 Brilliant. Thank you. Hello, everybody. This meeting has been recorded. You're all very welcome to open Education Week Look forward to chatting with you all and bouncing some ideas off each other and so on so forth Please keep on if you haven't already to register for your open badge put here and Say hi in the chat box What I'd like to do is talk to you a bit today and the Tensative title of this session. We're gonna have is Unboxing the textbook for an open world and I wonder if anybody knows what unboxing means Anybody like to hazard a guess in the chat, please Because I said this to a colleague recently and they didn't know what that meant Or they had a different idea than I did maybe I should have really had a slide on them on this but we'll see what people think and Yes, that's exactly it on you open a new product online to review it. Yeah, that's exactly it and It's yeah, exactly watching my son watching other people children on YouTube making toys out of their packaging and playing with them We actually don't let me do this anymore Don't let him do this I presume but yeah, it's this horrific genre of YouTube videos. We're really famous kids. We're making millions millions of pounds unpacked Toys from boxes, but it's also a term. It means to unbox to unpack to get inside of something To open something up. So That's what we'd like to do take take things like textbooks to sort of deconstruct them and so on So I'm going to talk about a bit of research that myself and some colleagues have been doing here In in the university and in other places as a kind of jumping off point to tell you a bit about some things I've done in this area and and the team And then I'm going to ask our panelists as well to jump in and they have experience and In this area from different perspectives from library from open textbook projects and student perspectives from lecture perspectives so With to that end Costs what did textbook costs? well, there's been a lot of research on this about what textbook costs and This is an interesting slide here. This is a book that is on a reading list in Dublin City University in the the place where I work here in Dublin and it's on a Reading list and it is a book and you can see it's called perspective of an urban ecology and I think I can get a pointer or something going here. What's this? So you can see there's a Kindle price up here You can see there's a hardcover price over here and the hardcover price is less than the Kindle and then the paperback price is also It's slightly more than the Kindle But you can see there's these are very high prices for a start like a hundred and sixty five US dollars seems pretty in ordnance But how in earth can I get a hardcover book for a hundred and twenty one dollars? That's also got a cost money to put in the post and send to me and this Kindle and it's But I guess what I'm trying to say here the point of this slide is this doesn't seem like a functioning market to me I'm not an economist, but there's a lot of weird stuff going on so Let me see so We looked at a bunch of reading lists here in the university and we looked at over 3,000 books on reading lists we scraped them from our website from the course catalog database We found that the mean price of a book was 56 US dollars And the most common value was it was ten dollars and the median the one in the middle is forty dollars and prices range between ninety nine cents and four hundred dollars for a book and We use Google books API to look up all the prices of these books and get Representative samples, so it's a considerable cost that students are going to bear And we wrote about that research in that in a journal information technologies and libraries And we calculated the cost the base cost it will cost students because they get them from all sorts of means people borrow books They get books for free they steal books, which is a controversial area They download them online and they go to the library and so on so forth, but all of those Library prices or the cost of a borrowed a second hand or a used book Previously owned book is relative to the baseline of a new book But we also talked to students Because we wanted to find out what they think and that was very interesting and people said things like I'm willing to go for Digital copy copies if I can get it without paying for it But my preference would be for a hard copy that I can own that I can highlight and make notes in that will be my preference So people students what we found is different perceptions of books. They're not necessarily binary They don't necessarily want physical or digital And they have a kind of it's part of their live reality that complex relationships with their books or something meaningful in their lives This student told us that she wait and see if she's going to use this especially in first year She went to the library at the book a tiny print She she won't buy it so she can use the library to test out whether she's going to use a book or not and She said she had a learning difficulty and if something was too small She couldn't read it and there was other ones as well where we looked at books And some people said if it's if I go to library and a book has got loads of scribbles on it It's it. I'm not going to use that book. I want a pristine book So there it's very interesting the the way that students think about books and they're a really important key part of their study And they mean a lot to them in various ways and I Don't know James. Do you want to? You have a look at some of this dad as well that we collected from interviewing a focus groups of students What was your what would be your take away from this? It's push One of our participants But in terms of that in that that quality of data that we collected from students, I mean, I think the biggest take away is the huge goat that we observe between what we would and Understand of a simple act of saying okay after you get done studying our in-house learning materials Here's a textbook where you can you know further read into that subject area You know now you've written now you now you now you have more study And I don't think that academics when we make that plan when we put that on a module descriptor I don't think we think that's enormously complicated But what we got through this focus group was that this is Not simple that this is messy and chaotic and that students have really complicated relationships with their textbooks with book lists and You know, they talk about hunting for books over the course of a summer. They talk about the panic of You know, maybe getting book Maybe getting a book is too close to the start of the year and then they're scrambling, you know Looking for these books and they're they're looking for them again. They're looking for them everywhere They're looking for International editions that they can get from India that are cheaper. They're looking for it can get can they get them? You know through download site, can they get them somewhere else? Can they get them second hand some of them some people then hate that they don't want matter books and all that But anyone's already mentioned that they have long relationships with some of the textbooks that they keep forever that they find useful Multiple modules. They have love hate relationships with books that they absolutely hate What's fine useful in multiple instances? They have complete hate hate relationships with books and enjoy burning them when they finish Having to have a friend who they're using them for and like, you know, I mean, I think for us there's actually a bit of shock involved in Hearing the decision point like some students just going I didn't bother I just don't bother with the required textbooks like I might find some textbook, but I don't I don't even pay attention to the book list and Others saying that, you know, again, I'll go look at the print and see how small it is. It's too small. I'm not gonna bother That's just not gonna work for me. Other saying I'll hang on. I'll wait to see what the academics say, you know Is it really necessary how necessary is it all that kind of stuff? So I at the other thing we know is that we're very interesting with this is not one size fits all We've got very different responses from people into studying different subject areas psychology students and We're very different philosophy students philosophy students seem to the books were more like treated as Sort of valued artifacts things that they would put on their shelf and read later You know finished reading after they finished their studies where psychology students They were very much more tools for writing. They were tools for researching and writing and And all