 So, you have to be gentle to me for two reasons. The first is that I'm on the market. So this is actually somebody else's talk, and I'll explain a little bit more about markets in here in a couple of minutes. The second reason is that it's currently got one name in South Africa, so my body is still very much in the wrong time zone, so be gentle. So I'm going to tell you just a little bit briefly about Ciabulla, so the organization... I was just going to check... Do I need it? I think music keeps people up here. So tell you just a little bit briefly about Ciabulla, so the organization that I'm working with, and then a bit more. So what the stalk is actually about is about taking an organization from, an OER organization from a foundation-funded model, so we're funded by the Shadowwood Foundation, to something self-sustaining. So we're currently in that transition phase, and it's an interesting time, and not always easy. So I'll talk a little bit about OER, and a little bit about trying to build something commercial using OERs. So we're a small organization, about eight permanent people, a couple more temporary people right now, for reasons I'll explain later as well. And basically what we're about to stand here for a little while. So first of all, it's a typical OER setup, so I don't think I have to explain much of that to you, we usually have to explain more of this to the other folks about that. But the idea is we want to help provide more open educational resources. We want to find better ways of using technology, and better ways of presenting material, curriculum-aligned material to learners, to teachers. And another big part of what we do is supporting communities, specifically teacher communities, to help them to know more about open educational resources, open licenses, use of technology in the classroom, and to basically help them help themselves. So as I said, a lot of this is probably similar to what other people are doing. One of the big differences is just the context we work in. So we are focused very much on the South African context, where this is one of the types of scenarios we have to work with. So you have a classroom, it tends to be fairly large, so 40 to 50 kids, not much in terms of resources. So this is the one scenario, but on the other hand, we also have this scenario. So this is a photo from a private school called Parklands, not far from where I live. And they have decided quite recently that from the beginning of the next school year, which starts in January in South Africa, every kid has to have an apple on top, end of story. The parents pay for it and they can afford it. And so this is the other end of the spectrum. So it's a very wide variety of context to work with, but this is the reality for us. So our main product, as far as what we produce so far is concerned, is a set of free-available textbooks. As I said, focusing on the South African curriculum. And at this stage, the focus on two subjects, so mathematics and physical science, four grades, 10, 11, 12. So this has been around for a while, this has existed for a while. And the interesting thing about these are two interesting things. One is just how do we distribute these books, and the other is how do we create them. In terms of distribution, and again within this South African context, online is okay, but not great. So internet penetration in South Africa is less than 20%. And again, this is very much also at the higher end of the scale, so like the second photo, not the first one that you saw earlier. So if we do adjust this, that is definitely not enough. You won't have a kind of broad impact that we're hoping for. However, everybody has a mobile phone. And this is sort of, it's not just South Africa that's like this, much of Africa that's like this. People who don't have access to good homes or running water have a mobile phone. So we actually, so 100% is out of date, we actually have something like 110% penetration. So we have more than one phone per person in the country. So what we've done with the textbooks to help address this is to make it available on mobile platforms, and by which I do not mean smartphone. The smartphone is a computer with a browser. So that falls in the previous category. Regular mobile phones that are web-enabled. And so here is a photo of a very, very simple version, so this is not a high-end phone. You can see text, and I don't have a photo of this portion, but you can see simple images as well. So what we've done to achieve this is to have the content, the textbook content, available on a platform called Connections, which some of you might know of, and then created basically a new theme, a new skin for it. So there's a proxy server between the mobile phone and Connections, which pulls the content from Connections and applies the skin to it to make it render properly on the mobile phone. So that's scenario number two. Scenario number three is hard copy textbooks are still the way to go if you want to reach every learner in the country. End of story. So whatever we do, we also have to produce a PDF of something that you can print. And I'll get back to this a little bit later, so much of what we're doing right now is getting the next revision of these books ready in time for the school year. And again, first prize is, have the physical textbook ready so that we can print it out and give it to the kid. Second prize is, also have it on a mobile phone. Third prize, or at least an afterthought, is have it online. Right, so in terms of producing textbooks, so this is only half a joke. So I mentioned before that the books we have right now are maths and physical science, which includes physics and chemistry and the scientific curriculum, for