common dreams and we understand all that, nothing revolutionary. Well, nothing revolutionary to us. Here's the challenge, we have a policy problem. Most of the policy makers, and when I say policy makers I'm speaking of legislators both at federal, national, provincial, state levels, and I'm also talking about the leaders of our educational institutions, of our K-12 schools, of our primary education. Most of them do not understand 21st century technical and legal tools and how they collectively enable this learning machine that we often talk about. Understanding that opportunity, understanding how those tools and those policies interact is key to being, for them to be able to think outside the box of the way that they normally think. So what are those tools? We know what they are. They're the internet, they're the affordances of digital things. The ability to make a billion copies of David's PowerPoint slide at a marginal cost of zero. It costs nothing to store, nothing to distribute, and nothing to make copies. That's a unique characteristic of digital items that never before has existed in human history. And then on top of that we've got open licensing and now with the ability, with the mobile phones in our devices we're seeing revolutions happen around the world because there's not only the ability to share and communicate but the mass willingness to share and the desire for information to be open. So the point is that for these policy makers, they, A, many times don't understand the tools individually, but more to the point they don't understand the tools collectively and what's enabled by these tools. And we know that taking together these tools collectively enable affordable, high quality, continuously improving OER resources. Case in point, you may have seen David's blog recently where they took CK12 open textbooks, they had teachers modify them, and they came up with a book, 300 pages, print on demand, it was $5.35 including shipping and handling, and then they ran the research on it to ask, did this hurt, did it help? The answer was it was no significant difference, and actually they saw marginal increases. Those kinds of stories are interesting to policy makers, I can tell you. So the question is how do we help policy leaders understand the affordances of digital things, understand this set of tools, and how digital courses, textbooks, data, research, science, public sector information, all of the items that we use in education can be non-rivalrous if they are digital and if they have an open license on them. So big deal. Why did I choose to talk about open policy? So first, before we jump into it, what is this, what is the open policy? What do I mean by that? Very simply, I mean that publicly funded resources are openly licensed resources. So when you're using public funds, that whatever somebody builds with those public funds should be freely and openly available to the public that paid for it. And we all know that if you put an open license on something or if you put something in the public domain, it's not available to just the taxpayers of that one country or that one state that can get access, but anybody in the world can get access. This is key. And while there are many open licenses, publicly funded educational resources and other resources should use an open license that allows the public to revise, reuse, remix, and redistribute those materials. So we need to be thoughtful about which license we're choosing. And for the purposes of open policies that contribute to the commons, I define policy broadly as legislation, regulation, and or funder mandates. And if we're going to unleash the power of the billions of dollars, in fact it's hundreds of billions of dollars of funding that goes into public education, research, and science projects, we need broad adoption of open policies. So what's this chart? Several of you helped out with this particular slide. I put out an all call and I asked the question a few weeks ago, how much money do you spend in your country on education? And I didn't know. And in fact I was shocked to learn that it's approximately the same percentage of GDP in countries around the world. The odd ball was Malaysia that spends approximately 25% of its GDP on education. Most other countries spend somewhere between 5% and 6% of their GDP. And you can see there's some variation here. But just to give you an idea of the numbers, the amount of money that we're talking about, Brazil spends 5% of its GDP. Its GDP is $2.1 trillion. The European Union, again, 5% of $16.2 trillion. The U.S. spends 5% of its GDP. It's $14.1 trillion. So we're talking about significant amounts of money. I asked the World Bank, what was the global GDP? And they gave me 2009 numbers, so maybe this has come down slightly. But the answer was $58.3 trillion. And again, 5% of that is approximately $3 trillion a year. Now of course this is not all going into producing textbooks or buying textbooks or educational resources necessarily, but a big chunk of it is. And so the point, of course, is that there is a lot of money that is currently being invested and with the proper open policies, much of that money could be unleashed to make it available to us and all that choose to learn. So if we can adopt simple open policies, we can get ideas that we can get our hands on some of that money, and not us individually, but us collectively. So this is why open policies are important. If we get this simple idea right, this question of sustainability that Josh was asking us the other day, I believe will largely cease to be an issue. Because A, there's plenty of public funding to build and maintain all of the teaching, learning, and