 It gives me great pleasure to be here today with Kathy Tam, who has been since 2006-2007 the key inspiration behind growing this open courseware project. We spoke earlier with Gary Matkin, and Gary as you will recall, explained sort of the overall vision for the project and how OCW fits into an institution. There's always another problem that we have, and this is why I've asked Kathy to talk to us today. The other problem is, if you have a wonderful piece of open courseware that could educate millions of people, but nobody knows about it, what good is it? Kathy, I want to actually start on the reverse side of that. I want to start by this issue that marketing has. Marketing is kind of a dirty word, isn't it? When you think about marketing, you think about people doing things out of pure self-interest. How do you approach this idea that is marketing for you something that is just this kind of professional thing that we do? How do you see the marketing aspect of open courseware? I think when you and Gary Matkin started this, it was never about what MIT did. I'm not saying that MIT did anything wrong, but I would think that people might say that MIT really marketed their open courseware. I don't particularly believe that we do marketing for our open courseware because we don't have a budget. Every once in a while, we spend $400 to $800 to distribute a press release, but most of what we do is all organic. It's all word of mouth. It's all about us extending the brand of UC Irvine and our land grant mission. It makes perfect sense for us to put ourselves out there, but are we doing it with a million dollar advertising budget? Absolutely not. I was shocked when we did one of the first press releases, and at that point, we had a grand total for faculty-created courses, a grand total of two open coursewares. All of a sudden, we were getting huge publicity. Could you describe that experience and how you knew how to do that? I think when we started, we started this grassroots open courseware program. We only had a couple courses, and we took some of our extension inventory and put it out. A couple things happened. Because we didn't have a marketing budget, we really had to focus on PR. Originally, the PR, because I guess we were kind of new to the movement, was very specific about courses, because at that point, that was really all we had to talk about. You and Gary hadn't really been out there yet presenting a ton. We hadn't won any awards. We were nowhere near where MIT was going to be in terms of inventory. We would put ourselves out there in the press, and we would use business wire with California distribution and national distribution, and really all that was for was to generate traffic to the website. We knew that just writing a press release and putting it out to the media wasn't going to get us a big interview, and it wasn't going to put us in mainstream media. All I wanted to do was make sure we got traffic to the website. That was it. How is the positioning of the open courseware project, as we have grown from those two courses to dozens of courses and hundreds of videos, how do you conceive differently today than you did at the beginning, the positioning of the open courseware project? I think one thing that you and Gary always wanted to do was you wanted to make sure that our open courseware was built for deserving audiences, and you two did a really, really good job at going out to institutions, to going to conferences, and presenting that idea. Eventually, what we were able to do is once we got a better inventory of courses is we created media one sheets. Instead of just going out to the media and releasing a press release, we would go pitch. We would pitch your ideas to the editors, and then we were able to get our message out there a little bit better, because the press release is just the basics. Once we were able to pitch a media one sheet and pitch what you were doing and what Gary was doing, that's when we started to get some more attention. I think, of course, MIT helped us. MIT helped everybody, because they put the concept out there, but once people started to figure out that UCI was playing a role in it, I think it elevated itself. We got more and more awareness, and then we finally became what I would say is a thought leader in the movement. Now the media calls us. They want to talk to you. They want to talk to Gary. Last year was kind of a banner year for us, because we got five awards. Some of them were international awards. Some of them were national awards, including even the Internet Marketing Association. I didn't even know those awards were happening. You were really on top of that. Why did you go after awards in that way? We were at a point, I think, where we had the opportunity to do it. Five years ago, could we have gone and submitted for an award? Probably not. I don't think we really would have been considered for the award. Since our inventory grew, we had really good faculty members giving us content, and we had done a really good job of, I think, building out the website and building out our mission to make sure we were really meeting this demand for people that didn't have access to education. We had a good story to tell. I looked at all the awards, and I still do, and I make sure that we tell our story, we tell our accomplishments, and we got a lot of recognition last year. We did really well. We got an educational portal recognized, Michael Denin for his work. We had Newton that recognized us, which for us was a big international award. All those things, because we don't have a budget and we really use public relations to our advantage, awards are perfect, because the media will pick it up, and it builds our reputation, so it starts to really put UC Irvine in the map of open education. All of the other awards were awards given by educational organizations, and one way or the other, a website that dedicates itself to education or the OpenCoursework Consortium. In one case, it was the Internet Marketing Association, and the title of the award was Best Website Content. Could you describe what happened there? We submitted it, and originally when I looked at it, I didn't know if it was the right thing for us to pursue, because we had never really gone out of higher education. We always submitted to higher education calls. I talked to the Extension Marketing Department, and we decided that it was a good time to present our OpenCoursework website for an award. The way we constructed the award, when we wrote up our nomination, was we went through what we call collections, so that was one of our big innovations. We