 pleased to welcome here, Hadir Shwetala and Aira Gooding, who will be presenting the title, Open Licensing Improves Institutional Responsiveness and Reduces Administrative Verdant During Emergencies. Thank you. Thank you very much. So it's terrific to be here today. My name's Ira Gooding. I serve as Assistant Director for Open and Inclusive Learning in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And I'm joined today by instructional designer, Hadir Shwetala, also of the Center. And we're both part of a small team within the Center that focuses on open education and inclusive teaching practices. And we're gonna be telling you a tale of two courses today in order to illustrate how open practices can improve institutional responsiveness and reduce administrative burden when responding to emergencies. And so I wanna say up front that these are admittedly anecdotes, but our hope is that these stories and others you hear today might be shared so that they can help bolster the case for open licensing in your home institutions. So to that end, we have two primary objectives. First, we hope that you'll reflect on your own experiences and tell us your own stories about how open practices have reduced that kind of burden at your institutions. And we have one story to tell, but I'm sure that there are others in this room and among our online audience. And second, we hope that the story we're about to tell it can be useful to you. I know we all encounter skepticism from time to time within our institutions about why we shouldn't do open educational resources. And we find it's helpful to be armed with stories that we can tell to respond to that skepticism. And so I, first of all, feel free to move in closer. I know there's been some adjustments, but I would like to start out to tie into the braiding theme of the conference into today's presentation because I think it helps us emphasize our objectives with this presentation. So I'm a rock climber, and in this picture, you can see a pile of tangled climbing ropes. I can't use this pile of ropes the way it is because it would prevent me from ascending and descending the rocks safely. So having untangled ropes is crucial for my safety. Now, you're probably wondering, how does this relate to braiding? Well, imagine I'm trying to braid these tangled ropes. Would it work? And I'm looking, go ahead, shout out an answer. Would it work to braid this pile of tangled ropes? Not great. What would I need to do first before braiding them? Untangle them? What if I've never braided anything before? Would it work? I could muddle through. Yeah, but it'd probably be more efficient and better if I were able to practice. So these ways of preparing for the process of braiding also relate to the process of creating openly licensed content to reduce administrative burden during emergencies. So by preparing, it allows us to be proactive and organized versus being reactive and chaotic. And learning and practicing these skills will make us more effective. And just in general, being organized will result, the end result is a braid that is planned and a better final product than the braid that was not planned. And so the same may be true for openly licensed courses. And I just know for a fact, having created this picture, that I would not have been able to successfully braid these without untangling them first. I made quite a mess. So I'd like to ask you another question and I know we're really spread out, so feel free to shout out. In order to make open educational content, what extra steps need to happen? Any thoughts? How much extra work would you have to do or what additional tasks would need to happen? Pulling together the stakeholders, getting people involved, yeah. And that can take a little while. Can't do that instantly. Any other thoughts? Yeah, getting all those same people at the table to make that decision, even if you've collected them to all have them to come to the same conclusion of what kind of license to apply, for example. And one other thing that didn't get mentioned, but for the sake of time I'll move forward, making just in general, finding the content can take longer, openly licensed content to create more openly licensed content isn't quite as quick and easy as something that might be copyrighted. Thanks, Heather. So those are all good answers and we know that making open educational content, it typically requires more work than content that isn't open. And in our center it increases our workload by about 60% we've found. When we're making a course that's not openly licensed, it's a lot easier, it's a lot quicker. But we think that the extra effort is worth it and I suspect if you're here today you probably agree. And so we're gonna tell you two stories to illustrate one reason why we think that open licensing is worth it. So in our tale of two courses, the first course we'll talk about is psychological first aid. Did I go too quickly? Yeah, I did. Okay. Psychological first aid is a training course we developed in 2013 and it's intended to prepare responders to render first line care and support during emergencies. It's composed of didactic lessons, simulated vignettes and assessments and it's all delivered asynchronously and is publicly available as a MOOC on Coursera. Notably however, it is not openly licensed. It does not have any creative comments licensing of any kind. So now I wanna pause for a moment and point out that I'm not making any value judgments about that decision to not put an open license on this content. As you all know, lots of factors go into making that decision and those factors were weighed by the team behind the course, the instructors, the funders of the project and that decision was made. And I don't really wanna focus on whether that was the right decision or wrong decision. I just wanna focus in on what the downstream consequences of that decision are, specifically the downstream consequences when responding to emergencies. So sometimes we see surges of interest in the course, the psychological first aid that correspond with emergencies that happen around the world. Those could be natural disasters, mass casualty events and armed conflicts. We see those surges in terms of activity on the discussion forum and help requests from learners and we frequently see it in the usage data that we have access