 Felly, we are speaking today about the one pillar of the OER ecosystem, high quality supply. And in thinking of high quality so that we don't make it a really scary notion, I found it helpful to think about quality as fitness, for purpose. So the first question, ah I'm still getting the right view, is that if we're thinking about high quality supply, we have to think about for which purposes is that supplier to be put to use. And the second question then, what are our priority purposes? What are the problems that we are trying to solve? And I think that's been a theme throughout this conference, has been trying to look at the different problems that we are trying to solve through the use of OER. To give that some meaning, I'm just going to give an example from my own country, South Africa, which I think is probably a best case scenario on the African continent. But the conditions and the problems that we face there are enormous. To begin with, the literacy levels of grade four learners are devastatingly low, especially for the bottom four quintiles. Okay, bottom four quintiles, the 80%ers. They do not have the skills to proceed to the next grade in school, 80% of our kids. Half the learners, not surprisingly, drop out before getting to K-12. Not surprisingly as well, around 3 million of our 48 million population, 18 to 24-year-olds, are then not in employment nor in education. They are on the streets. We have a recent green paper in post-schooling, which is on the way to a white paper to be government policy, in that we've set some targets for 2030, 18 years from now. We're meant to double the number of university students, moving from a 16% participation rate to a mere 20% participation rate. But we have to double in this period. More importantly, we have to increase nearly 12-fold the number of vocational college students in the country. But we already spend 6% of our GDP on education, so additional resources are unlikely, and we can't put up student fees because students are too poor to afford them. The demand for education is huge. The chances of getting a job go up exponentially with educational level. Let's just get a sense of that demand. I promised you some images. This is a scene from the beginning of the year in Johannesburg. It's outside a university. At the last minute, it said that they had some free places at the university. This is one kilometer from where I work and where I live. People started to gather early in the morning, somewhere around three o'clock. By eight o'clock, we were needing to protect ourselves against the sun. The crowd got restive. The crowd got a little disorderly, even more disorderly. And then finally, tragedy struck. This was a mother who had come full of hope that morning to enroll her son at university and she ended dead. It just gives you an idea of the kind of challenge that we have. Today, or yesterday, we had mentioned, I think it was from Ulricha, about our overall challenge, finding ways of providing better quality education to vastly more students with fewer resources. Obviously, OER can help in this, but let's not overstate it. OER do not constitute an educational experience. They are an important element of that experience. Our critical challenge in the background is to try and design a different way of organising our education system, one which starts with the idea of creating a learning environment with the technologies we have available, not one that starts with the idea of bricks and mortar and fancy buildings like this one, teachers in front of classrooms, of semesters, of all the other constraints that we put on ourselves. Rather, we need to think imaginatively from the start. But OER can help. And there is a huge supply of OER out there. The question for us in the South is are they fit for purpose? Are they contextually relevant? Can they be made contextually relevant? Are they in our areas of need? Are they meeting our problems? Will they help educators to help students learn? That's the key hallmark of a quality resource. And will educators be able to use them? Now in OER Africa, we have been trying to add to the supply in areas where we thought that there were gaps. We've worked with existing networks and supporting evolving communities of practice. We have sought to facilitate the use of OER if something exists out there, for goodness sake, use it. But we've also attempted to add to the supply in four key domain areas, teacher education, health, agriculture and the foundational skills for higher education. I'll give you some examples from the OER Health Initiative that we've been involved in. It's a collaborative project with the University of Michigan. The examples of the OER are things that you won't find in the West. Here is a resource about the Baruli Elsa, something which you find largely in West Africa and how to treat it. How one identifies tuberculosis in children, not exactly something one's going to come across in Boston. How one's going to detect malaria as quickly as possible so it can be cured. So these are the kind of resources that we are trying to add through the communities with whom we are working. But there remain some fundamental gaps. And perhaps most important of these, and I think there's been an undercurrent of this theme in this conference, the literacies for students to make use of OER from the very basics of learning to read, being able to read to learn and then finally to be able to find, analyse, evaluate, synthesise and apply new information. Those are the sum of the gaps. We don't find good resources to help us do all of these things. And importantly, another gap is assisting educators to develop the skills to play a different role, a role of navigator and facilitator, and not the role of a deliverer of instruction. This would have to include their own skills of educators to find, analyse, evaluate, synthesise and apply new information. To be able to stitch together OER in creating a purpose of educational environment, what was earlier called a learning pathway. Let me just elaborate a bit on learning to read. In our continent there increasingly are policies for instruction to be in the mother tongue for the early years. But are the resources there? We've recently been asked by one of our second richest province in South Africa, Khating, to do an evaluation of some