directed the people on the award panel to look at our collections, which is a nice repository of subject matter that we've tied together for a learner. That really was impactful. I think the other thing that was important is through our website contact, we don't just have courses, we've got materials that follow along those courses, and if you're really interested in a UCI faculty member, you can go to a video lecture. Our website wasn't just about one thing. We had a lot of different variety to offer to the user, and it's very, very user-friendly. I think it was a good time for us to go out of our industry and let somebody else look at the website and see what they thought. Going even further away from higher education, then, we got a mention for one of the award-winning courses that we had on Randy Jackson's blog. I remember I went to Gary and I said, Gary, we're on Randy Jackson's blog. He says, who's Randy Jackson? In any case, it was this moment in which even, and I'm sure Randy Jackson doesn't personally sit there and write his blog every day, but at some point, there was even in popular culture, then, a recognition of what was going on here, how would another, not us, that happen to us? If you were another university saying, we want to be as impactful as possible, and clearly when we reach that popular audience that helps us spread our message, how would somebody even start to conceptualize how to get there? Or is it just accidental? Well, I think in our case, that was accidental. But I think that the course content and I think that John Crooks is amazing. So I think that Randy probably did have people that looked at our course that said, this is a different way to approach music. But I think the biggest example of how you could approach it is probably MIT. They really used the power of the brand. They got to Oprah. That's huge. Once you get to Oprah, the door is just open. And so many people believe in what she says. And she's such a big proponent of education and fulfilling the needs of underserved audiences has always been her thing. So MIT fit perfectly into that. So I assume what they did is they really went hard and they pitched the editors and they got to the people that Oprah really listens to. For us, it was luck. But if we were going to go do it, we would really have to have something spectacular. And we would go pitch it everywhere. And getting to that mainstream media is very, very difficult. When we hit Randy Jackson's blog, Steve Carson at MIT did call me up and say, I thought we had made it when we got to O Magazine. But you guys got Randy Jackson, so. Right, right. So Kathy, the California subject exam for teachers is kind of this gateway exam in California. And we found a number of years ago, five years ago, that two-thirds of the applicants, or the two-thirds of the test takers in science and math were failing on their first attempt. And here we had a shortage of science and math teachers in the classroom. And yet we couldn't get them through that pipeline, including science and math majors were often failing. So the story, I mean, I know the story about how we developed it. We went to the Hewlett Foundation and made a proposal to them to create resources for these test takers. This today, I'm going to fast forward. Today, it's the number one trafficked portion of the website. The California subject exam for teachers, math one, math two, math three, science one, science two. And the number of hits is just fabulous on it. And without it, we wouldn't be attracting people to even all the other content that we have on the website. So how did people find us? Now we almost know that almost all the test takers are at least flancing at our site. So how did that happen? Well, I think originally when we started out with CSET, we really tried to leverage the Boeing Company brand and we tried to leverage the Hewlett Foundation. So we got a lot of media attention, I think, for that. But I think once we started, we really did. We put out very simple press releases. We've got math one, math two, math three. And we've got, at that point, I think we had science one. Then we came back and we said, now we have science two. So that happened, I would say 2007, 2009. So people now search the web and they still find that press release. So at the point that those press releases were written, the links for the courses were somewhere else. So now they can't find the courses on our website. But, so they come to me and they wanna know what happened. You guys don't offer these courses anymore? And I know this is coming from a 2009 press release. I say, no, this is where they're at and these people get to it and find it. The other thing that's been really impactful is from a little bit of press. We've gotten a lot of people on that website, like you said, and a lot of users. They're coming right before the exam happened. So we know that they're using them as preparatory courses. The other thing that's happened is they've been very, very successful. Almost all the testimony that we have from the open course website is from CSET test takers. A lot of science now users are coming through. And we've had people that have told me, I haven't done this for years. I can't remember anything about teaching math. And now I wanna go back and I wanna take the CSET. And they use our courses and then they come back to me and say, you guys have done such a huge service for me. I passed the test. So I think now we have this nice community of learners that virally spread our message about what we've done with CSET. We gave these teachers a resource that they didn't have. And I think that the last point you made is crucial. That now it's actually word of mouth. In California at least, it's word of mouth that these resources exist, districts know about it, schools of education know about it. And so the people who need this test are told where to go. And it wasn't true five years ago before the marketing, before the releases. What Kennethy has told us today is just another example of really leveraging scarce resources. Because we don't put a lot of money into the open courseware project. But we use scarce resources very, very effectively. And so I'm hoping that today you had a taste of a minimal cost approach that's yielded very large results in terms of our open courseware project. And our ability really, this is the point I was asking Cathy about earlier. It's not just marketing. If people don't find out about us, they can't take advantage of the resources we have. So it's really about global education and providing access to higher education to everybody. Thank you, Cathy.