 Are you ready? I can press forward and hand over to you. Sure, I'm ready. Awesome. Okay, then. Well, everybody please go to your emoji menu and find the applause button and give Paul the warmest OER20 virtual welcome that we can. So I hope you're seeing the apps in the chat and Paul, take it away. Sure. Well, hello everyone and so great to be part of OER20. Congratulations to the organizers for the pivot and successfully transitioning to an online event and also I want to acknowledge the quilt and those who have been so active in creating it. I think that's a very important symbolic piece of work, especially at this particular moment in time when care is such an important topic. So my session is, it was about looking at open education from a kind of reflective perspective and I wanted to take this little bit of time to share with you some of the thinking that I've been doing around how we conceptualize open education and whether we think of it as a market good, a public good, or a commons good and that kind of phrasing and terminology actually comes from some work that I did when I was still at Creative Commons where with a colleague, Sarah Pearson, we co-wrote a book that explored what we called open business models, which is, how do you sustain your open education initiative over time? And in that work, we explored thinking about openness, whether it's in education or other sectors as being influenced at the very least, if not directly affected by perspectives of whether or not the activity involved with openness was something that was primarily of the market, something that was alternatively primarily something that the government funded and became a public good, or the state, as you can see in this picture, or was it actually a commons activity? And I wanted to do today's session as an interactive one, so you won't be listening to me show a whole ton of slides. Instead, what I want to do is actually highlight some of the ways in which we could frame thinking about open education in those three categories, but I also want to allude to the most recently adopted recommendation by UNESCO, the OER recommendation, which was adopted back in November. That recommendation has a series of action areas in it, and I've highlighted four of them here on this particular slide, policy, capacity building, inclusive equitable access, and sustainable models. And it's related to sustainable models that today's little webinar is primarily focused on. And we had a, at the beginning of March, I convened a small group of organizations working in open education, and we were exploring the work that each of us is doing related to the UNESCO OER recommendation. And out of that, it became apparent that all of us are doing a lot of work in capacity building and sometimes considerable work in policy and inclusive equitable access. But very few of us were doing much work exploring what constitutes sustainable models. And so I thought as part of OER 20, it'd be fun to kind of not figure that out, but at least explore it. And so I actually have put together this as a starting point. Down the left-hand column in green are a set of questions. And then to the right are three columns, one for market, one for public, and one for commons that would allow us to explore answers to those questions that situate open education in one of those three ways. And so let me actually give this link, I'm just going to paste this link right here into chat. Mary, can you paste that link into, oh, there we go. Thank you. Yeah, okay, it came through. So I want to encourage you all to go and have a click on the link that I've provided in chat, and that will take you to a Google doc that actually is something any of you can now use yourself. You're welcome to make a copy of it, and what I'd like to do is invite you all to pick one of the questions that are in the left-hand side. And then what I'd like to do is kind of unpack the potential answers to that question as it pertains to whether the activity might be thought of as being something done by the market, done and paid for by government, let's say, and or alternatively the third option, done as a commons activity. On the document that I've shared, you'll see that there's a kind of blank table that, again, all of you are kind of free to kind of fill in for yourself, for your own purposes. But below that, if you scroll below that, I've kind of created my starting answers to some of the ways in which we might conceive of these activities as being one of those three things, so market, public, or commons-like activity. So I wanted to do this session as really a form of discussion and an invitation for us to jointly explore that, as opposed to me simply presenting my own set views. And I wanted to invite participants to first pick a question from the green column or from the very left-hand side that you'd like to explore first. Once we've picked a question, I'm happy to share my views, but then I'm also interested in people's own ideas on how we might conceive of open education in this way. The last thing I'll say then before we kind of get under with that is that the reason I'm kind of proposing that we think about the activity of open education in these three forms is because if we think about how we're going to sustain open education and bake it into kind of normal activities for ongoing education work, then we have to figure out how to develop a sustainable model around it. And as I speak to people about sustainable models, it's clear that we all have a different conception of how it should be funded and supported over time. And some of people's views are based on the understanding that it's actually a government activity that needs to be funded publicly for by public taxpayers money. Others believe that the marketplace and the big vendors are going to play a significant role in open education. And there's still others that think of it still in the kind of open, fully open format of being something sustained by the community and down as a commons. So as a place to start, let me invite people to pick a particular question. And we can start having a conversation. Hey, Paul, that looks really great. And I can see lots of people posting things in the Google Doc already. I've got it up here on my screen. Would you like me to share my screen so that we can see the editing on there? That'd be great. Thank you. And maybe then there's also an easier way for you to, you know, kind of moderate what people are picking out. So I'll just get that up for you now. Thank you. So it's kind of fun to see people putting in responses in the table. Thanks so much for adding your ideas. Marin too, I think it'd be fun to actually hear people express some of these things verbally. So if anyone wants to, certainly we can hand you the mic if you'd like to speak to some of the things that you're entering. Absolutely. Please raise your hand and then we can give you the mic. Sure. And it looks like, I