 Good afternoon. Thank you all so much for joining us. I'm Elana Harrington. I'm the Director of the Sailor Foundation and this is a talk about connecting the dots in the OER space. About one use case in which our organization, the Sailor Foundation, has set out to locate and actuate OER in an online learning environment. It first likes to begin by framing our efforts within the broader educational landscape. I think we can all agree that education is moving toward a more distributed model. We're seeing more and more online learning outfits, distance learning programs, and hybrid models all supplemented by studies that indicate the problems inherent in one-size-fits-all schooling approaches. And OER, this fast distributed galaxy of content within which the majority of us are operating, is both a mechanism and manifestation of this shift. However, as we marvel over this increasingly distributed learning network that is emerging, we at Sailor are constantly reminding ourselves of the importance of convergence, of the importance of context. We can't expect students to master concepts when the information is so disaggregated. And so we in the OER community, as many have brought up in the past, find ourselves in this difficult place. You know, we're torn between the desire to be completely free and open and in need for more structure and standardization. Somewhere along this continuum of tension, we need to find models that embrace and to some degree balance these two opposing forces. We need to find models that manage to both wander the galaxy while also identifying and designing constellations, pathways, and patterns. Sailor is one approach to that dynamic, an open yet structured way for students to navigate the OER network. So when we first entered the open edge space in 2008, we spent some time surveying the scene. I've said it before and I'll say it again, we were bowled over by the efforts of so many at this conference and, you know, so many in this room. However, in order to really push our efforts, we needed to define a problem statement and set to work solving it. While the OER ecosystem is expansive and thriving, first, content is disaggregated, even hidden or buried. We've been aggregating and organizing content for about two years now and we continue to find new projects on a weekly or even daily basis. Second, content is redundant. We're seeing a lot of providers recreating the wheel, whether informed by a not-made-here frame of mind or perhaps just the general difficulty of discovering content and making it interoperable. While this redundancy occurs on one hand, other fields of study are left completely devoid of useful content. Third, content is difficult to assess in terms of quality. There really aren't any validating metrics or tools at the public's disposal. And fourth, content is decontextualized. There are no end-to-end solutions that really tell students what they ought to focus on in order to learn what is generally taught at a traditional, higher-end institution. Now, we realize this is not vital to every student, but for those who seek a more structured learning experience, there are no standards in place. And so we began to ask ourselves, how can self-degraduate learners, with very specific educational goals, navigate this network on their own? How are they to know what to use and when to use it if they wish to pursue a particular field of study? And so our obsession with organization and structure was born. We knew we needed to make use of the existing body of content. We needed to vet that content, contextualize it, string it together to form something whole, something continuous, something that could lead a student from point A to Z over the entirety of a course or even a major. Our solution was to tap into the academic community and really empower forward-thinking educational practitioners. We called upon them to use their expertise of the higher-ed system on their courses, their discipline, their interaction with students, and their pedagogical training in order to help us shape course curricula and to use the existing content and to really add to and scaffold that body of content. I'm fairly certain, though, that you don't want to hear about this process for me because I've never taught a course at the college level and I've not constructed a sailor course of my own. So we have a short video to show you. You'll get a deeper look at our process and you'll also hear from some of our consultants who actually did construct some of our courses. Michael Sailor created the Sailor Foundation because he had a very simple, very earnest, and very bold idea. Education should be free. Rapid changes in technology are making the distribution of information faster, easier, and cheaper. Increasingly, the distribution of and access to education can be universal. We've reached an inflection point where it's now cheaper to learn to read on a tablet computer than it is to learn to read on paper. More people can access mobile networks in the world that can get access to running water. So that network access is greater. And as that happens, right, you've got this this profound, disrupted, egalitarian, utilitarian tornado that's blowing through everything. If I can actually provide 12 million books for free to someone with an iPad, then that means I can provide 12 million books to someone for free in the middle of a jungle of Burma. If I can automate education or project it, then maybe people that don't live in the first world can get just as educated as people that do. The question is no longer does the need exist. The question is content. The question is form. The question is distribution. Camelist providers of open content from the humble teachers and most venerable institutions are opening the doors. Sailors harnessing technology to deliver free education around the world, pushing the