 I also just bought a new program for presentations. I've never used it in public, so that's great. Let's hope this works. I'll be the presenters for you. So first of all I want to say thank you all for being here. I'm quite amazed that you all are here this morning, because when at two o'clock Dr. Oblivion set up his science experiment somewhere on the fifth floor, and we all had to go down to the lobby, well I'm not sure I would be here if I wasn't standing up here right now, but my time is eight hours off, so the problem with being walking up at two o'clock is it's ten in the morning. So the only thing you can really do is play on your presentation, which means I think I have about eighty-nine slides, and I'm going to try to race through them as quickly as possible. So thanks for the introduction. I do want to give a quick shout out to the Shuttleworth Foundation. They have a really amazing fellowship program, and if you have a big idea you want to build something, and you need a little space and kind of social startup capital, they are definitely a good place to go. Okay, so it's special for me to be here, and especially to be up here today, because Peter P. University has a long history with OpenEd, and the history actually started before OpenEd. So when I was working in Cape Town on open source software reports for developing countries, I was looking, I'd known about the open source world, obviously, I was looking for an equivalent for content, and I found this site called opencontent.org, and there was this guy, David Wiley, he'd written a license that I could use, and so I used his license before I ever got into open education, and so then a few years later I got interested, and I'm going to play this again, David, because that's amazing. That is an animated gift, by the way. They took me hours to make that last night at 2.30pm. So anyway, so then I got interested in open education, mostly at the institutional side, so open courseware projects, and I found out about the Open Education Conference, and the first open education conference I went to was in 2008, and a bunch of us had this idea of, you know, there's all this content out there, what if we started some kind of a grassroots movement or a little community that made sense of this content and worked through the courses together and kind of helped each other along, and someone had the brilliant idea of calling it peer-to-peer university, which resonated, and so in 2008 we actually submitted a session idea and said, like, you know, come and build the peer-to-peer university or something like this. With, you know, for good reasons, I'm pretty sure it was the last session on the last day of the conference. It was Friday afternoon, like quarter to four or something, people, half the people had left. We didn't expect anyone to come, and the room was full. We were amazed, and we were kind of on the hook also, and that was the problem. You know, we didn't know if the idea had legs. All of a sudden there's a room full of people, and we said, this is a brilliant idea. You should really experiment with this, and see where this can go. And one person stood out, and that was Vijay Kumar, and he sat in the last row, actually, and we were talking about, should we use the same content structure? Should we have departments, and what does that look like? And we were kind of using the traditional university as a model. And he got increasingly agitated. I could see him kind of, like, shuffling in a seat, and he was waving his hand, and he just kind of jumped up, and he said, you know what? You're starting this from the wrong point. Don't start from where the university is today, but imagine there was no university. What would you come up with if there was no university? You didn't have all these ideas of what a university needs to be. And so that has stayed with me since then, Vijay, so thank you very much for that. 2009, we came back, Vancouver, we had t-shirts, we had haircuts. We were ready. And we made an announcement at the conference that we were going to launch the first seven courses, and we launched them on the 9th of September, 2009, so 090909. And while it was incredibly exciting, it was nerve-wracking, we didn't know what was going to happen, and it was great. And then 2010, we came back to Barcelona, and we were a very different beast. We actually organized a community workshop just before open education. These are all the people that came to the workshop, except the few people that had food poisoning, which was a big problem, actually at our conference, we only ever had about two-thirds of the people there. But, and yeah, you know, kind of using the open-ed conference as a milestone has been really useful in this trajectory. And so just a few words about peer-to-peer university, because I'm sure not everyone knows what we do. It's basically an open community for social learning. Anyone can join and contribute. You can start a course, you can act as a mentor, you can help with the development of the site, you can get involved in governance, you can help shape the strategy. The original idea was to create a social layer, put people together around existing open educational resources, so not another content project. And the learners are really in charge. We're replacing kind of the top-down instruction model with a bottom-up peer-to-peer learning model. And we've always been interested in figuring out good ways to give recognition to what people do, and I think we've hit on something interesting with badges, and I'll talk about that later. So, you know, it's a fairly standard, very