literacy packs in the 11 official languages that we have in our country. The role of this literacy project was fairly simple. By the end of primary school, all learners can read and write fluently for purpose and for enjoyment. Not a hugely elaborate goal, but a really important one. The methodology that was applied. There was an expert review of each of the 17 learning resource packages. There were user reviews as well. What did we find? In half of the African language packages, the level of English linguistic accuracy was very low. None of the African language packages had enough readers for a book per fortnight. In two cases, there were three books for a whole year for a beginning reader to read. In the majority of the African language packages, the readers were only useful for phonics. For phonics practice, there was no narrative or book-like quality about them. Not sure why any kid would ever want to read them. So what are we proposing to do? Having drawn on examples like this from South Africa and other parts of Africa, we have a proposed intervention, a notion of an African storybook project. At the heart of this project, we'd have a website which would provide free, full-colour digital picture storybooks for new African readers, all released under a Creative Commons attribution licence. We hope this library will be very special. Besides being free to all, it will facilitate a re-versioning, new book creation, easy uploading and collaborative workspaces to form new literacy practices of communities. Thus, the website will be an open community encouraging contributions from all who are willing to participate. And we have already discovered that there are many such projects across the continent of people creating books, but they have no way to distribute those to share them and to translate them. So we hope that this proposal will be a successful one. We have our tentacles out in various directions. So we hope that you can watch the space. Siobonga, thank you. Thank you so much. Any questions for this speaker? If not, let's move on. Yes, there's a question over there. Can you quickly? Sorry, there are those initial skills that are developed in children able to recognise words, but in fact to be able to practice their reading, there's very little in the home language in many of the cases in the country, in all of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Okay, other questions? If not, let's move to the second speaker. Journalist per answer, Education Specialist for the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth at the Commonwealth of Learning. After serving as director of future education development for Seychelles Ministry of Education, he's also a member of the Seychelles Qualification Authority Board. Good afternoon, everybody. As mentioned, my name is John L. Esperance. I work for the Commonwealth of Learning, and at the Commonwealth I am responsible for the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. This afternoon we're supposed to talk about quality and high quality, but before we go into that, probably many of you doesn't know what is the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, commonly known as the VUSSC or VASCA. Um, let us see what VUSSC is or isn't. Um, it is not a university in a traditional sense, not made of brick and mortar, like you would have, like, you know, these institutions, but it's really something that is a concept. It can be best regarded as a concept, which is a collaborative network of 32 small states working together to strengthen the national institutions in their own country. So when the idea of the Virtual University started back in the year 2000, it was felt that maybe we should be creating an institution, but then when the Commonwealth of Learning was given the mandate to kind of come up with a proposal, it was decided to rather create an institution that would compete against other institutions in those countries. Why not use their existing infrastructure and make them work together? So as a whole, this is what it became. Um, we use a lot of technology to collaborate and to develop content, OER. We use the Creative Commons CC licensor. Um, and we've created also a mechanism for accreditation, and this is done through what we developed and called a transnational qualifications framework, commonly known as the TQF, to support the sharing of open educational resources. Um, these are the small states. As you can see, there are 32 small states, all scattered around the world, Caribbean, Pacific, Europe, Indian, Oceania, Asia, as well as Pacific. Um, we have a unique model that we kind of developed and tweaked as, um, we progressed. This is the cycle that we have for OER. Obviously, as you can see, it all starts with a need. The reason why I would say that the virtual universe for small states has been kind of successful in producing open educational resources and getting members seats to use is because we have priorities. Um, and these priorities were identified by senior government officials. We work directly with ministries of education and ministers, so we get support in that respect. So at the beginning, when the idea of USS was launched, a lease of priority was decided and that was given to us by government officials that came directly from ministries of education. Um, the process involves careful planning. We don't actually just develop curriculum, but we go about in planning and getting people together in all the small states. We start by involving what we call a group of team leaders and then eventually build capacity around the notion of what is open educational resources because not many people in the small states, especially in the developing world knows what is OER and as well the issue of copyright and as well ICT e-learning, which is something we promote a lot. And after that, we develop the content, um, and we have a lot of resources. So far, we've developed at least 12 complete courses as well as programmes we've started from certificate right up to master's degree level programmes. Now the issue of quality, um, forest quality came through a system of accreditation through what we call the transnational qualifications framework. But before anything else, the moment we complete a programme or a course, it is peer reviewed through our own network. So when we complete a