 I appreciate you attending. So my topic is actually going to be a little bit broader. As I started to think about this topic, I realized that the question of incentive actually extends well beyond just the production of content and actually into consumption of content as well. So I feel at this point that my title is inadequate to the purpose, but I've kept it anyway since I proposed it that way. But I did add the word to use as well. So to create and to use, to connotate that we're only, we're not only talking about production, but we're also talking about consumption of content and the incentives associated with all of that. So I'm a president founder of Academos, which is actually a sponsor of the event here. And a former academic, academic by training, in the area of political theory, social theory, philosophy. And for that, and that was sort of a various publication. So to come from it from a content side as well. But then I launched a company 11 years ago. And the early part of the company was doing other things. But today it services 82 schools across the country providing online bookstores and marketplaces. And the mission from the very first go has always been to democratize and enhance access to educational materials. And we do that, especially today, by providing a peer-to-peer marketplace. So if I want textbook production, we've actually been able, on average, to reduce the cost by about 60% by creating a peer-to-peer marketplace. One number of awards for all that. OK, move on. So what I want to talk about today is the question of incentive. But as question of incentive points actually to some, I think, bigger questions, broader questions about the OER movement in general. So what's interesting from my perspective, so coming at OER relatively freshly, it's about 18 months that I've known about it even. But I've been in this market for a while. And I really see this as an auspicious moment as a transitional moment for the question of distribution, production, consumption of course materials, of educational materials. But it's driven primarily, the disruption is driven primarily by students who are going online and really crushing the economic model of the physical bookstore. That together with the incipient use of digital materials increasingly. Not so much yet the OER having an influence on that disruption, but hopefully that'll come as well. So within the question I would pose as a starting point then is why aren't OERs more widely adopted if indeed there are such pressures? OERs have been around for about 10 years. Why don't we see more adoption of that? Well, the immediate answer might be, well, you're just being impatient by posing that question. And there's good reason for that point of view. There's this very limited collection of such materials. But the pipeline is clearly growing with foundation support. I think we've heard a lot in the last few days about the Washington State Initiative. And that's exciting and taking off. And we've had an OER friendly administration for only three years. So actual having funding for these kinds of projects also auspicious. But there may be fundamental reasons too for why OER is not more widely adopted. And that's really what I want to address today. So let's start with this notion of OER as both free in these two senses of gratis and Libra. So I think there's a self understanding in the movement of OER being free in the sense that it's no cost. That's part of the very definition. And also in the sense of being free to use. But gratis itself really has two connotations to it. And so to give you an example, if I walk on a beach and I find a shell on the beach and I can pick that up and I can appropriate that, I can take that home and put it on my bookshelf. But if I walk from the beach over to a shelf stand and I see a shell that's very similar to that one, I recognize, of course, that that's not free. And it could be that the only thing that that person did who is selling that shell is selective is to pick it up off the beach and say, I think somebody else would find that appealing. Which is say that it could be that nothing else was done to it than a curation of that object. So when we say that OER is gratis, what I think we're really saying, what I understand it to be, is that we're forgoing ownership, that nothing is required in exchange for our labor. In other words, it's a donation model. And I understand it as a donation model. So faculty really have four, there are four components for faculty to be engaged with OER. So much of the funding has been focused on the production of the content. But it seems to me, and this is really where it leads to consumption as well, that it isn't just about production, but it's the discovery and evaluation, the adoption of the contents to specific classroom uses. And then sharing either the content itself in a derivative form, or as just information about that content to others. All of these things working together is what makes such a movement possible. Content on its own, production of that content on its own. The internet is filled with content that's siloed, that's archipelagoes of content. It's not enough just to have content. So we're then relying on faculty to drive this whole thing. But who are these faculty that we're looking to do all this heavy lifting? This is also a transitionary period for faculty. In 1960, 75% of teaching in this country were full-time tenured or tenured track. By 2009, that dropped to 27%. It's a huge transition going on in this country with regard to higher education, teaching, and faculty composition. So at least 73%, this is the same outsource and downsize. That very idea that was part of corporate marriage for so long has come right into the heart of higher education. And these employees are paid for course on a yearly contract basis without benefits, making a third or less, according to the New York Times, of what a tenured faculty member makes. So 73%. And then let's think about the 27%. Well, they're focused on original research. They're thinking about teaching and administrative duties. So to have their contributions, it's very hard to see that on a large scale because introductory survey materials don't usually qualify for the tenured process. Now, that's