 All right. It's the top of the hour. Let's begin. Let me welcome everyone. Let me welcome you to the future transform I'm very very glad to see some of you here. We have a terrific guest and a very very important topic But before we get started with that, let me just give you a quick intro to the forum and the technology So you can see what we do how it works and where we're headed So to begin with you should know the forum is a discussion based place This is where we have conversations about the future of education What I'm doing right now is showing you a couple of slides will stop in just a minute The goal here is to have as much discussion between people as possible Now this is one part of a broader project called the future of education observatory And that's an ongoing multimodal multimedia Participatory attempt to grapple with higher education's future that includes the forum. It also includes a monthly FTTE report which looks at major trends It also includes a very active blog includes a book club and it includes a lot more besides that So if you're new to it, just check out future of education dot us to learn more Now we could only do this work with the support of some generous supporters And we'd like to thank them before we proceed to begin with I'd like to thank nizer net in New York State It's a nonprofit that does great work with broadband networks helping that states colleges and universities connect to each other They also do great professional development work, and we're really grateful to them for their support Well, we're also grateful to Shindig our technology provider who makes available this platform We're using now so if you're new to it or if you haven't seen it for a while Let me just walk you through how to use this to participate in our conversation To begin with where I am right now where the slide is again just for a minute is called the stage And we call it that because everyone involved in this conversation can see and hear everything that goes out on stage And this is where our guest is going to be in just a minute, and this is where you can be I'll show you how to do that right below us You'll see a bunch of people maybe 20 maybe 12 depending on where you are each represented by either an image or Like or a silhouette like Mark H or a video feed like Tom Hames And each of those represents one or more people signing in from somewhere in the world I think of that as the participants swarm and you'll see people there move back and forth as they go If you're interested in those people or an individual particular You can double click on them and see if you can have a video chat privately, which is pretty neat But about that conversation look at the bottom of your screen if you're on the show on a laptop or a desktop You should see a white strip running along it with a few different buttons The leftmost edge will be a button for a chat box So you can click that and up will be a chat box with everybody involved in this conversation So just before we go further. Can you just enter that chat box and just type in Who you are and where on earth you're coming from today geographically? I was just saying that I wanted to thank our supporters on patreon Patreon is a crowdfunding site which lets people support a creative project in this case is supporting the future of education Observatory so people contribute as little as a dollar a month to keep the machines running and we're which is awesome There's something to contribute more people on the slides contribute $10 a month to keep the machines going people like Fritz van Dover Matthew B. Henry William Michelle Francine Hibiscus Colleen Carmen Hugh Blackmer Kristen Eshelman, Melissa Wu We're really grateful of them and you can join them if you like just go to patreon.com slash Brian Alexander And one last note a little bit of self-promotion My new book is out. It's in stores called academia next on the futures of higher education it relies a lot on the kind of work we've been doing here for the past four years and Sales have been good if you'd like to join them just pick it up from Amazon or Johns Hopkins University Press But we really would be very glad if you can if you can support us. Let us know what you think of the book So now that's all my way of introduction. Let me introduce this week's guest I'm absolutely delighted to bring in Richard Barnick Richard is the founder and director of open stacks at Rice University in Texas This is one of the leading open education research projects out there It's a very very important project and we're really fortunate to have its Presiding genius with us today Richard. Welcome Great to be here. Well, I'm just I'm really really glad to see you Tell tell us just for the sake of American winter. How cold is it down there in Texas right now? It's actually a What do we have here? It's unfortunately a bit gray and cool in Houston about 50 degrees and it should be clear and sunny and 70 but can't win them all 50. Wow That's rough well Listen, I have so many questions to ask you and I know our participants will have so many questions as well But just to begin with let me just start you going as a way of introducing yourself to people For the rest of 2020 for the calendar year, what are the big issues and projects you're going to be working on? So around open stacks First yourself. Oh I have to clean my pantry I Probably some volunteers to help you with exactly. So, yeah, this is a great I'm