programme through a formal workshop setting, then everything is done collaboratively online and then peer reviewed between different institutions as well as different groups of people. Um, the transnational qualifications framework. This is what we use to quality a show programme. What is it? The TQF is actually a translation instrument. Many of you who's probably familiar with the European framework for qualification would be kind of something which is really similar. It is a very loose system that allows all the frameworks to be referenced against or compared to. Um, it is based on a set of prescribed criteria, but rather in a loose system, as you can see, which kind of look at the issues of mapping as what it can do and what it can is actually improve credit transfers between systems and countries as well as promote common quality assurance mechanisms framework. It is based on a system of credit that we use. Most importantly, it is a non-regulatory framework. It is in control because it's supposed to work with other frameworks that exist within the small states. And it does not replace existing mechanisms for quality assurance. So it has to work with other frameworks that exist or quality assurance mechanism within the countries. Quickly, I'll just go through the system, how we quality assure a programme and as well how an institution actually works. We have a basket with eggs. These are supposed to be providers of learning. Um, one provider offer a programme. It goes through the national system for recognition. That is a non-formal system, a non-formal or non-recognised qualification. And then we have another institution that offer a formal national recognised system, but it goes through the national system and that can be validated through their own quality assurance system. It's a body as well as qualifications body. Then another example is actually another institution or offering a different programme that goes through the national system as well as a regional body that if one exists in that particular region. And then that can be actually recognised nationally as well as regionally. Now we have what we call the one that is designed through the Virtual University for Small States system. Now, this starts with an identification from ministers or senior officials. It goes through a conduit that we use to kind of determine what sort of programmes and tools to be used. Then the programme once completed must be first recognised in the country where it originates. And as well if there is a national or regional body it has to be also accredited through that body as well. Now, the moment this happened this is where the transnational qualifications kicks in. The programme will then be put on the portal where it is recognised through the TQF. But before doing that it goes through a system whereby we have a special committee that looks at quality assurance. They will say whether this is fit to be then registered on the transnational qualifications framework because once it happens the whole thing becomes internationally recognised because the framework that we use has been actually referenced against the European framework of qualifications. In terms of standard now each programme must have a list of standard before it can actually be accredited by any institution. So this is a typical example of the kind of standard that we use and then that's just part of the standard but then it has all the criteria, range, statement, etc. Once everything is finished, completed we then share all the materials freely online on the website. Both on the Commonwealth website as well as the VERS website and then we also provide a list of accredited institutions and institutions offering all the courses that is developed through the virtual university for small states of the Commonwealth. So this is in a nutshell what is a virtual university for small states of the Commonwealth and the system we use to quality assure our programme. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions for our speaker? Yes. John, can you give a sort of specific example of a course that was developed in one part of the world that was then adopted in another having gone through this process? We've developed several courses and programmes and typically one which became really really popular was one that we developed last year with the help of the National University of Lesotho. We developed a full degree in business and entrepreneurship and that programme is now being offered by the National University of Lesotho as well as Bocodola in Botswana. So some countries have decided to actually re-contextualise the programme because there are differences because we just spoke about standards. Standards differ from country to country so they kind of tweaked it slightly to reflect the situation on the ground. But there are other countries that actually use it to us as a ready-made programme to be offered and directly like that. But when we design our courses or programme we make sure that we come up with a kind of a generic system of a curriculum rather than to specific in terms of activities, assessments so that then the countries where the courses are being offered they are to come up with the activities, assessment and contextualise the programme. So it is being used. This is one example but we've got other examples as well like I can give another one is agriculture where several institutions are offering a diploma in agriculture. Now some countries have kind of combined that with their own programme in a teacher education programme that is now being offered at the University of Samoa. So many countries are kind of using the programme in different ways. I've got no one to tell how to use across about the same kind of context. Thank you. There is another question over there. I just want to find out what were some of the challenges you faced in getting all the countries, small countries together to agree to be part of this system. In fact it is quite a challenge. Obviously this is one thing that we've experienced is actually because we work across cultures and boundaries. Many things differ. The thing is that because we do it so collaboratively kind of together it's not something we're trying to impose. We work together as a team. Obviously the way we do it is we start identifying key people within the region