not true necessarily for teaching institutions. But by and large, you want to incent the greatest number of faculty to participate in the movement. So if you're really just reducing it to those institutions and those faculty members who could possibly be recognized for tenure by producing such things, I think that's a diminution too much. So the commercial textbook authors then most are tenured or tenure track. And I put the cloud world in this category as well. As we heard, I think, from Eric Frank, that they are always looking for the best talent they can find. And these faculty are typically doing this for the extra income. They're not doing it for academic recognition. In fact, it's really the other way around. The fact that they already have this academic recognition makes them candidates in the first place to become textbook authors and sign looper to the textbook fields. It's not in, they're not bestowed recognition for doing that. They already have recognition by and large. I think there's a task of acknowledgment in the OER movement. And I think that it really came through in the days that I've been here, that goodwill donations are not sufficient to drive through the kind of ambitions that this movement rightly has. The use of foundation funds, state funds, federal funds, for-profit companies such as Flatworld in the production of these materials belies the idea that they can adhere to the highest standards without financial incentive. I think that's really important. It's a kind of taking stock of the movement where it is today, that kind of tacit recognition. Now, that doesn't mean that goodwill donations don't have a place. It just means that they don't have a place in changing, as being game changers in this industry. But the bigger question is, is the donation model in general? Leaving aside the goodwill aspect, is the donation model in general adequate against the considerable resources of commercial publishers? They have significant advantages. Been able to see firsthand these advantages, not only really providing the highest quality content and supported by really strong technological capabilities that are becoming increasingly the thing that drives these companies. These companies recognize the limitations of the core textbook and its sustainability for their businesses. They know all that. For them, it's about the technology that's built around it that's going to, in their view, preserve their business model. And it's formidable. Their marketing and sales opera at us is similar to big pharmaceutical companies. They have armies of sales reps. I mean, there are, I was just thinking about it, one company, Pearson, probably has double the number of sales reps. Then there are attendees at this conference. It's huge, right? This is, you know, so the sensitivities also, right? They know their faculty well. They know their faculty. They have studied their faculty very well. And so they know that what faculty really want, these adjuncts want the predigested material. They want it packaged. They want it ready to go because you know what they have, five different things to do. And if you can give them integration of assessments in other ways of reducing their workload, so much the better than they're all for it. And that's what these publishers are really keyed on, really focused on. Faculty are also sensitive to book prices. And they become ever more so because of the publicity and really truly the pricing fractures. But they are still more focused on quality of content. So for our part as a company, we're about to launch an adoption tool that actually allows, for the first time, faculty to contrast and compare commercial materials with OER content all in one place. And there are lots of metrics that we're providing so that they can just do side-by-side comparisons. Faculty reviews, adoption information, different institutions, affordability ratings on all the texts, lots and lots of really good data, I think, that'll help them make informed decisions and try to bring some transparency to the process. But the faculty attitudes to the LMS may actually be a harbinger for what's happening in the OER movement itself. Because if you think about it, the faculty are really concerned with questions like, in the case of an LMS, does this improve my productivity as an instructor? Can it help me reduce my workload and make teaching a bit easier? Will it produce better outcomes and make me a better or more successful instructor? These are the kind of questions that faculty are really focused on when they think about adopting new technology or think about using a new source of content. And I think that there's a risk that OER comes into a role that is not dissimilar to how LMSs are used today, which is to say, they're used but used in very discreet ways. The vast majority of the capabilities of an LMS go unused. So is there a drifting tour of rapprochement between, to say it like, between OER? It seems to me that there could be a drifting tour of sort of middle, free and open, may need to make some compromises in the name of quality, where, and commercial publishers may need to respond to the market conditions and the pricing pressures by reducing their costs and becoming more flexible with their content licenses and so on. But the question for me is, can the OER, or if that's the case, can the OER project nevertheless maintain what I take to be one of the most important qualities, which is the ability to freely remix, combine, and share materials? How do you preserve that in this context? So I think OER is the future. I mean, everybody here agrees, believes it has a future. But the question is really how large? Direct concrete benefits improve academic life. It will be large if it does these things, right? Financial incentives need to be in place, not just for the production, but also for the curation, organization, and distribution of these materials. And here I think is a critical difference that I have comments that I've heard at this meeting. OER, I don't think will come into its own unless and until its mandate, its project, is about not being as good as the commercial material, but it really has to be better. And that, in my view, means that we stop looking at the core