 two one two one two one two One two two one two one two one two two one two one two One two Hello Can people please move into the main auditorium, please? We'd like to get started as quickly as possible. Thank you Okay, folks. We're about to begin. You might take your places, please Good morning, everyone. Come on in. Take a seat. Make yourselves comfortable Come on in ladies and gentlemen. Don't be shy come to the front Don't be shy Come on in everyone grab yourselves a seat and we'll get started. Don't be shy. There's plenty of room at the front Okay. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming this morning. If you're still coming in just come and grab a seat There's plenty at the front, but we're gonna get started now with today's conference So take a seat make yourselves comfortable And we'll get going So good morning everybody and welcome to OER 24 It's fantastic to see so many of you here in Cork And of course, it's wonderful to see so many of our familiar faces But also so many new faces and we've got a really international bunch of delegates this year Which is fantastic and we welcome you all very warmly to OER 24 We've got a very packed program for two days So I'm gonna be very brief this morning before handing over to our co-chairs and our other presenters But I wanted to firstly say Fulcher and apologies to any Gaelic speakers if that was terrible pronunciation and welcome to OER 24 and Cork and the wonderful Munster technological University here in Cork We've had a fantastic couple of days here setting up with the Munster team and we'll hear shortly from our from Munster's President and principal about Munster and welcome you all to the conference as well. So welcome everyone. I Just want to say a huge thank you first of all to Munster and Particularly to the Munster tell team who have done a huge amount to make this conference happen as you can see they've transformed a Sports hall into a conference venue and many many more things that I can't even have time to mention today So thank you very much to them and to all the team that you'll meet throughout the conference I must also thank of course as well the conference committee and some of them are here today So if you're on the conference committee, just give everybody a little wave if you're here But these people put a huge amount of their own time and volunteering to put this conference together So another huge thank you to them And of course we have a fantastic lineup of sponsors partners and exhibitors as well Do visit the exhibition and we'll hear throughout the conference from some of our partners as well So please do visit them. Please get to know them They helped to put this conference together and without them this conference simply wouldn't be possible and Finally a massive. Thank you to our co-chairs who do so much to shape the conference They make sure that all the papers are getting checked that the peer review happens They put together the themes and they really set the tone for the whole conference and Tom and Garode have been very keenly aware of how important this conference is to so many of you And they've done a fantastic job with this program and with this conference. So a huge thank you to both of them I said I'd be brief and I shall so I'm gonna hand over to our first co-chair Dr. Garode O'Sullivan from Munster Technical University to introduce the rest of the conference. Enjoy your day Hi, I'm Garode O'Sullivan. I'm one of the conference co-chairs I have a few housekeeping matters to go through But first I just want to start by Sincerely welcoming you all to Cork and to OER 24 as we say in Irish Cade Mila Falter of Galare a hundred thousand Welcomes to you all so whether you're a newcomer to OER or like my co-chair here Tom You're a seasoned ticket holder We're just really pleased to have you here with us this morning I think the program has something in it for everyone and we just hope that you will enjoy your time Here with us and that our program and our campus will provide you with the Ideal space in which to to learn to listen to talk and share and in which to meet old friends and and you So our schedule is a busy one though So while we want you to feel very welcome and very much at your ease Do forgive us if at any stage you feel hurried or hurried So at particular points of the day We will actually be playing some video game music to inspire you to be Moving along so that'll be your audio cue to make your way without delay to the next location One other key resource in keeping everything moving along Sorry, and making sure that everybody knows where they're where they're going is the online Delegate pack So you'll find a QR code for that and the program in the conference Info sheet that you've received when you when you registered this morning We've tried to put everything into the delegate pack that we think You would need from finding your way around the campus the city and the county To getting online and participating in some of the online discussions and debates on that subject Do please consider Joining the conference back channel that we've provided on slack There's a lot of great discussions and conversations going on there already. So please do Consider joining in in terms of the delegate pack again though if we've missed out on anything or if there's anything else That you need help with while you're with us. Please just ask you can recognize the support staff by their red ID badges and their empty you lanyards So please don't hesitate to ask ask them any questions big or small They're they're genuinely here to help In terms of housekeeping now, I would ask you to please note the location of the emergency exits In case of a fire alarm sounding just make your way to your to your nearest emergency exit the toilets or the rest rooms as our US colleagues Might call them are located in the main corridor just outside the main hall there Just to talk through that the sequence and locations of things this morning We'll be serving tea and coffee as we were this morning on the other side of this hall just after the keynote After that though, we'll be asking you to either remain here for the first workshop or Make your way to the tourism building for the scheduled Parallel sessions and I just asked that speakers and Session chairs would please try to get there early so we can help you Get everything set up So there's guidelines again for both the speakers and the session chairs in in the online delegate pack If you if you haven't seen those at lunch then is served at 12 30 in the West atrium which is roughly about halfway between this building and the tourism building and Yeah, I think that's it in terms of housekeeping, but just before I pass you on to our president I want to offer some thanks and words of appreciation So look a huge thank you to to alt to our Organizing committee members who I can see distributed among the crowd here and to our session chairs to our speakers To our sponsors and really just to all of you attending for for making this possible It's just great to have you here today and your your support and participation are really appreciated But a big shout out as well to our own gang of helpers here in MTU without whom, you know, none of this would be possible in particular staff of the department of technology enhanced learning Including our operations manager just at the back of the room. They're dr. Ty Glean and our AV manager Shane Cronin. Thank you again for all your hard work and and dedication And now it gives me great pleasure to welcome on stage our President professor Maggie Cusack to open the conference formally. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good. Good morning, everyone Distinguished guests and all of our esteemed colleagues. I am absolutely delighted To open the 15th annual conference on open education research practice and policy or OER 24 We're absolutely delighted to host this conference in partnership with ALT And I'd like to extend an especially warm welcome to Katie Johnson the ALT event manager Kerry Piny who's the interim CEO and chief operations officer from ALT both of whom are Our with us today. You're very welcome so on behalf of MTU and ALT I'd like to welcome you all to MTU to our Bishop's Town campus and to our arena and And as you can see we're in a sports arena But we're really proud of the fact that it's a very flexible space and we use this for sports So health and well-being for students and staff for teaching for research for conferences And it's absolutely fabulous to be able to use the space this way today So we know that many of you are joining us Locally, you know from MTU and certainly from Ireland But many have traveled from from around the world to join us today Today and tomorrow and to champion the cause of of open education And we're really grateful for everyone's attendance We really appreciate all the work that goes into preparation, but without attendance and full participation Then we can't achieve everything that we hope to deliver So thank you all for for your full participation and engagement in advance We're really grateful to the time and the energy that you give not just to the conference, but to every day in terms of transformation of technology and And learning and all the work that you do to build a global network of educators and researchers in this field We're very well aware that our world is increasingly Interwoven with all things digital so We're living in a time when Expectations are rapidly changing around the ways in which education should be designed and should be developed So I think that OER 24 could hardly be more relevant or more timely So the theme of this year's conference digital transformation in open education I think really reflect some of those changes And I think it's also a theme that challenges us and it challenges us to consider how Open education can adapt and shape the future of learning and teaching it really invites us to start imagining new ways for open education to provide direct leadership in that digital