grades 10, 11 and 12. Two weekends ago, I believe, we had a script in our offices, with 20 teachers for two days, and the idea was to write a textbook, and this is the Life Sciences textbook, so that's Life Sciences, the new name for biology, and some of those are quite a chemistry, so I showed you that. And the short version is that it basically worked. So after two days, meaning 48 hours, from lunchtime Friday into lunchtime Sunday, we had 20 teachers, pretty much all day, I have to add, they're stuck inside very large offices, and they had computers, they had access to the internet, they also brought along their own notes, so we encourage them to bring their own notes, work examples whenever they have, and then do two things. The first is try and make them more comfortable with the process of writing a textbook that's going to be open, and that's going to be online, and with all the other, on a platform, connections with all this stuff that comes along, people can view it, use it, change it, do whatever they like. The biggest challenge here is not so much the technology, but it's just getting uncomfortable with open licenses. So a typical teacher in Eastern South Africa is willing to take this set of notes and put it next to the photocopy machine in the school and then the teacher has copied it, because then it's sort of a contained exercise, but they're not comfortable with putting it online and letting anybody copy it. And then they say, well, I borrowed something here and I used it, but there, and I don't know if it's okay to just share this stuff. So part of what we do, so the raising awareness is just informing teachers about open licenses, how it works, and what you can and cannot do. And then based on that, we ask them to bring their notes of what they feel comfortable with sharing online under an RCC bi-license. And then there's also a bit of technology, but we've been developing tools that bring the technology a bit easier. So teachers, so during a sprint, like the one we had two weekends ago, they bring their own laptops, they can use their own web processors and they use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, whatever they have. And then we have some software in the background that converts from some document format into ConnectsML, the format used by Connections, and then a client for uploading the ConnectsML to the Connection server. And then on the tagline, we've tried to make it as easy as possible just to reduce that barrier. So by the end of two days, we had 300-plus pages with content, with text, images, not so much video, we'll look at that in a second, online and available. So it's actually a connection right now, you can download it. The caveat is that it's rough. So you can write the textbook in two days, but to finish it off the same group of teachers are currently involved in a revision process. So they leave each other's work, they can make comments, online annotator, whether you want to make a correction or any kind of comment on that. So this is one iteration where you gather comments and they are done again and they revise the material themselves. This is now happening in a distributed way so we don't pull all of them back to the offices again, they can do this wherever they are. This repeats a couple of times and the important thing is repeating, so iteration, and type feedback. So you want people to be able to comment on other people's work and to receive comments on their own work as quickly as possible so that they can incorporate those suggestions, corrections, whatever into the next version. You want to try and go through as many versions, as many revisions as you can within the amount of time that you have. And so it is by the end of this we have what we typically call version zero of the book, so something that we are willing to give to somebody to try and use in a classroom, but it's not what we would consider a publishable book just yet. And we have had people use version zero of some of our previous books, the Maths and Physical Science books, successfully in the classroom, so they don't use it as the only textbook, but as a supplementary resource and it's free. So they can choose to use it or not. They can choose to pick a particular chapter or section and ignore all the others. And that's just fine, that's all covered under the open license. So that's all great and up until now as I said, we're still funded by the Channel With Foundation but that's going to come to an end fairly soon and not sure when exactly, either at the end of February or at the end of next February. But pretty soon. So the question is how do you move from this foundation funded Generating Open Resources model to something where you can still keep doing that but have a source of revenue or more than one source of revenue. And there are some problems with this. So one thing you could do is you could say, well there's all this content let's try and make our textbooks and sell the textbooks or something like that. So in essence taking volunteers' contributions volunteers' content contributions and then selling that on somehow. And the problem with that is that a lot of what we're doing is not just creating content but building communities of teachers and other volunteers. We also have quite a few graduate students helping out with these experience. And so you're basically breaking that sort of relationship, breaking the trust here with them the effort that they put in for free, well they pay with something like that. But essentially for free. And then if you're monetizing that and using that as a stream of revenue as proper for the company then you're breaking that relationship. So that's a hard one to do and where we're steering