research resources the world needs. And B, open becomes the default and becomes the exception. And not only that, but the bar for receiving an exception, not to open the materials that you built with public funds should be extremely high. So when people ask me, why are OER, or how are you going to sustain OER projects? I argue that that's, in fact, the wrong frame to think about sustainability of OER. That's asking the question, how is that pilot down the hall, is not part of our core activities going to be sustained in these difficult budget times? It's a fair question if your frame is that this is our standard business, and over there we're experimenting with something else called open. I believe that the right frame is to ask how do we maximize the investments that we're already making, and have made the sunk costs on learning resources that we need for our students, for our university, for our state, our province, when it comes to default output of our normal work, no new money is required. It becomes part of normal business, and as others have argued, sustaining OER and sustaining our natural practices of making sure we have high quality education simply becomes equivalent to sustaining the academy. Our sustainability plan in Washington State when I worked there was essentially that. When we launched the open course library from the Gates Foundation, everybody said how are you going to sustain it? Our answer was very simple. We said it would be a good thing for the 34 colleges in Washington to build and update and create the highest quality core curriculum courses just for Washington State, just for the community colleges. We owe that to our students in Washington State. And to do anything less would be irresponsible. And we are going to be selfish in those activities. For us, we're going to use state funds to sustain it because that's what we do. We are educational institutions that build quality materials and it also makes sense for college A in our system to share with college B because why would we not do that? They're all funded by the same state funds. And by the way, we're going to put a creative commons attribution on all those courses as well because why not? And why not A? Because the content is commodity. The content of English 101 or sociology 101 or biology 101 is not what makes Bellevue College great. It's not what makes Shoreline Community College great. What makes them great is the student services they provide. It's their faculty. It's the other activities that are happening on campus. It's their supportive students and their learning environments. It's certainly not the core curriculum. And second, when we share, the good things will happen to us when we share. And in fact, that's exactly what's happened. Shortly after, just one example, we've got several, and you can talk with Tom Caswell here if you're interested in more. But shortly after, I went to Creative Commons, I was fortunate enough to go to Brazil and I sat down with the community colleges of Brazil and they said, what's going on? What does? And they said, the highest enrolled 81 courses? Wow, that's our core curriculum as well. And I said, it's all yours. Would you like it? And they said, yes, we would. Who do we ask permission from? And I said, it's got a CC by license. You ask permission from no one, but I'll be more than happy to point you to where you can get those downloads. But I said, I'd like to know what you're going to do with those courses if you'd be so kind to share it. So that makes sense. I said, what else are you going to do with them? And they said, well, we're going to review the courses and we're going to look for errors because these are version one. You're bound to be some errors in the courses. And we're also going to rip out all of your case studies about Northwest Salmon and the biology courses. And we're going to input case studies about the Amazonian rainforest, which are more appropriate to the students that we're teaching. And I said, that's fantastic. You're going to do that. You're going to use them. You're into no obligation to do so. We didn't put an essay license on this because we wanted to give you as much freedom as possible, but we'd really appreciate it. And they said, of course. So now the state of Washington and anybody else who wants them can have all the resources translated by native speakers in another language and version two of those courses will be out. That's why we shared and we considered what we were going to do and then share with others because good things are going to happen to us. Again, a selfish move when we share. Now, of course, there were other reasons. So this policy, this open policy is simple to say, explain and convince impartial actors of its obviousness. Again, publicly funded resources are open educational or openly licensed resources. What's the implementation of this? Again, the implementation is that those resources go straight into the public domain, which is preferred, or if the copyright has held somebody that there's a license on those materials that allow the 4Rs, revise, reuse, remix, and redistribute. So note that this is about build, right? This is a policy that's about if you are building something with public funds, you must share. It says nothing about use. And when you're speaking with policy folks, something to be aware of, concerned about, they don't jump to the use. And they will jump to questions of mandates of use. We all know that's not what open is about. It's not about forcing anybody to do anything. In fact, it's quite the opposite. And so be very careful of that. And in fact, I've had to fend off multiple state legislators and