that kind of stuff. So I like it was it was it was very interesting and Pretty mind-blowing as an academic to see what the actual experience of book lists and textbook buying and textbook use was mostly I'm gonna quickly Say a couple more things we Get to and get get into some discussion with everybody, but we didn't a survey So we did a national survey and open textbooks where we looked at things like That are traditionally looked at we look we analyze the literature It exists in literature and surveys in different regions and countries and people typically look at three broad thematic areas when they're talking about open textbooks, which is financial value of open educational resources preferences for digital hard coffee and OER awareness what are the awareness among stakeholders People do people know what an open textbook or an OER is and so on And then there's the pedagogical value as well as another one So we surveyed librarians lectures academic developers heads of teaching and learning and educational technology Units in third-level HEIs in Ireland and The barriers we found were the biggest ones were not enough resources for for the subject So people felt that they they couldn't find enough openly licensed content in their area That was a big one and quality people have concerns about quality and so on these are perceptions at least Something we need to tackle because you know, how do you know a book you buy off the publisher is necessarily good quality? So one of the things we asked as well that I've gone into all the questions is We asked them about whether People who ship the say in the textbook and what people all the respondents were very much in agreement that Individual academics and of course teams should have the full say in textbooks decisions So this is an important thing. That's interesting is people believe in academic freedom And people are not a cannot very attached to this idea of their own That they their own right to choose books as respect to them, there shouldn't be some kind of legislation or mandates To these ends and maybe what we need to be thinking is something around nudge policies Or how we how we frame this in such a way that we tackle some of the This issue from that perspective And This is something we We were interested in as well Which is I can comment from one of the respondents where it says students are not reading as much full stop students struggle to buy books I do not urge them to purchase books. I make a big effort to track down openly about the digital content I haven't come across open textbooks sounds very interesting So people are engaged in these kind of practices that they're instinctively doing these things They may not heard of open education week or OE or open textbooks or any of this stuff But they kind of know they haven't they have an instinct right? I want to save money for my students I don't want to burden them with big book lists and so on and last the last thing I just mentioned as well is that Tony Bates talked about this in a road article in I But he was talking about particularly for graduate education one of the biggest sources of all we are our journal articles So if you're in a graduate program, you're studying for a master's or a PhD or something And even in a degree you're going to be exposed to a lot of journal articles But a problem is a lot of journal articles are locked up behind paywalls. So this is actually a huge problem in itself and I don't know if Tom is online, but myself and some colleagues did some work on this this year and we looked at them over several thousands Articles in the top 24 Journals in the area of educational technology and most of them are closed this big black box here And a very few of them are gold open access Which means they're available on the publisher site and green is a little bit more That means that the authors of archive to copy or something on there on a on an institutional repository or something that requires a bit of Digital open access literacy if you like And we also estimated that a lot of journals charge an APC Non-open access journal so-called hybrid journals that authors would pay and over this period between 2010 and 2017 thanks Linda We estimated that the following publishers were paid Couldn't be paid up to this amount but by authors in this field this area of educational technology at Tech Which is my own area that I have a researcher in So now my question for the panel is and I'd like to maybe I'm going to call on the panel and ask them to I just kind of throw these questions out there, but I'll ask as well before people Answer if they could give a brief introduction to themselves and say who who they are and where they're calling from so My first question is like to throw out there and I love our audience as well So please chip in and and chat away in the box To answer these questions too. So please be thinking about this one Why do we need open textbooks and oh your? Beyond financial savings for students. So I talked a bit about financial savings But that's something I know a little bit about us or at least I think I do but one of the things what other reasons are there I Can take your first go at that if you like Hi, everyone My name is Zoe. I'm with the Rebus community based here in Montreal and we are Really focused on open to export creation as we support that in lots of different ways that I can get to People are interested but mostly we focus on collaboration and community driven creation And then to start with an answer to this question I think one of the really key Differences that we can highlight with OER is that the content can be adapted to Be specific to the students who are in the classroom So that can mean, you know making sure that the names in the examples all the examples themselves are Relevant and resonate with the students who you're working with So it's not only the fact that they can have access to the materials more easily But there's a huge step forward that we can take in making sure that the materials themselves are the best that they can be To meet the students where they are And so by the use of the open licenses and and being able to remix Oh, yeah, that means that the the faculty or Librarians or whoever's involved in designing the materials for a course can make the right choices about about making sure that It fits what people actually need And I think there's You know, I've worked mostly in the North American context and certainly here There's a real emerging kind of discourse around the impact that that can then have on learning And one way to think of it is when you think about diversity, it's about who is in the room So improving access removing barriers to access can have the effect of Changing the makeup of the people who are able to access the room you're teaching in but then making sure that those people are actually Understood and engaged with and and have the best kind of learning experience that they can that's more about inclusion And so working with the materials you have to make sure that they are really customized to the students you're teaching is a huge Advantage, I think and a strong argument alongside financial savings And my name is on yeah, I'm a librarian in Newark and very much in a college And and I think what's really interesting about how Crafts has always become a default motivation and then it moved on to pedagogy But I feel like there's a lot of ways that social justice is kind of growing out of that as well And you talked about inclusion depth And one example that really hits on for me is that I guess in Ireland over the last while I would say That our student population has become a lot more diverse a lot quicker than our staff population And one of the ways that we can use learning materials is in terms of that inclusion So when I was doing my research there last year, I was working in to Dublin and that's a really diverse campus In terms of ethnicity, but also in terms of age So after the recession a lot of older people came back to college and that doesn't seem to have Stopped that seems to be ongoing So the classroom isn't always reflected necessarily by the person at the front of the room And that'll take time. We think that's a good generation of sorts change But what we can do is use these kind of resources To really reflect in a classroom to allow those students to contribute to the resources rather than just consume them And I think that's kind of exciting as well in terms of beyond finance I'd like to just jump in on that point can you hear me okay? Um, so I think it's really interesting that on the end though, we've both spoken about accessibility My name is Samantha Chavazquez and I am a 50 