very excited about 2020 We're going on the open stack side of things. We're going to be launching some Significantly growing our library. We're currently at about 40 books. We're gonna be announcing some initiatives to greatly increase that size in some really exciting subject areas. So that's one area very Excited about is just providing more high quality educational content to the people who need it most students in this country and then the second thing that I'm very excited about is Continuing to grow the Learning science aspects around open stacks Using the data that we're collecting Studies that we're conducting with instructors and school districts around the country to Be able to really learn more about how people learn because our ultimate goal is to build Not any old textbook, but build an intelligent textbooks Hmm. So not just a PDF flat out exactly a book that would learn about you and just as you're learning from it Well, that's great, I'm glad to hear that that's gonna be worked on Let me just say friends. I have lots of questions for Richard But this forum is here for you. We'd love to hear your thoughts in your questions So as we go Please chime in if you've used open stacks textbooks or you're considering using them If you're interested in OER from everything from how to finance it to how to get it adopted to how to make OER Content if you're interested in the creative comments part of the technology backend, this is the place for you to ask questions So let me ask a question from 20 I Mean I've been working in and following the open space since about 2000 and one of the big questions always is how do you get faculty to actually assign these things? I mean persuading students is a lot easier I'm wondering what have you learned from the course of open stacks? What what succeeds in convincing faculty members to assign and adopt? Yeah, yeah to adopt why I This yeah, so this I have been involved in this space That's now called open educational resources, but the space of open source meets Education meets authoring meets publishing for actually just over 20 years 1999 So I've learned a lot of lessons Along the way and that the the The main lesson that that I have learned as far as driving Adoptions is that is that you really have to meet you have to meet the adopters, which in this case of the instructors You have to meet them more than halfway What does that mean? Well what it means let me tell the store. I'll tell it as a story. So when I became involved in this world it was it was Developing an initiative called connections some out there might know about yeah, and which was I The idea was to have a some kind of digital platform that would allow Anyone in the world to be able to generate you know to author and then to edit Educational materials that could be connected together in a web right so to show how ideas are connected in interesting and very useful ways And it's fun that we just hit the 20th anniversary of Connections and But the problem was is that the model was too too bleeding edge if you will right, so it was it was It was too difficult for folks a physics instructor at a university or community college to just Adopt this idea as a way of replacing their you know other learning materials and so the the the pivot or the the new realization occurred to us in the early 2010 so about 2010-11 and that was that rather than just building a platform build it and they will come We needed to meet faculty more than halfway and we actually needed to start developing our own content. So so Just from talking to hundreds of faculty we realized that if we didn't have something that was turnkey That they could replace what they're using now with this new thing It was just too difficult because they're too busy, right faculty are very very busy And so that's why we went into the business which we hadn't hadn't been up to that point We are a purely technology project Into the business of actually publishing right so that's what we renamed the initiative open stacks 2012 just to signify this change in thinking around just technology To technology best content that help well that helps a lot So reducing the content and getting it there, but then how do you how do you overcome some of the problems and anxieties? faculty face whether we are either that They have a hard time Finding the right content for their class. Yeah, they're suspicious of it not being a good enough quality I mean, how do you get past that? Yeah? So this was in that this is another this is a great question. This was another key Sort of realization right the trust aspect Turnkey so ease is one trust is another one and that's why again Instead of just saying to Instructors while here's a physics text. It was developed using this radical Wikipedia like model. Yeah, right? Trust it. It's got to be great, right? We went to we basically took all the best practices of the standard publishing model and We applied them with some new more agile business practices to lower the cost and the time it takes To develop the materials, but we develop our texts Just like Standard publisher, you know, we have there's hundreds of people work on these books They in in, you know, everyone from if we're say we're built building a biology text top faculty from around the country who are writing the material Copy editors art program folks folks generating, you know thousands of assessments and And the goal is really that if an instructor looks at one