 And I just stress that we're talking about the assessment and accreditation of the learners, not the OER. And I know this is one of the things that was shortened and didn't say that. This is the Social Science and Humanities Research Council project that I'm going to describe here that we're doing. I'm doing it with Wayne McIntosh from New Zealand and Diane Conrad who works at our university. So we're working together on this. And before I get going I'm just going to back up a bit and tell you why we're doing this. And it's a bit different from some of the reasons for supporting OER that I've heard here. So I want to make it quite clear. I'm going back to the original copyright loss which created the public domain. There was no public domain before copyright came. And copyright has been turned on its head from an act for the encouragement of learning. And in the United States an act to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. And they've tried to switch that around and I want us to get back to that. We're pushing OER and yes there are great cost benefits on it. But what we see happening with the new copyright laws that are being pushed on us is that with digital rights management or I call it digital restrictions management and digital licenses. I suggest to you that we can't use proprietary content. But in an educational setting it is becoming impossible for us to teach and learn using proprietary content. With digital rights management when they put the lock on you can't copy, you can't face, you can't annotate, you can't highlight. You can't use text to speech, you can't change the format, you can't even move your material from one computer to the other. You can't print it out, you can't move it geographically. So if you had students in four or five different countries as we do as an open university we would have to get separate copyright licenses for each country. And they have quite often they have kill dates on them. On a certain date they go into your computer and they take it out and you license it so you can't resell it if you buy it. All of these things that they stop us from doing are things that we need to be doing in a modern education. Especially when we're talking about mobile learning and using tablets for learning instead of print. And we see the world is moving away from print and therefore within the digital world we can't use these. And you know they want the perfect copy protection. This is a joke but actually an American congressman actually brought this up in a bill in Congress. It was never passed but they wanted to give the right to the publishers to go into your computer and destroy your computer if you were using copyrighted material illegally. And the other one is of course the digital licenses which reinforce all of the digital rights management areas. So even if they got rid of digital rights management you still can't use them in an educational setting. With the license owners have no liability even if the product doesn't work. They have the full right, you've given them full permission to invade your computer without any further permission. When you click on it you've given them that permission. They have the right to collect and use your personal data and you have the license as a privilege. You have a privilege to use the product. You don't own it. So in Amazon when you click on it it says buy this digital book. They're lying to you. You're not buying it. You're licensing it. You don't own it. You're prohibited to show the content to the others. So if you're reading your textbook and you want to show it to your fellow student or to your spouse you must immediately delete it from your computer and notify the publisher. And you've agreed to that. Read the licenses. You must accept the fact that you have no rights whatsoever. Now people think they can work in a learning environment under those conditions. I think they're sadly mistaken. And you will be caught because they are scarring on you. A few weeks ago I moved to another computer and I put an audio book that I bought legally and they took it off me. And high tunes just pop and they said you have no legal right to use this book. And I had every legal right to do it. What I had to do was go to the company and get a key from them and give the key to Apple. And then they decided okay you are legal. We'll let you have it back. And I mean we just can't work under those types of conditions. So for me going to open education resources is not a choice for educators. It's something we have to do. We must get away from proprietary material. But that's an aside as I get into the problem that we're studying is this. The learners who access OER and acquire knowledge skills they cannot have their learning assessed and accredited at the present time. So our objectives is we're going to map existing projects around the world internationally on assessment and accreditation. We're going to analyze and evaluate scalable approaches to assessment and accreditation and document the lessons we learn and we're going to propose conceptual frameworks. When we're doing this I guess it's an action research project we're on because we are using this to build the open education research university concept. And for people who are more interested in it we have a logic model and a plan of action that's available online. If you type in just OERU you'll get to it with Google or you can use that long website there. But what we're doing with OERU is creating a system for evaluating and then accrediting learners who learn using open education resources on their own. So this is the model. The learners use open curriculum, open design, pedagogy etc. support systems and they apply to the participating educational institutions where they get open assessment and credentialing and it's part of the community service mission of the universities. And from that they get a credible qualification for what they've done and we have a support infrastructure based on open business models and infrastructure and open student administration. So the learning is free but you pay for the accreditation. So you go to an institution and that institution charges whatever they feel needs to be charged. And to guarantee the credibility of open scholarship for academic credit the assessment process must be strictly equivalent to that for mainstream students. So very, very strict on this that we want to make sure that this is not questionable from a quality point of view that our assessment is a real assessment that is comparable to the assessment in traditional universities. So the open assessment because of this must involve the payment of the fee so there has to be some kind of a cost recovery for the institutions that are participating either through the student paying or possibly through a scholarship scheme or a combination of both or any other methods that come about. So the participating institutions must have credible local accreditation. So if it's a US participant it must be accredited by one of the accrediting agencies. In Canada it must be recognized by the provincial government. In Australia it has to be recognized by the state government. So it has to have a formal credible accreditation. We're using the working with EFQOL and the OPAL on quality standards to make sure that our assessment process