lightweight interface. We don't want to have all the tools and bells and whistles. We want people to go out and use tools in other places. We are not going to build the monolithic, amazing learning management place that has everything and does everything. We just want to be kind of the lightweight connector of stuff. So, we have a lot of people coming from Latin America, although we have almost no courses in Spanish, about 5,000 active users per month, 60 to 80 new courses created per month, and unique visitors go up by about 25 percent each month. So, we're small, but we are kind of large enough that you can start experimenting. It's interesting to look at kind of courses, differences, and how do people react to it and what are models that work. We have a few focus areas. School of Webcraft is our partnership with Mozilla, which is really kind of focusing on web developer training, and also was kind of the starting point for a lot of our thinking around badges. We've got a few other schools, School of Social Innovation, School of the Mathematical Future, and then a School of Ed, which is really just a pilot for professional development for teachers, and if anyone here is working in that space, I'd love to talk to you because we have lots of questions, basically. We also try to partner with everyone who's in this community, and we are big fans of Sailor.org. I don't know where they are, but I saw them in the Lumia too. Good to see you again. They are running some of their great courses on the PDPU platform, and we've done something with Anja Cummins, kind of trying to figure out is there a space for a self-learner module where you actually don't want to offer a course, or you don't want to join a course, you want to learn something, and then this is kind of cooking at the moment, the School of Open with Creative Commons. We haven't announced it in any big way, and I think we're not going to for a while because we really want to reach out to all the organizations and make this something that's inclusive that has everyone who's part of this open movement play a role in it. It's not the PDPU School of Open, it's not the Creative Commons School of Open, it's the School of Open, and we'll hear from us about this idea. I didn't want to talk just about PDPU, I actually wanted to get through these slides as quickly as possible, I think, as you can tell. I wanted to think a little bit, you know, when you... I'm someone who's very comfortable in the trenches. I like small rooms, I like sitting in a circle and really digging into something and working on stuff together and making progress and hacking and tinkering, and so when you get asked to stand up here, it's a good opportunity to get out of your comfort zone and think a little bit more about, like, where are you, where are you? When you're down there, what does it look like from up here a little bit? And so I've thought a little bit about open education in the last few days and I've also been a little frustrated with open education in the last few days, I admit. And I kind of couldn't really put my finger on it and last night at two o'clock it was just the perfect time to really drill and face the questions that I had. And I think the frustration that I felt came from two sides. I felt on one hand we are asking too much of open education, we have these huge expectations and maybe not all of them are kind of the correct expectations and at the same time I feel like we're expecting too little of what open education could do. We're not daring enough, we're not bold enough, we're not kind of going in the direction that, you know, this movement started, the spirit of this movement started with it. So I'm going to kind of give a few examples of that and then switch from the kind of that tension space into, you know, imagining maybe a possible direction for open education going forward. So why do I think we are asking too much? I've heard over and over and I'm glad Cable actually didn't do that but, you know, so everyone kind of rushes aside the fact that OER is now making major inroads into reducing the cost of textbooks. That's a huge deal and so when I hear people say, well, you know, cost is great but you really need to think beyond cost and cost is only the beginning. They're absolutely right but I think it's also worth stopping and saying, well, you know, as a matter of fact, especially in the U.S., cost is one of your major problems and if we're able to help with that then that's an amazing thing that we're doing and so I feel like it's a little bit unfair sometimes to go, yeah, you know, the textbooks are free but, you know, is that really having an impact? Yeah, I think it is having an impact and I think it's worth kind of giving recognition to that work. Then I feel like there's this expectation that Open gets dragged in these days to fix everything. It's like, you know, my basketball team is not winning. Open education is failing. We don't have enough Nobel Prize winners. What's wrong with these open people? They promised they were going to do that and it's like, obviously Open can't fix all the problems and, you know, especially when you're operating in a structure in a system that's very old and has grown in certain ways so the one example that I kind of, yesterday I kept going through my mind is like, are we failing Brianna? I hope I'm not mispelling your name and I don't think we are failing Brianna because in most developed countries in this world, Brianna would have access to a very low cost student loan or a free tuition and she wouldn't have to work two jobs and drive an hour