year open education student in Dublin City University Students Ecology And for me when I was thinking about the importance of open education resources I was thinking along the lines of accessibility as well But from a much more practical point of view for a student So for me, I'm very lucky that I geographically am close to Dublin City University So I can access the library Um, but I know for a lot of my fellow students, that's not a possibility So, um, and this kind of that's geographical Um, and there's other things such as just flexibility. Um, when you are an open education student There's quite a few students who would have A far more, um, kind of responsibilities than I myself because I have no kids So people with kids full-time jobs and being able to get in and access the library Or being able to afford them. So yeah, there's the financial Um aspect of it, but there is also the, um The location aspect of it And I think as well that when the textbooks are online or they're online education resources There's a lot of new technology coming out Where you're able to, um, get it read out and that kind of thing Which also can help it be more accessible to a more diverse So it's not just your culture, but there's that other aspect of accessibility as well And I think that's really important Yeah, it's a great point, Samantha. I I know there's a I have a student on a module. It's about android developments And we have a big detailed module, uh, text and it's in PDF And he was telling me he takes it all laboriously out of PDF. He opens it up And he puts it all because it doesn't create a great Reading experience and he puts it into some other thing and he creates this book And it literally takes him ages to actually do this, you know Because it's PDFs not kind of an accessible format But the other thing I was kind of thinking about what he was started doing as well was He was kind of making it his own. He wanted to kind of say, right? This is my book as well. I'm kind of building it. This is my course and like he kind of felt like Uh, it was some kind of important thing he needed to do um So I think that's absolutely wonderful and sketching some notes here as we go along And I wonder if anybody else I'm just going to have a quick look at the chat here OE globals here on textbook grades Hand out from that. Thanks. Thanks very much, James What I was going to say was like, you know Other than financial savings What's behind the financial savings is removing a barrier to access. It's removing a barrier Letting all that chaos. I was No more funding for the summer. There's no more Pairing international that noise But there's none of that other stuff. I mean Before we even get to whether I suppose that might that starts to edge on to you know the social justice issues of not putting barriers in the system now I'm saying this is someone who has an open access open education degree That still uses a lot of commercial textbooks Um, but I'm going to leave that to later because it might go up under another question I'm going to start talking to you now I've James mentioned the the hunt over the summer. I know myself that I'm pretty sure I'm one of the students that annoys Staff where I'm going. Can you please give me that list so that I can get it as soon as possible? But I specifically remember one year where there was One lady who was a year or two ahead of me was selling off the book for a particular module And the book list had about 10 different books on it But it was liable to change but it was a really good price. I think it was about maybe $40 u.s And would have been a real trans kind of conversion And I took the I took the chance and before the book is with Let it go because I knew that these books I wasn't going to be able to find online I wasn't going to be able to access them. I checked the library and there were certain ones that I said, okay No, it's worth it's worth the money to transfer. So in the end, actually, I think there was only one that I didn't use That was something But that that somewhere it holds for a book. I I'll be glad when I don't have to do it anymore That was quick door. Thanks very much Good off mark So apologies there. I hope you can hear me now One of the things that we were talking about one of the big things is in the open textbook debate and open access and educational Um Editor is about Barriers to adapters or how do we get people on board people are saying things like quality? There isn't enough stuff in my area Or all this kind of thing Uh, and people have different motivators people are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated Um, but maybe there's nothing in it for them. Maybe they're perfectly happy with their book And it's not very expensive or so If you if you want if you had Um, if you had a professor in front of you who's an influential person who's got a very big class With that with with some expensive books on it What would be one thing you would you would save them to that they need to know that they maybe don't about open textbooks Or all you are I did some research last year with some colleagues some lecturing colleagues. Um And we there were people who who weren't using open textbooks who had a vague idea of open education But weren't really using open textbooks And they talked about the materials they were creating youtube videos websites online manuals And I was really struck that their their principles were all very much in open education in terms of sharing Collaboration and innovation they were doing all that but they weren't doing the practice They weren't doing things like licensing to make it clear Um, but then when I brought up the idea of open textbooks and would you I think people were really Daunted by that. I think they were really daunted by the idea of writing a book that had been perfect And it being a huge thing that they had to do on their own And so on and so I think what I would say is people are much closer to open textbooks And they really understand that they're already creating really innovative and student-centered resources Now I know my interviewees were self-selecting, but still there are people out there creating amazing resources But when we talk about open textbooks, they often see this tone this phd like thing that has to be perfect and I think we need to make it clear that um Their open textbooks are a work in progress. They're not aiming for perfection. They're different from university press printing Um, and just to make that clear to people that they're already as you said earlier They're already doing a lot of this stuff Yeah, I love that point Anya and mine's very similar actually what we often Talk to people about is is finding the smallest Jump that they can make or the smallest step that they can make into it So maybe the place to start is taking the resources They've already been creating for their classes and putting an open license on them Or it's you know Going in speaking to a librarian and being like hey, what is there in the library that I could start working with? Or something is often a very small step that people can take To get involved because it is it's you know It's not only the idea of creating an open textbooks that's that's daunting But if you are thinking also about the big picture and the kinds of problems we're trying to solve here in education It all seems huge and Undoable and that one person could never have a real impact, right? So there's I think real value in coming back down to focus on what is within your control What can you do with the resources you have already? Maybe it's a question of finding out what resources you have that you didn't know about But there are some very small steps that you can take And then the other thing point that I would make When when speaking to professors as well is about the opportunities that come along with getting involved in open education We have seen a number of people again, you know, I speak more from the north american context, but but I hope this resonates as well Uh People who've used open education as a way to expand their professional networks to build their reputation in the field Oh, I have a cat who's going to join me. Sorry Yeah, that they've been leadership opportunities available to them So if if those kinds of things resonate with some of the folks you're talking to that that can be a way to um to kind of Maybe it's not going to get somebody in who wasn't already interested, but I think there can be some fear of uh, you know, this being additional work and and um, you know Along with what else you're trying to to do that that it might be a big undertaking that feels like it needs to be Outside of you know, your career progression