of our books They cannot tell the difference to one of the books that is has been is being sold for $360 by you know, one of the big publishers the big difference though is it is exactly zero dollars, right? So that's just and that required us to go from not a purely community-generated content model through a Venture philanthropy backed content development model We spend on average about eight hundred thousand dollars per book creating them, right? So that's the investment, but big foundations are willing to pay that cost because they know that the The return on investment to them the psychic return on investment is Currently about fourteen hundred percent. So what I mean by that is for every dollar that we bring in to create a book We're currently saving about fourteen dollars students are saving about fourteen dollars Right because they're using free books And so we're gonna cross through sometime this spring. We're gonna cross through a billion dollars in student savings Wow library. Yeah. Wow. Yeah That's fantastic So the venture philanthropy plays a key role in way absolutely and just realizing that Back gold team need to be yeah that they have a lot of They're extremely busy and they need to be able to make it You know just a choice, but then switch over easier, right in an easier way not a harder way. Yeah Make meeting them more than halfway. Yeah We have a question that already came in this from Dana Wilkie So let me flash this on the screen so you all can see it are the OER is ADA compliant for online courses Oh, great great great question we have a we have a Accessibility team and open stacks. I should mention that we we have a staff of about 75 Wow, and we yeah, we grown from the connections days of six right to 75 and we we are We're definitely at compliant at the The levels that are at, you know, absolutely necessary, but we are trying to extend into making our materials even more accessible to an even broader class or groups of students, but I'd be happy to connect you with our our Accessibility team if they'd like to if you'd like to dig into that more great question great question indeed Yeah, thank you so much. You have to be open for everyone right open for all not just yeah, some small Fraction of the education world indeed indeed questions been flying in and let me just say if you have video camera and microphone available just hit the raise hand button and you can ask us questions as well so this one just came in from Charlie Doyle is a student who says I used an open stacks biology textbook in online course at you the people great book Will you make textbooks more like a self-study standalone course like a turnkey MOOC with video lectures? Yeah, great question. So that's part definitely part of the this goes back to your earlier question and this Well, just I'll just answer it absolutely that's part of the plan However, if we had come out of the gate in 2012 Trying to tell instructors Who were who were at that time were more thinking about the cost issue? Right my students are having to choose between a $350 book and groceries Right. It's that bad if we had told them. Oh Why don't you and said move to this new? futuristic platform that has video lectures and it's all nugget tithes and personalized and it's just environment this Again, we would might have trouble on the trust side of things, right? So our our goal has always been Well not always been since the pivot is that instead of being completely bleeding edge We need to introduce these new ideas in a more Trojan horse like way Meaning that we need to have something that instructors are really comfortable with and that honestly even means selling paper books If you can believe that we sell a lot of paper books Extremely low-cost but again is for partly because there's people who really need those partly. It's because of the trust aspect But it is absolutely part of the plan that because all our content You don't see it when you go look at one of if a PDF file of one of our books, but they're already Componentized into learning objects They're already now flexible so you can rearrange them in different ways, and we've done a number of experiments with turn what what I we just to colloquially call it the super text book of where we take a Usual open-stack text and we have embedded in it you know video lectures videos of folks solving problems in different ways interactive simulations all kinds of other Activities that students that can get involved in and then with that we're really just epsilon away from What could be a MOOC, right? You really just need the? Sort of learning management system like capacity right so this is definitely a direction that we're moving in great question Well, it's a great question Charlie, and thank you Richard for that really really rich answer. That's really exciting Kate Herzog Librarian has a question as well Back to the faculty authors. She says do your authors realize any credit for their efforts in terms of acquiring tenure? great question so so our authors Our author's names go in the book And and they so that's as far as academic credit They they would get the same kind of academic credit working on one of our texts as Working on a text for one of the big publishers One one thing to note is that the textbooks that we've focused on and then people can click down there on the open Stacks button to to learn more, but we focused on these big intro level hundred love like 100 level Intro