to her campus which is why she dropped out, right? She looked like a perfect student that you would want in your higher education system and if the structure doesn't have space for people like this then that's a big problem and Open Education should try to do something about it but I don't think you can really blame Open Education or put the responsibility on Open Education for that. And then finally I feel like we are maybe asking too much because we're looking at the institutions. We're asking the institutions to drive the innovation because institutions are for structural reasons having a very difficult time to kind of imagine a future that's different from where they come from, right? They're listening to their customers, they're listening to the government, they're listening to the industry, they're listening to the students and they're all telling them things that kind of drive them in a certain direction but if you want to see really dramatic change like pattern shifting then you need to step outside of that and the recommendations that Clayton Christians is making is new organizations but also for existing institutions set up kind of safe spaces so don't make your Open Education innovation center part of the university that operates in the same structures in the same political environment but make them independent, maybe give them an office outside of the campus give them a lot of autonomy give them senior buy-in and then you will see really amazing innovation happening not that it isn't happening I'm kind of speaking about the people who are not here and then why do I feel like we're not asking enough of Open Education because Open Education is global and some amazing stuff is happening outside of the US and outside of the developed countries and we're not really paying attention in some sessions it kind of comes up but just two examples like there's this whole talk about certification and Open Education FGV is a private university in Brazil and they offer people the opportunity to kind of walk through their course and do some little kind of self-assessments as they go along and at the end they can print out a declaration of participation it's free, you have to work through the entire materials you can print it out at the end 1.3 million people or 1.3 million certificates have been printed now if you compare the size of the Portuguese these courses are in Portuguese size of the Portuguese speaking audience to this number but I didn't do this but if someone wants to do this I'd love to hear the comparison how many people would print MIT certificates what's the size of the audience in English how many people would print MIT certificates if 1.3 million people print these FGV certificates and then there's a project in China that's taken a lot of existing open materials and translated them and put them on a portal and they have an Open Education channel and they get 1.2 million unique visitors a day I mean it's mind-boggling these things are happening outside of our sphere, they're happening in other languages and there's so much innovation that's well beyond what we sometimes get bogged down with day-to-day wow, yeah there is Portugal and Gola, Mozambique so there is more this is the number that he presented at the MIT open courseware conference I assume it's correct but maybe some people printed 2 or 3 then I think also Open needs to retain the spirit of a lab I think that's where we started it was very experimental and I don't think we should give up on it I think it's important to mainstream and it's important to have an impact on more people but I think if we lose the lab focus we lose the core of what Open started with and kind of reiterating that in a slightly different ways a lot of the conversations here are drifting into the space of just education like making education work better or making education cheaper or more efficient and they're not really Open the Open character gets lost a little bit sometimes and I think Open is about participation it's about making things together it's about tinkering and experimenting it's essentially social and there's a certain level of serendipity that I've always found amazing about these open spaces that things happen you don't expect and if you have these perfectly curated experience where every learner gets on-demand videos with little checks and badges and they get walked through this and they get to the end and it's really cheap and efficient it's kind of like it's great but it doesn't sound like something I would want to do I want to be in a space where I work with other people where things happen I didn't expect I want to kind of interact with the ideas anyway, so I'll come back to this so here's my kind of attempt at a big vision slide I heard the story about the brothers ride recently at a wedding and I don't know if it's true it might be an urban myth but apparently after they had their successful attempt to fly they were asked about the experience and they said well if we had studied flight before we built this thing and jumped off the cliff we would have never done it because what we would have learned is that it's impossible to do who were investigating, flying and studying it and they were doing all the tests and they realized that it is impossible for humans to fly and it took these guys who were who didn't do that who didn't listen to the conventional wisdom and who didn't care about the constraints that they would have known that it's impossible that they just went ahead and did it and so I feel like we kind of have two choices one is and both of these are good choices