or whatever it is But there are ways where you can take it and make it an opportunity for for other parts of the work that you're doing as well Students perspective, um for this question. I find a lot of the time, you know, when we first died into a model Our teachers are always going to lecturers are always making sure that we're aware that, you know, we have to peer reviewed content and sometimes As a student you can get confused and think peer reviewed equals not open and I think that, you know, I'd encourage, um A professor or a lecturer to engage with the open the open resources because I think, you know, um Price tag doesn't equal quality. Um, you know, there's some actually quality work out there that doesn't come with a price tag Um, but also to highlight that to the students Um, because if you're not highlighting it and pushing it and showing the students what is out there and what we can use Um, and how to recognize the good quality work Um, I think that will really encourage the fields as well because then as the students grow in their career and their Educate like their academic life Then we'll become the next generation coming through and we'll bring that experience through and then it won't seem like the big gap Or this big team because this is all we know I'm trying to think about one point I would make to I think I would probably say Books this year that our commercial textbooks. They're on the syllabus And we have them as e-books so we don't have to worry about students You know accessing physical textbooks in the library But the publishers have decided to change the licensing structure such that it's no longer a digital book In a digital book that's treated as if it was a physical book So only one student will be able to look at it at a time So they've just They've just demolished the whole reason for Subscribing to that as a legal in those two instances. It's like, you know, it may be somewhere to find You know, the right old textbook the same way as finding any good textbook But once you've got it, especially if you adapted slightly and you've actually got it, you know in your own You know red area, whatever It's not the right word But like then you have control over it. You don't control it over when it gets updated Not oh wait, they've updated it again. And you know now you can't get that edition anymore Or you do go with the new edition and then it turns out that students actually can't buy it for less than 250 Great because there's only four of them in the distance in the world So and so it's just you know Maybe a little bit of work to move but no more work than you have Thanks James. What's your cat called Zoe? His name is His name is Puck So I've adapted very quickly to my to my Canadian home And he's also very demanding perfection. Thank you for welcoming him. Yeah Very true dragon. He's a beautiful cat. He's being well looked after And you're very welcome So let's see. Let's go on to the questions. So Tom, I don't know if you can hear us as well And I'm going to try and promote you up to the panel there if you Yeah, no, that's all right. Jay. It's weird. You're you're kind of your thing comes in and out James, that's all so this is a slightly different one and maybe this is a bit of a somewhat redundant question in some senses, but This one is about what point would you make to senior leadership group in university about open textbooks and where you are? So it's it's um There's a different thing about how you're gonna Is there a strategic approach we can take to these kind of things like it's all very well having a confused time poor academic and asking putting all this on them, you know, it's a kind of like for me, this is about sort of things like banning smoking in bars or You know putting a very high tax on plastic bags It's doing something at a systems and a A high level and taking the kind of individual onus and guilt out of things It's not saying that people look you're a bad person if you're not doing this It's saying how can we help people at a systems level? And it can be a bit controversial like how do we how do we nudge people or what policies can we do to Effect change or or should we is this an issue for us? Is this is this what is important to us as an institution? Is this important to us or do we want to do other things? Do we want to You know increase our number of citations and Papers in nature or do we care about this kind of stuff? And if we do care, what do we do? So This is the thing I think about and I would love to hear More about what you guys think and if you have any thoughts on this and hello so just Tom thanks for many for coming on and joining the panel. I mentioned the Erode stuff earlier and we've lindy heard about the basket with us So just to bring you up to speed if you can just give us a brief intro Through are they coming through now? Yeah. Okay. Hi. My name is Tom Farley I'm a lecturer and academic developer down here in a small college in the southwest of Ireland the Institute of Technology Traleigh where the county that James grew open and Myself and and aiming and in particular have done a lot of work around open access and open access publishing and treat treating open access Publishing ads as all we yours And it wasn't the things I'd love to make the senior leadership and I sort of tried to bang on the drum a bit Is I think you'll often see colleges will have these lovely warm fuzzy statements We we celebrate an inclusion and Fluffy clouds and tomorrow fortnight and all of these sort of nice warm things But when it actually comes to the hard decisions about who gets promotion who gets tenure who gets funding What did they do? They don't necessarily really? Acknowledge the work of people putting stuff out to the open access what they really want and the high impact journals read by by treat people and their dog Because that's what they sound as proper Outputs and I think that's that's the thing there that I think I would like to say if we're because on some hand On one hand you will have these big meta statements and it looks good But when you drill down and you look at those policies those improvement policies those policies which which encourage and support people What are they actually doing and if you see who gets those those plumb jobs or who gets the funding? I think it'll often be in the case of they'll revert back to rewarding what they've always rewarded That's my my top and support Yeah, I agree with that a lot is um, you know a lot of compensation around tenure and promotion and just adding a couple of words To to the guidelines can have an impact and we've seen some of that now and develop in uh, western canada. So ubc has adopted Uh open educational resources are specifically mentioned in their tenure and promotion guidelines now And and that you know, I don't know how much that's led to You know specific people and and their promotional paths changing at the moment But what we are seeing is that as part of an institutional shift and a prioritization of what? What they want to do so that the policy has been really important as part of that And those those meta statements is actually one of the things I was thinking about in response to this question Dave Ernst is with the open textbook network He did a little work a couple of years ago looking at mission statements for universities and analyzing the language in them and so many of them have some version of We stand for education for all and so What the the kind of the case he was making is that that that gives you something to point to to say, okay So education for all that's your your entire institution mission is dedicated to that Open open access broadly and and oer can and should be a really strong part of that Um That you can use the language of the you know, the administration and and and the things the goals They've set them for themselves set for themselves and use that to then make the case for for oer um, and then another piece of research that has uh come up fairly recently Uh is i'll drop a link in in a moment from Virginia Clinton Who's I can't remember where she is in the states, but she did a meta analysis of a lot of the research That's been happening around the impact of the adoption of oer on withdrawal rates And in the conversations we're having that's starting to prove to be a Real, you know the ears perk up when they start hearing the numbers and I think out of her analysis She saw something like a 20 to 25 impact on withdrawal rates And so when it comes to making a business case when when you're talking to people who who need numbers Who need a reason to put numbers to this in terms of funding? that is You know one place where we're with