 My name's David Wiley. And for some odd reason, I have the opportunity to welcome you to the meeting today. Just a few words very quickly to contextualize myself. I'm a Shelterworth fellow with the Shelterworth Foundation out of Cape Town, which some of you are familiar with. Currently on leave from Brigham Young University, where I'm a faculty member in the instructional psychology and technology department, leading an organization called Lumen, which helps colleges and universities adopt open educational resources. But the reason I'm standing here right now, I think, is because I'm also the senior fellow for strategy at the Sailor Foundation. And so it's my pleasure to welcome you to the conference and say a few words to set some context before introducing Michael, who will be here shortly. I hope I don't have to argue at this point with you. We've lived in pretty amazing times. I think that's true for a number of reasons. But the reason I think that's most relevant to our meeting this morning is that I think if we as a group put our collective minds to it, there's literally nothing that we can't do. Anybody want to argue that point? It's really just a matter of creativity and passion and commitment and political will now. There aren't technological barriers in our way for, say, there aren't many barriers that have been in our way in the past. So I think the state that we find ourselves in, where it's possible for us to do essentially anything, really creates a moral imperative for us to think about, if we can do anything, then what are the things that we should do? And I italicize this word should because it really is a pretty strong word. If we can do anything, then what is it that we ought to be doing? How should we be spending our time? If you've been to the Saylor Foundation's website recently, you've seen this kind of motto at the top of their page, harnessing technology to make education free. I think that's absolutely one of the things that we ought to be doing, that we should be doing. And that's what this meeting today is about. Now, I don't have a monitor in front of me, so forgive me as I turn occasionally to reference these slides behind me. I assume I don't have to spend a lot of time on this particular story either. Everybody knows what's happening with the cost, particularly of post-secondary education, up about 500% in the last 30 years compared to about 150% growth in median family income. And we all saw this happen last year as well. Student loan debt crossing the trillion dollar mark for the first time, surpassing both outstanding credit card debt and outstanding mortgage debt, at least in the United States. And everybody knows the important thing that's different between student loan debt and credit card or mortgage debt, right? What is it? It never goes away. You can't get rid of it. Bankruptcy won't get rid of it. There's literally no way to get rid of it. So it really is, I have 10 minutes, so I'm not doing it the justice it deserves, but it's really a significant problem that we're looking at. And education is more important to each of us than it ever has been before, not just to us individually, but to us as a society and to a planet as well. The kinds of problems that we're dealing with now, these naughty, thick, difficult problems don't have easy solutions, and they need people who are well educated to solve and to work on them. So this meeting is important for a handful of reasons, but the one that I want to focus on really has to do with getting people of a particular sort in all into the same room at one time. Academics are not famous for being particularly business savvy, can we all agree on that? Okay. Can we also all agree that business people are not particularly famous for having a deep understanding of education and the way that learning works? If you've ever seen somebody from a startup walk into a classroom and tell a teacher of 15 years that she's doing it wrong and let me show you how then you have a sense for this as well. So without both groups bringing a particular kind of expertise and both groups really need each other to make progress in the kinds of problems that we're facing and that's why it's important to have us all in the same room at one time. I think it is very much like, you remember those old commercials where the guys roller skating down the street, eating his chocolate bar? There's a girl with a jar of peanut butter inexplicably eating it with a spoon, walking down the sidewalk and then he trips and his chocolate lands in her peanut butter. Great commercials, they're available on YouTube if you go look for them, hard enough. I really think this is what we're trying to do over the next two days is to put the chocolate in the peanut butter and if you want education to be the chocolate and business to be the peanut butter, the other way around you can choose however you want that to work but that's what we're trying to accomplish here. There are a number of key innovations that are enabling the things that we're trying to do. Some of them are really obvious, some of them are less obvious, obviously internet, broadband and mobile on the technology side are enabling what we're doing. Innovations and licensing, particularly with the Creative Commons licenses around making it easier and more legal for us to share with each other in a way that can make education free in the way that we're thinking and hoping and also innovations in financing