that will happen and will happen I think there is an important distinction in this open education space one is I think we can focus on solving the major education problems of a system that is somewhat broken it's here and there and open has a lot to bring to this and I think open will make huge improvements to the system or slash end we can imagine what the impossible open education future could look like and we need to listen to all the people about what we can't do and we didn't know what the university looks like and what education looks like but what could we come up with and so I want to kind of run through some ideas here and they're much less grant than I set them up to be and there are things that are happening now but I think they point in directions that we could go into and we could push further taking things apart and breaking them apart and questioning them there's some interesting stuff that we could do with education that isn't happening right now okay good I'm almost on track I think I'm only about 25 slides behind so I'm not kidding so okay well let's look at learning right so learning is obviously one of the key things that we are all interested in yesterday we've already I'm sorry Jim if you're here I'm going to repeat two of your examples but you know we're seeing some pretty interesting stuff happening with how we conceptualize courses and learning there's the digital storytelling course that Jim talked about yesterday there's the AI course at Stanford and I looked up the final number it's 145,000 people that subscribed to this and so these people kind of went ahead and did things that aren't possible right you can't have a course with 145,000 people and they just well we'll see how it goes it's just started recently but you know they're going ahead and doing it now at PDPU we kind of took a slightly different approach because we started with a really we felt what was important was to have a strong bond between the people who work through in a course together and so size is kind of you know runs against that at some point you want to know the other people you want to spend time with them you want to get to know them and I think that's a good experience not better in any way but different good and so that's kind of where we started what we realized is that when you have courses that are small they end up depending a lot on the quality of the facilitator and the facilitator is really difficult to scale so we were in this position where we had some web development courses and we got some fortunate press but from Friday to Sunday from Friday to the next Monday 1,500 people standing at our gates demanding more web development courses and we realized well the current model it would take us so long to find all these new facilitators and then kind of give them the tools that they can be great facilitators and they don't become instructors but they become kind of guides that help peer learners you know it would take very very long to get to that point where we could have 8,500 people just show up one day and we could offer them something and so we kind of start thinking what are the other alternatives one alternative I think that's interesting is let's call it a learning expedition and if you look at mountain climbing then I thought that was kind of a good example you know you kind of know where you are obviously you're at the start there and you kind of know where you want to go it's somewhere up there and then lots of people have gone before you and they have these little markers and it's actually quite amazing what they're called it's all in German but there's one called the iron which is like ironing board there's one called the death bewek which is probably a very good place to stay overnight there's the spider the broken band anyway these things almost sound cool like I want to go and I want to stay at the death bewek one night so there's these markers that people have placed into the mountain and you can follow their path there's kind of a community that's gone before you and if you follow the path you join that community but also there's nothing keeping you from going left or right there's no one says you can only go on this path now in mountain climbing obviously if you go off the path you might never get to the top but in learning I think if you go off the path maybe you'll take a little longer to get to the place you want to go or maybe you'll end up in another place and it's equally interesting or more interesting for you you know the idea of that map came up yesterday and I think this is the kind of map that I think makes sense in open education and then if you get stuck in mountain climbing or you're a little nervous about the route you know you can hire a climbing guide you can hire someone who's gone this path before you who can give you the advice occasionally they might carry your bag a little bit but mostly they just point you in the right direction and they kind of go check this out and if you want to go off the path you know they're likely they've done that before you and they can help you and so how do we translate that into online learning so we've come up with a model that we call challenges which is really learning expeditions and it's a set of tasks that you work through kind of step by step and then there's a set of challenges which you can think of as these positions on the course up the mountain and we've rolled some of the stuff that we saw in the mountain climbing into this so there's badges that we attach to these challenges both as a way to give you recognition of where you've been so you've