 My name is Jay Heap. I'm with the Georgia Virtual School. I'm the Associate Director of Operations and with me today is our State Director of Distant Virtual Learning. I keep forgetting that. Dr. Christina Clayton and our Manager of Instructional Development Tammy Eckert. And probably most of what we're going to show, I give you a little history of what Georgia Virtual School is and does and where we were. And then spend some time talking about where we're going and why. So yes, the topic is we are making the move to open educational resources but I think part of the interest is the journey that we've gone to getting there. So Georgia Virtual School actually has three programs and we'll look through those. We have Georgia Virtual School and that is a program that started back in 2005 through a governor's line item in the budget. We serve courses to students in 9th through 12th grade for credit students throughout the state. We serve public, private and home school students. We are SACs accredited and NCAA accredited courses. We do offer middle school courses in a summer program. We also have 5200 enrollments this semester and that's not 5200 students but that's 5200 half unit courses being taught. We offer over 20 AP courses in six world languages. Also part of what we do with Georgia Virtual Learning is have Georgia Credit recovered. And this started in 2007 to fill the need of our students in our state who needed to recover credit. There are 18 teacherless self-paced courses and they're free to all Georgia public school students. So that's another piece that we did. And then we also have Georgia Virtual Learning that we established last February as kind of an umbrella. We had trouble with people trying to figure out where to go, whether they were credit recovery or they were virtual learning. And we needed an umbrella organization to kind of direct people and provide some stability for the programs overall. So one of the things that we started with Georgia Virtual Learning was a blended learning program. We started my slide right off and we're running a pilot right now this year. With about eight schools, about 1500 students in different blended learning models and we will carry that pilot over. The other thing that Georgia Virtual Learning is doing is taking us into the open education area for fall of 2012. And then we also have a program called eSource that provides material to our students. And we're going to take a look at some of those here in a second. But I just need to get a little bit of history of what was going on. So we started with Georgia Virtual School having courses and tried to find a way to get this material out to our students. And so right now we have 24 shared courses that you can get to at Georgia Virtual Learning. They are not all open educational resources, but they are available for anybody who accesses those. And these are the 24 courses here and I'll leave them up there for a second because I know a lot of times people show this slide takes too long. So you can look and we offer, most of them right now are core courses. Our middle school summer program courses are also in the list. Those are courses that are generally the whole year's worth of material taught in six weeks. So it's very fast paced. The design originally was for middle school students who needed to move to this seventh or eighth grade but didn't complete the material. They could go back in and take this course. So those are what are available now. So how did the whole OER and Georgia Virtual Learning, where are we and why did we choose to go this way? And that I guess is really the crux of what we're here to talk about. We had some issues and concerns. We've been around since 2005. We develop all of our own material. We buy very little material. Most of the material that we have is created by Tammy's team through contracted adjunct instructors or subject matter experts. We build almost all of our courses exclusively to be textbook-less, which is a challenge to build something without a textbook or resources but somewhat also very easy to make it then shareable. We generally use teacher-created or public domain resources now. Not all of them are OER. Some were used with the fair use policy. Some were used with the Teach Act. We have content in Georgia. There are 376 high schools in the state. We were trying to find a way to get our material out there. In some of the courses we have subscription models and copyright issues. We understand the idea that taxpayers built these courses with state dollars and that we need to provide that material back to at a minimum our school districts, but in a larger sense, whoever we can provide the information to. But we had these issues. Subscription and copyright being one, delivery, server bandwidth. How can we serve that out effectively? Our first thing, and when I showed you the shared courses, what Tammy's group did is we said, okay, we have this material, school districts want it. Most of it is teacher-created. The rest of the stuff is probably out there in the public domain. We didn't really go get a lot of copyrighted material. But we did have some subscription services. Discovery Education has a lot of videos that we used. And although every school in our state has access to that, they're all individual licenses. So we had to go in and physically pull that material out of the courses. So the shared courses that the list that you looked at is a cleaned up course, but we had to pare it down so we had to take some of the videos out. We had to take out some of the subscription pieces. And so we started thinking, well, how can we really move past