transformation and to do so in a way that explicitly promotes equity promotes inclusion and accessibility in education and those are all aspects that are really really important to MTU and Really fundamentally important to our strategy So by its nature Open education is global and it is interconnected So we're all really delighted and privileged to be joined this morning by three distinguished keynote speakers All of whom are leading scholars and advocates in this field We have Dr. Rajiv Sanjiani from Canada Dr. Catherine Cronin from New York by way of Galway and so a slightly circuitous route And and Professor Lorna Chernovitz from South Africa. So you're all very welcome your pioneering work and your dedication to fostering equitable inclusive and just educational practices are Really resonates very deeply with our own mission and our own strategic priorities here in MTU So thank you in advance for your for your contribution and thank you for being here So we know that through our speakers insights and through the many papers Presentations and workshops being delivered over the course of the next two days We're all being invited to work towards a brighter future for education So before I hand over to our keynote speaker, I would like to say thank you to Alt To all of the organizing committee, we all fully appreciate the events at this don't just happen at the snap of you know Someone's fingers. There's a huge amount of work that's involved. So thank you to everyone involved in organizing Thank you to our sponsors the staff of Tell department and I know that the road called out thanks and just before me But I would just like to and add my thanks to the to the list And also to say thank you to all of you and as participants for really making OER 24 a reality I hope you enjoy all of the conference events and that you make full use of this opportunity to network and to Learn from each other's knowledge and experience and once again a huge welcome to you all Thank you for being here and I look forward to all the new and really exciting ideas that emerge from here and to see Them being implemented at MTU. Thank you to y'all So many thanks to our president for those words of welcome and for opening the conference Next up we have a presentation from our headline sponsor E campus, Ontario and very grateful to them for their support. I don't have much of a presentation But I am going to take a selfie for the social media Thank you for that Gee which our major good morning everybody We're really pleased to be here today to help celebrate open education with all of you Thank you to professor Cousack for the welcoming Message and thanks to everybody for joining us here today I just want to acknowledge a few people that are in the room my colleague Rajeve who I Support in Ontario is Nick Baker here. I saw him on the program Nick Baker's former board director of E campus, Ontario. He is going to be here as well I do want to acknowledge all of our E campus, Ontario team members who are here sitting right here in the room We can all wave come and talk to them anytime And I also want to acknowledge each and every one of you who is professor Cousack just said has taken some time out of Your busy schedules to come and do some work together on what open education means E campus Ontario is a not-for-profit organization Supported primarily through the Ontario government the Ministry of Colleges and Universities We support digital transformation for 56 post-secondary institutions So that's all of the publicly assisted colleges Indigenous institutes and universities in Ontario. We're the we're Canada's largest tertiary educational district we support about 70,000 faculty and staff and a million full-time students and probably a couple of factors of that million students part-time as well We are really focused on digital transformation. That's our raison d'etre We want to try and increase digital participation in education and in the economy and as professor Cousack said Everything is pretty digital. I've got some notes on my iPad here I'll be posting my picture up on the social media a little bit later That's all done conveniently because social media. I often joke actually to institutions This will work one time you could choose to be the analog Institution you could stew the internet entirely you could print everything you can have no online courses You could probably even use a rotary telephone if you remember what that is. That's gonna work once I think you're gonna be able to charge a lot of money for that actually I think the one institution that is able to do that is going to be able to say yes come to us We are the analog institution, but if that's not you Then you need to learn how digital transformation can support your mission and your mandate So our sector is very focused on the sustainability of education that's certainly on financial Sustainability, I think that's pretty common around the world We see open educational resources is one of the key avenues for financial sustainability I had a great conversation with Kerry this morning about what that means and for us it primarily means how students can save money Because the cost of education is very expensive We have several team members here today that are going to be Chatting with you in some of the sessions would encourage you to check them out topics like supporting OER adoption with metadata for federated Discovery, I used to teach in the library school. So I love anything to do with metadata and federation Translation of OER which is also very important and empowering educators in the digital age And I know I've seen a lot of really great things on the program that I'm planning to check out I'm personally really excited to be able to learn from everybody and to learn Primarily about some of the themes that we're talking about here today Certainly around equity and of course around artificial intelligence On equity our teams have been focused on decolonization and reconciliation with indigenous peoples And what this means for open education? This is a very important topic for us all of Canada in all of Canada as we Chart a path together with our indigenous peoples on reconciliation Over the last three years we've supported something called the virtual learning strategy, which was a 70 million dollar digital transformation Funding package that was designed to support the entire sector half of that 35 million dollars a lot of money to us Was dedicated to open educational resources and in doing the virtual learning strategy We worked to stand up a new version of a creative commons license, which we called the Ontario commons Because we specifically wanted to support indigenous educators and we learned that the OER Philosophy might be counter to our efforts at decolonization Because of the implicit biases the Western bias that it has on Publication and copyright so that was something that we've learned a lot about and we'll be pleased to continue to learn with you as we focus on equity And some of our recent work has also been focused on artificial intelligence Actually use chat GPT to write a memo earlier today. It was very handy a But we're also looking at the integration of AI into our open library and coming this spring We're going to be launching a series of open AI GPT's that are supporting educators to find create and reuse open educational resources as well as to create things like micro credentials from those open educational resources and as this conference is about Education we're happy to share these GPT's with anyone who is interested in collaborating on the use of AI and open education So I want to thank the organizers for convening this important Conversation I want to thank you all for taking the time out of your busy schedules to come and learn and listen with everybody I'm certainly looking forward to learning and listening to all of you as well. Thank you so much This is a stand-up here and I look and I said, oh my god, what have we done? Well done to everybody. I won't go into lots of tanks because Professor Cusack has thanked people and my good friend Garot has thanked people so I won't go into that there like that I am I have spent the last few days sending out emails particularly to the session chairs telling them about keeping on time So I better physician healed I sell for you really better do that I suppose just in introducing our first keynote I suppose I just a little bit of why I think open education is important and I think words like So this isn't just like a pedagogical approach or a new type of technology. It's about as I said social justice It's about inclusion It's not even just about mission statements, which are all important and targets It's what my father who would have been far less educated would say you do it because it's the right thing to do You don't need fancy words or anything and that's why I love open education If you haven't made it all we are and this is your first time I tried to explain to people all we are is a special community I had the pleasure of having Rajiv stay with me for the weekend and you know as I said tickets If you saw how hard this man worked because he cares about this community about open education. This is His people if you will like that and I think this is it's a real pleasure to have him here And you have people here who genuinely cared about the things we care about we are facing all sorts of challenges and At the risk of sounding like oh my god, here's the COVID pandemic again But I mean if it if that didn't challenge us to sort of reevaluate Where we are stuff like digital devoid really started to mean something if you didn't have a computer I had students who they used to go down to the library to get Wi-Fi that was closed Open means so many things As I said, I I'm really shocked when I'm talking to my friends and colleagues in North America where the textbooks is such a big issue I mean, it's genuinely obscene some of the prices here But as I said for us here the lessons we learned and all of that like openness. It's meant