to on Coursera. So you can see here a curve of monthly active users in psychological first aid from March of 2021 through last month. And you can see these surges in activity and there are certainly way more emergencies in the world than these four but there are notable surges of activity in this particular course and they do line up with emergency events that happen in the world. The Israel-Palestine crisis in 2021, withdrawal from Afghanistan, you can see the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sadly to say this chart doesn't reflect it but I did check on the course this morning and we have seen a notable increase in demand over the past week since the events in Israel. So these emergencies frequently generate additional activity through the course discussion forums and flagged issues within the course platform but we also hear directly from organizations requesting permission to reuse the content for the specific populations that they are serving in the case of an emergency. And the things they're looking to do are the typical activities we talk about here when we talk about derivative works. They're looking to do translations, localizations of the content, adjusting it to serve a different population. There may be sometimes looking for a modality change from an asynchronous online course to something to a synchronous session or even an in-person session. And those requests come from government agencies, they're coming from nonprofits and regardless of those requests, they generate work for us because the course is not openly licensed. We have to answer phone calls, we have to answer emails, we have to have meetings and that requires effort. And we're happy to undertake that effort but it would be a whole lot easier if we were able to say, sure, go ahead, use the course, there are the terms, follow them. So we can take a closer look at a recent example to illustrate shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, the course instructor forwarded a request to me. He received it from an organization that wanted to translate into Ukrainian in order to train responders to render aid to citizens and soldiers who are experiencing traumatic events. The instructor said, let's do this. He was supportive, the institution was supportive, I was supportive, we were all eager to help but good intentions only go so far. Because the course isn't openly licensed, there were all sorts of questions, there are all sorts of questions that emerge in that process of trying to be supportive. What are the conditions of that use? What about attribution? What about commercial uses? What about access to translated content? Of course, all these questions would have been immediately answerable under an open license but we couldn't rely on that because that wasn't the choice that the team made. So all of this amounts to additional administrative burden. In this particular case, there were 10 different email exchanges, there were a couple of Zoom meetings, we had one Vice Dean level meeting to talk about it. The total staff time devoted to just responding to this one particular request ended up totally in somewhere in the neighborhood of about seven hours of staff effort. Now, that doesn't seem like very much in the face of the events in Ukraine and people were suffering and we wanted to help. However, we hadn't planned for this work, other work had to be set aside so we could respond to the request and we had to chase people down for meetings and we had to find convenient time for people to meet, we had to read and respond to emails. In short, it was time consuming and disruptive and it meant that we didn't respond as quickly as we could have. It took us three weeks to formulate an answer to the request. If the course had been openly licensed, we would have been able to answer them instantaneously and authoritatively and they would have been able to proceed with confidence. They might not have contacted us all at all. We hoped that they wouldn't, they would just go ahead and use it. And that's just one example. We've had many others over the years, the earthquake in Turkey, floods in Pakistan, conflict in Sudan and Tunisia. These happen with some level of frequency and it would be terrific if we could respond quickly and decisively by relying on an open license. But that's not the case here. So each one of these requests generates extra burden in varying degrees, email work, clerical work, phone call, Zoom meetings, legal and all while the emergency conditions still persist on the ground, making our response and our ability to support people less effective overall. So by contrast, we have the COVID-19 contact tracing course. This course is when we help our faculty create in May, 2020 in response to the COVID pandemic and the goal being to train future contact tracers on how to stop the spread of infection by identifying who had been in contact with cases of COVID-19 and asking them to isolate and quarantine. And you may all have heard about contact tracing in the beginning of the pandemic. So this course was designed to quickly prepare large numbers of folks to become contact tracers. It was offered as a MOOC on Coursera. And although we created this course in response to an emergency, we did create it with an open license from the outset in anticipation of future emergencies, which we'll see more here, if I can get it going to the next slide. So this graph shows the monthly active learners in the original version of the Coursera course. In this one, there's three major peaks of active learner use. And so these represent the three major variant surges of the COVID pandemic after the initial emergency had kind of started to survive. So we've got the first Delta surge, the second Delta variant surge, and then the Omicron variant surge. As we see in our other courses that don't have an open license, as Ira has described, these are the types of moments where we might get many other requests for reuse of the content. But we didn't have to have a huge influx of those requests. So to prepare this course to be easily reused when an emergency occurs, we gave the course the Creative Commons license. And we also compiled the course components into a zip file, which included the videos, the PDFs, and slide decks. Because the course was being used as a certification for employment