that? And really make the material so that when we create it for Georgia Virtual School, it's just available for everybody. And we don't have to spend the time remaking it and redoing that. So with some guidance and encouragement from Dr. Clayton and our technology director, Bob Swigam, has kind of allowed us to really look at how we can use open educational resources. So what we have found is that the solution to all those issues is to use open educational resources in creating the courses. So this year we have a year long development cycle. Tammy has worked with her development team. So all courses that started being creation in July, next fall will all be open educational resources. The whole course will be available and it will become part of the shared resources on the list. So the shared resources are there now, they're just not all that we are. In the fall, the new 30 some odd courses and we'll look at the list will be there. Here's the list. So just because of the development cycle, we didn't go back and readdress the English Maths social studies. We just started where we were. Fortunately, we were also an RT3 state. So we part of the RT3 application required us to build 10 courses. And through conversation, we want to use those dollars to build really good courses. So we looked at the three last ones, the AP Calculus BC, AP Physics Mechanics and AP Electrical. Very hard to find in a virtual school anywhere, a virtual high school anywhere. So those will be available next fall, the entire courses. The tricky part with building AP courses is that College Board does require a textbook for the course. So we kind of got together to figure out how can we do that. So those textbooks, excuse me, those courses are being built textbook agnostic. They'll refer to your textbook in a certain area. But the material isn't going to say go to Chapter 4, it'll just say go to a specific area. But the teacher, all the material in there will be OER material. But we have to have the textbook tied to the course or we're not going to get through the audit. The other courses on the list just happen to be what we were working on through development this year. Actually the food nutrition, the web design, those are also RT3 courses. So the last five on the list are probably going to be even a little bit more robust because there's a bigger pot of money used to develop those. But we're pretty proud of most of our courses and we've been able to include the courses. We'll go back eventually and start working on the core material to include the mass, even though our state math is very different than most state math. But the language arts and things like that, we'll be moving all of that to OER. But this is the list that we will have available for. The idea is that everything we build from now on will be built in the same way. So we've worked with our developers, worked through some training. One of the reasons why we're here is to begin to learn even more so we can get access to more resources and finding those pieces and creating networks that will really help us make this piece grow. I took a couple screenshots of some of the courses and I have some course material that we can look at. So we have AP Physics and this is just a sample of the course. The Moving Man simulation is an OER product. All of our courses are lined up. We didn't change our design process for this. So this is the same way that we've been developing courses for several years. Just the material that we've chosen to use. All of our courses are set up like this and when you look at them in the shared resources, they'll look like this also. All the handouts associated with it are always found in the same place. We will link out to other resources outside of ours that may or may not be open educational resources but they'll be in the sidebar. Everything in the white pane will be an OER material. Some of the material like in this one, this is a teacher created gym. So we have a lot of material that we're not only going to be able to... that we're going to be gathering but also a lot of material that we will be adding. To OER material. So that will be there and certainly everything will have a CC by license on it. And these are just really snapshots. This course is one unit of the course and it's nowhere near finished yet. So we can't really give you a link to go through this yet because we haven't had it reviewed or checked for accuracy. But that is what they look like. They'll be orange though because we take everything and make it orange when we share it. So just as a... it's the exact same thing we just rebranded in an orange background. So that would be the physics course. And we also have management insurance is another course that we're working on right now. So we're not focusing strictly on core products in academic areas. We're looking at elective areas as well, career. Georgia's new superintendent is very career oriented. So along with the academic courses we will also be offering and including a lot of career technical courses, which are a little hard to find out there now. Judging from what I've heard when we've been here, the K-12 piece of OER is really still very small. When you're talking about AP courses it's very easy to find the material. You just go to the college courses and find the freshman type material out of higher ed. And that's very, very valuable. When you're getting K-12 the material is a little bit more difficult to find. And we're certainly working on that. But hopefully as we contribute and other schools begin to contribute, that pool of information will grow in all the areas that we have. So this will be the