being open to different ideas People think about OER sometimes and digital transformation has to be high tech. You're gonna see a video in this keynote I can assure you this was made on with two metal cages and a plank of wood in the kitchen and county carry So anybody who thinks my god, this is really high tech. I can assure you as my photographs Indicated it's not high tech. It's about giving something a go. It's about you being open yourself That's what I think for me open the start with yourself and been open to ideas So I won't And so I'm just watching the time here. So I can genuinely say It is Real pleasure and a real honor that Rajiv has been able to come over here to us he's a man I've long admired and I think we've become good true friends there and as I said, we both share a real common Care and compassion. That's what makes open education. So Going back to my father there Yes, he's the VP of Brock University. He's a long and established Open education scholar Well, as my father would say he's a decent skin And that's the highest compliment I can Dr. Rajiv Janjani sweetest introduction from the sweetest man We tell this aside I'm just going to take a minute to get set up here I'm going to check which chain and crew we'll get Oh beautiful You can't hear me yet. Is this not on Two seconds. It's coming. It's coming. Excellent This was described to me earlier today as the britney mic and I think of it In my generation as more of the Madonna mic, but I'm glad it's It's ready to go over here. Well, thank you for that tom There's a few things I wouldn't do for you. Honestly, you're like a brother to me But good morning, everyone and Ramadan Karim It is such a pleasure to be here with everyone Tom and Groad, you know I'm very grateful for the invitation to help open the conference And you know, I was a bit uncertain about taking up even more airtime after Three years ago at this conference when I was hosted online in conjunction with domains I subjected people to my curious contradictions and open-ended questions But thank you for convincing me otherwise and prompting me to reflect further on our collective work For those of you who haven't been here before at this conference I will say this is a very special gathering There's many people in this room whom I greatly admire and many whom I absolutely adore To Alt's great credit in my experience. This is a conference that has generally been a lot more intimate It has been visibly guided by an ethic of care Where's Martin Weller? Martin you talk about this on your blog about about meticulous informality, right? But in my estimation, this is also another place that has where folks have been unafraid to be lovingly critical And so this is a place where I come to feel re-inspired, re-centered and even re-energized Before I begin I would like to dedicate this talk to a very dear friend Irwin DeVries For those of you who did not have the privilege of knowing and working with him Irwin was a true leader in the world of open education And not just by way of formal titles Although he certainly earned those like a VP of open learning at Thompson reverse university And not just in terms of his scholarship Which was extraordinary and it ranged from everything from OER to open educational practices open course design Open universities and a lot more Irwin was a true leader in the more important ways that are often invisible to others In his mentorship in his sponsorship to many including to me including to myself In the integrity that he brought to his work and that he inspired in many of his colleagues In the joy he brought to everyone when he had a guitar in his hand Especially his bandmates who witnessed both his brilliance and his generosity Irwin was open in all of the ways that really count in his curiosity in his counsel in his friendship in his heart I will always be grateful for the memories that he and I created together Usually with our friend Brian Lamb as you see over here as we're skipping along at the top of Table Mountain in Cape Town And i'm especially grateful to his wife Jean His wife Jean made it possible for us to travel together one final time in december About a month before he passed to visit with our mutual friends and camloops in british columbia. I will miss this man forever Irwin taught me many things over the years including the importance of cultivating moments of joy and the power of storytelling As evidence of both I will point you to the lyrics of the chorus of one of his many songs The lyrics go he loves everything about her even the parsley in her teeth And it's drawing on the inspiration of Irwin that I would like to begin my talk by focusing on storytelling Whether it's the narrative that we pitch when we're advocating for oer Whether it is the future state of higher education that we daydream about when we're facing a sometimes dystopian reality Or even sometimes the tall tales we tell ourselves along the way But allow me to start with a fairy tale The setting is somewhere in north america. This is the scene that I know and work in well By the way, if any parts of this fairy tale are familiar to or resonate with you I would appreciate you letting me know by snapping your fingers at the time So here we go once upon a time There was a kind hearted junior faculty member who is happy to have secured a 10-year track position at a well regarded public university in their hometown shortly after they earned their doctorate They were equally passionate about research and teaching and so they were delighted to be assigned to teach one of their favorite courses the following year The course was at the introductory level and so it served as a gateway to the discipline It allowed them an opportunity to ignite the same passion that they felt in curious young minds Over the next few months the faculty member began to reflect on potential learning activities They began by browsing through the teaching materials that their more experienced colleagues had readily shared with them Given their own familiarity with the scholarship of teaching and learning from their training in graduate school They knew they wanted the learning activities to be active and engaging So they attended workshops offered by their university's center for teaching and learning and began to pick up ideas When it came to the assessments, they generally shunned high stakes examinations And the objective and principle to the use of remote exam proctoring software And so they took pains to design formative assessments that scaffolded learning and skill development And crafted summative assessments to be authentic and meaningful They drafted course policies to be inclusive and to reflect the trust that they had for students In slowly designing the course they embraced principles of universal design for learning anti-racist pedagogies and trauma-informed practices A few months before the course was scheduled to begin They attended a teaching conference organized by their disciplines professional association Drawing on their ample professional development funds And gratified by the knowledge that engaging in educational development would of course be recognized during the tenure and promotion process at the university Don't laugh The conference opened with an acknowledgement of the events major sponsors Which included of course a major commercial textbook publisher A representative with which presented participants on their latest courseware options during the sponsored lunch hour Later during the conference's evening reception and awards gala A lifetime achievement award was presented to a well-known senior academic And among of course the achievements the honoree was being recognized for was offering a popular commercial textbook for the disciplines introductory course The next day the faculty members stopped by the sponsoring publishing companies booth They picked up from some free swag They learned about the courseware options and they left the conference excited about the learning resources that they had discovered Including of course the automated adaptive quizzing the interactive simulations that were associated with the textbook and that of course would embed within their university's learning management system I'm not making any of this up By the time they returned to their campus They were impressed to see an email from the textbook publishers local rep already waiting for them in their inbox Including all of the information they would need to pass on to their campus bookstore to formally adopt the textbook and the associated courseware The representatives email also included an offer To explore the potential sponsorship of the annual departmental symposium series If the department as a whole elected to adopt the book as required across all sections of this high enrollment undergraduate introductory course The faculty member forwarded the email to their department chair They asked if the offer from the publishing company was something they might discuss at an upcoming department meeting But when the first week of march came around They were intrigued to learn that their campus library was Coordinating the series of events celebrate something called open education week The promotional materials spoke directly to many of their values concerning access equity and social justice Some of the sessions were offered in partnership with the university's center for teaching and learning And were focused on an approach to assessment known as open pedagogy It appeared to have a lot in common with some of the authentic assessments that they had been reflecting on Other sessions focused on course materials and ways in which these could be made more affordable Inclusive and equitable for students. They were intrigued. So they signed up And it was at that first session that they met A librarian a librarian who was a member of their university's open education working group The librarian introduced the faculty member to the concept of open educational resources They showed the faculty member a guide that they had prepared