like this resurgence of the idea of royalty capital that can provide investment funds to companies that really want to be mission driven like education startups primarily want to be without getting in the way of dragging them off course with this push, push, push for an exit that you get with traditional capital. There's a lot of things coming together that I think are very interesting that enable the types of work that we want to do. My own particular work, I just want to say three minutes about it and go very quickly just to give some context for the kinds of things that are possible, not to say that my work is the best work and that you should all follow it but just to lay out some examples and I'm looking forward over the next two days to hearing examples of the work that you're all doing in this same area. So open educational resources by show of hand if you're familiar with the term. Okay, just about everybody, awesome. So there, if you're familiar with the four Rs, right? So open educational resources are materials you have free access to that come with licensed permissions to engage in the four R activities to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute them. So one of the things that I think particularly is interesting about the cost problem is that tuition and fees are highly political but textbook costs have been growing terrifically, that second line down there as well and textbook costs are actually a fairly straightforward problem to attack. So three specific examples from my own work. First, the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative which started a year ago and has gone into eight community colleges or open access four year schools. We've touched about 10,000 students so far but interestingly we've taken open educational resources work together with faculty to pull those together into textbook replacements and then made the required cost of textbooks on the syllabus $0 for each of these courses and these are things like intro psych, intro to biology, developmental math, driven the cost of textbooks to zero for these courses and seen on average across the 10 courses that we worked in last year better than a 10% increase in the percentage of students who were completing the course with a C or better. Saving money, improving outcomes. Another project I'm really excited about one we're launching this fall with Tidewater Community College not too far down the coast from where we are is an initiative to take an entire associate's degree and move it off of textbooks and onto OER. This is a two year degree program in business administration. It's about $3,000 a year in tuition. The cost of textbooks over the life of the program is $2,500, $3,000. So by literally taking all the textbook costs out of the degree program we knock 25 to 30% off the cost of the program. It launches in the fall so I don't have outcome data for you yet but it's gonna be very cool. And then the third one that I'll mention very quickly is our Utah Open Textbook Initiative which is a K-12 initiative where for the last four years starting in science we've been working with teachers to replace the typical textbooks that a school or a district would adopt and purchase with openly licensed textbooks. And you can see that these are free to use online. The print on demand service that we use this year, the middle school science textbooks were $3.99 a piece. The high school science textbooks were $4.99 a piece. Over 90% of the districts in the state of Utah are on either or open math or open science and we're moving into open language arts with the Common Core Transition this coming fall. And we've just released some data showing statistically significant gains in learning outcomes for students that use open textbooks compared to students that are using the publisher provided textbooks. And these growth, these changes in growth are on the state standardized test. So, three very quick ways that I'm attacking the problem. I know you're all attacking it interesting ways too, very excited to hear what you're working on and all these different ways that we're all kind of running up against Michael Saylor's vision of this idea that education should be free and should be available to everyone. And a final word, and I think this is where the chocolate really hits the peanut butter, is that these models can be financially self-sustainable. Everybody knows Red Hat, everybody knows that they work in a space around open source software but still manage to add a lot of value and be a very profitable business. So this is not an either or situation where we have to live on grant funding forever and ever. I think we can make this work very sustainable. We need more of these kinds of models, we need more experimentation. So it's my opportunity to introduce Michael Saylor to you now. Two things you probably did know about Michael are that of course that he's the founder and CEO of MicroStrategy, the very impressive looking building that we were all just standing in. And also that he has this double major from MIT. Something you probably didn't know was that he actually attended MIT on a ROTC scholarship. I didn't know that till I started putting these notes together, which I thought was very cool. And of course you all know that he's very committed and very passionate about this idea that education ought to be free. So with that brief introduction, please join me in welcoming Michael Saylor. Thank you.