made it to the Deathbyweg yes, here's the Deathbyweg badge but also as a sign of where you're going to go next so I can then show you the badge for the next thing and you can go okay well you know that's the direction I want to go in I know what that badge means I'm going to follow that path of the badge into this direction then you can get a mentor and one thing we found in the kind of grassroots or volunteer driven open education space it's a huge ask to ask someone to run a course for six weeks if I go to any of you and I say hey I really like your work in this area would you run a course for six weeks on PDPU you're all going to hesitate and you're going to go I'm a very busy person how much time will it take it's really easy to ask people if they would act as a mentor in a relationship with someone who's learning it's much less time consuming it's demand driven they don't have to prepare like they set up a call and that person comes with problems and they listen to the problems and they share their experiences so it's a much easier way to scale support if you offer mentorship instead of instruction so this slide I think is accidentally here it should be somewhere else but it is an important point that in these challenges we've structured all of the learning and making things together with others so the challenges are not designed for you, you can technically work through them on your own if you really don't like to work with other people but they all have prompts where you need to review other people's work, you need to kind of prompt them to review yours there's a social interaction and many of the badges actually require peer assessment so you need the opinion of your peers so this is socialist baked into this to avoid the problem that we would have all these people just on their own path not looking left and right and so what makes a good challenge is one question that we've been asking for a while now and we've come up with a 10 piece framework that we are testing at the moment to see if it works in other domains except web development and also I guess the most exciting thing about these challenges is really the first set we had to develop them because we didn't have any challenges for example, so you know it was difficult for me to go to someone and say hey why don't you design a challenge they would say well what is a challenge I would say I'm not sure but now we've got a set of challenges and we have this kind of how to that has 10 components and the idea is that as people work through the challenges as you get to the top of the mountain you now get to design new challenges for other people and I mean how amazing would it be if you're learning something and you get to the end of the class and now you get to set the challenges and you get to the end of the line you know in web development you could easily have a thousand people work through your challenge what an incredible both reputational benefit is that but also what a great feedback for my own learning what I've accomplished as a web developer as a learner if I can help other people learn and there's this response to the challenge I've given them so I've tried to think a little bit about kind of like learning what could learning look like and then switch to assessment which is obviously a huge topic at the moment and lots of people are interested in it and in a way learning assessment is a little bit like baseball scouting about 20 years ago and I don't know how if you've read the book Moneyball or watched I think the movies out you kind of know where I'm going with this but the interesting thing there is that baseball teams are faced with a very difficult problem they have to find people at a young age when they've only played baseball for a short time and they have to pick the ones that are going to be successful major league baseball players and it's very difficult to do that and so the community of baseball teams kind of developed these two strategies the first one was to say it's basically an art right like you need experts who have done this for many years and they've developed a taste for they can smell a good ball player and they developed a whole language around like he throws like a horse or something I don't know what the language is but if you don't speak the language you can't participate and that's partly intentional so it's like we are the people who know how to choose the good ball player so we're important you need us and we go around and we check out all these young guys and then we say this pick this guy he's a winner and so there's kind of this art of doing assessment and then the next step was and as always you know people put a lot of faith into data you give me statistics it looks like you know there's something meaningful there but there isn't always and so the first statistics that the baseball teams had were we're looking at where things like RBI runs better in which means if you're up to bat and there's like a guy already on the plate I know most of you are Americans but for the few of us who are not and you hit the ball and the guy runs in then you've batted one run in and so they count that and seemingly that's a really important statistic because each run obviously is a score and you want more runs and you win the games but actually it isn't they found out later they looked at kind of more sophisticated statistics they found that RBI is actually not a very significant statistic that you should be looking at and so I feel a little bit like some of the stats and tools and measurements that we have today are in that category where we place a