that linked to a number of oer repositories They walked them through the process of discovering oer and even helped them identify a few potential open textbooks That had glowing reviews from faculty members at other institutions The librarian explained that the faculty member was actually eligible to apply for an oer adoption grant This was a stipend that was funded by the undergraduate student association at the university Finally, the librarian promised to follow up with information about the oer grant program A summary of research about the efficacy and impact of oer adoption And an offer to visit the faculty member's department to share these resources and opportunities with their colleagues The faculty member was really quite surprised that they'd never heard of oer until then Including at every one of the disciplinary teaching conferences that they had ever attended They were alarmed to learn about the limitations imposed by digital rights management in commercial e-text books They were surprised to learn that students do not actually purchase digital e-text books But instead they lease them and so they lose access at the end of the term And they were especially dismayed to learn how many students were unable to afford the cost of required course materials And so they began to wonder about whether the extra bells and whistles that they discovered at the teaching conference were really worth widening inequity in the classroom Now admittedly they weren't yet certain about whether the available oer would be of comparable quality to the flashy courseware provided by the commercial textbook publishing company But given the numerous positive reviews from faculty members some of whose names they did recognize They were at least willing to take a look Their explorations were emboldened by the knowledge that many of their colleagues in different departments at the university were already taking advantage of the oer grant program And so they were not alone And they were especially encouraged by the new knowledge that the university's recently revised guidelines for tenure promotion and merit specifically included a reference to the creation of oer Eventually they decided to informally survey their current students to better understand whether they the financial challenges They were facing were really as severe as the research had suggested and how the students would perceive a course in which the instructor assigned oer What they what they learned changed them forever They they were horrified to learn about the true extent of food and housing insecurity experienced by their students That a majority of their students were not purchasing at least some of their course materials Due to the high cost that many actually chose courses or dropped courses due to the high cost of course materials And that all of these choices were much more likely to be made by students were already marginalized Where the first generation students students of color or students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds In their mind the decision had been made It was a decision supported by information and guidance provided by the librarian The availability of relevant oer the positive reviews from other faculty members the incentive of the oer adoption grant The recognition of their work within the university's tenure and promotion guidelines But it was a decision that was driven by the eye-opening responses of their current students With their own decision made the faculty member decided they had a responsibility to at least place the same information in front of their colleagues And so they emailed their department chair to request a revision Of the agenda item from a question about a common commercial textbook to a broader discussion about course materials Including open educational resources. They also asked for the librarian to be invited as a guest presenter The department chair agreed And at the meeting the faculty member not only shared their decision to adopt oer for the coming year But also promised to bring back a report concerning their experience As the new academic year approached the faculty member was glad to be able to respond to student emails inquiring about Whether the textbook was required or whether they might perhaps use an older edition with the clarification that no We're going to be using a free and open textbook And when the term began the faculty member received overwhelmingly positive feedback about their use of oer from the students enrolled in the course And although they began to already identify several ways in which the oer they had selected might be improved Might be enhanced in ways that might align even better with their pedagogical goals They were already thinking about applying for the university's oer adaptation grant the following summer Which included expertise and technical support in addition to a larger stipend Eventually the faculty member grew from an oer experimenter to a consistent oer adopter and even an oer advocate They were recognized by the undergraduate student association as being a campus oer champion And they were in fact invited to join the campus's oer working group as well Eventually they did adapt the open textbook they localized it while updating it And at the following year's disciplinary teaching conference They presented on their use of oer in an effort to help move normative practice within their discipline Now some of you may have been wondering through this fairy tale whether i've been telling you my own story I've not In truth, this is more of a composite although i'm certainly drawing on many true events many true experiences some of which are absolutely my own But more than a story. I think this is a tale that we love telling ourselves in the oer space Right this fairy tale for me. This is the hero's journey Yes, this is the noble educator overcoming numerous obstacles including a villainous commercial enterprise With the assistance of a trusted companion from the library and guided by a strong moral compass The faculty hero denies themselves comfort and conventional reward in pursuit of justice for which they are ultimately admired and rewarded Right, this is the fairy tale But this is less of an accurate portrayal. It's much more of an oversimplification It's a hollywood adaptation right or maybe tom considering all of the singing we do at these events Maybe it's a bollywood adaptation. I don't know but But what this comforting narrative does I think is it glosses over many of the fissures and cracks in the foundation The many tears in the fabric of the reality of higher education today Years ago during the 2017 open education conference in anaheim in california a group of 10 of us Planned and facilitated a hybrid session titled. How can we destroy the open education movement? it was intended as As an it was intended to catalyze a conversation about ethics and to our delight it ended up being one of the most popular sessions well attended sessions at the conference Despite the title, of course, none of us actually wish to derail anything related to open education We were actually using a group facilitation technique called tris This is one of a set of liberating structures which allows you to step outside of your usual frame of mind So we began this is a fun exercise. We began by putting on our dr. Evil hats effectively We imagine, you know, if we really did want to derail open education What would we do a lot of laughter a lot of creativity? We came up with more than 150 ideas Some of those included defund and privatize education Put oer behind paywalls. Do not allow platforms to talk to one another Also have a missionary zeal take a missionary approach with all of the implications of colonialism In the second phase we began to ask ourselves whether we were doing anything even remotely that resembled anything on our first list And so that's when we started to talk about things like Well, we might be creating inadvertently a caste system when it comes to the different open licenses We might not be sufficiently attending to metadata We might not be doing enough to support those experiencing precarity including adjunct faculty members And then we finished by beginning to identify some initial steps we might engage in to stop engaging in any of those practices Trues is an effective technique if we wish to interrogate something without immediately triggering a defensive response And that is the kind of openness I think we need when we are critically contemplating the limitations and the unintended consequences of our work with who we are And especially the larger systems in which we are nested For example This was fun to do It is true that there are many faculty members who are passionate about teaching the introductory courses in their discipline But it is also true that this is the course that is most likely to be offloaded to junior faculty members So that tenured and full professors can teach the niche courses in the boutique areas of their scholarship These are also the courses for which precarious adjunct faculty members are most likely to be hired at short notice Teaching the largest course sections that bring in the most revenue for the institution While at some institutions being paid poverty wages with no benefits I've been there. I vividly remember teaching as an adjunct faculty member three different institutions at one point even on the same day In an effort to cobble together a full-time job This is why it's easy to elicit a laugh today Especially in North America when you talk about a newly minted phd quickly securing a tenure track position And that too without having to move away from home. Yeah, good luck with that That's not the scenario in higher education today It is true that professional associations for many disciplines host teaching conferences In my case one of them is the national institute for the teaching of psychology or nigh top It's held during the first week of january every year on a beach at a resort in florida. It's very nice But like many other conferences