these demonstrated impacts on on um on something that is held up as important by many administrations That that you can kind of put some numbers to so to say i'll drop a link into that I mean, what the two points I was going to make one would else go in other places Think your audio is officially haunted gems. It's just bizarre. Sometimes it's loud. Sometimes it's low and you know Do you know any sign language dance Student perspective them while we're waiting for James to type um, I think this is the the part where I'd be a bit more kind of Dreaming in my appeal for the senior leadership is um, I think The student like obviously I don't know the ins and outs of what it goes into to get publications and books made within a university But I know from a student perspective what I wanted to make sure that I have the best um access to information and knowledge and The actual just information about the subject and it kind of reminds me of um I don't know if anyone's seen the big bang theory where one character is talking to another and asking, you know What's the most important thing short? There'd be a bit of an apocalypse, you know and the answer is that it's the Maintaining human Knowledge and that's what it is for me And that's what I would use I'd appeal to just kind of remember what the bottom line is and that publication at the very basis is to actually just get information out there to help Um, generate new research in order to gain more knowledge I welcome this from a slightly different angle. I was thinking about it in terms of Being holistic and trying to make that argument to leadership Um, I think at the moment in a lot of ways when we're evaluating student success We often do it based on module learning outcomes So five or six things to what extent the student achieve that and we're not doing it very much from Programmatic learning outcomes. We're not taking that holistic thing And I think there's a lot of research out there, but the students will learn something in one module and not necessarily apply to another Um with that open textbooks are kind of collaborative Um, particularly the collaborative not the individual but collaborative creation of resources Can really help with that in a lot of ways But it's not going to happen bottom up that has to happen top down And I'd be really interested in how open textbooks could be used to make links across modules between themes across modules across the years And how that could be something that would be developed within the program In order to reach all of these graduate attributes that we're always talking about in terms of students learning more than Just throw away science. So um, that can really only happen if leadership is involved That isn't the thing of champions that can you know do wonderful things for a particular cohort at a particular time That's the kind of thing things like BT campus have done really really well by implementing strategic top-down project managed resource kind of initiatives In terms of making these big changes Very true. Pianucci is just Uh typing there. So we don't have any policy. That is where I want to start. So that's that's an issue Do we are these I guess there's two different things we're talking about here We're teasing out a couple things some things are like we're trying to influence or Uh affect existing policies. We're also trying to reinterpret or Get back back the existing policy and say hang on. Is this what you meant? Is this what we're really about? Is this what you're saying? Uh, we're talking about big new Strategic policies take us in a whole new direction. So we're going to resource this as an actual thing um And I guess something that really resonated with me that what you said And it's like what what is the university is about is it creating knowledge? That's what we are supposed to be doing. That's what we're trying to encourage in our students and We are often funded in large part by by public funds and we any information we produce should be in the public domain It's kind of makes absolute set sense and that's what we're supposed to be doing contributing to new knowledge for everybody um So james do you want to try your audio and I think it should be working better now. Is that much better? Yeah the The I had not I had not checked it that the right Microphone had been selected some I wasn't actually speaking to the headset. I have on my head Um, I was just I've already said it and like and tom already said it I mean, I think the one thing is for an institution to actually have a policy You know, I mean if it doesn't have a policy you kind of you can kind of Intimate from there why you might not then be getting traction in terms of promotion criteria or hiring criteria or you know And the other thing that this was reminding me of maybe it'll come up more in relation to another question I'm involved in Um, I know you funded project Open game, which is is looking to make a game that will sort of promote open teaching practices With people because I think it was on you was mentioning they're kind of open pedagogy And like sometimes open textbooks can sound very onerous, but I mean if you kind of give people uh, You know lower level competency stuff or open teaching practice stuff where it's like well, listen if you Made a rubric if you invented if you wrote that rubric if you put a ccby license on that and put it somewhere Where other people can find it you have just made an or your and shared it like there there you go You've now engaged in something if you Ask your students if you get your students permission to Take stuff that they have artifacts that they have made in class and share them on a blog Congratulations. You've just You know, you're you're now in doing open pedagogy pedagogical assessments You know, it's like it there's lots of lower level low-hanging fruit that might get people into that space uh, that might Grease the wheels towards doing something like writing an open textbook or taking materials and putting them together or I mean if you just show people open textbooks somewhere else and go you could just use that like a regular textbook Can I be a little bit controversial? does openness go against The heart of being a university if you think of the early days to potential schools What do they do they close knowledge around and they said only those people who attend this university Only those people who possess these credentials Are worthy of that knowledge so on one hand Do we have short level colleges that we promote openness? But actually during the business of selling accreditation I don't I think I think the two can work together, but I know what you're talking about And I was just the other day. I was listening to terry greens Getting air podcast, which I highly recommend and david wiley was his guest and David wiley of lumen learning and and he he made a point around zero textbook cost courses Which I very much like the sound of and have seen some very nice examples Spoken of but he he was worried about the sustainability of zero textbook costs approaches where To get to get to a zero textbook cost took funding or grant funding And he was just like well that'd be something that'll exist for so long And then we'll kind of collapse under its own weight because there's no there's nothing in there sustaining it Really interesting because one of the reasons that open textbooks were particularly interesting to me once we cost We spent so much money trying to Meet the needs of kind of core modules Where you've got a bunch of students who need the particular book for a short amount of time and you're changing loan routes and trying Find really expensive people to try and make that happen And then two years later you're buying a whole new edition a whole bunch more And so I feel like our budgets are just not being used particularly well It's not that that's it's something that could stop in the morning It's not something that libraries can just stop and put the money somewhere else It is something that has to be resourced through projects But then in the long term you would hope that institutions will have budgets That they can rearrange and rather than giving all of our money to commercial entities that we can kind of start thinking about What resources can we claim and own ourselves? Yeah, I I absolutely agree the money that is in the system can be allocated differently And I think we're also in a transition period. So to me, I'm not concerned that we don't have all the answers Yes, we we need to build up a foundation to to make the case and work out the models and you know We're even at the point where we don't have the content coverage So I think where institutions