where we bring them together. We develop a common template for the programme. Then once this is agreed we then constitute another group that we say these are curriculum developers. We come together, we work and develop the programme. But as I said there are issues. This is why we decided to come up with a generic kind of curriculum because each would like to re-contextualise the content to fit their own systems of culture and then to reflect national needs and trends etc. Anyone else? Let's move to the third speaker. Delaine Tanks, director of the Open High School of Utah. Good afternoon everybody. Just by Shelf Hands how many of you are higher ed? University level. Anybody's from secondary here? Policy makers? Curious people who wandered in off the street? Of course you are. David's probably in that group as well. I'm excited to be here. I appreciate the introduction. As he mentioned I'm the director of the Open High School of Utah. Just to give you a little context. The Open High School of Utah was founded by Dr David Wiley. We opened our doors in 2009 serving 125 ninth graders. We've since grown to roughly 400 students and we serve grades 9 through 12. We are a public charter online high school. Lots of qualifiers for what we are and what we do. The reason why we're named the Open High School of Utah. Anybody want to venture a guess as to why? Bingo, we build our curriculum from open educational resources and I'm going to walk you through what that looks like. We get lots of questions as to why are you named the Open High School of Utah? Does that mean anybody can go there? Yes, but that's because we're a public charter school and we're on a lottery system. That's not why it's named the Open High School of Utah and we go through this big log explanation. I just want to make sure we're clear on that. Our mission at Open High School is to facilitate lifelong success by meeting the needs of the 21st century learner through individualized and centered instruction, innovative technology, service learning and personal responsibility. That's all good, a lot of educational edgubabble buzzwords in there, right? The thing that sets us apart is our commitment to use and share our curriculum that we've developed as an open educational resource. Here's the cupcake model as we like to call it at the Open High School of Utah. Obviously, open educational resources are cost effective, they're flexible, they're adaptive and they evolve. There are three components that we look at at the Open High School of Utah that are the key components of our cupcake model. We have our base, we have our frosting and we have the cherry on top. The colors are reversed work with me here. We start with our state standards as the common core and what this looks like is that the teachers when we hire them we put out our call for resumes and I might get 300 back per position in this economy and so they all want to come and they want to teach at the Open High School of Utah. But in order to do that we're looking for a very specific skill set. Good bricks and mortars teachers don't necessarily translate to rock star online teachers and vice versa. We audition our teachers, we give them some state standards, we give them some of the tech tools that we use and we say, you have a week go build us a lesson, let's see what you can do. We look at how long it takes them. We look at how well they put the material together. If they come back with a worksheet slapped on to a computer screen guess what, that bore us kids in person and virtually, it's the same thing. So we want to see that they can create engaging curriculum not just text with a picture to make it pretty. I get, you want to guess how many people out of the 300 actually do that process? Three, you're a little low. 32, about 30. I can get about 10% return on that. He cheated. I gave him the answers ahead of time in case nobody else participated. I'll just be honest here. Once we get those 30 back we look for all of the elements that are going to help them be successful teachers in the online digital arena and with using open educational resources. About 10 of those 30 do a decent job of it. We take the top three we interview those and then we hire the best possible teachers and we provide ongoing professional development for them. Then they build the curriculum for us. We teach through it, we release it but part of their job description and the ongoing tasks that they have to do as full time teachers is to create that content. They're constantly, it's data driven. They look at the back end of it. That's why it's critical for the teachers to have that skill set. You can't just drop a teacher in there and say, you know what? You have kind of lousy tech skills but we're going to hire you anyway and gosh I hope you can make this work and there's all this data and these reports and lots of numbers and you're an English teacher but you know what I'm sure you'll figure it out. We have a new system which is Moodle Rooms. There are multiple LMSs out there to be able to be used. We look at existing OER and then we go to the icing on the cupcake which is our media and interactives. After the culling process they look at all the stuff that's out there already they bring that in, they align it to the state standards then we start throwing in different digital pieces that make it more interesting for the student. So, if you are familiar with teenagers how many of you have teenagers? How many of you have been a teenager? Okay. We're on the same page here. If it is not interesting they won't look at it. Going back to what Joi Ito said yesterday they're not going to look at it. We don't have problems getting the kids who open up the laptops to engage. Our struggles come from getting the kids who open up the laptops. We like to say you can lead a kid to a laptop but you can't make them learn. That is extremely true. We provide a laptop for the students but we can't make them learn. We try to incentivize them with media and interactives. Next we add our collaborative Web 2.0 tools. We like our students to work with each other. They're collaborating with the teachers. They're doing group projects. We look for cloud-based collaborative materials. The cherry on top of our cupcake model is our faculty. I explain the process by which we hire them and then we give