 I missed the deadline for slides, and I was a little upset about it because they're like a crutch for me, but then I decided to go with it, and it's been incredibly liberating. I don't have slides today, and I'm happy to tell you that. So I'm here also to talk about cost, and I think kind of what I'm going to say is very complementary to what's happening at UMUC. I work for Achieving the Dream. We are actually not brand new. We've been around since about 2006. Has anybody heard of Achieving the Dream before? Okay, great. So if you don't know about Achieving the Dream, we started as a grant funded, lumina funded project, and then we kind of became a non-profit a few years ago. And we really work on, we are member institutions, and we work exclusively with community colleges to work with them to kind of holistically transform the institutions to meet their student success goals. So not just OER, but a number of initiatives. We work with our member colleges to improve their outcomes. And OER is really one of the newest initiatives that we have at ATD. What my argument today is, I'm talking about lowering costs, but I think when we talk about lowering costs, it's very important, but really lowering costs is just a step towards kind of a larger goal. Lying costs, especially for community college students, is a step towards a goal of increasing student outcomes, student completions, and helping community college students meet their goals. Today is the day, I'm going to talk about this initiative called the OER Degree Initiative, and we just today released our first research report on launching OER Degree Pathways. So if you go to the Achieving the Dream website on the news section, you'll be able to download that and get probably more than you need to know about this initiative. So at Achieving the Dream, we focus on seven capacities at colleges that they need to focus on to kind of improve their success, teaching and learning, equity, leadership and vision, strategy and planning. And so we go into colleges and really work with the colleges in a holistic way. And OER really fits into all the seven capacities, particularly OER degrees, which I'll talk about in a second. But first, I'm going to have a pop quiz. So you need to get out your pens and paper, sorry, sorry. So here's the first question. The more expensive course materials are, the better they are, or the more effective they are. True or false? False. Okay. All right, next question. The more a student pays for course materials, the better that student will do in the course. False. Okay. True or false? Assuming a textbook is an integral part of a course, sometimes the biggest assumptions, a student who does not buy a textbook for a course should do just as well as a student who does. Let's, let's, some hesitation. Assuming the textbook is an integral part of the course, can you go without it? Right. Right. Similar to my hotel of the street of the Hilton, I can buy a can of Coke at their convenience store. It's three bucks for a can. But it tastes much better, right? So, so I mean clearly there's a disconnect between the kind of cost of course materials and what we really should be focusing on, which is outcomes, right? Student goals. And so I think that's a really important piece. Students value, kind of quality courses they value instruction. They know when they get this $200 textbook and read three chapters out of it, they feel ripped off by that. And I think students more and more are, you know, as we see from the, from the data, they're finding ways to get the materials cheaply or if they can. They're, you know, trading with other students. And they're doing what they can to get the materials. I did have some, some really kind of ad hoc conversations with some student groups at Montgomery, Montgomery College in Maryland, as well as a bro of Manhattan. And I got a quote from one of the students, which was, I use the course to supplement what I learn online. And I was like, shouldn't, don't you mean the opposite? You, no. So, so basically, they really wanted, they're really striving to kind of learn something and they want to learn it. But course materials and the expense of course materials, especially for community college students, is a barrier. So why should we care? And why should you guys care about this? If any of you read Sarah Goldrick-Rab's book, Paying the Price. Okay, you should read it. It's a really good study of community college students in Wisconsin. And she looks at specifically financial aid and expenses. And there's some really interesting information, but really sad information in the book when you look at just average, you know, the average population of community colleges today and some of the challenges they're facing. Financial aid does not design for these working students, right? There's a lot of kind of barriers and obstacles to even getting the financial aid that they qualify for and some of the kind of arcane rules. So there's that. There's also some really depressing information about student hunger, community college students who are hungry, don't get enough to eat, as well as homeless. So, you know, when they decide to attend college, if they're homeless or hungry, right, that's a motivated student, right? But they have to make some pretty hard choices oftentimes. And I think you pointed out some of the statistics about kind of adoption of textbooks, but there's a 2016 student textbook and course material survey out of the Florida Virtual Campus Survey. Significant number of students take fewer courses because of expense. They don't register for a specific course because of the textbook cost. They drop courses, withdraw, earn a poor grade because, specifically because of this, or fail a course, or don't even purchase the required textbook. So, again, assuming that these textbooks are important pieces of courses and a student is not having that material, they're not going to do well. And we know also from research, if you, you know, the momentum counts for a community college student. So the more courses you take and are successful in, the higher the chance you're going to be successful, the more barriers you're encountering that you have to stop out, you're not going to come back, right? And that's not what we want. We have a really kind of miserable completion rate at community colleges