deploy money will start changing and has started changing, you know, I think particularly in In us and the well funded institutions who are often, you know Not us necessarily, but well funded institutions are often at the forefront of these things But I think too that there is funding from other places that should absolutely grow and and I mean in particular government funding And and educational budgets that you know, whether it's state provincial national level That too can can and should be invested into these things so that there's no You know, this is a little reductive but no sales model for open access and open education is is fine We're figuring out what it will look like without that and grant funding is allowing us to do that So that's very much a part of the the the problem that we're trying to solve the things we're trying to work out here So yeah, I guess I'm I'm I'm very unconcerned that we don't have all the answers right now because I know there are a lot of people working incredibly hard to to find them and to figure out how this does last and that You know, it includes thinking about Value and value exchange in very different and exciting ways You know, it's the you know, this new technology driven method of disseminating information and I think you look at Netflix you look at youtube how youtube has changed, you know Now I've got to see several ads before I watch my video And I think how money can be made out of open education resources is an important Aspect like to say and I think that you know like to say as it grows That's when we'll see the way the best way to be able to sustain it Um, I doesn't mean that it's not sustainable It just might mean that people need to think outside the box And I'm just to touch back on Tom's point about you know closing off the education and keeping the knowledge within certain walls Um, I think, you know, you need to think as well about open education resources Um, yes, okay, they're going to be available to everybody But my degree is going to be able to tell everyone that I know how to use this information And I have the critical thinking behind me to say that I can read this effectively and that's the importance of The reason why we still have our qualifications and my qualifications are still important Bernard, I think that was uh fascinating And we've tied up a good few really interesting ideas there And as James has mentioned about what what David, while you were saying and he's actually got to he's come up with a particular perspective on this and he's Come at it from he's been in this a long time and he's now decided that he's going to Have a commercial company that's going to do this. So that's his kind of where he's coming from obviously that's his position but I think like, you know Zoe and others have mentioned there's a lot there's a lot of money here and as only says there's libraries are paying money And I started trying to visualize this and I came up with a world with the money kind of going around the students publishers academics libraries So, uh, so I just put a world pool of costs and actors That's all of uh, and it's a great point that this is like it is a kind of flux or it's fluid or we there's things that were maybe We don't know what stage we're at. That's the thing like in the future We may say that was a really inventive stage where we come up with some things Or we may say that was pointless and we were just dreaming who knows And so the next question I have for you is about a bit about the future, I guess and You know, I suppose the original team or topic to try and hang this Discussion around was unboxing the textbook and kind of unpacking it unpicking it Retooling what what is it? Like it's it's such a iconic artifact of Any educational formulations. It's like the motor board or something. You know, you got to have a lecture in front of a class You've got to have a textbook But what's beyond that? What else are we are we missing or how could we read? Really out there and I'm gonna say I like this with my little idea of an elnetic style Subscription service, you know, I'm going to pay X amount And I'm going to get all my books and I don't have to worry about it Um, but I think that they have copy books. I'm never going to go out of style personally because As happy as I am to use open Education resources, there's certain books that are my bibles and I'm using one at the moment that going looking into my Master's in my future academic career. I know that that book is going to be my by my side forever Because I've all my little notes with certain things highlighted um, so I think that you know, there's things that um That there's still always going to be a place for that I would like to see a future in which I can figure out What's going on exactly? I mean, I think I would like to see a future where we kind of Review the existence or the use of the textbook Because sometimes this thing of like, oh, it's just part of the educational furniture You know, you have to have this you have to have that and then you have to have a textbook. Do you? Like I think it really depends on the context um and What I found was I tried to find open textbooks for psychology and I went out there and I found loads and I was This is brilliant. I'm going to be able to replace all the textbooks with open textbooks But we're like we're an online learning program We Make our own online learning materials and when I compared the open textbooks with the detail of our in-house open open Our online learning materials They were at the same level of detail in many instances So I couldn't you know, there was no point using giving them the same level of detail twice often It's supposed to be well. Here's the learning materials and I'll go more in depth in this textbook chapter So I I found one good intro to psychology which we're using Um, but the other is I'm still now. I'm stuck in this kind of mental loop or a pedagogical loop maybe of Okay, what what's the matter? Are those open textbooks not detailed enough? or Is actually what we have now in house as good as Learning materials plus a textbook. Maybe we don't need to use textbooks on one of our modules An intermediate social and organizational psychology about four years ago We decided we decided not to use textbooks all the required readings or journal articles So we just don't have a textbook if students want to use one there's lots out there You know, they could find one But so I'm now stuck in this loop of trying to figure out am I still looking for good open textbooks Or should I be taking this stuff? We're we already use and turn them into open textbooks and give them to other people Can I just come in that I just Taking up the point you said there James. I think we need to drop the word text Because we have all this technology and why are we just trying to replicate? a written book In online Why just it's kind of like maybe book is probably not even a good enough word So yes, there is text in it But there's multimedia is all sorts of stuff rather than just something because as I said sometimes I use a disruptive technology thing As I said, if we aren't going to genuinely have open textbooks with the level of technology available our fingertips We really need to redefine. So the material that you're saying you built there in DCU James That's that's a book in a sense But we're not like it was interesting you presented it as the textbook and the learning material Rather than you put them all together. It's just called Whatever that is I think that might be because I said I think just simply just doing a glorified pdf of what exists anyway It's sort of limiting ourselves I think so I think the future I'd like to see is where won't we drop the word text Just call it a book, but maybe even we need to move beyond I'm interested in your idea about disruptive because I think that's when I got excited about open text or open books Was when I caught this is going to disrupt everything everything's going to change. This is amazing Um, but then when that moved out of the commercial premium kind of into education That changed happen which store I put this huge nuance because it's happening slower and I feel like that's what I'd like to see for the future I'd like to see us moving forward from moving forward slowly So we talked about it earlier about taking a small step and open stack to talk about it really I wrote down this book because I'm so impressed But their model is really close to traditional textbooks And they say the go and the idea is that it's people can adapt them within their comfort zone It's what lecturers are used to they don't have to make this massive leap Up and they say that the goal