support to them throughout the year. They collaborate as well. If they find something that works they share that in our teacher commons so it's very transparent and every teacher does not have to go through the same process to figure out what works. Here are some of the things that we use. We have a CK12 as one of our staple items. Bright Storm, Khan Academy and the process that they go through. We put it into our LMS. It's got a state organized. We ran into some struggles. Just so you know, our first year we did everything wrong. We know really well how not to do things but in going through that process we basically dismantled the plane mid-flight and reassembled it and kept it from crashing and it was a feat in and of itself. So what we figured out is that if we can build it inside the LMS it helps to be able to organize it. We had to work with our teachers to not be afraid to make it their own. Teachers are historically self-deprecating, right? They don't want any credit. They don't want any attention. Just let me go in my classroom, shut my door and do my thing. We can't do that in an online arena because everybody can see what you're doing. And then the thought of releasing it for the public to see that was frightening to our teachers. So we had to work with them to get past the perfection syndrome. It doesn't have to be perfect to release it. Think about when you're building, you go out and you find something it's good enough. You use that, you work with it, you make it so that it fits your students' needs and there you go. So something is better, nothing and close enough is good enough to be able to come up with. So we like to personalize it. John Bergman yesterday mentioned that the kids want the teacher's voice. They want the teacher's face and I second that, I echo that. It's absolutely true. We can have Brightstorm videos, we can put Khan Academy, we can put Harvard University professors in there. Those are all great as long as they're in conjunction with some personalization from the teacher. Here's what's going to happen for the week. We're going to learn this, we're going to go over here, make sure that you take a look at these three videos from Brightstorm, they're really awesome. So they connect with the students on a personal level and it adds a nice layer of connection to the computation and the computing that they're doing as they do their school work. The other thing that we figured, perlinguistic cues, can't see those when you're an online teacher. Can't see the confused looks, the boredom, the solid airplane. That kind of stuff, you don't have a good finger on the pulse of how that works. So we use data on the back end to determine those types of things and we also have figured out that if the instructions are not granularly clear, they're not going to get it. And by granularly clear, what I mean is click here. Step one, step two, and so you'll see that's a lot of instructions. It has to be that way and they don't ever come back. One of the other lessons that we learned when we first started using resources to build our curriculum, our teachers spend a lot of time finding. And they wanted to use everything they found because, dang it, they put a lot of time into it. And so this is what our courses looked like at the beginning. Every single thing that they had gone out and found, they shoved it into their course. Well, what we discovered is that finding the best resources is actually more important than finding a bunch of resources. It's the quality, not the quantity that matters. And that is the conclusion of my presentation. I issue the invitation to all of you as well, there to share. I'm so glad that we've been able to use a lot of the stuff that you guys have produced and woven it into our existing curriculum. And thank you very much. Thank you. Questions for our speaker? Yes. How often do you find that your instructors will identify a resource open or not that they really like but doesn't quite fit with what they need and so they just create their own version of it? Does that happen a lot? Yes, because it becomes more time intensive to pick up each thing that's out there and look at it and determine it. So they're just like, you know what, I'll make my own stuff. It happens more in English and Science about 20% of the time. I'm sorry, English and Social Studies. Math and Science, it's pretty concrete. They either like it or they don't. And so there's a lot more teacher created material in our English and Social Studies courses. You said that interesting presentation. That you continue to support your teachers. Do you have any resources, a pool of resources which you use to build the capacity of your teachers as they go? And if you have, is it also available as we are? The reason why I'm asking is that we are working in the same area and I think one of the biggest challenges is really to find suitable teachers to do the online and support the learners through that. But it means it's finding a whole new person to develop a whole new toolbox if you like of resources to build the capacity of those teachers as they go. So if you have such pools of resources I would be happy to know where to find it, thank you. So a couple of things, great question. I explained our hiring process. So we try and hire teachers that are a good match, that are going to be successful in the first place. Obviously that's optimal, right? But it's a lot harder to walk into a school and say, hey guess what everybody, we're going to do digital, we're going to do online, it's going to be awesome, here's how that works. So what we have designed, we have a very robust and rigorous evaluation process where we evaluate our teachers three times a year with an administrator or curriculum director and then they do an artifact at the end of the year, a portfolio, it's actually in slide rocket and we take the standards for the state, there are five different sections and then we take some of the stuff that we want them to do as teachers for the school, the faculty expectations and they put together a slide rocket presentation which they narrate and then they show documentation as it goes through. They're actually very fascinating to watch and way better than having to go through links or even sit down with them in person and then we can share those among the faculty and what