that, you know, we have a solution for which is more and more open educational resources. So, you know, the cost of course materials really affects a college student's future, whether they're going to succeed, whether they can even access these courses. But, like I said, it's a symptom of a larger problem, I think, and I think the reason that achieving the dream is involved in looking at open educational resources. Because when you start looking at costs, how we got to this situation where we have these publisher textbooks that are so exorbitantly expensive, it really opens the door at looking at some other issues, kind of structural issues within community colleges. How do we measure efficiency or efficacy in higher ed, right? How do we know that a course works, right? Is it the grades, or, you know, what is effective teaching and how is it being done in community college classrooms? This is my screen keeps popping back. What is the role of faculty at institutions and what should their role be? How does the internet or, you know, kind of access to the information that's on the internet? How should it change? How has it changed education or knowledge creation? How should it? What are the institutional costs of a student dropping out? Because there are costs to that. You invest in a student and a student drops out and doesn't come back. That costs a college money. And that's often costs that they're not looking at, as far as their kind of bottom line, I suppose. And what does a student's role, or what does a student's role need to be in knowledge creation and content creation? And for achieving the dream, these are not just cost issues, these are kind of institutional structural issues that we see as opportunities. And the reason we think, you know, we look at institutional issues is because when we first started out after the first five years, achieving the dream did a deep study of its outcomes, something that, again, often institutions don't do. And found that for the past five years, achieving the dream hadn't been really that effective. Hadn't moved the needle at these institutions. And the particular reason was the way achieving the dream was approaching it was like kind of discrete ad hoc kind of initiatives that weren't really connected together. And so since then, we've really seen the advantage of going into an institution and really looking deeply at the kind of structural issues. For textbook costs or completion issues, we tend to either blame students. It's the students that we get, right? We're all access institutions. That's the problem. Or faculty. We blame faculty a lot for courses that have poor outcomes. But really, these are institutional issues. And OER really allows, it's a free issue, right? But the openness of OER really needs to be emphasized, what you can do with these materials. How many planets are there in our solar system? There's Pluto up there. Eight or nine. Well, that's great. Exactly. At some point, when I was going to school, it was nine. And then in what, 2006, I think? Pluto, sadly, was downgraded to a dwarf planet. So there's eight. Overnight, those astronomy textbooks were, they were obsolete. They had some incorrect information in them. They added, I don't know if you know this, last year, they added four new elements to the periodic chart. When I was taking chemistry, I opened the slab of my hard cover textbook. And there was the periodic chart on there. So again, knowledge is changing quickly. The things that we thought were kind of stable, they change quickly. And that is not something that kind of commercial publishing is very good at keeping up with. OER can, right? You have currency. It allows currency. It allows faculty much more control over kind of what they teach and how they teach. They're not teaching that extra chapter because it's $200 and they feel bad to teach a chapter or three chapters or five that they don't feel really confident about. And they can choose the best resources, what are activity or whatever outcome they want. So at ATD, so if we think about UMUC and kind of their initiative, what we look at is once an institution starts to kind of invest OER, has a kind of a groundswell of faculty, has these initiatives going, that the next step for that is to create what we think OER degree or OER degree pathways, right? Which is, with a faculty member, you can do this independently, you can do an OER course. But to do an OER degree, you need a kind of institutional effort. You need IT services. You need student services to be involved. You need to figure out a way to promote it to students. So an OER degree is for community colleges and associate degree or certificate, as all the required courses and some elective courses are created with open educational resources, right? So a student can move through this over two years or one year if it's a certificate and not pay any textbook costs. So in two and a half minutes, let me tell you about this initiative. For the OER degree initiative, what we've done, we've got funding from the Hewlett Foundation. We're funding 38 community colleges across the country. This is the largest OER initiative to date, to create OER degree pathways. So you need to create at least one pathway at their colleges, pilot these courses. It also includes a research and evaluation piece. I told you about that study that was released today. So we're looking at academic outcomes of OER degree programs. We're looking at economic outcomes. How much does it cost to do these degree programs? And what are the benefits? What are the returns for keeping those students or lowering the cost for students? And implementation. What are the best practices for that? And so colleges are developing a number of degrees, general studies, liberal studies, business, health and health sciences. And they're also looking at sustainability issues, which is something that's not always done. If this works, if you're getting the kind of results that we think you're going to get, how are you going to bake it into what you do institutionally? How are you going to connect it to your student's success and continue to use it for your students? I encourage you to go download the report from our website. And again, if you have any questions, I'll be around. I'm happy to answer them. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you.