college courses things like calculus chemistry physics psychology sociology And those books by and large tend tend to be written by a team Even though there might be one person's name on the front that these are a 1400 page very voluminous Books and so they tend to be authored, you know buy a team and so You know you would get the same kind of credit With your you know chair Dean that you would working, you know with a regular With a regular publisher the other difference between our model and other you know We are initiatives and again back to connections. It was just a completely community driven Let's call it is Wikipedia like approach The other thing is that authors actually get paid So like I said, we're we're bringing in venture philanthropy to develop these books and we pay authors for their time and so I Would I would Throw out there that on average I would bet that our authors at open stacks actually end up with more money in their pocket Than authors who are doing their work Speculatively hoping that they're gonna get royalties Does anyone who's ever written a book knows or an academic book is that the promise of royalties? Often doesn't pay off like you like you'd hope Well, that's that's all too often true. Yeah, but this sounds like a fantastic model and thank you Kate for the really really important question Actually, I've learned something for me Brian. I love When I ramble you say I'm being rich that's excellent my rich response. Thanks for letting me ramble I'm not trying to make a terrible pun on your name No, no, just rich but when you ramble you're you say you're rambling, but you're providing an awful lot of information to people And if you go too far, I'll try and bring you back in but so it's all gold No, you'll see everybody that these have been questioned so far that folks have been putting through the question You know, let me just put some of the fun video right now. Do you know how that works? This is our longtime friend of the program and fellow Texan to you Richard. Tom Haynes. Hello Tom. Hey Can you hear me? Yep? Okay. See I even have the tote bag. Whoo. Whoo. I love it Oh good Well No, this is very useful. Let me there were three different things that you brought up and I'll let me I'm looking down on my notes here There's let me cover them in three Yeah, three sort of chapters. So the first is Just as far as sustainability, I completely agree the idea here is not to Rely on, you know foundation support to develop, you know, all of the books But if you really actually think about it There is enough venture for there's enough foundation support in this country to actually be able to do that or government support, right? the amount For something like a hundred something million dollars you could apply our model to Develop a full fleet of college textbooks. That's a tiny amount a Percentage of the entire amount spent every year by students, right? So, okay, but Absolutely Yeah, yeah Absolutely, so that's sad. I'll just tell you a bit about our sustainability model So when we and the whole business model behind open stacks is to So we create we take in venture philanthropy. We create these super high quality textbooks They get adopted widely but just like open-source software the books Form the core of an ecosystem or a community of companies Who work with us in some really innovative ways? So just like a lot of you that use Lennox you actually get it from red hat You're paying for that right because you're getting a value-added service and you're actually happy, right? Your schools are happy to do this because they have a 1-800 number to complain to right and that's probably to sue if it doesn't work, right? Yeah, so so we work with we in fact work with pan opens a whole bunch of other companies And what they do is they wrap a value-added service like tutoring or fancy e-text book or some other distribution model around our books And then they market that so that has two effects. One is that it really helps get the word out about open stacks So the areas where we have really taken off fastest is where there's a lot of computer-based homework systems that are Using open stacks companies like web of science sapling learning So that's taken us to over 50% market share in those in the college physics market, right? But the other thing is when they make a sale of one of their Inexpensive products around our our books they actually revenue share back to us So so so we don't ask the foundations to create to help us curate the books or create second and third editions because we have we're already economically sustainable on the 38 books we created We have enough funds coming in to be able to pay to pay for that and what our models point to the fact that if we can get to You know close to a hundred books that We're gonna hit it's like a nuclear reaction, right? We're gonna hit critical mass that the amount of revenue that's coming in will actually now allow us to just accelerate and create more and more books Oh, wow. So so that's really the the model and and Secondly around lecture four chap secondly around creating second editions. There's Remember these are open source. And so there's a tremendous community that gets built around each of these books That work, you know, that's the whole point, right? Is that you want to build this community not just have kids save money You want both? Oh, I'll give an interesting example, and this is really going rich in my Answering here