happens is again it's that level of transparency where they say, oh I didn't know that you were using Camtasia this way and you were using Google Docs to do this, that's great and so the rising tide lifts all boats principle is kind of applying with our teachers. I'm happy to share any of that with you if you'd be interested. Hi, I was wondering if you've done any experiments with student created resources. That, not probably in the way that you're thinking of but that is something that we're moving toward. We are doing some student publications with the virtual ink blot is the name of our literary magazine that we're doing this year and we're moving into that realm. We had to stabilize our faculty first to have that stable foundation and then we're branching out into having some student publication stuff. Oh sorry, Joseph. I have two questions. Can you say a word about who your students are and I take it the numbers are terribly small compared to other open schools around the world. That's because you're still in the start-up phase. Yes, we're actually capped by the state as a public charter school so our cap is 1500 but it's a roll out we ramp up a few a couple hundred students each year and then our student population, that's a great question it's one of my favorite questions to answer they come from all walks of life we have homeschool students who their parents wake up in ninth grade and the thought of trying to teach them chemistry in French and English nine and all of the other things scares them and they say we're going to send you to high school David's son is actually at our school in those similar circumstances we have students who are athletes one of our kiddos just won a gold and a bronze medal in the winter Olympics took his laptop with him to Switzerland and did his school work on the slopes in between his practices so we have the kids who have already identified their passions and are living them at our school with them we have quite a large population of students who their needs just weren't being met in a traditional bricks and mortar setting whether they were bullied or maybe they have ADD or Asperger's or Autism or some sort of disability that would make them be a little more judged by their peers and the computers are a great equalizer for them, they're judged on what they put for their words and their work and their effort instead of what they look like or how they behave and then we have our advanced learners who maybe they only need 20 minutes and we're giving every single student the one size fits all 50 minutes per class if you can do it in 20, fantastic we also have the opposite end that may need 75 that's okay too You mentioned that your teachers have difficulties initially identifying the right resources to use so did you give them any guidelines as to how to now assess the the store of resources which one, any guidelines? Yes, we actually have a full-time curriculum director and that's her job to train the teachers and we have kind of a manual that they go through a lot of it is this process that I just described that here's your list of staple places that have resources typically the teachers find a couple that they really like to go to places they try those first if they can't find something then they'll try maybe their second tier and then they get frustrated and give up and build it themselves Have you done any comparisons between students going through your program and schools going through center public education that we might be able to use in other states? We have our state mandated test scores from the end of the year ours are 10% above the state average that's one of the comparisons that we have between the public schools across the state this last year our school ranked 6 in the state for our science CRT scores so we have that as a standard comparison we don't have any other data that correlates well It's worth adding though 10% of our average in this case is almost two thirds of the standard you said you're cataloging content against the core standards which a lot of states use can we get access to some of that cataloging so we might be able to use some of that Thinkfinity, YouTube Yes All of our stuff is available it's ocw.openhyschool.org We teach through it first for a year before it's released and so our stuff that's aligned to Common Core won't be released until a year from September but all of our stuff that we have already taught through is available at ocw.openhyschool.org I have two questions one is there a library librarian and what's the role and two what about literary works how do you deal with that Our curriculum director is kind of our curator and she takes care of she strips out the Swiss cheese stuff that was spoken of earlier today anything that's fair use before it's released publicly and so there is a little bit of stripping that goes on before we can send our courses out publicly but we do try and stay within the CC licensed materials as much as possible sometimes there just isn't stuff that we can use and so then we supplement with fair use Thank you Our last speaker David Wiley Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University where it also leads the Access to Knowledge Initiative Okay I don't have slides I just want to make a couple of high level kind of field level comments about issues of quality and high quality supply and maybe use some examples from the web to illustrate a couple of points the first point I'd like to make is that quality is not a property of a resource some of you have heard me say this before so I apologize but I think several of you haven't heard me say this before quality is not a property of a resource so if I have an open educational resource it could be very accurate but if it's in a language that's not appropriate for me then even though you might consider it high quality I would not consider it high quality if I'm reading at elementary school level and you've got a great resource about the history of the local geography and interesting things that have happened there but it's written at a college level and I read it at an elementary school level then that's not a high quality resource for me so that issues of quality are never only issues of the resource quality is a function of a combination of a resource and a user so there's no resource that you can