that. And the second problem is on the one hand you want to reach as many people as possible especially, so again just sort of places in the South African context we have serious problems nationwide, especially in rural areas with under-resourced schools, with textbooks getting to the schools, with teachers not doing what they're supposed to do. There are serious problems. So one of our aims is to get educational resources to the kids as broadly as we can. But if we want to make money from some things we have to put it behind a payable. So if you want to get it to everybody you can't charge for it. If you want to charge for it then you run the risk that you can't get it to everybody. So there's this tension so that you have to try and figure out which bits can be make free available for everybody to still achieve our aims and which bits can be monetized in order to have a source of revenue. Right, so in terms of what is free, so this is just briefly what is currently free and what will stay free within sort of the sustainability model is the textbook itself. The online version of the textbook and also the mobile version of the textbook which is enriched. So the physical textbook you can't have things like videos and simulations and they're both in the online version and the mobile version you can. So here all of these things are video simulations those are all pulled from other open resources and we're distributing them along with the rest of our open content in a nicely sort of package, South African curriculum aligned version and that stays free. There are also exercises in the books where you go online to find work solutions to the exercises and that stays free and this is just a mock-up so it's not very pretty but the idea is you want to see the textbook on one side and have Q and A on the other side so we're also currently actually developing which is why this is a mock-up but it's basically a forum but the idea is that the forum it has hooks into the textbook so you view the textbook online and while you're browsing the textbook you can see little icons down the margin so a particular student had a problem I'm sorry a question about a particular section they can ask it and get answers from either the students or from teachers or from volunteers or anybody who's answering questions and you can follow the discussion alongside the textbook so in context and the idea is that when you have trouble in a particular section and if you're viewing the book online or on your phone then you will be notified where there's some discussion going on and either you can just go read the discussion to get some more information or if you're also having trouble understanding a particular section you can go look at the discussion to see if it's already been addressed or otherwise start a new question to get your answers okay so first off we thought okay we provide some additional services for the books but we have to get the books out there so we have the free books and then the one thing you have to do in South Africa to distribute your books to schools is get on something at school the government approved list especially because they recently changed the curriculum they had this whole process of publishers and everybody who's interested in selling textbooks to students revising their textbooks to align with the new curriculum submitting them to government for review and then some of them get on some of them don't if you're on the list then teachers are allowed to buy your book if you're not on the list they're not even allowed to buy your book at all you're just not in the picture they can use your book as an additional resource but they do also have to buy at least one or exactly one book from the government so it's a pretty big deal if you're interested as we are in getting your books to kids in schools the short version is we didn't get on to the list so that's the problem because now teachers don't even have access to buying your book but then what happened that was an interesting twist is then the government folks got back to us and they said well you're not on the list but we're still interested in printing your books ourselves they're free right so we can print them and well the answer is yes but then sort of the annoying part is well there goes part of your revenue stream like if you're interested in selling books to teachers then and if the government is just going to print them for every kid in the country that kills off the revenue from selling books and a bunch of other opportunities so what ended up happening is so we do have to we currently and this is why nobody else from the company is here in the process of updating the books based on a new set of specifications that were hashed out during a workshop with some people from government and curriculum experts in the whole deal and they said if we're going to pay you to make these changes and then we're going to print the books for everybody from the broad reach perspective it wasn't so it was a really big deal it's a little bit of a crunch thing because very little time to do it and people at the office aren't getting much sleep right now but it's worthwhile and so from our end the business model is now books go to everybody and we want hooks from the books to other available resources so things that are online or on the mobile phone and the same way that you have hyperlinks on web pages we put short codes random sequences of numbers and letters in the books where you can go to the website or onto the mobile site and type in that code and that'll take you to the relevant link, whatever it might be it could be a video that we can't show in the book we show the short code and say if you type this in then