several in national governments who want to jump to that next step. And the answer is no, it shouldn't be mandated. And the good news is we have slogans around this. David's already created several. Buy one, get one is his favorite. You should get what you pay for. Public access to publicly funded resources and others. And the good news is that others have already called for these open policies. The open access community. The Cape Town Declaration recently. The Washington Declaration on intellectual property and the public interest held in Washington, D.C. recently. And more good news, these arguments for getting policymakers to adopt open policies are simple and they are compelling. And I have yet to find a member of any party in any country that doesn't agree with these statements and will make this part of their platform. And there is an open argument that this will work with or there's an open argument that will work with most people regardless of their political views or their biases. And I find that if you just listen you'll find that one of these arguments tends to work with almost everybody and very soon they want to co-sign onto legislation and they want to support our efforts. If Hal Plotkin were here today from the Department of Education he would add another bullet point that would say approximately today 5% of the world's population have access to a high quality education. And what do you think the odds are that the cure for cancer for renewable energy resources, etc. are in the 5% or are in the 95% that currently don't have access to the learning machine that we have access to. And I can tell us, it reminds us about this concept of sunk costs. Wayne is an economist by training and that again, if all we did as educational resources was to openly license our existing intellectual property, the existing resources that we have locked up at our institutions and our libraries, in our journals it would be a tremendous boon to folks who want to use those as learning materials. So what's possible with open policies? What can we do? Well, the EU report says that OECD countries spent $638 billion on basic R&D. So these were scientific grants that were given out to institutions of education to do research. In the United States, the dollar amount is approximately $60 billion a year is given out by NIH, NSF and other agencies for scientific research. And as you all know, in many cases there are international institutions. There's no requirement to share. There is an open access policy with NIH which is very positive but most federal agencies in this country and other countries do not have requirements to share under an open license. There is an act that is being considered in the U.S. Congress called the Federal Research Public Access Act that would require 11 U.S. government agencies with extramural research expenditures to make those journal articles stemming from the research publicly available within six months after they've been published in a peer-reviewed journal. So there are proposals out there and there are several around the world. So I throw out a couple examples here. What if the public that paid for, say, elementary or higher ed textbooks mainly through taxes did something like this? So in most countries and in the United States included we tend to pay directly for textbooks for our young children who are in K-12. In my state the dollar amount is approximately $70 million a year. Washington's a small state relatively small population. The net result from that significant investment this is $70 million every year, by the way is that our textbooks are on average 18 years out of date. That's what we're able to buy for $70 million. So those are all big ideas but let me just give you one simple example. Again, this comes from the Washington State Community Colleges. One course this is the highest enrolled course in the CTC's English Composition 1. That's the number of enrollments. Nicole Allen will tell you that that is a very low and underestimated cost for a highest enrolled textbook. It is $156. Am I close? $176. Wow, it keeps going up. So exchange $100 with $176 at a much higher number. But ask yourself if this is our highest enrolled course do any of your institutions also teach English Composition 1 or anything called English 101. My guess is that you do and in fact they do everywhere in the world. It doesn't matter what educational institution you're at and in fact you can say the same thing for the top 100 courses that are taught at all of our educational institutions and they tend to cross countries. We call them slightly different things that teach something like sociology 101 and a biology series and a chemistry series etc. And so the question here is does this make sense to do anymore? And I would argue this is really stupid and we should no longer do this. And if we were smart just in Washington what we would do because of this $5.5 million or using Nicole's numbers it would be closer to $7 million. Where does that money come from? So who's paying that bill? Well it really comes from three sources. It's coming from federal financial aid. So raise your hand if you're a U.S. federal taxpayer. Thank you very much for funding Washington textbooks. We appreciate it. If you're a state taxpayer of the state of Washington so several of us are those we are also providing student financial aid and especially to community college students they're heavily need based and they get a lot of aid. And then the rest of the money comes out of student debt and as we heard Josh say consumer debt has passed mortgage debt in this country I'm sorry student loan debt has passed consumer debt in this country and