like this the cost of attending is prohibitive for many And that is even after the customary sponsorships from yes major commercial textbook publishers It is true that many educators find great value in the courseway marketed by commercial textbook publishers But it is also true that this marketing is aggressive and unsolicited As a faculty member I routinely received unsolicited packages in my mailbox with the latest editions of the various commercial textbooks And commercial textbook publisher representatives routinely visit faculty offices at my university and my previous university They leave little goody bags on our office doors when we're not around I recall one experience in particular when my department negotiated with a vendor So that yes all sections of the introductory course would assign their textbook as required In exchange for a kickback to the department for every copy of the textbook that was purchased at the university bookstore This was a fund that was ultimately used to provide a scholarship for maybe two students a year So this is not all fairytale It is true that centers for teaching and learning provide incredible supports for educators Yes, that are workshops that are consultations related to udl anti-racist trauma informed pedagogies But it is also true that it is very often the same subset of educators who engage in these professional development opportunities And that centers for teaching and learning often operate within a culture and higher education that devalues teaching And that usually does not require any pedagogical training to practice in the classroom And sometimes doesn't even provide this training to graduate students It is true that many educators are happy to freely share their pedagogical strategies and course syllabi with others But in many cases these are jealously guarded amid a rather competitive environment It is true that librarians offer wonderful supports to educators to learn about affordable course materials They're happy to curate the university collections to support the university's teaching and learning mission But it is also true That many librarians are treated as second-class citizens by their fellow educators Even when they are formally included as members of the faculty association They have to be careful not to push too hard Or they will run the risk of their expertise being perceived as an encroachment on a faculty member's academic freedom This is also why many faculty champions are important parts of the equation when you're advancing oer It is true that many faculty members who adopt oer become pure advocates But it is also true that many adopt oer in stealth Aware that they risk being penalized in some cases by senior colleagues who might even be commercial textbook authors It is true that many faculty members who adopt oer go on to adapting and even creating oer And in some cases the work is supported through oer grant programs Some even jointly funded by the student association as it is at brock university right now But this isn't always the case and very often even oer grant programs only provide a mere token recognition Of the effort involved It is true that in some cases like at my alma mater the university of british columbia and my current institutional home Brock university the publication of oer is in fact recognized as part of the tenure and promotion process But it is also true that these these institutions are still very much the exception Right and the tenure and promotion processes still often constrain efforts to widen equitable access Whether we're talking about prioritizing publishing scholarship in paywall legacy journals associated with prestige Or whether we're talking about authoring textbooks for which one actually receives remuneration And it is those same departmental tenure and promotion committees that misalign incentives that reinforce cultural traditions concerning exclusion and elitism It is true that many educators are attracted to the practice of open pedagogy Whether it says a way to better engage learners Encourage public scholarship or simply to move away from what paulo frere described as the banking model of education But it is also true that open pedagogy can be approached in a way that has a negative impact on students Whether it's by insufficiently supporting learner digital literacy Whether it's you know by failing to recognize the uneven distribution of the risks of open scholarship Especially for marginalized students Or simply by disregarding learner agency And it's also true that educators who embrace approaches to teaching and learning like open pedagogy that are still relatively outside of the the norm They run the risk of being penalized in for example student evaluations of teaching Bias disease are already very well known to be I don't sound like an administrator, do I? And it isn't just negative feedback from students that is the risk with open pedagogy But the perception from fellow faculty members that one's instructional approach is insufficiently rigorous Or that it does not sufficiently uphold academic integrity I'm using scare quotes to talk about academic integrity because I find it perverse That the concept of integrity can be used to underpin and justify practices that include for example the ego use of remote exam proctoring When these tools are known to use algorithms that disproportionately flag students with darker skin tones as cheating Where is the integrity in breaching student privacy by recording their bedrooms when they're writing online examinations? The same now applies of course to the employment of tools that purport to detect the use of generative artificial intelligence in student coursework When these tools not only trample all over student intellectual property rights But are also known to be biased against for example second language learners Again, where is the integrity in widening inequities? But it is also true that many educators feel abandoned by their institutions Left to fend for themselves amid a changing tide with generative artificial intelligence Unable to do what they recognize may help because it takes time It takes labor to teach in a way to quote bell hooks that respects and cares for the souls of their students Time and labor that isn't always well supported by institutions that are grappling with their own financial constraints Amid declining government funding for higher education For example, my home institution is located in the province of ontario in canada Where provincial operating grants per full-time equivalent students have been frozen and not adjusted for inflation since 2006 That represents a decline of about 31 of funding or in the intervening years This is also the lowest per student grant of any province in canada Adding to this when a populist conservative government was elected in 2019 Student tuition fees were reduced by 10 and have been since frozen These two policies have combined to produce many consecutive years of austerity budgets at universities in ontario Despite of course like everybody else having to navigate the pandemic Enrollment drop-offs over that period and of course record inflation All of this means that many of the talented and driven individuals who support faculty members who support students Especially in ways that are sometimes invisible Think about academic advisors. Think about student services. Think about teaching and learning center staff They've repeatedly been asked to do more with less with their areas budgets and staffing levels slashed From an academic administrator's perspective. I can tell you that Despite the common reference to moving to the dark side I work with a remarkable number of jedi nights every day Right people who wrestle with extraordinarily difficult budgetary decisions While trying to develop or reshape structures policies and practices to make the university a more just a more humane place But as I said earlier, this isn't a hollywood movie And this certainly isn't a story that took place a long time ago in a galaxy far far away This is a story that's playing out in many jurisdictions where without sustainable government funding higher education is starved higher education is weakened And in some cases an increasing proportion of costs is born by students Which of course results in widened inequities and things like food and housing insecurity Yes, this is the reality Tom, thank you for the use of your kitchen table This was just an iphone folks on a plank of wood So as tressy macmillan caught him explains in her book lower ed Education in these circumstances is deliberately repositioned from being a public good to being an individual privilege And at the same time there is a significantly hampered ability to support knowledge creation innovation societal transformation less economic and social mobility All of which play into populist rhetoric That in fact questions the value of and specifically the return on investment of the now growing costs of a university education This is by design There are egregious examples everywhere I remember one visit in particular the youngstown state university Karen's here from the open education network This was when I was facilitating workshops for faculty on behalf of the network about oer And the evening before the workshop. I was reading this article in inside higher education About a party that the adjunct faculty members at the institution had organized complete with cake All in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the last time they had received a salary rise Along with an article I read about the students at that same university struggling with food insecurity It was evident to me that we were talking about the precarious teaching the precarious And admitted all we were going to have a conversation about what textbook costs It seems strange and I know this is an extreme case in some ways Even at my home institution where we are actually in the process of reducing our proportion of adjunct faculty Or what we call limited term instructional faculty