open education movement forward, and creating greater access to these resources. I believe that open education is important because not everybody has access to the traditional higher education system, whether that's because of financial reasons or whether that's simply because of location. And so to have this access to kind of an open educational resource like Sailor provides really new opportunities for students who might otherwise have been excluded from a higher educational system. So I think having the ability to log on from anywhere in the world with internet connection and look at resources that are vetted by experts that are assembled by experts and that are trustworthy is really just an ideal way for these students to gain that level of education that they might otherwise be excluded from. Access to the internet is outpacing access to higher education in the United States and abroad, but would be students shouldn't have to drink from the fire hose of free information. We've called upon college educators, discipline experts, to help us discover, vet, and organize the very best of what's around. Our contribution is, in a word, design, the transformative marriage of form and content. We unite superb learning materials with well-wrought courses. The product is a portal to substantive, scaffolded, asynchronous education for a few hours, a few years, or a lifetime. Let's take a closer look at how Sailor is curating, developing, and distributing free education. On our homepage, we list our areas of study, including a general education program and 12 complete academic majors, art history, biology, business administration, chemistry, computer science, economics, English literature, history, mathematics, mechanical engineering, political science, and psychology. As an example of how our full courses of study are laid out for the students to work through, let's consider the history major. Selecting the link for history brings up a description with detailed instructions on how to proceed, followed by robust courses designed to capture the range offered in a typical college catalog. The history major within the Sailor curriculum is similar in some ways, but also differs in some ways from your typical university or college curriculum. Where it's similar, of course, is that each course replicates roughly a 15-week semester course that you would have at a college or university. Materials are very similar, readings as well as analytical materials, and that allows the student to achieve that same global understanding that they would in a typical college or university classroom. And we also, in the course structure itself, we offer all the same basic courses that you would have to take in a history major at a college or university, a basic world history curriculum, U.S. history, or a Latin American history, or even an Asian history. What we differ to is that we offer a diverse range of courses that might not typically be taught at a university. It's certainly not every semester. We offer some courses that we were really excited to put together, but that will be courses that a professor might teach perhaps once in four years. And so when we start to do that, we have these unique courses that are always on, and they're always available to anyone who has access to the website. I think offering these diverse courses really gives the student a much broader and deeper knowledge of history. Once a course outline is created, our professor consultants search for and vet open education materials from various content creators in a higher-ed landscape, matching content and form to build a dynamic learning environment for students. For example, in History 104, Historical Methodology, the art and craft of the historian, our professor consultant, Dr. Benjamin Schwantis, has incorporated a wonderful openly licensed lecture from MIT, a seminar in Historical Methods by Professor Ann Maynard. While this lecture has tremendous worth on its own, weekly value is added by placing it in a larger structured learning context among other materials. Similarly, in History 201, the history of Europe from 1800, our professor consultant has decided to include an openly licensed Yale lecture, The Enlightenment and the Public Spear, by Professor John Merriman. Again, a great lecture, but now is connected to a larger learning landscape that students can access in one place, Sailor.org. To see how all these fantastic OER materials are connected and incorporated into the Sailor structure, let's examine the course, say History 212. Clicking on its length brings up a page with a short introduction. Just below that, the student will find the course overview, everything he or she needs to read, watch, listen to, click on, and learn. While we're here, it is important to note that each course is designed to provide a student with the same level of information contained in a traditional college classroom setting. We've listed time advisories for each unit to let students know how long it should take them to work through the materials. We also list learning outcomes to highlight specific lessons students can take away by successfully completing a course. The time advisories and learning outcomes are designed to help students navigate the asynchronous learning environment. Furthermore, our materials are placed in sequence. Clicking the first resource uncovers a link to the material and some brief instructions. When finished, the student can move on to the next resource working at his or her preferred pace. As in all our courses, the consultant's first look to open education materials for resources to incorporate into the learning experience. For example, Professor Schwantis has included a reading assignment from a public domain American History book published online by the US State Department. Our professor consultants work hard to find high-quality