lot of faith into things like the SCTs I mean they are important if you think about kind of milestones in people's lives but what do they really say about someone's ability to be a good citizen later or be a good colleague or be kind of an interesting, you know have interesting ideas or solve problems very little and we kind of proxy all this other stuff but it's dangerous so I think assessment coming back to assessment ideally assessment the easiest assessment well not the easiest but the easiest to defend is if it's authentic if someone does something and I can observe it and they're kind of the activity is part of the assessment it's very easy to say if someone is good or bad so if you're a sculptor and I'm doing the sculpting and there's the sculpture any other words with sculpt in the beginning right then that's like that's part of the learning and part of the work is the assessment if I play a sport I win, I beat you in chess it's like you know I don't need to do a test so every time you do a test that's separate from the activity you have some inaccuracies you have constraints that you introduce you are not really assessing the core of what you're trying to assess anymore the other thing is quick feedback and good failure are important so Cable told me this amazing story yesterday about how he set out to learn to play computer games recently and he's getting help from an expert his 5-year-old or 6-year-old his 6-year-old son who's sitting next to him coaching him and Cable is kind of running down jumping off rocks and the son is rolling his eyes but he's still there he's like keep going dad keep going you're gonna get there but the amazing thing about computer games is that you can do game over and then there's this thing that says press R to try again well what if education was like that okay I'm learning calculus damn it I didn't get any of it all my answers are wrong press R you go back to the beginning you try again and there's no stigma attached to that it's part of how you learn to be a game player that you have to try over and over again it's part of the fun of playing games that you fail it doesn't lead to discouragement and I think good assessment does this good assessment gives you quick feedback that encourages you, that motivates you to work harder that doesn't say you're dumb you're not good enough which is what a lot of our assessment today says so assessment has to be learning otherwise it's not useful and learning here's where it should be learning is if learning is making things with others then what does it mean about how we can assess learning well today we've got a few interesting possibilities that we didn't have some time ago but one is we can let action speak so when people do things online they click on things every little click creates a data point it's the analytics stuff and I know there's a it's the A word and people don't like it let me just say this I think we are at the first step of analytics I don't want to discount it I think it's going to be hugely important but we have no idea yet what we're looking for but if you don't have an idea of what you're looking for at least you need to start collecting because if you don't collect you'll never be able to see later when you realize what you can be looking for and actually I would encourage you all to look at I don't know how you manage to run a conference and write blog posts David but there's a new blog post with a beautiful visualization of activity in a kind of a good example of learning analytics and so I think we're at the beginning don't react too strongly to it no one's trying to turn learning into numbers but I think there's going to be a lot of useful stuff in here and we need to start collecting it and analyzing it then Openest that's also in the wrong place so the other thing is the things we can do now at a much better scale is we can showcase our work and we can share it with others at the core of Openest you share your work with others you talk about portfolios but it's much easier to do that online and you can bake it into the learning experience so in one of those challenges in the webcraft course you have to write a blog post and you have to share it with others and the whole idea is that as a web developer what you need to do is develop a portfolio as a web developer your ability to show the world what you can do and get a job and have a reputation for your portfolio and so our course WebMaking 101 is basically the first step towards building a portfolio at the end of that course you'll have a very simple portfolio and so we're baking these things into the learning but they are at the same time assessments because they give people access to your portfolio and then the last thing is listen to the community so if you make learning social and people interact with each other those are the people that are going to get feedback on your abilities and so if you look at things like stack exchange or stack overflow if you haven't I think it's one of the most interesting assessment experiments we have online at the moment it's a huge question and answer community and they do very sophisticated analysis of the interaction between people and the voting up and down of other people's questions of other people's answers and of your own answers influence your score in that community and they break it down in very nice ways where they say in the different application what's your score, what are your top answers so I can quickly review what your answers are and they're selling this to employers now as a recruiting tool and employers are willing to pay