create that's universally high quality for a number of years in OER we've strived and we've struggled and we've tried to create this high quality supply that will be great that everyone can just pick up and use because it is high quality it's not possible to create a universally high quality resource and I don't know if we forget that or if it's just really inconvenient so we ignore it and don't want to think about it but it's something this idea that we could drive one resource we could make it better and better and better and better until finally it achieved this high quality status that it could be useful to everyone it's just not true we've heard that a little bit in the way these courses are adopted or adapted rather Delana talked about how they try to revise their own but those revisions run down a very particular path and this is a place where open educational resources are very different from open source software so if open source software is something that you knew before that you use as a metaphor to think about OER this is a place where OER is very different because in the case of open source software you take a project and you put it on a source forage or a github or some place like that and the idea is that people are going to contribute to it and contribute to it and make it better over time and the worst possible thing that can happen to an open source project is mitigating this a little bit but historically the worst thing that could happen to an open source project is for that project to be forked so someone to take the project take it over here start making changes to it and not contribute those changes back to the core project there's a lot of work going on making it faster, optimizing it adding new features that aren't making it back into the core version of the software so forking is sort of a nuclear option in the case of software but the idea about open educational resources actually forking is exactly the behavior that we would want to see because the changes that I would make to make this piece of material speak really directly and clearly to my students would break that material for your students possibly as I use examples about Mount Tempanogus out behind the house and these kinds of rocks and whatever maybe you don't have mountains behind your school and maybe those kinds of rocks don't even exist where you are and so the idea that we're all going to take we're going to improve these resources and roll up all of our changes into one super improved version would be like some kind of edit war in Wikipedia where you'd be writing over top of it over and over and changing it and changing it back educational materials don't accrue improvements in quality in the same way that software does because these because quality is a combination of the resource in a user or a group of users improvements in quality are only meaningful in the context of that group of users so we can't push them back up to the world and expect that to happen I want to show a couple of quick examples here if I can keep that from rolling away let's see here there's a programming language called Ruby I don't know if any of you are familiar with it doesn't matter if you're familiar with the language or not but this is a tutorial about Ruby that looks like every other beginning computer tutorial that you've ever seen factually accurate okay factually accurate but not very engaging why is it not very engaging? well it's trying to reach the broadest audience it possibly can so there's not a lot of personality there's not a lot of local flavor so it's very kind of dry and neutral trying not to offend or put anyone off and trying to be as broadly applicable as it can contrast this with another tutorial called wise poignant guide to Ruby this is the cover of the book here's an example of a chapter from the book if I take you back to maybe chapter 2 oh here we go so in this case there are these cartoon foxes in this one chapter now every chapter is different but in this case there's this ongoing dialogue back and forth between the author of the material and the cartoon foxes so the author is giving examples of how you do print statements in Ruby and the foxes are saying hey say something really loud maybe he'll put it in an example and the other foxes what like chunky bacon and so they start yelling it a little bit and he's still going on giving his examples that are ignoring the foxes but at some point the foxes prevail on him after yelling a lot and you can see here now that in giving examples of variables he finally uses chunky bacon and the foxes proceed to congratulate themselves woohoo we're in the book when you see a ruby tutorial like this you immediately know if you love it or hate it but you can't feel in between about this tutorial contrast it to the first tutorial which you can neither love nor hate very objective, very dry no personality trying not to offend anyone but at the same time not exciting anyone for the same reason because this idea that quality is a property of a resource and a person so I think one of the things that's great about OER is it provides us these opportunities to take basic OER maybe like that first tutorial and turn them into things with personality and voice that will speak to some people even though they won't speak to others they don't have to speak to everyone they need to speak to your students and promote learning in your context and then other people can be inspired by them to make other changes for their local context one slightly less crazy one that I'll show an example from Flatworld that I worked on with some of my students Flatworld has a great project management textbook that's openly licensed that we could jump in here and read and look at the table of contents for and hear the contents over here about introduction to project management and how to profile projects about how complex they're going to be but this is really written for a business school kind of context and the examples in this book are examples about international construction projects and ordering concrete and making sure it gets there on time which is great if you're in the business school but I teach in the ed school however Flatworld openly licenses their books so last year with I don't know if I can type and talk at the same time last time with some of my students