meets those quality standards and with the international network for quality assurance agencies in higher education. The technical model of what we have for any university and Judith Murray pointed this out to us at Thompson Rivers University is you've got, there are students at our university they're using our content and they have our support but what we're moving to is a situation where any students can come along using any content that they come across and any kind of support system that they have but they will get our assessment. If they want an Athabasca university credit then we will assess it and we will do that and they could go to another university and get their assessment but the ideas we're moving away from this where we own the students we own the content, we own the faculty to a different model and so it works like this Jim Taylor at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia came up with this so the learners access the courses based solely on OER and I don't agree with them on that I think let them use proprietary if they want but we will identify pathways to credits using solely OER but if they want to use other things that's fine too we're beginning the creation of academic volunteers international so as retired professors and others who want to participate and help students we'll find a way of getting them involved in this we're also looking at student mentors perhaps a scholarship system where you pass a course and then you mentor the course and we can give you credit on your assessment and things like that so as students who've recently passed the course will be available online to help the students who are going through it then we have open assessment from the participating institutions the participating institutions they grant the credit for the courses and then they're awarded when they have enough they get a real credible degree or other credible credential so the learning scenarios you have the one we all know the formal learning at a credentialing institution non-formal learning is you take a course for your union or a society you work at the right cross and they give you different types of training things and there's informal learning where you just learn on your own you go on the web or anywhere you just learn whichever way you can and all three of them will be counted towards your degree at the university you may have 10 courses from different institutions you may have a lot of these mini courses from your workplace and you've done a lot of informal learning yourself and to do this we add on RPL recognition of prior learning or we call it CLAR there's a number of different names for it and as part of our research now we're looking at ways to make CLAR cost effective and scalable because right now it's a very labor intensive process and we believe there are ways of bringing down the cost structure for doing CLAR and recognizing people's learning there's other forms of assessment beside CLAR of course the transfer credit we do our university has transfer credit agreements right across Canada we're an American accredited institution so our credits are readily accepted by nearly every institution in the United States and generally around the world in Britain they accept it and vice versa so is the American participants the American universities generally it's recognized for transfer credit and then there's the challenge for credit where we have an exam and the student says I know my French is good enough to pass a second year French exam so we give them the second year French exam they pass the exam and we give them the credit for that and it could be you know I've worked in a lab and my biology is great I can pass a biology exam but we also show the pathways so as a student can before the exam will be able to say yeah I know this this this this this and this I don't know this I'll look at that and then I'm ready for the exam and of course then there's the portfolio learning which is used a lot in CLAR and we're looking at other possible ways of assessing so what it does is give freedom to the learners to enroll in and complete courses at institutions of a learner's choice freedom to change institutions as they strive to complete a program freedom to transfer credits among institutions nationally and internationally and to have prior learning assessed and accredited so the research questions we're looking at and these are just some examples of them you know is a MOOC formal non-formal or informal how would a batch system fit into this and how do credit transfer portfolio assessment challenge exams etc. interact so that is the research project and I'm just going to go now just couldn't be here for this so I'm going to go over quickly some of this slide so as you have a better understanding of what we're doing with the open education research university project and the OER foundation is a non-profit foundation which is leading this initiative the OER foundation founded Wiki Educator and if you want to look at this quite a few participants in it and I won't go into the details of the roles of the different people who have been in there but one interesting thing is that there's more older people than younger people which was a surprise to them we do workshops right around the world we've trained about 4,000 people in developing countries on how to use Wiki for learning we're promoting digital literacy and most of the people who we train have never even seen a Wiki or used one before so we've been doing a lot with that and with the logic model we're talking about we started off with a meeting with 200 participants from 46 countries around the world so there's a lot of interest in this we're trying to strike a balance between open education and sustainable to make it a sustainable proposition and using open education resources open educational practices we want to break the iron triangle that they say when you increase quality you have to increase cost if you lower quality you can increase cost we say that we can break that triangle now it's possible in the digital world to do that and really we're talking about a return to tradition where the University of London in 1860 started they had this whole system you learn any way you want you take their exams and you get credit from the University of London it's been going since 1860 five Nobel Prize winners have graduated from the University of London we talk about the tragedy of the commons how many are familiar with the seminal paper about the tragedy of the commons and of course the argument is the commons is a limited space and the internet is so unlimited that the tragedy of the commons doesn't occur but in fact the whole paper is mistaken the commons still exist in England there has been no tragedy of the commons they still have commons in the United States and Canada we still have the open range it exists so there was no tragedy it was a theoretical speculation and there's an old poem about it when they started to take away the commons they didn't take away the commons from people because it was being misused they took it away because private property interests wanted to do it the same way as they're putting in closed gardens on the internet trying to keep it to themselves and to take out any free content but I think that this poem is quite interesting from 