here isn't to replace the publisher textbook with a free textbook The goal is to give faculty members back control of their courses and improve student learning That's a huge goal. That's massive. That's insane But we can do it step by step. We can do it by letting people adapt Very traditional books in their comfort zone And then over time think about what else can I do so we can have these massive goals for what I'd like to say Is that we allow people to move forward slowly and we accept that people will move forward slowly I love that quote about about you know giving back control and I'll take that a step further my kind of vision for the future And and the things that get me really excited are where everybody has access to creation And in particular that the the tools the infrastructure the knowledge everything you need to be doing really high quality Content creation is living within communities. It's owned by them and and they're able to do that work themselves So that they can make the materials they need for their context So there are so many different kinds of of communities who I think could could benefit from this I think the You know one that we're working hard to to support is with marginalized communities And so if you look at a case like the hbc use the historically black colleges and universities in the u.s Having the infrastructure within that system to develop content that is Tailored exactly to the students that that they are are working with predominantly Rather than working with what a publisher has decided is Their students that they are targeted at you know the the large publishers who are creating books Particularly both the large courses, but for everything they have an idea of the audience that they are meeting That they are serving and that idea is very narrow So when you take away the role of the publisher as the person who decides What is worth publishing or not and put that control in the hands of of communities to do their work to do the work themselves And it's work. I know there's a lot you know in there that that can be unpacked But what they can do is create for themselves And another another kind of case where it sort of have half a project in mind But it's not kind of moving not moving very quickly Is something like working with instructors in cameron so French language and the majority of the learning materials that they use are created in france So it's also a tool of colonialization that the the materials are being imported and used in the classrooms in in cameron So what does it change when As I say when you take publishers out of the picture is being the only ones who can decide what's good enough and what should be taught And there are fun conversations to have about then how do we ensure quality? What does that look like what's needed? You know It's uh, I could go on for hours about that you can properly tell this is the thing that gets me very excited but to me the future of Of oer and I think absolutely moving beyond just the the box of a text box There is so much potential in having more people involved in the creation of knowledge as well as access to it Yes, so true. So we're going to just get mass produced stuff from the publishers from the center from the colonies from the the The people with the power and and the control and it's going to be targeted at the core group like a you know It's a very very complex area Just on the radio this morning there was a talk about a really interesting play in the uk They can't remember the name of but It's in a futuristic society and a minority of black people are in control of the world and they're this kind of racist hierarchy And it's obviously a kind of a flip on things And the interviewed one of the actors and it was that who was amazing is incredible and uh, he was talking about the experiences of Other lists and all this kind of thing and even things like Plasters and he was saying well, you know plasters Uh Plasters are designed with a particular skin tone in mind And that's obviously because they're being just exported and it's we're getting packaged up these particular images and representations of what it should be like and they're obviously going to be You know generic and have different things encoded in them whereas if they're being locally produced they'll be more Um, as Anja said we have a problem in our know We have the diversity of our education is rapidly increasing We're a very poor country for a long time. Nobody wants to come here But now we've suddenly rich people are arriving and we're not ready Uh, it's a bad day. That was it. Uh, James. Thanks. I was struggling for, uh The the language Um So Uh, I don't know if anyone else wants to uh Come in there. I'm going to take a picture or something. Don't There are I mean there's not to get into again like so not to get into favorite rants or anything But like the Irish higher education system explicitly Discriminates against part-time learners against online learners. There's no funding. They're barred from They're barred from financial supports Um, even though all policy and all reports for like over 10 years is all that the The funding model should be equalized and everyone should be treated the same but it never happens So again, all those barriers are there and that's everything we're talking about reduces barriers So it's all that that social justice kind of matrix that all starts to To uh, come together. I just you know, martin weller just released his is 25 years of ed tech. I just got my uh I just got my 25 years of ed tech t-shirts in the poster Yeah, one way that I I I try to um Capture that is if all that we do is replicate the exact same system that exists right now But with open licenses on the content we have missed a huge opportunity I feel that times are just changing so much and I get incredibly excited at the possibilities that open education Um as the media of studying opens up to everybody Um, and I think that the academic world needs to keep up with those possibilities Because people being more educated isn't a bad thing and I think that we need to get away from feeling that it is a resist and that we should try and kind of Keep it to the people who can afford us and have the time to do it um, you know, and the more open access resources that are right there Will only help The open education and it can take off even more. So the more that happens the better Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, thank you Uh, if anybody, uh, would like to comment along my line, uh, who have any things before we Uh, we finish off if anybody else wants to say anything at all about you know Actually, I'm going to take one minute to ask something which is quite interesting to me and connect up a couple of dots which is that My colleague James is very interested in project management project managing and as expertise in developing open resource resources using teams small but distributed teams so I want to ask Zoe a bit about that if you could say a bit I'd love to hear a bit more about the work that your organization is doing in because people think kind of think of loan academics as well and like the pressure's on you to create a book But that's not the reality and maybe uh, you could tell us a bit more Zoe about about what your what your guys are doing in Uh, in absolutely, uh that description is everything you know James. I was like, hey, hey, we do that so uh So rivers community we're a registered charity here in In Canada and we've had funding from the Hewlett foundation for Almost four years now to develop a collaborative model for open textbook publishing Um, so where we started was we just started doing the work of project managing open textbook projects to understand what their process looks like We worked with I think we got up to nearly 40 different projects that we had hands on at different times across a huge range of subjects a huge range of types of projects To really try and get a sense of of all the ways in which this can be done and out of that what we've developed is a really comprehensive set of documentation on how to do Collaborative open textbook publishing and the collaboration is really key Because as you say when you look at that as as an individual you look at, you know Anya said this earlier you look at the scale of work and involved in creating an open textbook it can seem really overwhelming Um, so the the approach that we take is to break it down Into pieces The process and then think from day one about how this is going to be collaborative because all publishing is There there is you know To the point of if you have an audience if you are one person writing and you have one person reading it That's