Here's a really interesting example of the open source nature of these books So I don't know how many of you are chemists chemistry instructors, but we have a chemistry book it's a nice book and it's used in a lot of places and University of Connecticut Okay, the students Increasingly at students who are going to their faculty saying hey, do you know about these open stacks books? Well, the chemistry students went to the chemistry faculty at Yukon and said hey Why are you making us buy this $350 chemistry textbook when there's this really nice open stacks book That's free and the faculty had a actually completely Good reason for this. They said because you know what there's two ways to teach chemistry As far as matter, there's kind of a bottom-up way and a top-down way and At Yukon we like Adams we teach the bottom-up way we teach about Adams first and then matter later and The open and the open stacks book does it the other way Because that's most schools in the country do it matter first Adams later. We use their book Well, that's too bad students were disappointed. They went back scratch their head realized the book was open source They took a collection Okay, the students raised $20,000 their own money $20,000 and then they went to us and said can you take this money and get some chemists to create the other book? based on What you have and in fact we could took us the six months we created his new book Not only is Yukon using it But it is so good this book that if you go to our our our library We have published that as one of our canonical text now, right? So it's actually a commute that was the community's idea It was essentially developed by this community and and so that I think is the power of this this open source model Right that's gonna be able to allow us to create your just a Tremendously more what I'm gonna use the word rich but a rich Resources, okay, so I don't want to ramble too much so that's the standard bill the other one is You know that I always use this word textbook and book But it's a metaphor yet. They have a metaphor, right? We're talking about learning materials All our all of our open stacks books are in little learning objects. You just don't see it. You don't see it because Most faculty don't they're just starting to get that right there's a cutting-edge people get it But but you know we I worked for ten years in this learning object space, right? And it's just so complicated and that you have to be aware of the chasm I don't know if you read the book crossing the chasm It was on the wrong side of the chasm open stacks is on the big book, you know the big bell curve side So so so that's one thing the other thing though is that these you know, we did this for a decade Can't quality content does not emerge from the primordial soup of ideas. It just doesn't okay a bunch of faculty Don't just get together and write books, right? They might write a collection of really nice learning materials. No narrative thread And it's more like saying hey if you need to learn calculus use Wikipedia as your calculus textbook It just doesn't work Right, you know that it's just you need that narrative It ties everything together And so and we've kind of seen this this is kind of my you're going out on my on an allege here But the thing that was really hot fire through a few years ago was Z degree Yeah Faculty are gonna develop these books. It just didn't work right and when it did work one school built a book But it was so specific Didn't work anywhere else right so anyway, this is a this is a space. I would love to see more progress in right but for right now we're Because we're trying to We're trying to really focus on students and helping more students get access to these high-quality learning opportunities We're more leading with the free even though what we really believe and the future is open Okay, that's that's two things now last you brought up a point that I think is incredibly important and Everybody on this call needs to know about this and you need to go talk to your administrators about this and That is everything that we believe in Everything that we have been working towards Right free and open access for students Open exit open source models so faculty can have academic freedom right to be able to to make the material their own Customize it make it perfect for their course. This is under a big threat today Okay, a big threat and it's because the big publishers have figured out that this is Gonna eat their lunch Okay, and that this is putting a tremendous stress on their business models And so they're trying to co-opt this movement with with ideas that sound really good like they sound Inclusive access right, but we're not. Oh, that sounds great. It's so And it is extraordinarily dangerous because it is anti-academic freedom There it's trying to Hide the cost of the materials in student fees for example And it doesn't let students opt out. It's basically trying to kill the use books book type market the rental market other open initiatives and It's it's funny when I talked to university presidents and provosts about this They're just incredible their eyes open wide because they say that's not what that we were told when we bought into this great, and so this is something that Open stacks and and you know organizations like spark and other open educational Folks are starting to take really seriously because we could see a backslide on all of this great progress It's been made