in some jurisdictions, notably New York State. We didn't include the summative assessment because we wanted to maintain the integrity of that assessment. But all the rest of these files, we uploaded directly into the course so that the whole zip file was there for anybody who wanted to use it, and they didn't have to contact us to get ahold of that. So while we did receive lots of requests for reusing this content, we were able to easily accommodate them by just directing folks to that zip file that was hosted on Coursera. So five seconds to send that though, I don't know, a minute to write that email and say, here's where that link is. As with the psychological first aid course, reuses included complete translations and adaptations to make the content culturally relevant among many other adaptations. Most, many of which we may not even be aware of because they didn't have to contact us. On top of the reuses that we knew about because of the receiving the requests, there were plenty of reuses such as from the University of Geneva where they translated, adapted and modified the content for use in Francophone countries. We learned about the existence of that course just by stumbling upon it during our routine work on Coursera. So this course was created with absolutely no need for us to do anything extra. So here's an example of the content in reuse from the University of Geneva course. So on the left, you'll see content, a slide from our original course. And on the right, you can see the slide from the French version of the course. It's pretty obvious that that diagram is the same from both. And this image is one we created, our team created specifically for this contact tracing course when we gave it a Creative Commons license to that specific image. But what you'll also, if you don't speak French, you may not notice, but the French version of the slide is a fairly direct translation of the original slide. So the whole thing is just repurposed for their context. And the course itself largely follows the original course, but they do add in a few more pieces to make it relevant to their context and their purposes. So, hand it over to Ayala. Oh, sure. I forgot what our plan was for this part, so I'll just, I'll just wait. So just to recap and compare the two stories. The course that was not open had an extended response time, approximately two to three weeks, and the administrative burden in the form of correspondence, meeting, consultations, phone calls, and documentation. And it's not just about the amount of time, it's about the quality of that work. As Heather mentioned earlier, when she was looking at her ropes and figuring out how to untangle them, this was work that was unplanned. It was reactive. We were reacting to responses instead of being proactive. And the response was chaotic. We had to set things aside and chase people down, get on their calendar, and try to arrive at decisions. As our audience participant mentioned, getting all those people at the table together took some time. Are you doing next? Yeah, and I'll do the next part. So by contrast, the open license of the contact tracing course allowed us to have an immediate response time. So if someone hadn't come across the zip file and the Creative Commons license already on their own, if they did show task us to reuse the content, we could just direct them to that zip file, rather than having to take the time to pull all those resources together or find the exact item they were asking for. So we didn't have to interrupt our workflow beyond writing that brief one to five minute email. And then to also be able to outsource some of the digging to find that exact file they were looking for by saying, look in the zip file. So just to summarize, as a result, there's little or no additional administrative burden at the time of the emergency itself. Of course, in advance, we had to go through the process of selecting the openly licensed materials, and then we also had to go through the process of compiling that content in the zip file and then recompiling it after the course had gone through several updates to reflect the changes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, as Ira mentioned, this led to about 60% more effort on our part on the front end, compared to creating the content that isn't open. However, that effort was planned, it was proactive, and it was systematic. It had to only happen once, and it happened in a timeframe that fit into our workflow. So now you got a preview. Another discussion that I know we're pretty spread out here, but this is, I want to invite you to share your stories and examples. I mean, we focused on emergency scenarios, but any kind of example of the difficulty of sharing not openly licensed content or a counter example, I guess, potentially, of sharing how it caused more problems to openly license the content, we'd be interested to hearing any of your stories of a time when not having an open license caused problems for you. Anyone is welcome to share their thoughts. Also accept questions at this time. Yes. So to summarize, because I know we don't have mics for the people who are online. What's that? Just to summarize, just in case. There's mics. Oh, I see, the light's very bright, I can't see. If you'd like. It's a good story, so yes. I teach at Quantland Polytechnic University in BC, and we have a really high percentage of international students from the Punjab region of India, and often times their semester will start, and students aren't able to have their visa applications or paperwork ready, and they arrive kind of the end of week three, and feeling quite lost, right? So now that I've got this open ed resource that I use for my intro to Criminology textbook, which is a course, sorry, which is kind of the first, a course they've taken their very first semester when they first arrived in the country, they're able to access that online right away, whereas the textbook that I used previously, there's no way they would be able to get a hard copy of that in time, so that's just one example of how it's been extremely helpful with international students. Yeah, it sounds like it, especially with inclusion and equity for those folks as well, excellent. Can I just jump in on that? And I would also, also one advantage of an open educational resource in that, in