open educational resources from a variety of providers. When they don't find something that meets our needs or standards, we find high-quality copyrighted material available freely on the internet. Then our permissions team reaches out to copyright holders to simply ask for the rights to host or re-license those resources, such as this presentation on the history of slave trade routes. We now host over 1,000 high-quality educational resources from this process. While we first look to existing OER materials and are pleased with a positive response to our permissions initiative, we also have examples of open education content created specifically for sailor.org by our professor consultant. In History 212, American's Award for Present, I developed a series of lectures that complement the reading materials from each unit of the course. I used the resources such as recording tools, Microsoft Paint, a drawing pad to create these online blackboard lectures that would help engage the students, showing them images, writing key terms or perhaps key descriptions on the board, and I say board, I mean literally the screen of the computer, as I would go along to present perhaps a 15 or 29 lecture. And these lectures are tools that are, as I said, complement the readings for each unit and give that student a broader, more engaging experience of having a professor sort of help analyze or help explain the highlights of the materials. In some of those cases, I want to listen to the lecture first and sort of gain a better understanding of the highlights and then engage in the readings, or I'm sure some students get approached as the opposite of the readings, and then listen to the lecture in order to confirm or explain to the materials that perhaps they didn't quite understand in the readings themselves. In addition to these types of lectures, which are distributed under Creative Commons Attribution, or CC By License. In a number of our courses, our professor consultants have created original OER materials such as readings, assignments, and assessments to help the students measure progress the long way. For example, in History 101, Ancient Civilizations of the World, our professor, Dr. Konchi-San's camera, created a reading titled, Art and Society and Religion, to supplement existing OER materials and made the reading available under a CC By License. An example of Zaylor-created course assignments can be found in History 102, Early Globalizations. For this course, our professor consultant, Dr. Dean Costin-Terres, has created reading questions for most of the course units along with answer guides to allow students to check their work. These materials are also made available to the larger educational community via a CC By License. Each course culminates on a final exam administered through the open source learning management system, Moodle, where the student can obtain a certificate of successful completion. We believe that our courseware is truly high quality, but how can we be so sure? It's all very well to ask a highly qualified professor consultant to build a course and select its resources. But we're taking an extra step and have committed to engaging additional professor consultants in peer reviewing all of our courses to ensure that we're doing the very best we can. When we are peer reviewing our course, the first thing we look for is accuracy. We want to make sure that when we send a student to a website, we want to make sure that everything on that website is right because the internet is a blackboard that when you put something on it, it never goes away. So if you're going to do it, the set of information always wants to make sure that it comes right. So having experienced designing courses not only at Sailor, but also at a traditional accredited institution, the best part of that is that it's not only just on you, but eventually your courses at Sailor get peer reviewed, which is something I never had the opportunity to have at a traditional accredited institution. So at Sailor, now you have people that do teach at other universities and institutions looking at what you're doing and commenting and giving you feedback. So in some ways it's almost even a better process. Now that we've explained how we develop our courses and looked at some ways students can utilize the resources on Sailor.org, we'd like to share a little about some new projects, student e-portfolios and the media library. We're developing an e-portfolio system to help students track their progress. With this tool, students can declare major, enroll in courses, view their transcripts, and access their earned badges. They'll also connect with other learners around the world, sharing resources, asking and answering questions, and building networks. While portfolios will allow students to stay on top of their course progress and grades, our forthcoming media library will organize every resource from our courseware into a fully searchable, robust database open to the whole world. The future isn't bright for open education, which we think translates to a bright future for hungry learners. The question is how far can you go? OER can go really as far as people's imaginations. I think education is absolutely right. I think that everyone can learn, everyone does learn to whatever extent they're capable, and I think the more and more you make it accessible to people, the more they'll learn and the better lives they'll have. We agree the sky is the limit. We look forward to working with the OER community to help further connect the dots and pave the way for students to obtain all of the education at zero cost. So, in closing, and I really can't emphasize this last point enough, we heard Jim Shelton's call this morning for a shift in value proposition from just free to better, and we're absolutely on board with that. However, our priority is to get version