 Alright, well thanks for being here. I looked at the schedule and I almost didn't attend this one. Anyway, so my name is Tom Caswell. I'm the Open Education Policy Associate at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. It's my time up. I'm here to talk to you about some of our experiences with creating the Open Course Library. And I'm here with Connie Brogan, who's the Director of Key Learning and Open Education. She'll be sharing a little bit more in the next half hour. But I'm just going to run through a little bit on...let's see, there we go. So, one of the things that we had to do in our system is make the case for open education. And so, as we set up the Open Course Library and started to recruit faculty to be part of the Open Course Library, and I'll explain a little bit more about what that is, we had to make our case. And so, we argue in terms of efficiency, the fact that you can build on great existing content that's already out there. Affordability certainly is a big issue in our state and we have student groups who have been very concerned about textbook affordability and that's an important concern for us as well at the State Board. There's a quality issue and I think that you can make the case for quality. I would argue that developing in the open, and we've seen this as our faculty are prepared to launch the Open Course Library. The first 42 courses are going to be made available to the public on Monday. So October 31st are the first 42 courses, all the materials for those courses will go out into the public. And I can just tell you that when faculty know that it's going to be on the web out in the open, yeah, they go back and double check and they run that spell checker and they do that proof reading one more time. And then there's just a self-interest argument to be made that we've seen time and again that working out in the open, if you can show up in the top results of a Google search for example or something like it, it increases your exposure as a faculty member and there are all kinds of reasons why that leads to good things. Working in the open can lead to collaboration, can lead to new opportunities for the faculty. So those are some reasons. Now actually I'm going to pause here for just a second and just explain a little bit more about the Open Course Library and I think I put my slides in a goofy order. But basically the Open Course Library is an effort to take the highest enrolling and most critical 81 courses and create openly licensed content for every course. So what we did in Washington, it was jointly funded by the Washington State Legislature and the Gates Foundation. So we very much have a state that's very bought in to the idea of open education and I love that because we have state legislators and policy makers who really see this as an efficiency that we need to grab on to. So what we want to do is deliver on that and that's the Open Course Library is really, instead of taking sort of tinkering around the edges, the Open Course Library just really grabs the bull by the horns and says we're going to take our top courses, we're going to make openly licensed materials available on all those 81 courses and then we're going to push, we're going to have an adoption effort around that and really push this as an efficiency and as an opportunity for faculty who in our system we have 75% adjunct faculty. So we have an issue where faculty are in a situation they have to many times develop course materials very quickly because they're coming into a new course and they need to ramp up and get ready to teach very quickly, sometimes just within a few weeks or even a few days. So these materials provide, basically this is an opportunity for them to have a starting point to not have to start from zero and so they can grab these materials, modify them and customize them in the way that works for them. But the other important thing that I should mention about the Open Course Library is that we didn't slam the door on publishers, what we said was we want all comers, we want to be able to work with high quality educational content, the problem is $200 textbooks just don't work for us and so we capped the cost of the textbooks per Open Course Library course at $30. And you would think that you might as well have slammed the door if it's just $30, but actually we had publishers come and really worked with us and so Cengage as a prime example, but there were others as well who were willing to come and figure out what they could do to help our faculty at the $30 price point. So anyway, those were the parameters around the Open Course Library and it was developed over a period of roughly a year. So what I want to talk a little bit about is how this is different or how our approach is a little bit different than say an Open CourseWare site because I used to work with the Open CourseWare consortium and we had a lot of, you know, helped set up a lot of great Open CourseWare sites, but this is really a little bit different and I just want to sort of point out the differences. And that's where this comes in. So your typical Open CourseWare workflow, you've got a faculty member who creates a course that they're teaching and then you have sort of a separate track where there's some support staff of some kind that then comes in and offers, you know, takes the faculty's syllabus notes and materials and sort of organizes them and puts them into an Open Course. This isn't every Open CourseWare, but this is just sort of the pattern that I've seen. So I just offer that as sort of the typical Open CourseWare workflow at a very high level, not a lot of detail. And the Open Course Library workflow, the reason I've got it in a straight line is the faculty who teach the course, they also are the, so we went through a competitive bid process and selected the best, or among the best faculty to be part of the Open Course Library. So they built materials, they used OER, existing OER materials, and then sort of filled in the gaps with their own materials and they created this Open Course and then they proceeded to teach from that Open Course. So it's more of a straight line workflow, if you will. And the reason this is important to our system is we don't have funding to keep an Open CourseWare site alive. We depend on, you know, what we're trying to do is actually affect a cultural shift in the way we build courses. And so we're jump-starting with this Open Course Library, we're sort of jump-starting that process. In other words, really building the Open Course as part of the process of getting to that course that you're going to teach at the end. And so you have basically a single workflow, and really in our case, in the first phase, in these first 42 courses that we did, it really sort of leverages the existing technologies. So we didn't run out and buy something new, mainly because we couldn't afford to, but also