over the last few years. So Yeah, yeah Which is remember that that's the beauty of open source of this is that you can create You know a best, you know, Brian can say just make the best book for his course because it's open, right? Yeah That's great. That's great to hear actually. Thank you Tom Thank you Tom and for everybody else if you're new to the forum. This is you can see how easily the video session works and Richard, thank you for really really diving into Tom's questions and pulling them apart I just want to say for everybody who hasn't seen this yet if you go to the open stack site the Chemistry textbooks you have covers one says chemistry second edition and one says chemistry Adams first We have a question here from from Vic Vic Vujic or Vujic. Hello Vic Hey rich long time Can I just say before Vic says anything that we wouldn't be here without Vic Vujic and He was one of the key People of Hewlett Foundation who really believed in us and believed in this model. So great to hear from you Vic Thank you Vic. Thank you. It's one of my proudest grants. I made Great to hear great to hear where everything is growing and booming. I got two questions for you Um Do you have any mechanism or way do you guys check the pricing of your partners and to kind of Make sure that your partners aren't taking what you're doing anything. Oh great question. Okay, and then the second quick one Is are you guys thinking about k-12 at all moving into or kind of AP or the bridge? So first is yes, we do check now, of course we don't have You know, we don't have it built into our contracts that That's one way you could do it is is is have a licensing agreement where they had to Where a company couldn't be exploitive the good news is is it just that hasn't happened so far So we haven't done that And let me just step back and and explain why we would even have a licensing agreement, right? because everything's open source so companies Because our because we use the most open cc Creative Commons license the cc by license Companies are well, you know, they're free and welcome to take our content and put it into their platforms The thing that that that is that we keep proprietary though to open stacks is the brand Right our logo and our brand because that's really the thing that people trust. It's now now faculty are starting to know wow It's an open stacks resource. Hmm. I've got all of these I've looked at the you know, they have this whole library. This is this has got to be great stuff, right? so so we actually Have to we get actually sign a licensing agreement for that and that that is some way we could enforce it, right? So that's one that's a really great point. So second is about K-12 and this is this is This is an industry K-12 publishing industry dwarfs the college publishing industry and so this is an area of of Great interest to us I'll just point out that even though we have been laser focused on intro college textbooks And we have about almost four million students using our books this this school year 10% of those students are K-12 students. They're high school students and They're you and this is because even though we do no marketing in K-12. So They're coming for a number of reasons one is and I don't just mean students who go to our site I mean real adoptions. Hmm. Our book is the book they're using so it's a number of directions One is AP we have a number of advanced placement textbooks physics biology economics And these are becoming very popular so advanced placement dual credit is becoming more and more popular So more and more of our great ahead college books are being used in high school So that's great momentum everybody always asks about K-12. We're very Interested we actually do have a K-12 director now But we need to get it right, right? We got to get the plan, right? It's got to be at the right time the right kind of level and we'd be very interested in You know thoughts or comments from folks, you know about that that helped Vic Thank you. It's super helpful. Yeah, and thanks again Well, thank you and thank you Vic for the question as well as for the grant. Thank you so much Um We have a whole stack of questions coming in and let me quickly flash a few of the text questions up This is one from let's say This is from Charles Finley from Northeastern who asks is there a problem with alignment with existing texts such as the legal Action of all that is boundless. Yes boundless who remembers boundless. Yeah So Yeah, I won't go into the but all the problems boundless had because You could see from the very beginning that there was going to be a problem there The good news okay so if you look at one of let's say if you choose our camera look at our chemistry text and compare it to a Publisher textbook it will look very similar what we call the scope and sequence Sequence of topics will be similar and the you know topics and how they're covered will be similar But that's because if you look at compare any two publisher texts They're gonna look similar and that's because again this point that was brought up there brought up earlier There's just a uniformity or and a standardization across the country of how That about just a standard way to teach a lot of these courses and so we just follow that same Standard scope and sequence, but there's no we don't need to Yeah, we're not we're not going in there like boundless was and trying to actually sort of recreate a Publisher text. Yeah, we you don't