risk management class. All the pieces come with it. We do some neat things with the recreate module minutes. So a student can listen or read in one minute what the entire module is about. So at the end of this eight page module, probably half a week's worth of work, if they can't answer the questions in the module minute, then they know they're not ready for the test or if they don't understand that. So we include that. It's kind of based on Father Guido Sarducci's five minute university. So we thought the one minute module. Here's what you really should learn by the end of this module. And this is just, we include the PowerPoint presentations. We have a big emphasis on making it multi-media, incorporating different types of material. And like I said, the handouts and things are on the side. So this is who we are. Wow, it's only been 17 minutes. That's pretty good. This is who we are. My name is Jay Heap. We all have the same email addresses except there are different names. Dr. Clayton may have some additional comments that she would like to make or we certainly have time for questions or comments that you have on how we can really begin to participate and provide material. We're going to spend the money to create it for our students anyhow. So why not provide that to everybody that we can. Any comments that you have or any ideas or any pathways that you could provide to us that would help us be successful, we would certainly appreciate that also. If you want to see the live versions of any of those, the AP course, I have that available to see it. So Dr. Clayton, do you have any? I'm interested in hearing from you all. So this is sort of what we're doing. There are lots of reasons, as you heard, throughout the conference of why the need and especially we've asked a couple of questions in the K-12 space as far as not being a widely used practice. And of course there are a lot of policy reasons. There's funding, there's all types of reasons we can talk about. But we really believe that we have a service to provide and a need to provide to our students and especially our teachers in the state with dwindling budgets. And we've got to figure out how to leverage the technology and leverage the resources through the funding. Jay talked about the race to the top, being able to offer those courses, really trying to grow the program and be able to support not only our teachers and parents in the state but certainly our students moving forward. So please feel free to give us some feedback on what you're seeing. If you have questions, comments, we'd love to hear from you all. But don't want to hold you up for lunch either. Are there other states that you can collaborate with that are doing the K-12 programs? Utah! I mean, I'm just figuring they're already in virtual K-12, right? Or is it just nine? Open High School. IDLA, which is Idaho, Idaho Digital Learning. Montana Digital. Yeah, Montana, so we're all part of a state virtual school sort of alliance. And I know we have in the next two weeks the virtual school symposium where we're going to get together and sort of share. But I know Bob Curry in Montana and Cheryl Charlton in Idaho, we're all sort of swirling in this pool and figuring out, okay, we don't want to duplicate efforts. Certainly, here's what we're putting out. We should be collecting soon what they're working on. And we're hoping to, like Jay was saying, continue that community. Here's what we're putting out. Let's see what you've got, how can we share and mobilize resources. So if you're looking for that from a 9-12 perspective or even a K-12 perspective, Idaho and Montana might be good resources to go to as well. And a lot of Harrington from sailor.org. Jen Shook and Candy Warden. And we're so excited about what you're doing. I mean, this is really awesome. If you get a chance, there might be some resources on sailor.org that would be helpful in the creation of some of those advanced electives, any computer science and risk management. We hear you, though, that the resources for those courses are really tough to find. So if we've done it at the college level, perhaps some of that material could be repurposed. That's what we're hoping. And that's what we found. In some areas, freshman English is similar to 11th grade English. You just, it's the depth in the scope you have to watch. So a lot of the material is useful. The fact that it is open makes it even better because we can then create derivatives of that and make it what we need, which we can't do with a lot of other material. So we certainly look through the available material. And we certainly, I didn't even know who y'all were until I came here, which is part of the reason we're very new at this. We're new in the neighborhood. We feel very welcomed. We've had many doors opened in the last couple of days. Hopefully we have also opened our doors. By no means are we even close to understanding the full capacity of what this neighborhood brings us. But we certainly want to do our part and contribute, especially to grow it in the 912 to start with, because that's where we focus. But we have all intention of creating K5 resources. We may never develop K5 courses. May or may not. But the resources piece, so as we even develop those, we may be looking at developing K5 open resources, which will really help. Yes. Good job. Yay. I am from Connections, and now with the Shawworth Foundation, there's a fellowship to try to make it easier to get content from place to place. And Softchalk has been one of the partners that we've been really trying to figure out a leverage point to get the ways to get things from Softchalk into connections