just because, again, it's the learning management system that a lot of the faculty were using was something that we could leverage. We had them create that course within it, and then we did exports from that course. And so at the end of the day, we will have guest accounts that faculty can come into, or that anyone can come into, so to view the course materials. And then also we'll have course export files available on connections. And so you can pull down a copy of that course and then start modifying it in your own institution. So we're trying to leverage what we have, work with what we have, to create a workflow that works in our system. What we're headed for, and what I think this is for us the ultimate model and what we're looking for is that the faculty member, the faculty designer, and ultimately, I guess I think every faculty is in charge of their own course materials. Every faculty is their own course builder for their sections. So they make choices about what works for them. So every faculty member will put together a course, but in a system where with the push of a button, the same course is available both on the open web, with all the student data removed, of course, and also in some kind of a learning management system that the faculty can use. So that's my hope, and so that's why I've kind of put the two circles together. Again, it's just this idea that if we're really going to mainstream the open education, at least in our system, we really need to find ways that don't introduce additional complexity or technology, but rather just allow faculty to have openness, the potential to openly publish within the same pathway as what they're already doing. And I realize that right now Alarm Bells are probably going off and many of your heads thinking about copyright and things like that, but clearly there's an education component to understanding what elements of a course you would need to flag to not expose. And so this open publishing feature that we're looking for in our next learning management system, because we're in the process of a search for our next learning management system, and one of the requirements is that we need an open publishing feature. And that requirement ideally would have a way to differentiate between pieces of a course, where you say, well, yeah, this is under fair use. I've made some copies here that I'm not going to put on the open web, obviously, of perhaps some articles or something that I don't have permission to put out there. So I'll flag those this way, and those won't get pushed through to the open course. So you sort of have that same idea of differentiating between what you're allowed to put out there and what you're not. So that's the end goal. And I think that more and more learning management systems are supporting Creative Commons, are supporting open publishing. And so I think that there are features that we can, and we're also, I think by the fact that we're demanding this in our request for proposals, it also drives the market somewhat, because it's a fairly big RFP system-wide 34 colleges. It's a big deal. So, yeah. I missed this, I apologize if I did, but what is the LMS you're using now? So right now we're using Angel, which has been bought by Blackboard, and so we're in that downward spiral. And so we know that we eventually have to go to something else, right? Tell us what you really think about it. Well, it's, you know, even if we go with Blackboard, we have to go to something else, right? Because we've been assimilated. So we have to make a decision here. So we're sort of using that as a good opportunity to really put in some other, you know, some other asks of really what we want out of the LMS. And, you know, as I think you're seeing, open education is a big component of what we do, and so it's something that we're pushing for. So this is a little bit more about the open course library, really a little bit of an overview that, and I've already touched on some of these, designing these 81 courses and one of the goals here, and I think there was a session just before us where Eric Frank talked a little bit about how some, there's research now that's showing that, or at least preliminary research showing that faculty, or excuse me, that students are not able to purchase all of their textbooks. They're actually not buying some of their textbooks because of the high cost. And so we're positing that completion rates are being impacted because of that. And so we're doing our own study to see if, by introducing these open materials and looking at courses that pick to adopt these materials that are more affordable, will that have an impact on completion rates within our system? So it's, but that's one of our goals. And then the rest I think we've talked about, but really helping our faculty in Washington State to really be able to engage with the open education movement is an important goal too. Okay, so the courses will be available, the first 42 courses will be available at opencourselibrary.org, and that's going to be on Monday. We're excited and we're working hard to get that all ready. And the next 39 courses will be available in spring of 2013. And the process is, just so you understand how we've done this, we essentially, with the grant funds, we buy out a third of the faculty time over three quarters. The first two quarters are for design, so they're actually creating some materials, but mainly they're working to bring together and curate the high quality existing open educational resources that they can find for their particular discipline. So they work, every course has at least one faculty member. There are a few that have teams, depending on how they apply for the grant. And every faculty member works with an instructional designer and a librarian. And so they're a team of at least three, and the instructional designer is quality matters trained, and so we use a lot of the quality matters principles to design the course. And then the first two quarters, the faculty, instructional designer and librarian, work to basically create a course map, plan out course objectives, and really design the course, and then bring in the content, the open content to go with it. Third quarter is a pilot quarter, so every course that we're releasing has been pilot taught at least once, but usually multiple times because they continue to teach with that course. And one thing I should point out is that we eat our own dog food. So every faculty member actually produces a course and then agrees to adopt it. So we're not creating materials and then sort of leaving them there and going and doing something else. What we create, we use. So every faculty member that has been part of the open course library is using the materials themselves. And so then in the fourth quarter, the third quarter is not a paid quarter. Faculty would have been teaching anyway. So in terms of the design, the