we've got a whole generation of students that are coming out bankrupt as they come out of college and this is one of the reasons. So I ask could we do something different could we instead launch an RFP could the state of Washington put out an RFP and spend a bunch of money $2 million to anybody who can build the very best English 101 textbook. But if we did that what we should do is not just do it for the state of Washington right we should design it in collaboration with all of you who might also want to have that textbook we're happy to pay for it because we will recoup our investments in one year and then the message to our students in the state of Washington is here's an updated free textbook and the state of Washington will put $100,000 a year to keep that textbook continuously updated. Now the kicker is that we'll put a CC by license on our textbook as well and then we will turn to you all and say California would you be willing to do sociology 101 and Alaska would you be willing to do biology 101 and Ohio would you do the first two series of biology and of course if there's an open license you have every legal right to modify those to meet your local needs in the same way that David's faculty and Provo modified the CK12 textbook to meet their needs I would argue that's a better policy and a better use of public funds so new models are showing us what this dream might look like and there are several here P2P Western Governors University Badges, Straighter Line University of the People, let me zero in on one OER University will provide free learning alternatives to students worldwide with pathways to achieve formal credentials they've got ten founding partners these are quote-unquote anchor institutions around the world and the idea here is that students will learn in the open using open resources they'll use MIT, OCW they'll use other resources they will go to internships, have apprenticeships they'll learn to traditional institutions and they need somewhere to go to get assessed and then to get credit that's the idea of OERU and they're setting up anchor institutions around the world this is a world first this is an institution that is starting from a blank slate and is leveraging what policy makers need to know about so the good news is that many already have adopted open policies Brazil is out in front on this they're working on open legislation right now it's working its way through the legislature that requires government funded educational resources be made available widely to the public under an open license two it clarifies that resources produced by public servants under their official capacities be OER and three it urges the government to support open federated systems for distribution and archiving OER Poland is working on legislation where's my friend from Poland who I'm meeting after you should talk with him wherever he is and Athabasca University there's the Athabasca table over there they've got a brilliant policy that requires if you're going to develop a new course where the instructional designers are first required to search for published OERs before not after but before they purchase proprietary content or committing to in-house development I believe that's a proper policy the United States of course has the NIH open access policy the Department of Labor as we heard a couple days ago has put a CC by requirement on $2 billion of funds that are flowing to community colleges last night there was an announcement that the New York State Board of Regents will be requiring Creative Commons licensing on their race to the top funding there's a website where Tom Caswell has an open policy that says if you take money from the system regardless of fund source you will put a CC by license on everything you build and of course there are hundreds of open access policies globally where faculty have stepped forward and said I will allow a copy of my research article to remain with the University at the same time that I submit it to an academic journal so of course it's not this easy am I doing on time these structures that make this change difficult most educational content business models were built in the 20th century and they're built on gatekeeping models that lock up resources primarily to make them rival risk so that it's expensive for us to access them we know differently we know that when things are digital that they can be shared and stored and duplicated at essentially no cost or at very ultra low cost so these these existing business models frankly are starting to fight those of you who know Gandhi's writings Gandhi said first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you and then you win and I believe that we are in stage 3 of that process Dean Flores are you in the room Dean are you here so Dean is from California former senate lead in California where there was a law on the books that said that if you are a community college student you cannot be charged over and above the standard tuition and instruction fees unless what you're being charged for gives you a tangible piece of property that you can keep and we know that the new textbook model from many of the publishers is to move to ebooks where they put a time bomb on those materials and of course at the end of that period there is a new model and we know that that's a very tangible property and many of these business models were in frankly trying to get that law changed so that their new business model could succeed Dean and others successfully fought that off we saw this a couple days ago as well there's a language that has been inserted into a funding bill specifically targeting the Secretary of Labor certifies after a comprehensive