settings like that, when we're talking about diversity and equity is that the ability to modify those materials sort of on the fly, if the population of your course somehow changes, or you've got a special need that requires sort of a different perspective, it's a lot easier to adapt that open educational resource and sort of make it fit with the population we're serving, whether that's an emergency or something we're expecting, and just that flexibility makes a huge difference. Yeah, so that's one, so our center is the Center for Teaching and Learning at the School of Public Health, and so most of our work is for our four credit programs, and so that work is not necessarily open, right? And so we make lots and lots and lots of content. We record lectures and do technical writing, also illustration, videography, all of that sort of thing. When we're not having to make something that's going to be open, it's easier. You don't have to go through all that additional work. When we say, okay, this is going to be an open educational resource, it's gonna have a Creative Commons license, there's more effort that we have to go through in order to make sure that say the slides that a guest speaker has provided don't include copyright protected content, or that we have to get together with people and decide on what that license is gonna be. Is this lecture gonna be licensed slightly differently from this one? Derivatives or no derivatives? Commercial or non-commercial? So just looking at, we log our time using project management software, so we're able to go in and look at the amount of time and effort that's put into not open versus open, and that's what we're finding. Now, that's an average. There are some that are a lot more difficult or a lot easier, but on average, it does amount to a considerably more work for us. Yeah, I suppose that would be part of it, but picking the license, although it is extra work, is not the biggest part. I would say the biggest part is that when an instructor comes to us and is ready to record their lecture, and they've got their slides, and they put in a bunch of stuff from journal articles that aren't open, and then we've got to correct for that, and that's probably the most time-consuming part of all of it. And just to dovetail onto that, let's say everything was given a Creative Commons license, and the same Creative Commons license, all of our SMEs, all of our faculty would be well-versed in how to create that content, and there wouldn't be quite as much of a learning curve. So the courses where we have somebody who's never worked on an openly-licensed course before is a lot more work to create that content than if we work with them again on another course, and they're much better at it the second time around, or even the second slide deck around, for example. So there's that learning curve. So the more we do it, the better and more quickly it goes. But yeah, so yes, it would probably be more efficient if we had the same license on everything all of the time, but I think the point more is just like openly-licensed content does take a little bit more intentionality in creating it in the upfront. Excellent. We've got a touch more time. Any other questions or any more examples or counter examples from your own contexts? Are we able to get questions from online or is it just like a live stream? Okay, just a live stream. Did you have one? Yeah, the microphones are back in the corners. I just wonder if first there were complaints about this new way of disseminating the course, and if then on the contrary, what we hope, and then those people were the most convinced one. What feedback did you have from the creator or the others? I think that's a good one for you to answer. Yes, it took convincing, and it still takes convincing sometimes. So there are challenges that come with it, but we've been able to demonstrate over time through anecdotes like the ones we just told that there is some real value in doing it this way because of the outcomes that you can have on the backend. Do you give them feedbacks of the reuse of the courses? I mean, I guess the other feel better when they know it has been really useful in crisis context, you see, and it's a way of recognition. It's where I work a lot on these subjects, how to recognize the contributor for open educational resources, and the first thing is human that they're here, they have a feedback on the reuse, the successful reuse of their work. Yeah, that's a really good point, and we do sometimes share that when something comes up, but we're not very systematic about it, and so that's a good suggestion that we actually be intentional and systematic about gathering that information and sharing it back to our subject matter experts. I work like Rory before, I work on this blockchain technology and therefore I came to open badges and recognition, and I really think there is something really strong for in every human that statistics or show people that they were useful is very important for their future contribution, which are harder, as you said. Yeah, it's a terrific point, and one of the challenges with open education is that frequently we don't know about the reuses because people don't have to tell us, but when we do learn about them, it's good to take note of them and share them to give that positive reinforcement, I completely agree. Looks like we are out of time, thank you for the questions. Did you have a quick wrap up? Yeah, I'll just wrap up very quickly to tie us back to our braiding theme, puns sort of intended. So it's been a delight to engage with you all today, thank you for sharing your thoughts and questions, to close, here you can see the resolution of that tangled climbing rope successfully braided. So I applied the best practices to creating open content to the process of braiding these ropes. I planned for the braiding process by proactively untangling all the ropes, and I've drawn upon my many years of practice braiding as a person with long hair. This proactive preparation allowed me to systematically and intentionally complete my braid. Similarly, when we proactively create course content with open licenses, we can reduce the administrative burden during emergencies. This allows us to fulfill our school's vision of protecting health and saving lives millions at a time, thank you.