the kind of collaboration, but when you have editors you have peer reviewers you have people doing the formatting There's so much that happens as a team. So when you opt into that approach from the beginning Um, that can help people get comfortable with the idea of doing their own their own publishing essentially um So how we support that now is as I say we have the documentation which I'll share in a moment That has you know easy ways in to just start getting a sense of it We also go very deep into you know a very step-by-step process for peer review For example, um, how you can run that in a few different ways on your text because we know that's an important indicator to people doing this work Um, because they want to know that you know, not only that it's valid for them But also that the people who'll be adopting it need that kind of market too Um, we also run a professional development program, uh, with which we run Uh, three cohorts a year of about 10 projects Who form a kind of smaller learning community? Who come together regularly both to to learn the publishing process? I mean to work with each other and support each other as they apply that to the projects over the course of a year Um, that one is that's a paid offering for institutions We're working on ways to make more and more of that accessible Openly as well all of the materials are open We're kind of thinking about other ways to deliver that course Mostly because it's very intensive for us To to to run so um, and then uh, we're also In the process of figuring out a kind of publishing arm that would help people who've kind of done the work of creating materials But i'm sure how to take that next step to get it out so other people can use it outside of their institution um, so that's something that's coming together And and we're kind of exploring at the moment So what we're trying to do is is you know, this is the infrastructure It's the word I come back to in order to do this work a lot of pieces need to be in place And so we're working on you know working very much with the community to develop those And and broadly I think yeah the the case that we make is that creation is something that people are doing all the time Um, that a lot of institutions are supporting often, you know, it'll be Adoptions and adaptations will come first right before, you know from scratch creation But everything that we're developing works for those as well particularly, you know adaptation work As as you're trying to do that customization that we've talked about um Yeah, so that that's what we do um, and we really uh are Trying to make sure that it is all responsive to community needs and and that we make it accessible and and You know lower those barriers to to creation and the same time as we're lowering them to accessing education And if anyone has specific questions Thanks, Zoe that that's fascinating and I mean we're we're myself some colleagues here are involved in writing a book at the moment and it's shambhali the way we're organizing the the uh The collaboration activities. Oh my god. I didn't hope it's not being recorded. I was joking Uh, but and it's it's it's very It's very underappreciated that you know having to have an assistant and being able to organize and have contributors and how you Manage all those things. So I think that I should add to sorry my morning brain completely But we also have an online platform that anybody can access and use Uh, so that's a community discussion space where you can ask any questions you have about OER creation and you can um Call for contributors to find people to have work with you on your project And you can also create a homepage for your project So it has a visible presence online that uh, everybody can then find and then there are pathways in for people to To join the project or to follow it so they can hear your updates as it goes Um, I'll I'll also post a link to that so that yes Missed that that very large piece of what we do is is we we are supporting the community where they are And and making that space for for people to exchange knowledge because a lot of us do know things and we've come across things before and And so that's kind of a another key part brilliant Uh, okay projects dot revist doc community. Yeah, that's it on yet. Super Um, and I've made a sketch here and if anybody like to comment I'll keep evolving the sketch so send me any comments you want or I put it up online as well You can see it there and just uh, I put a link in earlier. I think uh So you can uh, hope you comment on that document if you want me to add anything or change or amend or anything else Uh And tom, okay, right. That's great. That's in the other chat window. Okay and documentation fantastic So I don't know how much longer we have dora or if anybody else in in the the audience in particular Is any comments on anything? I think that idea of Of decolonization and local creation is is a really interesting one. It's something I've Been thinking about a lot lately in my own work and and someone hoping to something publish on shortly, but um It's hard. It's hard to know what the response is and I think these are great to see open tools and open projects that are helping us um to those ends and To see if anybody else wants to say anything Select all the chat and copy it up your records. That's a great idea. Just a control all brilliant control a And uh, stick that into an old work document or something here Okay Thanks, dora. That works from agents should be if there's anybody that Hasn't said anything yet and maybe they're just doing other things. They're You know correct and grading essays or working away an assignment to another window Who knows what but if anybody would like to who hasn't said anything yet, please um Be free to To comment or say hi all the box I suppose if I give some like I was giving some confession time earlier with the fact that like Currently we're still using more commercial textbooks than open textbooks The other thing is that in terms of taking some of our own materials That could be open textbooks and making them open textbooks. We haven't I don't I haven't gotten over this hump yet of saying I know there's a bit of work to do and take someone sort of taking a look at our materials just you know Making sure that it is in a state that we wanted to go or to be in before we put it out there and um Then there would be this process and it's like it's now it's to an extent It's about workload and it's like I know that's that's a job and it's on the list But we haven't gotten to it yet But also I don't know if it's just one of those things where because it I haven't done it once or how it hasn't been done Very close to me once that it's just this thing of like, oh We'll have to figure out how to do that later. So if anyone wants to Tell me I'm being silly and to you know that all I all I really need to do is go to x which um Sorry, amen. I just want to Comment briefly on the the text because I I am a student. Um, who is taking james's course So I have used some of those text myself And I know for a lot of it, um They like I'd always call it as them, you know the module text or the core text And that's how I refer to it. It's that you've used if I'm just talking with james Um, but one of the only reasons I would use a lot of the textbooks was for references because it always felt less academic To be trying to ensure that I suppressed reference For that particular document. So that was the only reason I would use the textbook Um, because there was enough detail Um within it and it was also there was always slightly more I think I'm not sure whether it's because it was written in ireland that I felt more like my mother's home and um, but it always felt a little less formal as well So you get a giggle here and there which is always enjoyable. Um, but that's just my own My own experiences of working with that kind of a text and um, kind of the reason the bible that I was referring to earlier is actually a stats book Um, so obviously I've incredible number of very important notes that can't go too far for me if I continue on in quantitative research Great. Thanks for the the hashtags. So Yeah, and I'll just share my uh, twitter handle with you if you like it's e a m and zero Which is uh, people say ammo and it's an effective name in in in the east of the country As they say on on the news nowadays when they're referring to Dublin so I guess that That's a good a good attending place to wrap and we can continue the the conversation online outside the bounds of the of this uh, this particular box and just like to thank everybody for so much for all of your time and uh, we'll see you on the other side