first two quarters are faculty time is bought out by the grant and then the fourth quarter is a revision quarter to polish up and prepare the final course. So over a year, we design the open courses. And so this talks a little bit about how we start with learning objectives. We go to the OER first. We look for the resources that are available and then fill in the gaps with our own content. So the idea is we're not out to reinvent the wheel. We're not asking faculty to go build a textbook. We're asking them to curate and bring together the best materials in their course. And of course that varies because some courses have more OER than others but that's the goal. The idea that we can have more, better, faster basically the open course library courses are digital so they're easily shareable on the greatest distribution network known to man called the Internet. They're non-rivalrous and scalable. They're searchable. And one of the benefits that they have is that these courses, because they're out in the open really allow students to make better decisions about what courses they're taking. So if I could have previewed my courses before enrolling as a student, I might have made some different choices or maybe not but at least I would have known what I was signing up for. So the idea that you can preview courses from a student's perspective I think adds value. Also looking back as an alumni being able to review your courses whether you're completely done with school or you're just going into the next course that depends on the last course that has some kind of a prereq. I know that faculty sort of don't trust the prerequisites in a lot of areas and end up reteaching most of that content anyway because they have no idea if everyone was really exposed to it. Well in this situation the faculty could point back to the open course and say, if you need to brush up on this material then here's the link and go do that. So I think generally it just paves the way for lifelong learning. If you can always go back to the courses I think it's a tragedy that the way that learning management systems have worked in the past at least is everything's measured and billed by the megabyte. That's just a tragedy because what does that do? This is the deletion of great courses constantly and so I hope we get away from that. And then finally open courses can be customized. They can be translated. I mean it seems like you ought to be able to translate or caption something but actually you can't if it's copyrighted and all rights reserved you can't until you have permission from the owner. So those are some other advantages. One highlight for the open course library is that even before it's released we heard that the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil had committed to translate all of the open course library courses into Portuguese. So clearly other places in the world are understanding the value of collaborative shared educational content and I think that we want to get in that game in a big way. So my time is almost up and I want to leave a little bit of time for questions but let me just sort of show you a little bit of what that means in terms of enrollments. For our 81 courses in Washington State's College that represents 411,133 enrollments every year. And of course some of these are students enrolling in more than one course that's now been developed as an open course library course but it's just a lot of enrollments and so we've there's a lot of potential textbook savings to students here. It's like we talked like we heard in the keynote this morning though it's not just about savings I think it's also about the opportunity for improving quality and because you can modify because you can adapt you can custom tailor a resource to your needs and in that sense it's higher quality to you. So question is how much could your students be saving? And then just the argument about the completion rates student perks report that I think was mentioned in Eric's presentation was just that if students can't afford the textbooks and are not buying them then stands to reason that completion rates are being impacted in those courses. So by making them more affordable we expect and we hope that the course materials will be that the completion rates will increase. And finally just some things that we're doing different in the second phase of the open course library with the first phase we found we learned something about using a learning management system to create content to create open content and that is that it's difficult to once you've gotten it to that point it's difficult to back it out unless you're in that particular learning management system you you've got to have the kind of technology support to be able to take the exported file and re-import it into your learning management system there are interoperable files that allow that common cartridge is what we use so it's not a question of interoperability it's just a simple question of will faculty will faculty adopt more if they can jump right in and get right into the content themselves and I think the answer is yes I think the likelihood that they would reuse courses goes way up if it's in a format that they can just grab, download as a PDF, a Word document whatever file format they want and then start customizing it for their needs so in phase two we'll be installing everything in Google Docs we'll be using a Google site to keep all of the courses organized and it's just a system that is a little more simple for faculty who are not accustomed to working in a learning management system it's just something that a big part of all of the open course library is just trying new things learning how to come at the problem of broad adoption on the faculty level trying to make that happen more and happen faster so we're going to push ahead with Google Docs in phase two and we're excited to see how that works out and we'll share that when we're done so all of the project information everything is all on that same site so it's opencourselibrary.org and just a few we had some frozen cons with switching to Google Docs generally speaking we're very happy with the choice and we asked the phase one faculty about it and they were just you know like we wish we could have done it that way so this is I think really we learned something here and that's part of what this project was about finding the right path or finding the best path possible for our system to be able to do OER on the faculty level so with that slides just keep coming make them stop so let's see and then this is just talking about our adoption plan we're going to get out so just quickly we're going to have adoption efforts that follow up on the first phase including when we have new faculty training we'll be sharing the opencourse library it's all voluntary we don't force it on anyone but we expose everyone so that's the plan thank you