a lot of money to get access to these statistics and then also you can bake peer assessment into the everyday interactions in the community and you can aggregate that data so if you're discussing with someone and they make a really good point you can get access to the data and you can give them a badge and you can say here's the helpful feedback badge and that badge, maybe you only get it once three people have said it but that badge stays with you you can keep that in your portfolio you can show it to other people and maybe the helpful feedback badge isn't the most important one but you can see where this is going towards kind of more meaningful badges so online these things get easier and you can get access to this and this is an area we're working on we're spending a lot of time working on right now designing a a set of design guidelines and a framework for assessment of social learning online so if you're interested in this work or you're working in this space I'd love to talk to you more we're going to release the first draft kind of for input in about two weeks so I'd love to find more people who want to work on this and now we're going to skip through the first few very quickly but just to say that the higher education accreditation system in the U.S. is a major problem and prevents innovation in the open education space and the only comparison I want to make is between taxis in San Francisco and taxis in New York so you go to San Francisco you try to get a taxi, good luck you go to New York, there's a taxi anywhere, any time of night you tell them where you want to go they know how to get there but is it so different? It's because you need a little vignette to have a taxi and there's an organization that controls how many vignettes there are for taxis and in New York they've taken one direction in San Francisco, they've taken another direction higher education accreditation has taken the San Francisco direction for good reasons I'm not discounting this, the reasons for this are quality, you want to make sure that there's high quality the problem is now that that's starting to backfire because first of all there's high accreditation so we end up with bad quality and second of all it's too difficult and forces you into a certain model that people like Peter P. University could never be an accredited university we have no intention of being one but it's kind of sad that we couldn't ever be one if we produce amazing let's say we produced amazing learning experience in the future and we tracked all of your learning we would have all the data to back it up and you would have portfolios and badges and it would all be transparent but why couldn't we be a university well it's impossible anyway so credentials are signals some signals are more explicit than others we know what they mean by just looking at them other signals we have to learn to interpret they don't say what they are and degrees are signals that we have to learn to interpret there's a lot of data that's not part of the degree now we know that if my dog went to Harvard there's a good chance that she will be a successful private equity lawyer and ruin the world economy anyway so you know we place the interesting thing here is we place a lot of faith in these signals and that's based on the reputation that they've developed over time so these signals that we have today they have two problems there's a reputation versus innovation choice if you want reputation in the signals today you need long history you need lots and lots of people coming through moving on to do amazing work you need in universities buildings actually are helpful for your reputation if you don't have buildings it's more difficult to have a reputation and then on the other side you have innovation where the amazing thing about open and the web is that things are moving very very quickly we don't have time to spend 250 years to build up a reputation before you believe that we do good work 25 days is probably more realistic or reasonable so there's a problem with the signals we have today that if we want our signals to have meaning we need to find a way to deal with this reputation problem the other one is convenience versus authenticity so signals are proxies and that's convenient because if you give me a degree I can place a lot of trust in it I don't need to interview the people the reality is you apply for a job he's from Princeton I'll invite him for the interview he's from some other university but does that degree really tell you enough to make those decisions in many cases I would argue not but there's a convenience factor you get a thousand applications you need to filter out 950 of them it's a really easy way of doing it and maybe you're mostly right you'll hit and miss a little bit but what do you care it's a problem because it prevents these other people to demonstrate how amazing they are that they would be much better it's an inefficient system essentially on the other hand authenticity we can't all go out and sit next to the person we want to hire and spend days and watch them talk to their colleagues and how they're working are they nice they don't do that it's simply too much work so we have this drawback the signals need to help us they need to be convenient but they need to retain as much authenticity as possible and so I guess it might be worth trying out new signals and there's this big discussion now about the open badges infrastructure and I will run through this very quickly but there's a person here sitting right there Mozilla is working at Mozilla and is the project manager of the