you'll see the video online and that's still free video simulations, solutions to exercises all of this stuff you can get online as well so it is a kid in a classroom or at home with a physical textbook work through it and if they want to see something extra use their mobile phone, type in a short code and get the video or whatever it might be and then because so this is basically our mechanism for driving people from the physical textbook to the website or the mobile site and there we can offer additional services the the two things we're looking at at this stage for actually generating revenue two paid services we're looking at one is again Q&A but this time Q&A answers from an expert so if you're sitting somewhere and this is actually a real use case in South Africa or maybe other parts of the world as well where you have either a poor teacher or an absentee teacher and you're sufficiently motivated yourself to work through the book but you get stuck somewhere who do you ask so this is where the ask an expert comes in or you're a kid, you're busy working on something at home and you have a good teacher but you would like an answer right now and you're willing to pay for it or you can afford to pay for it that's the one the second one is online practice if I have a slide I think I have one a bit later but I'll just talk about it now online practice, so you've done the exercises in the book but you want to practice some more and especially when it gets to exam time you want to practice some more questions in preparation for your test exam or whatever it might be so the second thing we're working on is an online basically it's a mixture of an online assessment bank and the user interface to learners they can answer questions get word solutions and the system tracks their responses so it starts building up a picture of how well they're doing and it measures their progress and the plan we're not there yet but the plan for the future is to use that picture of how well a person is doing to make suggestions to that individual, to the student but what they could do to improve so you could give them more practice exercises on a particular topic if you're having trouble with that one topic if the teachers are connected to the system they could get some feedback on which concepts that they're struggling with and then intervene on specific things rather than trying to teach the same thing to actually everybody over time so these are the kinds of things we're looking at and I sort of left that for last because in order to make this work we actually have an interesting scenario now where we've been doing everything under CCB but except for the the new revision of the textbooks that is being worked on right now that is under CCB so any meaning no derivative the opposite of SA and the reason is if we leave it under CCB and give it to the government they can print it or they can change it and so we actually we talked to them about this and we made sure that they're okay with it and they said yes so leaving it under CCB we put one or two pages of essentially advertising material in the front of the book but basically it's just saying there exists this website with additional resources this is how you access it and the short code so they links from the book to the online resources we can leave that in and they can't take it out this is what's going to make the business model the sustainability model work so there's still the CCB version but there's no CCB and D version part of what we're planning on doing is so we want to uptake the books and it's one of the wonderful things open education resources is you can keep uptake them so we part of the the plan is we get teachers and this is already happening to annotate the current version of the books we bring out the book there's an online annotator, you can hide a bunch of text and type the comments and then for the next revision so basically for the next school year we get an editor and try to incorporate as many of those suggestions, corrections whatever there might be into the next version of the book so that every year or I guess once it stabilizes this might not happen every year but in principle every year you could bring out a new version of the book that is significantly better than the previous one until you reach a point where the book is sort of in a stable and good so that's where the CCB site comes in and then where the CCB idea is just the latest version of the book is basically under the license so we still have something that we can use the same people to so what's in the ND version aside from these two pages that's different from the CCB at this stage a whole bunch of revisions that came out of this workshop with government folks so doesn't that make your CCB version kind of die yes but we don't feel bad about it because every kid in the country is going to have one anyway so that's why we have the CCB and because of this revision process and that you can basically think of it as a sort of a bit of a delay the latest version is under CCB the latest minus one version is under CCB so all the revisions go in next year to the CCB version or for the next four years sorry for January so basically I'm basically sort of dealing with my students the government pay for books for the students so what attracted them to this whole process is that they get to have a say in what the book looks like which is not something that they have with the traditional publishers the publishers take the curriculum that's published by the government go through it write their textbook put it into the process of getting them to the approved listening they make it or they don't end of story here the government officials and their curriculum