need to do that You just need to be a chemistry instructor and know the standard way that is taught when you become an author It's all a great question a good question indeed Yeah, and we have a question from Fred Beshears a couple questions from him. Here's a I know Fred. How are you? It is awesome. He asks. How do you deal with student information? Oh? Good point. You mean student data and all of that kind of stuff. I think so. Yes, so We so the we okay. Well in the Intel recently we didn't actually have accounts You would just go to the open step. So there was no student information it was Yeah, you would just basically come to our website or download a PDF file now that we have tools on the web version of our books like highlighting We have a really nice highlighting tool where you can You know customize your book And then share those highlights with other students We do have student accounts. And so we're We're basically working with you know leading privacy folks and day data security folks to make sure that we Protect that student data To the fullest extent possible And this is where another space I think where we're really Excited by playing a leadership role because we're not a for-profit entity and we're based at a major University we want to wear the widest of widest brim white hats in the space so that we are Really thinking about students again thinking about students first and that not only includes just access to learning but also Protecting their data. So great question. Well, it is indeed and Thank you for it and thank you for that really really clear answer. We have a another question That's another video question. And this is from a long-time Supporter and friend of the program. This is from Roxanne Risken who is actually from the Yukon area. Yeah, and Roxanne, hello. Hi, Brian and kitty and Spider Yes, that's him. Hi Thank you so much for working with Yukon. I'm very very happy to hear that. That's fantastic and Just one other one of the question about Yukon any other Universities in Connecticut that have well if you go to the open-statch website and you There's a button to Push to get the full list of adopters So I guess everybody go check that out if I There should also be a map Adoption map, which is very fun to explore. Yeah, if it's not there, it just means that it's coming in like the next few weeks but We're actually at close to Yes, well over 7,000 institutions across the country 62% of all colleges and universities around the country I worked at Fairfield University Library and I was at one of the first open stacks or OER launch as we had many years ago and There was quite a lot of interest and quite a lot of curiosity about how How we bring librarians and faculty together to yes these important resources for students and what do you see as the primary role for the librarian and Also, I have another another one that really doesn't match up with that one, but well, can I answer that? Yeah, yeah, so I so librarians have been our friends from the beginning very important people So we have had close ties with Spark for 18 years and Have worked closely with librarians and have Some of our marketing campaigns and institutional partnership programs are actually the leads of those at the various Institutions are actually in the library because it really is the nexus information nexus so I would say, you know long long term the I see a shift in The way that that students think about obtaining materials You know the things that they use outside of class and as shifting from the bookstore to the library, right? That's really what needs to happen The bookstore is really there, you know every think of back, right? It's the place where the big stacks of paper books are stored and Picked up and paid for right but things really need to move to the library and I think the thing that the library brings it is so much more than a bookstore and the bookstore a student is a customer but in a library a student is a community member and Again think of open the open-source aspect of all of this right the whole idea is to build these communities around the content and Librarians are the natural Curators of all of this right. I think it's just tremendously exciting For you know for the future right and once once everything becomes digital once more and more things become open-source and We you know move to a world where Instructors are really making a lot of improvements and changes Those have to be looked after right and discovered by other people and that's really what librarians are great at So I think it's like a new golden age of libraries do you see the faculty members as the as the Important having the important role of reaching out to the librarians Or is it a collaboration between both library and faculty members because a lot of faculty members are very wary Sometimes of adopting and over your resource. Yeah, I'm in applied ethics class right now as a lifelong learner and I feel you and the book cost me a fortune what a used book Your ethics book out the line, but I I need an unapplied ethics Why you need your faculty member to customize ours, right? I didn't want to interrupt you. Oh, how do you decide which books? This is leading me to another question How do you decide which books are next to be? Yeah, good point good point so that the model The model for the first 40 or so books was really around What we called like an impact factor This was combined two Combined two figures one was