and use that for remakes and get it back out. This might be a perfect, really huge amount of content to drive that, but I'd love to be helpful in that process. Well, we used Softchalk about three years ago because we needed something. We're not in the LMS business. We have an LMS that we buy. So we wanted it to be portable. And as we want to give this to the school districts, their LMS may be totally different. They may use something different than we do, or they may not use one at all because you could drive this right off a website. So that's why we went with Softchalk because of the packaging. We can move it fairly easily. Yeah, I've heard that it's really a good offering experience. And it's very easy to use. And Tammy's in the development area more than I am anymore, but it's so much easier. We've had districts who tell us, especially our rural districts, where we wanted to build something and be able to share something to those and listen to our districts that are saying, we have nothing. We're lucky to have an interactive whiteboard. We're lucky to have a projector. We're lucky to just have a whiteboard that doesn't do anything at all. There are situations that are like that in the state of Georgia and I'm sure in other districts, obviously, around the country, but we wanted to be able to serve everybody. Those that are saying, we just don't have anything to the big boys who are saying, yeah, we've got an LMS. Give us your stuff. We can load it in and go. Yeah, that's a really nice thing about the output from Softchalk. You can throw it anywhere on the web or you can have it as an integral part of your program. Absolutely. And we actually have, and you saw it briefly, we have the shared piece. We also have an e-source program that individual high schools in the state can subscribe. It's free. How many districts do we have out of 100? Well, we have 42 schools, 42 subscribers, but they actually can have access to the package so they can bring the whole package down. If they have Softchalk, they can manipulate it themselves. So, yeah, we don't necessarily recommend that they remove stuff because we've had good results with our material. Our student success has been very good, but they can do that. So even if it were to rebrand it, give it to school colors, change the discussions, type of things, so they can actually get the whole package. Those are not OER now. They're shared and available, okay, but they're not necessarily all resources OER. And I'm assuming having just authored a course for English, one of my obstacles was running into the copyright. If you want to use anything that's OER, you have to use something with 1,900. Yes. And that's a few more projects and things. So you're trying to, is that one of the obstacles that come with it? In those English classes, specifically yes. Although the material, the critiques around that could be OER. We don't provide the book to the student. We tell the student they have to go to the library to get the book or whatever. So that would still be an option. We'll still be able to use those materials and critiques and resources and reviews of those stories, but you can't copy the story and stick to it. Right. How do you deal with assessment? Well, we deal with it inside our LMS. In every package, though, we do include project-based assessments. There are, if you just access the shared material, there are inline activities, so student self-assessment things. There are non-scored quizzes. The grade book drop box submission piece is inside our LMS. And we're trying to figure out a way, not only do the school systems want our material, they want our assessments also, but we're trying to keep the integrity of our test questions. If our test questions get out there, then so we're actually looking at possibly revising all of our questions within our program, providing the old questions in a bank. But questions don't move nearly as well as content between learning management systems. Even though they say they do, they don't. Yes, sir. The way a textbook publisher would normally handle that is anybody can get the student edition of it in order to get access to the assessments of things. I have to contact you. You somehow have to verify that I'm teaching. If I can email you from my email address at a school in Georgia and say, could you send me the assessments? Is that the kind of thing you'd be willing to do privately to share with us? We build the test base inside of our LMS. And we've had very... We move it between classes. We move it within the LMS to pull that piece out. We haven't found a good tool to do it because we have some Moodle instances that we would like to be able to put some of these questions in. If the question has a picture or an equation, it loses it. You can get the raw text and the multiple choice pieces, but we've been unsuccessful trying to... Those standards are still really... I think through our going out in the state, the schools are very happy with the content and the teachers kind of want to create their own assessment piece. And I think that's where we're starting in our state. It's very useful because we don't want the teachers just to say, here it is and I'm never going to look at it because I have all the pieces. And if they have to create the assessment, then we knew they had to go through the content piece in order to be able to do that. So, we would like to provide some guidance in the test back piece, but we haven't gotten there yet. Christina has... Oh, I'm done. We'll be here. We're about to go have lunch. We stood at that table way in the back. We got black shirts, so feel free to drop by. Thank you.