appointments From seven percent of full-time faculty down to no more than five percent of full-time faculty And I know that's an aberration in the landscape I'm very aware that there is a reason why even our tenure track faculty members fall prey to the promise Of greater convenience from commercial publishers It's not that different folks from why students fall prey to the promise of greater convenience From companies like chegg and course hero Ontario is among the canadian provinces in us states and robert mentioned this That has been investing in supports for open educational resources But even in such context i'm admittedly wary of good work with oer being used as a band-aid Over a gaping wound of inequitable access to defunded education I'm wary of oer being the equivalent of those go fund me campaigns that I sometimes see on social media in the united states Trying to pay for somebody's cancer treatment Right it rallies the community it provides some tangible support It even makes people feel good while distracting from the reality of living in a country without universal health care I promise you I'm not looking to provoke a state of existential angst through this talk And despite all of the challenges I've described I am not at all not even remotely pessimistic or cynical about this work I see the tangible impact of what we do every day on students on educators on institutional culture even on society This is of course much of my life's work and I believe in it, but I do prefer to approach it in a way When my eyes are open aware of all of the all of the hand hazards student across the landscape I'm also aware of many of the challenges That I've described are that they are systemic and that we have a need for systemic change And when you contrast that against the individual efforts of individual open educators, it feels like a mismatch It feels like the challenge is sometimes insurmountable And yet as kevin gunon wrote in his book radical hope a teaching manifesto The real work of change in higher education is done students by students classroom by classroom Course by course and it's done by educators who have committed to teaching because it and their students matter Over the 15 years that I had the privilege of working at quantlin polytechnic university I worked with a great many individuals educators who committed to this real work of change I think of people like terry burg an inspiring faculty member who very close to retirement decided to author two open textbooks Terry was dedicated to serving students and he derived great joy from knowing that he was planting trees under whose shade He knew he would never sit I think of arlie cruthers the incomparable arlie cruthers A disability rights activist and a faculty member whose deep commitment to care and an inclusion was humbling It shone through her authorship of open textbooks and especially her brilliant and creative approaches to open pedagogy She will be forever missed I think of melissa ashman who like terry and arlie authored open textbooks and has gone on to do Important research on the experiences of both faculty and students with open pedagogy Now also with the support and mentorship of the go g n And I think of andrea and ioc who also of course authored an open textbook We did a lot of that a kpu and also served as a mentor in the open education for a better world project All four of these incredible educators were deservedly recognized with the bc campus award for excellence in open education And I can tell you firsthand that the way in which each of them approached their work Inspired real change in others. It was departmental colleagues Who changed what they were doing? It was instructional staff Institutional staff mentors admire us further afield. They set off ripples of positive change that continue to grow So my work as an academic administrator was focused on trying to make sure that they were not swimming upstream Right, so I worked on things like assembling coalitions of allies Cross-functional open education working groups on embedding supports for open educational practices within institutional strategic plans So that they could not be De-prioritized if I left the institution that they were part of the fabric On lobbying for and allocating resources to allow for building supports for educators Whether we were talking about publishing supports oer grant programs professional development opportunities On developing ways to recognize the label that's involved and that underpins the work with oer Whether it's teaching awards or yes criteria for tenure promotion and merit On cultivating partnerships with the student association who are now funding our work Or part of our work at brock or sometimes with the campus bookstore So on and so on Our team at kpu. I'm very proud of them. They we developed canada's first zero textbook cost programs They were centered on the creation adaptation and adoption of where we are And in the six years since this initiative was launched in january of 2018 Students at kpu have saved over 10 million dollars nearly 11 million dollars in textbook costs. It's been extraordinary More than a thousand individual courses eight entire degree programs without textbook costs Students enrolled in courses that are free from textbook costs consistently Don't just save money, but they show higher enrollment. They show greater persistence They show better course performance And at the last count, which is december 2023 the data I pulled a couple of days ago The zero textbook cost courses now represent 28 percent of all courses offered across the university We started with two percent But none of that would have happened without educators like terry like arlie like melissa like andrea and so many more The point i'm trying to make is that educators cannot be left to do it alone or even the brightest flames will burn out They need support. They need change at least at the institutional level if not broader system change But system change is tricky especially when the need for change is so easily co-opted to preserve the status quo We all know about the example of open access scholarship dealing with eye watering article processing charges and journals that double dip into the limited part of public funding That's just an example of the kind of bastardization we see But because I live in north america and we speak the language of textbooks. I'll give you that example Textbooks I know are not a thing everywhere, but these are a pedagogical prop that are seemingly permanent fixture on the set in north america And as you've looked at the commercial textbook industry itself I think it's a peculiar Parasitic industry really it prays on a few things it prays on academic prestige It prays on inertia and it certainly plays praise on the powerlessness of students in decision making But what it ends up doing is siphoning off an extraordinary amount of shrinking public funding Including millions of dollars that go to student loans and grants that are then redirected to pay for required course materials But it is the very greed that underpins the commercial textbook model that actually threatened to kill that industry's cash cow Because after four year or not four years four decades of unrelenting increases in the price of commercial textbooks This was typically about between three and four times the rate of inflation in north america since 1977 anyway The data showed that students at that point about 2017 or so were simply unwilling or unable to further increase their spending on course materials Take for example the florida student textbook survey, which was conducted in 2016 2018 most recently in 2022 And as you can see this is actually based on nearly 14 000 responses from students at 30 of florida's public post-secondary institutions More than half of respondents are simply not purchasing required textbooks due to their high cost. That's how the sentence ends in the survey My partner and co-author serita and I saw exactly the same trend in british columbia in 2017 There's about 54 percent of there and the result of all of this was a precipitous drop in revenue in share price Which of course only accelerated the accelerated the pivot of commercial publishers towards a digital delivery model Something that was absolutely hastened further by the pandemic and the shift to emergency remote instruction The digital delivery model for textbooks is most commonly now referred to as inclusive access Although sometimes it's also known as day one access unlimited access digital direct immediate access exclusive access Or hilariously equitable access It is a pitch. I'm sorry to say that many university administrators will find attractive because on the face of it It seems to address the problem of high textbook costs But in reality folks, this is a problem. Simply masquerading as a solution In case you haven't encountered this yet inclusive access is a model that is more honestly described as automatic textbook billing Because every student is billed a mandatory course materials fee that represents an alleged Discount of the high watermark of the price of a new hardcover textbook The fee is still often much higher than the average student currently spends because the current spectrum includes everything from the purchase of used copies Reserve copies from the library group purchases older editions or of course the many students who just forgo In exchange for the fee the students as I said earlier don't purchase But they lease digital only access to the required textbooks within the publisher's platform This is access that expires after a set number of days And these platforms include DRM digital rights management which imposes restrictions that affect accessibility Ability to copy paste print for example, and certainly raise data privacy concerns Billy my key is over here. Where are you Billy? My hero you are such a gift to this movement my friend This is an article in the chronicle for higher education that Quotes Billy's work sites Billy's work it identified instances of student