market-based analysis that no commercial option exists or and here's the kicker is in development right so what would this mean this would mean that if you've got a really great developmental math program at your college and you're getting 30% higher completion rates and you go for a Department of Labor grant and you say I need some money to extend this to scale it to innovate further is no I'm sorry there's a publisher that already does developmental math you're gonna have to buy what they have or if they have something in development you're gonna have to wait until it's finished that's what this would do now the good news is we heard from Martha Cantor and from Jim that there's seems to be a low chance that this makes it through but my point is not to rally us yet anyway but to point this out that these existing business models are beginning to take notice of our efforts and they are large and they are powerful and they have significant funds we need to pay attention we need to be aware and not be ignorant to the politics and the money that is at stake here so what might our open policy strategy look like well it's fairly simple we choose the most open license that we're comfortable with to increase the degrees of freedom of downstream use to increase interoperability and remix opportunities of licenses and to reduce attacks from existing for-profit entities where their models might be disrupted when we choose to put something in the public domain or to put a CC by license on it we're not excluding commercial activity and if we're smart and if we I believe if we're smart and if we're engaging with the business community there's actually quite a strong partnership as Jim was saying the drug industry for example is very fond of the public paying for the basic R&D of things like genomic research and other activities so that they don't have to do that but instead they can build their businesses on top of it so there are lessons to be learned from Clayton Christensen disruptive innovation lessons we shouldn't attack the existing business models head-on incumbents typically win when you're playing by their rules rather we choose to play by the new rules that we understand that these new tools afford in the open course library we simply said to the publishers we know that these tools exist and we will not pay more than $30 for required instruction materials if you choose to work with us you're our new best friends if you don't we'll simply find other solutions and those are our new rules and we gave them no choice they complained about it but that was it we understand the technologies and we're changing the policy I'm not going to skip over this because Josh talked about the iron triangle already but the point is that most of our policy makers exist in this world and think in this way and we need to help them think differently so I believe that we have to think bigger and make smarter decisions collectively on December 1st 1862 one month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln sent a long message to the Congress that said the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present and this occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion as our case is new so must we think anew and act anew and we must disenthrall ourselves and then and only then shall we save our country and so the question to us is can we disenthrall ourselves from our current behaviors and think and act anew and I think that we can we'd be straight and honest about where the money is what the existing policies are and we've got a great story to tell as my friend Nicole Allen often reminds me we tell the positive story we don't attack the negative attacks that come at us and so in the end it's most important to take policy makers back to first principles you take them back to these two points and you remind them that only one thing matters for the policy makers this is what matters efficient use of public funds to increase student success and access and accessing the materials that are paid for and this is the kicker everything else including all the existing business models are secondary no existing model should be sacred should be kept out of the eye of the public for criticism for evaluation and those that do so are protecting something and they're not telling you the whole truth we need to expose that by following the money so the end game here and David's given me the off the stage so the good news is I'm on my last slide the end game is that the winning argument that we can make is that policy makers will want the highest return on investment and impact of their public investments and our open policy goal should be that open policies are adopted by all nations states provinces departments institutions remember that food machine we don't have such a device but while we might have the global capacity to feed everybody food is not a digital and it tends to be a rival risk good and so universal access is more difficult not to say we shouldn't try but it's a harder problem to solve it's a shame because many people don't have enough food to eat if we did have a food machine we turn it on tomorrow there's no question about it because the moral imperative to do so would be overwhelming the good news is we have a learning machine and we simply have to turn it on and moreover we have a moral and ethical responsibility to work with our policy makers to do that because we understand these tools if anybody's interested in working on these open policy problems we stand with you globally and one final closing thought in the 21st century the opposite of open isn't closed the opposite of open is broken thank you very much