textbook as just a commodity. I heard this morning someone said it was just a commodity, and it's just about price. Well, that may be the starting point today. But through innovation and imagination, those core texts really ought to be something quite different. They ought to become something quite different. And part of, in my view, what OER should be doing is actually helping that come about, right? OK, so I think there's really just an open question about whether or not states in the federal government can support this. I mean, I personally support a single payer system for health care, but look where that went. So the question is, not all good ideas are funded, right? And they may be funded for a short time, and then the political winds change, and then a movement that's dependent on that is then really hamstrung. OK, well, thank you. Do we have time for any questions or comments? I know somebody who works in academic publishing. And his kind of take on this is that the publishers will always be doing something that other people aren't, in terms of, I should say, having these resources available to them to do the kind of sales and marketing, to curation, to have the analytics coming back from the journal, hits, and stuff like that. Is it a mountain which is too big to climb, to actually break the hold that they've got? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think there are lots of. First of all, I would say that there's no, I can't think of an example of a successful open source movement that isn't, at some point, made more efficient, more competitive in the general marketplace through private enterprise. And I think that that will have to happen here. But that doesn't mean that you follow the traditional publisher model and sort of replicate that structure. It can be hugely disruptive at the same time. But I do think that it's going to need a partnership with, because these things are really expensive to do. And I just don't think the nonprofit world and even the state-funded nonprofit world really has the wherewithal on its own to confront this. But it's absolutely doable. As an adjunct faculty member, I was struck by the fact that I would never use a textbook. Because I'm much too busy. It's just too much to build up a textbook and just keep talking. Instead, I rely heavily on my own materials and primary source materials. And you're at this conference? Yeah. And you're at this conference? I'm at this conference, right, exactly. And so where do people like me sort of fit into the analysis that adjuncts are? Yeah, so what I'm getting at is that's still an anomalous position, right? I mean, for the vast majority of faculty, they take precisely the opposite view, which is, I'm just too busy not to adopt a textbook, right? Not to just take this pre-packaged, pre-digested survey of material and just teach from it, right? What you're describing to most people sounds more timely. Yes, it's as if you've been talking to people. Do other people like me show up, or am I just really like you? Yeah. So what's the? They do, they do. But the question is, I mean, we're talking about an industry. I'm talking about macro chains. I'm talking about there are 120 million books circulated to students every year. That's what I'm talking about. I'd like to see an OER movement that actually addresses that. And I don't think that it can do so within the sort of this narrow framework of a denation model. You mentioned my medium of incentive, being like prestige. Do you have any thoughts on what that actually might pay out? Yeah, I don't think that's. I think it's crass financial incentive that it's going to attract the most capable, the best authors to contribute to this. I think it's as simple as that. But it isn't just about the production. It's also the consumption. It's also about the curation. And those incentives need to come into play. And those need to be thought through as well. So what do you think those incentives might be? So I'm just like some magic pot-bag we have. It's a lot of my time curate. Yeah, that's right. Or how, yeah, what would my incentives be like? Well, there could be institutional incentives to do that. That are supporting a faculty member. The question is, I do think it comes back to a personal incentive for that instructor. And I could think of various kinds of personal incentives for someone to do that. But that likewise takes resources. So it gets back to the point that this has got to be something that is solid, both the private and the public sphere. Question, would you say that this model that you're talking about applies strictly to higher ed or secondary ed? We have, at the Open High School of Utah, two of my teachers are here with me. We create our own content. We use state tax-funded dollars. And it's a successful model. So I'm curious as to how this model that you're talking about would apply to secondary. Yeah, that's a fair question. I think the dynamics in primary and secondary education are really quite different than higher ed, primarily, because the burden of buying books is mostly on students in higher ed and not so much in primary and secondary school. So we work with a number of prep schools where the students or the parents do have that obligation. And that's where we come in and try to lower costs. And so I would qualify that, I guess, and say that for the prep schools, those are more analogous to higher education than what you're describing. So it's just indirect, because the parents are the taxpayers with which the state schools are funded, with which the textbooks are purchased. OK, thank you. So did I have a question? Oh, one for any. OK, great. Thank you. Oh, we'll take one more. That's OK. Um, what do you use, what is your opinion that I was going to play out, what do you see, what do you think is the most like, the outline of all different things, but what's your vision? You know, I'm an optimist, so I think that there is an opportunity for a for-profit business model in this that just aligns interest in whole new ways and is incredibly disruptive to this market. I think that that's what I would hope to work toward myself and encourage other entrepreneurs and people who are really thinking about this market to help solve these issues.