data sharing that conflicted with or raised questions about the practices related in publisher's privacy notices For example in a review of the Pearson's popular my lab platform It was found that personally identifiable information such as students names email addresses were sent away to google analytics Along with notifications of exactly what the student was reading and highlighting in their ebooks In some but not all cases students are actually given the option to opt out of these kinds of programs Usually under restrictive terms that are not always obvious to them such as by locating completing and submitting a form within 10 days Of course for students who prefer working with a print copy or maybe even resell that copy later to recover some of the cost The ability to opt out is important But as you might surmise the publishers have a vested interest in keeping the number of students who opt out to a minimum And so this is why at institutions the opt out terms range from restrictive to punitive Interestingly the u.s. Federal government is now pushing back against the opt out version of inclusive access models in favor of an opt in model instead Nicole allen who is a champion of the space and is here in the room with us as well She works with the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition or spark She noted in this article that if if inclusive access is really the great deal that many people claim it is There is no reason to believe that students would not continue to do that voluntarily Of course in in in addition to a reduction in student agency inclusive access I will note also brings an accompanying reduction in faculty agency as these institution wide deals Compelled faculty to select textbooks from a single platform According to a survey that was run in consecutive years by inside higher education About two-thirds of faculty members believe that inclusive access programs Potentially limit faculty members ability to choose course materials that they prefer Now of course the benefit of this model to publishers is very clear For one there's no longer any printing or distribution costs Two they're able to permanently extinguish the use textbook market where a single copy is sometimes resold up to six times In the lifestyler or in the life cycle of a of a single edition Third this model brings the ability to guarantee high and predictable revenue by institutional licensing contracts So it's a little wonder although frankly rather amusing to me that the large publishers have now sought to sought to repaint themselves As the saviors of those suffering at the hands of their own business model As i've said before Inclusive access for me is akin to leasing a faulty fire extinguisher from a serial arsonist But the publishers are not done yet They're not satisfied by hawking a model that trades on academic prestige and that markets false scarcity to captive audience Now the industry is eagerly sifting shoot through even more silicon valley excrement By for example turning their titles into non-fungible tokens so that they may track the ownership of a book Even when it changes hands so that they can and i quote participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life Fun I don't doubt that commercial textbook authors will face a similar fate to recording artists with the shift to streaming services Or that commercial textbook companies will be among the biggest proponents when it comes to generative ai to replace contracts with faculty experts Updating editions looking past exploitative labor practices looking past the negative environmental impact as they integrate this further into their courseway What is more convenient than generative ai? Publishers can create instructional videos featuring ai generated instructors that narrate content Created using gpt4 and perhaps even augmented with images you created using mid-journey right we can do this now Those in turn of course hilariously may be summarized by a series of ai driven video video summary tools by students We can also have ai powered learning management systems that auto grade assignments And those in turn can be used fabulously well to process student course work that has also been generated by generative ai It's fantastic. Just zero education happening Leave it to venture capitalist to describe something as personalized learning when the one thing that's missing is a person a human educator But I can see them going much further still and at the risk of sounding like a kori doctoral novel over here on an episode of black mirror I'm envisioning learning management systems wherein students enrolled in the John Deere school of engineering because what else? Can purchase different tiers of access with higher tiers permitting the revision of course work after receiving ai generated feedback Students having to jailbreak their devices in order to avoid being penalized because the surveillance that's baked into the digital textbook platform notices When they do not pause within the optimal range of time for learning when they're scrolling through the text in the assigned readings I only wish this was all impossible Where's Anne-Marie? My hero as Anne-Marie Scott and the fabulous Brenna Clark gray have written about in the incredible chapter Who cares about procurement in Catherine and Laura's monumental volume higher education for good? I love this quote We spend more time thinking about the ethics of buying tea bags in universities than we do the ethics of technology This is precisely why Anne-Marie and I are currently part of a group Developing guidelines for ethical educational technology for post-secondary institutions in the province of british columbia And why brock universities recently approved academic plan includes a pledge to develop and adopt an ethical framework for educational technologies That ensures the procurement of digital tools do not perpetuate and reinforce systemic inequalities and racial biases I'm still pinching myself that I got that language through senate So as we write the next chapter in the story of open education Let us ensure that we do not lose sight of the plot. Otherwise Our diligent efforts will be co-opted. They will be ghost written in service of a different narrative One that harkens a much more dystopian future This is why we need not only the individual change makers but change within the system as well And it seems kind of fitting to talk about system change speaking from the rebel county But without system change Education will continue to be commodified With everything measured and controlled and everyone mistrusted and surveilled and along this path to dehumanization We will absolutely lose our soul Already we hear people complaining that students only care about the grades or that they care about the grades more than they do about learning But they are only responding to systems in higher education that lead them there systems that lord and reify instrumentalist goals If we tell our students that their education is only meaningful in terms of their career outcomes We have no right to criticize them if they only care about their grades If we design course policies that are predicated on mistrust of students We have no right to criticize them for the for being disengaged in the classroom Even when I hear people advocating for equity diversity and inclusion it is often with these instrumentalist arguments Right, I hear things like more diverse teams are more creative more creative teams are more productive Listening to someone make a business case for something like a sense of belonging Once me once makes me want to throw up in the back of my mouth I don't need a reason beyond human dignity. That's what tom said As order lord famously reminded us Those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill It is learning how to stand alone unpopular and yes sometimes reviled and how to make common cause with Those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths famously For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game But they will never enable us to bring about genuine change In the battle for the soul of higher education It may be comforting to indulge in fairytales But it is essential that we engage in this work with hope Insolidarity and firmly grounded in reality Thank you very much everyone Stand open to tell us who you are where you're from State your question and allow it in clear voice Thank you very much for these inspiring Talk I really appreciate your efforts and I I wish we had more people like you running universities and sitting in university boards And I have a question about The faculty member that you mentioned At the beginning when you said that this person got her phd and then started to work, etc Uh, I imagine that this person when she was working towards her phd and was looking for a job and being She was very much part of a subject based community Say philosophy let's say physics. Let's say history and her professional culture Her conventions her attitudes everything was being shaped by that subject specific community 10 years later she meets somebody in an open education week And then she discovers open textbooks, etc Is it a bit too late for that person? to Learn about oe week Is it a bit too late for that person in her career? to learn about Open education open pedagogies even perhaps open science as well Should we not pay more attention to subject based examples of open educational practice and you know target Subjects in conferences like having a strand for physics a strand for history on open education And instead of having this transversal approach that is like it's good for any subject And should we do a specific training? 