experts and whoever they want to invite they have a say in what's going to go into the book they can say well I feature we want you to change these specific things for these reasons and I think we're happy with that and I think that's a very big part of what what's putting them in so the MD clause is a really really extreme way to make sure that those two pages stay in did you talk about or consider having a separate clause that just required those pages stay in but still allow other kinds of derivatives so making a custom license exactly you're adding a clause to the qualification of what the by attribution yeah I was just thinking that like could you say proper attribution of this is inclusion of these two pages you know you wouldn't be able to do that in connection with them we don't like to customize that but it would be a much so it would have to keep the two pages and all the links from the book to the site um attribution clause I think well I guess the question is if you know if MD is the tool you're using within the Creative Commons license to sort of keep this little bit of information in it also occurs sort of cranking down on a lot of legitimate modifications and just you know were you married using Creative Commons licenses or were you even discussed using a custom license part of the reason why the old MD thing why I don't feel that bad about it is because it's a living project and it's a project so the thing that's currently under CC by MD will within a year or two be under CC by I mean in a way and this is where this is a cinematic thing using the sort of the cutting edge version of whatever you have to try make money but still eventually releasing and eventually is not a long time it's not 10 years or 5 years even it's 1 or 2 years releasing everything you have under CC by yeah so we didn't really have a very big long discussion about this in part because of time constraints in part because CC by MD is an easy thing to understand in comparison to hashing or something and they're doing it once like 10th grade books that got on to the the list so yeah I'm kind of concerned about this too but it is an experiment it's not their one child library books yet unless it's widely successful but there's some other way to do it it would be it seems like this is sort of like journals that have some form of an open access policy where after 6 months the author can do with it what she wants so you've got this time limit where MD goes away and then after that it becomes shareable so there's months for it out there do you at first think that this book is CC by MD until this date and after because this we know make sure that after I mean this is what I did with some some movie that okay I can allow me to use my music but make sure that on January 1st 2012 this is CC by SA and another question that was really surprising for me maybe because I also come from a young democracy that that you that you feel that the government feeling with the content of the textbooks I mean because most of the time we've been in Poland we think about the future of textbooks is how to make the government not in a position which we make unable to in any way fill with content so it's very political I mean we care about the content right and we care a little bit about the curriculum because we have to make stuff along to the curriculum but we really care about the content and so it's a painful process to talk to government people because they're very online about certain things when it comes to content sometimes for political reasons and so I guess the one positive thing on that front in terms of the workshop is it wasn't just a situation where they told us what they want and then we had to go do it it was it wasn't actually a workshop so we had significant inputs in what ends up in the final book so we fought back on a whole bunch of things and some of them they redented on some of them they didn't but if you want to it's a trade off between making exactly what we want and not just going to go on folks on the one hand and getting the book to every learner in the country on the other hand sorry I keep saying learner that's the news South African word for students so maybe students in the country on the other hand in the longer so in the short run it's more important to us to a spread our name and we get people to just be aware of the content and the additional services whether they're free or not some of them are free some of them are not to make them aware of that which at this stage most people are not but within a year or two they will be and then the picture changes a lot so we were so yeah so having government that input into the process is both painful and helpful and we do get to push back and we're also in the end the ones we're still the ones who write the books the the only bit of changes is they review the books now so there's a sort of formal review at the end of this month when it's already happening but there's sort of the deadline at the end of the month but they then go through and say we're going to print it one thing that counts in our favor and don't repeat this there's going to be people as a government folks are kind of lazy so once you've had the workshop and you've shown them something that looks okay they're worst likely going to say at the end they're going to say yeah it's fine but you think they would have been energetic enough to go and remove all your leaves your little embedded sneaky leaves do you know what they're doing? well maybe not the two pages yeah they couldn't be filled with those that I can see that making the issue one more question I think we're out of time so if anybody wants to leave don't feel bad but I'm happy to answer more questions