mean, actually there's activity happening all over that table. But let me kind of, again, invite you all to kind of ask for the mic and share some of your thoughts, but also to kind of jump in and kind of reflect on some of the things I see entered into the table already. Even with the first one, the first question around who's responsible for creating and iterating open education resources. This is an example of a really critical question. And you can see even in your answers, the disparate views of who would be responsible for that. If it's the market, the publishers and entrepreneurs, if it's public, then we have higher education institutions, the government K to 12, even teachers themselves and students and learners being involved, which I think is very fascinating. And I think a significant difference in terms of who the players are. So if we're thinking about a sustainable model for open education, then part of our decision making ought to be who are the actual hands on players who will be responsible for creating and managing iterating that OER over time. And as you can see with the even the very first question, what one point I'll raise here is that it's also a bit of a difference between thinking about open education as an outsourced activity, which would be something that you hand off to publishers or something as an in sourced activity, which is being done by the people directly involved and responsible for, in this case, education itself. And alternatively, for the third option commons, then we're really thinking about not something that's outsourced or in sourced, but something that's completely community sourced. One of the challenges I see around conceptualizing open education as purely a public activity is that then we're speaking about, as has been noted by others on the table, the fact that government would be the funder of that open education activity, which is one of the primary things that's currently happening. But to the extent that open education is really thought of as a commons that would benefit everyone around the world. And it's a real challenge for governments to think about funding something that goes beyond their national boundaries. They tend to be focused on meeting the needs of their regional citizens who are the ones that have provided the tax-paying money to fund a particular initiative. And so thinking about using public funds to support something that is of a global benefit is not normally top of mind for governments. Paul, we've got Mike passed over to one of our participants and I think she does here in the room with us. Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yeah. Oh, thanks Paul. It's really just more a comment. I think this is really interesting document, really, really useful, but I'm just wondering about this, you know, creating and iterating and maybe it's just language. I think it's more about sharing and how people are using OER. I think we really need to think about that and, you know, maybe, I think we've got quite a lot of policy, but I think we're quite good creating stuff. I think what we're not so good is using that stuff. We're very good at creating more stuff that's the same as the other stuff that people have created and shared openly. So I think now there's maybe something in terms of the commons and, you know, kind of people like us there and this there, you know, how we actually foster that. And I don't think that's about policy. You know, that really goes back to practice and some of things are happening here. So that's just something that's been crossing my mind as I'm looking through this. Yeah, well, I couldn't agree more. I think this is actually one of the biggest challenges we face right now in open education is that we have increasingly high volumes of stuff, as you put it, but not enough actual reuse and adoption of that stuff by others. And this leads me to kind of think and reflect on the need to form really a kind of community around open education. If I go back to the made with Creative Commons book that I co-wrote with Sarah Pearson, one of the things that emerged for me was that for these models, for any of the case study models that we examined in that book to be successful, there's sort of three things that they did. And I often reflect on that in the open education context. So here's the three things they did. First of all, they openly licensed some very high value resource. The higher the value proposition of that resource, the more likelihood they would be successful. So first, make open a very high value proposition resource. Second, they actually had a social mission. So they didn't make something open and available for others for profit purposes, but rather to make the world a better place. And the more compelling the social mission, again, the more likelihood they would be successful. But the third piece really relates to what you were relating, which is that we need to actually build a community of people around these resources. And that community of people can be the users. It can also be the developers. It can be everyone who actually has a need for that high value resource that's been openly licensed. And the bigger that community, the more likelihood that the model would be sustainable and their initiative would be sustainable over time. So you really need those three things, a high value proposition resource that's made open, a social mission, and then a large community built up around that resource. And so we've been really good at creating resources. We've been not so good about creating community around the use and iteration of those resources over time. Other comments, please. I would much rather this be like that. Anyone else want the mic? There are actually a lot of rich comments in the chat as well. Paul, I'm not sure if you've seen Marina, Gabi, Suming. Many have been commenting. So I wonder if it might be worth picking up a few of those. Sure. I'm just going to kind of look at those now. Yeah. And I think Gabi, so Gabi, I really like your comment too around, it's not about this stuff, but it's about interaction with the people who want to learn. For me, the open pedagogy activity currently happening in our world is one of the most exciting aspects of open education, because it focuses less on the resource and more on the actual interaction. And I think that's really an exciting and important thing to take account of. I see some people have the book. Thank you. So yeah, so just a comment on the differentiation between public and commons in the columns. This is something that Tanya has asked. So the way that I'm using those terms, Tanya, is to say that the public represents something that is be a sustainable model for open education because government funds it. Just the way government funds public education today, we could expect government to fund open education as part of its support for education in general. Whereas the commons is something that is a benefit