you'll recall again the whole point of open stacks is to help students, right? And so there's no point There's a lot. There's more. There's no point helping students in a course where the learning materials cost $25 Well, not that there's no point, but there's less of a reason than a course where Students are paying $250. So what we looked at were These courses where there were both very large numbers of students A great example of psychology, right psychology 101. There's a million students Take that course every year And then where those million students are having to pay a lot for a book So a psychology book is you know often $200 So so if you look at our if you look at the catalog that we have By and large it's all these big courses like chemistry and statistics and psychology so so So as we're developing out though, there's a few more of those that we need to develop But the next phase is actually moving into developing degree programs Like or what we call like a vertical stack of books That would allow you to get for example an entire business degree Or at least like again at least an associate's business degree say Never having to spend a dollar on a textbook. And so we we've actually launched one of those in business Entrepreneurship just published last week. There's a it's a it's a it's a Curricular like a vertical of six textbooks And we're planning a number of others of those So that we can hit not just the gen ed texts, but also the highest enrolled Degree programs around the country That's that's that's that's extremely innovative. Um Also the other question or the third question I guess I had was how do you integrate The books with the lms Oh great question Yeah, so this is uh This is much more it's much harder than it sounds Uh, one would think if you just you know, put things into a certain container and pop it in And and you would also think there's only about two or three dominant lms's in the country The problem is is that canvas is not canvas is not canvas every Every school seems to have a slightly different implementation of say canvas or blackboard or some of these other uh learning management systems and so Uh, so one of the things that we have been doing is working Returns out is fairly complicated And that means it's costly right and we're all about lowering costs and scaling So we're we're still trying to crack that nut in the best possible way But in the meantime one of the things that we've been doing is working with One of our partners is a company called willow labs Who are a lms facilitator? So if some of the schools who are big adopters of many of our textbooks They can work with willow labs to very easily have them be pulled into the lms That's sad Faculty are already You know just doing it right they're either linking from our The web view of our books from their lms or they're pulling the pdf of the book into their lms But this is an area that we could really use a more I think principled Uh easy solution be beautiful if you could just push a button. Yeah The lms isn't going away anytime soon. Absolutely. Absolutely absolutely needs a revision Absolutely the next gen lms really can't come fast enough. Well, you're gonna build this one I am okay I need Tom I need Tom He's pretty awesome. Thank you for the great questions. Thank you so much Richard I I hate to say it, but we're out of time It's been fun. It's been rich It's been rich with rich. Um, we have um I I just want to say I'm so thankful for all the all the really detailed answers that you you've you've you've taken Every question very very seriously and I I learn I'm interrupting you, but that's how you learn I mean, I've learned so much from everybody today. So I agree. Thank you so much Uh quick question. How can we all keep up with you? What's the best way? Well, the best way is just to keep coming back to open stacks dot org And if you we're on face all the usual social media outlets And there's a pretty active blog that will give you the You know updates on exciting goings on and so you can just sign up Sign up for that too. Very nice. Well, thank you so much We'll uh, we'll have to follow up and when you cross the one billion dollar mark, please let us know so we can I'll do it. Thanks again. Thanks so much for the invitation and we'll see everybody. We'll see you soon But don't go away everybody. Uh, we have to point out what's happening over the next week And let me just thank you all for that fantastic series of questions Next week somehow it's february 6th and also the fourth anniversary of the start of the future transform And we'll have two fantastic guests lanae erickson and rebert kelchin lanae is from a third-way think tank and rebert kelchin is from uh seaton hall university And they're going to be discussing a really powerful powerful question about policy Trying to look at how congress could link federal funding to student completion rates in higher education This is a great great topic and these are fantastic people. I'm really looking forward to it Uh, we also have videos up of a past feature trend forum Sessions, uh, if you just go to tiny world dot com slash f t f archive, you can pull those down If you want to keep talking about this, we're continuing to have conversations Especially on twitter, but also on slack and linkedin and on facebook So please go to those sources and in the meantime keep thinking about this great stuff. We'll see you online next time Thanks so much. Bye. Bye