1760s they hang the man and flog the woman who steals the goose from off the common but leave the greater villain loose who steals the common from off the goose and of course in those days they didn't have gender equality so the hanging and flogging was different so I'm sure we're doing different today but that's what's happening is people are taking these commons away and making it private and proprietary and this is the common knowledge of mankind is on the internet and we need to protect that and we're doing it and we're saying that there's disruptive innovations if you remember Kodak the leading camera company and they discontinued Kodakrome the best selling film in the world at the time a few years ago and now it's over and it happened very quickly and so changes can happen very quickly Ice Harvings thing used to be one of the biggest industries in the United States and when they brought in artificial ice they actually had people arguing that oh artificial ice it's not as good as natural ice it's like you heard people saying oh digital sound is not as it's not as crisp as the old what records got so long ago right the old records the same thing so you get these types of criticisms and we're prepared for these criticisms and we want to make sure we're on firm ground and there's a number of open education red herrings the first one is the sky is falling or their poor quality and we want to really address those right up and say no the sky isn't falling you can still make it you can still function in a sustainable system so it's going to be a transformation a bit of rush through this they're all there but there are now ten there are now ten universities on five continents that are participating in this three of them are from the United States two from Canada one from Australia three community colleges from New Zealand the University of South Africa and a university in India I can't pronounce the names so I won't even try it there they are and there's the name the Babasaheb Amdikar so you know why I was stupid enough to try to pronounce it there you go so that is the view and I'll just open it up we only have a few minutes I'm going to open it up for questions and discussion thank you thank you for that that was a great overview two related questions one will a student take one examination for a particular course that will apply for credit to all ten institutions or are there individualized examinations for each of these institutions and then what are the projected costs associated with these exceptions good questions the first one is we expect that most students will do it in their national area so American students will go to one of the participating American partners Canadians that go there but internationally it depends on each institution what they want to recognize I do know that our institution will recognize any courses from all of those institutions with the Proviso would have a closer look at the Indian one but the others we wouldn't even look we would just give a straight blank of transfer the other institutions will probably do the same but it's not guaranteed the institutions are going to be independent they can do what they want with it it's a confederation not a federation so it's up to them now the price we're looking at a price point of less than one quarter the price of a course of exam so we're looking at our average courses are $650 and we're looking to get it below $200 we now charge $350 for challenge exams we think it's too much but we're going to have exams computerized automated exam systems and as I said we're looking at how we can reduce our PLR costs to be able to do that to give tests you know there's this potential for kind of forum shopping students might take this course from this university that course from that university because they know they figured out somehow those professors are easier to handle and get good grade very quickly and graduate and get a degree right so how do you prevent that and also if so much of that happens online do you have a potentially a risk of students not taking exams but you get someone else to answer the questions or do whatever the assignments are those are two questions so everything will be open but will there be a lot of reuse of those materials that you expect between the institutions involved or even from other institutions as it happens on the reuse question yes we're going to reuse and each institution has to put out two courses that they'll give credit to but they don't have to create the courses we could take two courses from Carnegie Mellon and say will you credit those courses and we want that we want people to forget about creating courses let's start assembling courses let's start using what's out there this is one of the biggest problems with OER people aren't using it now for students cheating that's the same problem in traditional universities so we have the same problem we have to address that and we're looking now at automated systems and we're experimenting with them where they can tell by how you use the keyboard whether it's you or not and we have a camera a special secure camera that we ship to the student so as we can see them and we know who they are so if there are some ways we can do it I mean right now what we do is we send students to the if they're in a small town somewhere to the local RCMP station and then they start to so there's ways of doing it but we want to get it more automated and the other yes when you have collected enough of those credits and you want to get a degree there is a there is a problem that for instance when you want to get a degree in informatics for instance that all kinds of courses database but nothing on and compares to the next subject so there's a discount balance in the total number of credits you have students supported in get the right balance and are institutions taking account of it well that's what we're going to be doing is we're going to be developing pathways and we're not going to develop the courses but we're going to say these are the OERs out there you do this, you do that this will give you the material you need to pass an exam in computer science you need to pass exams in this, this, this and this so that's the way now we're starting off in a very general way we're looking at a first year certificate associate degree a general and a general bachelor of arts we have a general bachelor of arts three year bachelor of arts and we'll take any kind of credits it's a general one, it's not specific but we have to be careful of that so if they want to have a business bachelor of business they have to go through the business school and take business courses but we need to provide the pathways for people to do that within the open aspect are you going to be publishing the financials of this how much money you're making is this actually sustainable or not all ten partners have agreed that this is going to be totally transparent it will all be published on the internet the finances, everything and even the first, the meeting we're having November the 8th and 9th 9th and 10th 9th and November 9th and 10th in New Zealand it's open online and anyone can participate anyone can everything will be totally transparent so WikiLeaks won't be able to find anything or if he does we will thank him for it ok, thank you very much