we got together and we took this book and said let's remix this book and let's take this book which is a great book for someone else but it's not high quality for us and let's make it into a high quality book for us so you can see that our attribution here at the top project management for instructional designers is an adaptation of this book published generously published under an open license by Flatworld et cetera but if you jump in here and look what you'll see is you'll see new artwork that looks kind of more like students you'll see these yellow boxes that have examples in them many of them have been rewritten to be from an educational perspective I guess this one hasn't particularly but you also see that we've added these interactive mastery checks at the bottom so we went through this resource and we took it apart and said it was high quality for the group it was originally intended for we can make it high quality for us but we can do that without breaking theirs so we don't go on to Flatworld site and try to edit their book out from under them oh we also shot this series of three case studies that run throughout all the chapters with practicing instructional design project managers talking to them about what they do so we added these interactive assessments we added some videos we rewrote the case studies but we didn't break Flatworld's book when we did it we forked it and we made it work for us so now this book works for two sets of people and it could work for more all of this to say that Kathy today made the point about infrastructure she didn't quite connect the dots as tightly as I wish she would have because what I wanted her to say is that OER is infrastructure there's work that we all do in education that depends on content can you imagine teaching and learning without content you can't it's a critical infrastructure for what we do and to Joey's point yesterday when that infrastructure is reasonable quality and it's freely available and it's available to everyone it lowers the cost to innovate lowers the time to innovate and when there's good quality infrastructure we can try lots of different things now we don't typically get excited I'm going to say typically because I know this is not a universally true statement we don't typically get really excited about electricity with some obvious exceptions to that rule or about water or about roads or the kinds of things that we think of as infrastructure and so the idea that we would be really excited about OER boggles my brain a little bit because you don't get excited about electricity for the sake of electricity you get excited about electricity because there are things you can do now that you couldn't do before because you have electricity and oh my gosh I've got a building that there's a road to the building there's electricity and there's water to the building now think of all the things I can do I'm not excited just because there's water there think of what I can do that I couldn't do before right so if we were focusing so much on OER I think it would be great if we could elevate the dialogue in the field to stop confusing the means with the ends and say OER is infrastructure what can we do now that we have this infrastructure which there's a lot of and there's more every day and it's reasonable quality and it is free and we have the permissions we need to fork and make copies and make them better for our own particular purposes what can we imagine what can we do on top of that infrastructure it's hard to be excited about the means when the ends are so much more promising I think I'll stop there we have about five minutes to ask questions to our last speaker and to make a brief conversation before reconvening back first of all questions for our speaker if not are there any points that we want to make trying to connect together these four presentations most of all I will try since there were no volunteers I will try to make a synthesis for the plenary of this session what do you think are the most important points I think definitely what we just heard is a crucial important point but we also heard other interesting experiments what do you think we should isolate and bring back to the plenary I'll do it of course keeping in mind to hear about quality we heard the formal process of ensuring quality of a certain kind with the virtual university for the small states we heard the experience of the high school yes we heard South Africa and importance of localizing certain resources which is directly connected to what we heard from David Wiley and it's connected with the experience of the heterogeneous kinds of states in the virtual university other points yes I think a key issue is the utility of the materials are more important than qualities that it has because it's utility for a population or a purpose and that we often confuse those aspects of other people's judgment the other issue is around the importance of how do I find what's useful to me based on trusting the work of other people and a lot of our quality assurance processes are designed to help me make a quick efficient judgment of whether this will work for me and I think the presenter before us that collaboration is essential to build a trust among a community of people so I can spend a little less time figuring out if it will work for me right if I can decline what you translate in another way which is just said a sample of the Ruby tutorial let's say that I don't know much about Ruby but I'm interested in making it more something very engaging for a specific community I could start with a boring tutorial but I have to trust it unless I'm a Ruby specialist myself you want to I think a different presentation is also identifying how difficult it's not a trivial task to utilise OER for your own purposes so it's often requiring quite a lot of skill as an instructional designer to use the job in order to do that and I think that's an important lesson Yes I think I get the sense that in using OER but then if you prepare the ground prepare the ground for a substance of this of a new way any other attempt to help me in reporting the session I think we have it's complicated we can just say it's complicated like on Facebook okay if not I think it's 14.5 so we can stop here thank you for attending this presentation and thank you to the speakers