open badges infrastructure project at the moment together with another lady that's on maternity leave Erin Knight who deserves a lot of credit for all this this work and it's something that we kind of started figuring out together five two anyone can issue badges so what's interesting about badges anyone can issue badges right the reputation of the issue is still important but there are no more barriers to entry there's no approval process so what we've already seen in the open education space is that people were hacking that right so David Wiley issued Wiley certificates for people who took his open education course it's a hack but he's a professor at a university so you know it's still part of the system Joey Ito gave certificates for people who took a digital journalism course at P2PU now Joey doesn't have a university degree he wasn't the director of the media lab he did this but he's still a very well known guy in the media space so like his personal reputation carried but there's also people like this guy John Britton John Britton hacked the certification system by saying to people if you take my course at P2PU I'll write you a recommendation on LinkedIn and people did it people asked for the recommendation on LinkedIn and they listed the P2PU experience in their education profile so people hacked this but why do they have to hack it if we can give them an infrastructure where they don't have to go through all these lengths we give you the infrastructure that you can do this much more easily and so it's anyone can issue but you can also imagine people issuing badges for any skill for any competency for any accomplishment that you think is important and I guess one thing I want to say about badges I think we chose the wrong term I think there's a lot of pushback and negative response to the term badges because it makes people feel like we're trying to gamify everything and we are not a Harvard degree is a signal Harvard degree is a badge right so don't I guess I'm inviting you to not respond immediately to the term badge but to look at the other two terms open it infrastructure which I think are much more important in this conversation and so any skill competency including the ones people care about we've actually gone out to web developers and asked them what are the skills that are most important for you and surprisingly it's not the hard skills like JavaScript, PHP open source it's the soft skills web developers if you ask them to write recommendations for each other the things they put in those recommendations are things like he can translate the ideas of the client into code he can explain things to his she can explain things to her co-workers she helped me when I got stuck with my problems she was very organized and kept the team on time those are the things that they care about and those things don't ever show up in any kind of computer science degree badges can act as motivators they can act as guides I talked about this a little bit before so at the end of the challenge you can see where you're going next they're transparent so each badge has a link to the evidence that's underlying the badge which means we will see lots of experimentation but we can all see what the experimentation is it's not like we have to we see something that's close and then we figure out what it means with degrees and then we have some trust in it later but we can actually look at the badge click on the badge takes me to a website where they got the badge where the evidence is stored I can look through the evidence I can have a description of for example the p2p badges many of them are peer awarded there will be a description of the logic needs three votes from their peers needs a vote from someone who's already completed the badge you can review all of this and then you can engage with it and so there will be hopefully there will be a huge amount of experimentation in both assessment and credentialing as a result of having this open infrastructure there's a competition if you haven't looked at it digital media and learning competition focused on badges if you have ideas for badges I look at that and see if you can you want to come and experiment in some of these ways and then finally there's ways of sharing your achievements that are different you can move these badges around the web you can put them on your Google plus profile I made this up of course you can't do that today but this is what kind of what it will work like in the future and you can move them around freely and you will actually get them as an image file that you can put on a USB drive even and give to another person so you really are in control of your own achievements you don't have to ask someone to certify the badge itself contains all the information you need so I try to imagine a little bit what the impossible future of open education looks like and as I said before I'm not so good at imagining I'm much better at building and I would invite everyone to join us to build this future of open education because it's an incredibly exciting time the opportunities that we have today to do things we haven't had them even 10 years ago some of these ideas that we have today didn't exist the scale we can have the impact we can have the connections we can make between people it's really I think the most exciting time to be working in this space and so I wake up every morning I don't want to do anything else and I'm sure all of you do so it's great to be in a community at OpenEd where it feels like the people are building this future together and so that's the end of my 98th slide, thank you