to everyone around the globe. So for example, Wikipedia would be thought of as a commons because it does not rely on market or government funding to support its initiative as a sustainable model over time. Instead, it actually gets its support directly from donations, from expertise and people sharing their time to manage and update that Wikipedia article or set of articles over time. Oh man, I'm still waking up. My mouth isn't working right. Well, I must say, Paul, you're doing an awesome job to stimulate this discussion, which is so lively both in the Google Doc. We have at least five more minutes, so also very conscious in case there's any other Q&A. I'm going to repost the link to the Google Doc in the chat as well, just so anybody who hasn't got it yet, because our audience has been growing during the session. Yeah, it's great to see. There's lots of great questions. It's fascinating to think about these views of open education, because in my view, at this stage, we're at this moment in time, an inflection point for open education we're about to potentially see significant growth around it. It will come down to what is our model for sustaining open education going forward? There's a whole variety of suggestions in the chat, including what would be the role of the United Nations and how would the United Nations potentially itself be a funder. I think it's unlikely that we can expect something like the United Nations to fund open education around the globe. I will maybe say a couple of last things, Marin, and then hand it over to you to transition us to the next session. One of the things that I will say is that it's probably not exclusively one or the other of these three options, market, public, and commons, but instead some kind of hybrid approach is likely to be the way that it will emerge as being the format for sustaining open education going forward. Even today, I would suggest that in some ways there already is some aspect of open education being some kind of hybrid of these three things. I think I need to take two final questions before we end. We have given them to Sue Ming and then we also have one final question from Kathy. So Sue and then Kathy. Okay, I'll try and make a brief brief. I'm just looking there at Jim's comments and what's been going on in the chat box about the difference between public and commons, and it seems to me that how we think about public has kind of been eroded over time and we have certain assumptions about what we think public means, but we don't really question those assumptions and we don't really ask ourselves where they come from. So we think about public as being, well, the government, it's something that the government pays for or the government provides. And this is really, you know, a legacy of public goods theory that goes back to a period of history that we don't live in anymore, the kind of a new deal of state government public state that steps in to deal with market failures. And it seems that commons, you know, we seem to be using commons more in terms of use. So if public is to do with government and provision, commons is to do with community use and maintenance. So it seems that we've got a kind of like a little bit of crack opening up between who's providing things and who is using and maintaining them. And part of it is to do with the fact that there's a crack that's opened up in democracy between communities and government and governments don't, well, the public don't pay for governments anymore. And they don't, governments are not used and maintained by the public in the way that they might ideally be used. And I agree with you very much Paul that it's going to be some sort of a hybrid in the future. We think of sustainability as being the ability to meet goals. But of course, the goals are not in just in the present, but they're also in the future. So it's the not compromising future generations ability to meet their goals. That's very much in the definition of sustainability. Yeah. So so and part of that is maintaining something that comes from the past and is still in the present. And I know Jim and Laura and I had said at first that we would do something about the ghost imaginary of the commons and that ghost think is very much something that's that's persisting from the past and into the present. And this is some kind of idea of a stable knowledge. So you might say, well, we don't really think that the UN could possibly fund open knowledge commons. But then would we say the same thing about we don't really believe that the WHO should be able to fund knowledge commons around public health and pandemic control. Yeah, I mean, you've made some really great comments. Thank you so much. This is the kind of reflection I was hoping to trigger and stimulate with this session. And it's just the rich number of things being put in chat and on the document are really fantastic. I think that this kind of conversation is really important as we ask ourselves how will we take the great work that we've all been doing right now and move that work forward in ways that don't just kind of reflect on the past, but also invent new things going going forward and and finding some ways to do that. And maybe the UN is a way that would be a model for making that happen. It remains to be seen. I think even the UN of course gets its funding directly from its member states. And there were so many and there was someone else, Maren, that was going to speak. Yes, we have one more. And the last question from Kathy Esmela. Yeah, it's Kathy Esmela at Oklahoma State. And I really am curious about whether or not we would consider open a traditional commons or an emerging commons. Because I think that speaks to the goals and if our sustainability is our ability to meet our goals, the goals of the traditional commons are different from the goals of an emerging commons, right? Is that Bullier? How do you say the same? Yeah, David Bullier. Yeah, I think that and of course, the traditional notion of commons was primarily resourced based in terms of physical goods like pastures and forests and water. And now we're talking about digital things primarily. And relationship too, right? Yeah, exactly. And so thinking about how those constitute a different kind of commons and how the need to support those is of a different type, I think is an important part of the piece of figuring out a sustainable model. I don't have an answer, but I love the questions and I was hoping to prompt not just answers with this session, but this kind of exploration of the questions that underlie sustainable models. So with that, Maren, why don't I end there and say thanks so much, everyone, for participating in this session. I'm glad you found it stimulating and of interest. And I love the comments that have been posted here in chat and on the document. And I hope that this is a conversation that we can continue as we explore sustainable models for open education moving forward.