one of the content out there first. That is our first priority, then we can iterate on that content, others can iterate on it, but we want to get it out in its most basic form first so that students around the world who don't have access to these educational materials will have something to use right now. I'd like to invite Jen Xu, our content development manager, and Jeff Davidson, strategic initiatives manager, Cammy Rodin, our public relations coordinator, we have a couple minutes for a couple questions if you guys are curious about anything. So, is it an accredited institution? So, people go, they take a course, just personal enrichment? Yes, just as students would go to MIT and maybe click on astrophysics to look at the materials in that course, we've instead laid it out in the full semester long course, so if someone is looking for that experience, they have access to it. Do you have just a sense of how many students or would be students and self-learners are using this? You mentioned recently one live, just to get a sense of it. Sure, well I guess we didn't go live until what, March? You know, unfortunately, our site has set up such that there is no login requirement. Our trusty wanted it to be as open as possible. Do you remember what it was? I'm just real quick to read that and promote it yet. We're still building. This is the first time we've ever spoken about this. The percentage you saw on the video or some of the courses are still being built. And just to address your point too, in addition to what Lana said, you envision also in the near future, if not now and very soon, where certain segments of students will be going to take a portfolio of work and take that to an employer. They're not working every field, but it will work in some. It's already has worked in some. Computer hackers don't have degrees at all, right? They're out there working. So maybe someone can take our web development class, our small business manager class and start a business, or go to another small business and use that as, you know, show their portfolio and show their badges and take that knowledge and as well as a portfolio that creative work and pass it on. So they can, you know, then maybe once they have a job, they can afford degradation school somewhere else. I'm sorry. I meant to say we have completed 200 courses. That's about 80% of our original 241 slated for development. And we're still, I mean, we are still learning and we're finding our process as we go. And so if you guys have any recommendations, we want to hear them. Yes. Yeah, we're building this, the OER University. Yes. And it's got, we have 10 universities and colleges in five continents now. And our idea is to take type of work students do there, give them a test and we'll give them credit. So we're also prepared to do that. Great. Quick-stealing car. Well, I got a partnership to do that. Wayne McIntosh is also. Yes. Are faculty at credit institutions, traditional institutions, using these materials in lieu of traditional textbooks and all, or is that what we've seen in funding? I mean, we definitely hope so. At this point, we're still sort of, we don't have data yet, but we can say that a lot of our professors are developing our courses. And I think we have 200 professors we're working with. A lot of them say that they end up using materials they found through this course design process in their own classrooms, which I think is a really interesting sort of subculture crazy. Are these all designed in the self-study formula? Yes. Yes. So I totally understand getting the content out there for version 1.0. What is version 2.0? Well, I don't know. I mean, something, for example, I'd say the Carnegie Mellon OLI courses. They're beautiful, intelligent tutoring systems. They gather data as the student progresses through the course. Something more advanced like that maybe. The textbooks develop on the platform where videos are embedded and students can work with each other literally on the page of the textbook. Yeah, I definitely think assessment is our next stoppage focus. Dean? Yeah, I was just adding to that for a moment. There is, Barbara Diazky's collaborative statistics book that we so often talk about in open source is on sale. So you start to think about the next version with 2.0. I think the issue simply is how can we make more of your content that format? But then the hard rule would be how do we get that? And I'm glad to hear OER University because in our community colleges, for example, our staff courses are completely impacted. No one can get the staff course. So when you look at a sailor and you're using the same book that 17 other universities are using in California, it kind of makes sense that you would get credit if you could test out of that by going through the sailor course and not impact the system itself. So I think the next level for at least my viewpoint and working with sailor is to try to get to a point where we can provide some of the content in a more enriched environment for faculty that can do exactly what OER University is doing, even beyond badges and starting to get more certificates and credit for it. But I do think badges are going to be really huge for the rest of the 95 percent of those who don't go into higher education because they're going to really, really need some skill and they're going to really need to go to employers and say, I've actually mastered X, Y, and Z. And I think to your site is probably, I know my kid can pass Khan's Academy, but we need an adult academy, if you will, to go through like a sailor. It kind of gives us the same kind of skill set. So I think it's going in a great direction. Thank you so much, and we would love to answer your questions offline and getting the signal that we're five over, so shame on us, so sorry. But please ask us for questions whenever you see us. Thank you.