20 questions. I have one question for Rajiv. Okay, you get the gist We need to focus on early career people and work through the subjects. Thank you very much for the question my friend I think there's many thoughts over here I think you're right I mean one of the interesting things it's a it's a benefit and it's a drawback as well disciplinary cultures are so strong Right. There's a lot of things that are perpetuated and sometimes you see the perpetuation of trauma quite frankly, right? I've been through a hellish experience. I'm going to perpetuate that as well You see you see people changing the narrative Where I think it's an opportunity is when you engage in more interdisciplinary work like we typically do in open education I mean we have open pedagogy fellowships and other programs at various institutions You see the natural cross-pollination and so even if it's just talking to colleagues in different departments that can help change But few things i'll point to um, I'm always looking for beck pit in the room. Where are you beck? Beck there you are So beck and I were among a team of researchers who back in 2016 looked at the question Were many research questions, but we were looking at educators in british columbia It was a sizable community of oer practitioners We were interested in stage of career and their engagement in it, right? And so it was interesting because we saw people at various stages But it wasn't just the case that it's people who are new and sort of have not been ingrained in cultural practice Who are most open to it? We saw a lot of people who were really engaging in in it late in their careers as well Like terry burg who are who are referenced later in the talk Certainly the tenure and promotion process is something that's the in-between step that can be really critical in taking away from that work But in general there are opportunities across the board So the 2016 paper is something i'd love to share with folks. Um, I forget what it's called, but it's on bc campuses website We'll try and share it in the slack channel Perhaps there was another article as well that would be relevant where we looked at patterns of adoptions of who we are And we found eight different patterns and that also shed a lot of light in terms of how people were discovering it Moving between institutions one colleague in a department spreading to other colleagues and so on But you know in general, I would say Intentionally, I would really want to focus a lot of efforts on graduate students on the future professoriate on making sure Even before we get into indoctrination within a with a new institution that they're coming in with these practices We can talk about it in concert with what? With what receives less pushback sometimes people understand open science practices a lot more now We can talk about that. We can talk about open access and we can talk about open education Um, I would also want to do exactly what you said and we've done this certainly in psychology Is an example where we took a vertical integration approach. There are some areas psychology benefits from being in high enrollment popular Uh subject to major in so funders have often seen a very large return on the investment to fund the development of OER and spaces like psychology like sociology And so it's been easier to do this and so This is where the zero textbook cost program has really helped because in many cases It's you know, the the first two years may be somewhat of a common core But the specialized courses are in a very single subject area and I know james is here in the room as well Where are you james? Thank you and the other james as well From our thank you. So two james one in california one here in in in ireland both doing work But certainly james from ireland is also focused on on oer and psychology and seeing that the benefits of that So for me, it's a mix of strategies. I think you need to look at it in a variety of ways But just look at those practical opportunities But i've also frankly seen enough people who've shifted to this kind of approach later in their careers that I I don't think it's ever too late I mean one of the joys of this work for me is when you support faculty members and you see how the system can make you jaded To be honest, right? It can beat that spark out of you And one of the things that I take great pleasure from is in seeing Uh an an experienced faculty member Reignite the joy that brought them into this work in the in the first place And that's often when they reconnect with those values. So I would intentionally do it. Yes within disciplines It's easier to make that argument. I would intentionally talk about in terms of graduate school I would want to change Uh a realign incentives like tenure and promotion processes But I don't think anyone is out of the running over here, right because we came into this work for a particular reason Um, lee darin. Oh, you ready? Sure. I think oh, yeah, it's on lee wolf university college dublin. Hi, red you just a question about sort of the lived experiences of Of navigating the space and if you can talk a little bit maybe about The the patterns of of experience or behaviors to to continue to slay the the dragon so to speak from from each of our points of view Can I just ask are you talking about things like What we've built within institutions? That's maybe and even you know Pragmatic or not pragmatic, but like practical examples like a lived experience. What's it like to experience This and how can we you know learn from those patterns? Yeah, there's a lot of learning to be sure and I I saw Karen earlier from the open education network. She may have disappeared for a moment, but I'll allude to that group in particular because One of the things I love about being a member institution in the open education network Is there's a bit of a listserv and there's so much beautiful learning that's happening because every day there's somebody saying It's not just I'm looking for or you're in this subject. That's an easy question It's more I'm dealing with this systemic challenge this this I need a strategy for this I I need to think about what approach will work best in In this particular scenario and there's so much sharing within that community So I think there's an incredible amount of learning and and one of the fun parts about doing this work Over the last 10 years is that a lot of it hadn't been figured out yet So there's been a lot of creativity, right? So for example, even with zero textbook cost programs We had to think really pragmatically about what do we mean by zero textbook cost? Are we talking about? You know lab codes and calculators. Are we just talking about textbooks? Are we talking about software? We just talking about textbooks. So we had to think about that We had to think about practical things like what are the barriers over here if there are some faculty members who This is a fun one I was once accosted in the courtyard of my institution and accused of being responsible for and I quote the destruction of print culture which Just felt just a tad unfair, but I got the point But you know the arguments will come about the analog and the paper and the joy, right? And so I understood as well practically that there is a proportion of our faculty members that love the idea But if they think we're limited to digital, which we're not They won't even go down this route So hence partnership with the campus store to provide a print on demand option for students who want to print copy And it took away that objection and that faculty member was with us because the values were always there or we had to think about You know we can do all the work, but this is not one of those build it and they will come We need to make sure students can see this information at the point of registration So all of the work involved in how do we integrate Information about which courses and which sections of which courses taught by which faculty members are visible in the course timetable So that students can see it That was a whole bunch of learning And then learning that once you do that once you integrate this information into your student information system Then you can use your institutional research office to slice and dice that it had to look at the student outcomes I was referencing because all of a sudden that's a data slice. So I mean, I'm just giving you a little bit of an example over here But oh my god, there's so much learning, but there's so much community So I will say that people who are on this journey who are maybe not as far as along as kpu is now There's a lot of people very very happy to share this incredible guides For everything from how to do course marking to how to approach this in the library You want to you know import mark records into your library catalog and the open education network provides them You know all the groups do as well There's an incredible amount of support But I would say one of the nice things about this community is as much as we keep having to learn and figure out There's there's a ton of sharing as well. And of course you're going to see a lot of it at this conference as well One small pitch for those of you who are not going to be in our Concurrent session after this about the institutional self-assessment tool We'll share that in a slack channel, but that's a piece that carries some of those pragmatic elements We've We've revised updated an institutional self-assessment tool that you can use within your own institution to help Identify different dimensions and levels of maturity in where you might go next in that very practical journey in the back end I'm going to do something that you don't often see at conferences The alarm said we've time for one more We actually don't against someone asks a question and Rajeev answers We'll be over time and I have spent the whole week telling you to To move along quickly. So we're going to be about a minute ahead of time I just want to say I make it if one of the purposes of a keynote opening keynote is to inspire and to challenge I think Rajeev has done an absolutely wonderful job. I think he really has Set the bar and I think it's you know, you're talking about setting the scene for us I think you've done a great job. So ladies and gentlemen, please one more time so Actually, we've already a minute to spare now. So if you want to move in next door teas and coffees and then