 All right. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining our session today on the power of legislation transforming open education in the U.S. State of Colorado. Today we are going to be discussing how we use legislation and people, importantly, to transform open ed in our state of Colorado. Here is our state of Colorado. It's the little pink square there. I want to make some terminology clear. When we use the word state, we're referring to the pink square where we live and where this legislation is applicable to. If we want to speak about the whole big green country, then we'll use the term federal. We'll be helpful as we move forward to avoid confusion. I put some statistics up here. I'm not sure if you can read them from where you're seated, but just for context's sake, the population of Colorado, similar to that of Scotland, and then the physical footprint of Colorado is similar to that of the whole of the UK. I also have listed there a number of Unis and colleges that we have, as well as students, higher education students, and those are some of our mountains. We're located in a flat area. That's where the state capital is. So we'll Chelsea and I are in and around that. Just to introduce ourselves to give you a little bit of context about who we are and why we're talking about this. I'm Carlyne Chelsea Bulley, the Director of Open Education and Learning Innovation for the Colorado Department of Higher Ahead. In my role, I manage our state's grant program, which will tell me more about. I coordinate the OER Council and Statewide OER Conference. My position is through a piece of state government. My boss's boss is supported by the governor, similar to a First Minister. And I came through this role, not being a legislative worker, but actually being a librarian, like the majority of attendees here. For years, that's a scholarly communication librarian, where I got to work on OA, OER and open data initiatives at a few colleges. I managed open public property and IR services. So that was the background that I came to. I don't get to work with faculty 101 anymore unless maybe they're the PI for grants. So I do miss that kind of work. But I get to help liaise and work with a lot of my former counterparts at their respective institutions and get to work across the whole state. Primarily public institutions of higher education will kind of talk a little bit about that distinction. Right. And I'm Jamie Hanthorn. And I work for the University of Colorado. And our connection and crossovers, of course, with we use the term OER rather than OE. So that's that's what you'll hear us say that more. So with OER with Chelsea at the state level, where I'm one of the council members of our statewide council, I'm the chair currently this year. My role at the University is the director for academic innovation programs. And we're quite a few hats in that role, one of them being OER hats. I'll just like put that one on for today and just wear that one. But I work with all four of our institutions. And so I manage the OpenSeo initiative as well, where we've managed to have all four campuses. It's a bit of a unicorn. We have all four campuses working together closely together. And more or less mirroring how they manage their the use of the state funding. So we apply for the state funding together and we use the state funding in the similar ways that are measured in similar ways across the campuses. So we'll be speaking about the legislation at the state level today. But if anybody is interested in talking about sort of university organizations and OER, I'm also available for that. All right. So just some highlights. We are now in our fifth year of the grant program, but we've only had three reporting cycles. So we'll use both three years and five years. We're talking about this, but over the first three years of our grant funding, students have saved an estimated 20.5 million dollars from an investment of 2.4 million from the state. This is a return on investment for over eight times. Cost savings is not the most important part. I think we all can agree with that as far as open education practitioners. But for lawmakers, our administrators and institutions that ROI is a really huge reason why that work continues to be supported. And I feel like public funding, state dollars are getting really stressful far with that eight times return. I'm expecting, don't quote me at any of this room court, I do think we're going to get really close to 50 million after our next reporting cycle. Again, this is also assuming that the OERs being reused each year. We have addressed nearly a thousand courses over those first three years. Last year, in this, the core three reporting cycle is where this graphic is from, 64,000 students were enrolled in courses that we are. Some of them probably were enrolled in more than one, but generally that's 29% of the entire higher education student body in Colorado, which is a really good chunk for a third year win. The first three years, the grants were 500,000, 1 million, and then 1 million in the first three years being awarded, which is a significant amount, very thing before. And then we'll come to talk about how we got that money. But how we transform open ed in Colorado is the backbone of everything is the OER Council, the group that Jamie is the chair of. They guide open ed work. There's a full time corner at the Department of higher ed, my job. That's funded through legislation. We get to award that $1 million in OER grants annually. That's a huge impact. I do think though, one can make significant drives and impact, if you're awarding 50,000, or 5 million, like you can really scale this depending on one's context. And then we have a host an annual statewide OER conference. Last year's conference between virtual and in person attendance had about 300 open access or open ed practitioners, faculty, librarians, instructional designers, some students attend. And it's really through like those four streams, I think we get our biggest impact in transformation. And all this came from legislation, right? The OER Council is actually not a group of people that just came together. It is designed and identified through a piece of legislation. It's identified and I'll dig a little bit more into the specifics of that. But the legislation outlines who and like minimum requirements of representational demands. That's important, too. It's not just me getting to decide like these are my favorite 12 people in the States, that there's quotas we need to meet and representation and try to make it fair. Although no one of your all institutions cannot be represented because we do have more than 12. My job funded through legislation, the million dollars is funded through legislation, which is also great to know we have the timeline we have to guarantee that for statewide conference funded through legislation. And your region can replicate this in the context that works for you. Maybe it would be through your own government, maybe through your administration. It could be a group of universities, whether this is your individual institution, your region, your country. There are ways you can replicate this and it may not be the way that Colorado did it. And I think it's very important that we're going to discover we're actually not that special. I wish we were really lovely to say we are these magical creatures, but it came down to people. And every single person in this room is a great person. So the legislation isn't specific for the state of Colorado, or is it the federal legislation, Colorado legislation, our state law. So we're not talking about anything at the federal level when you're talking about our state and what guys are our laws. So so I want to find out what some of you wrote on your on your week cards. So I really like for our voices all to be heard, not just the two of ours, and find out what you hear from each other, what your why you came. So let's start with that. We can we're going to go around the tables. If you wanted to say pass or you know, you don't you don't have to speak so you can just shake your head if you don't want to go back. If you would please read the reason why or you know what you hope to gain from the session and how it can contribute to important aspects of your work. To bring I think just some insight into the role of policy and inside of it. Yeah, I'm thinking about the tactics to approach government, you know, is different from my context. But for me, yes, anywhere else has been really difficult, approaching government. Yeah, to get them involved in these mindsets, make change. Is it how systems can support the local use of systems support the local use of what we are. All right. Thank you. So I really just kind of interested in everything that's involved with going out and applying for funding and understanding how that breaks down a little bit. Just being from reclaim we don't usually see that side of things. So that's why I'm here. What is going on in Colorado and how can we do it in Virginia? Yeah, I'm very interested in the state movements for open education, how they come to be co less like with conferences and all this stuff. So I guess it's a state movement. Yeah, it is a state to discover how much opt-out support is required. Right. Okay. Mine is very jumping. Just learning about how we are in other countries. Yes. Yes. Okay, great. A new context. And we are champion. Legislators. OAR champions. Yes, great. Great. And if we don't touch on asking so that we can make sure to touch on things afterwards. That's these questions. So next. I'm also more interested. Okay, great. Yeah, I was going away from the national section. Well, great. Yeah, our government plays a role. We have a couple of funding, etc. Right. This is actually between going on the institutions. Government, I think interesting. Okay. Good to hear. Thank you. Yeah, just from the title, I think I'm interested in how funding is sort of maybe bridging the gap between policy and practice, because I think in education, there's a big gap between, you know, what the legislators say what happens in the classroom and sort of seem to be a hint here that maybe with this funding that maybe policy practice are a little less disconnected. Well, I live in Northern Ireland, so there is no actual setting government. So it's maybe a bit of a tricky one. But I guess what I wrote is to understand how to affect meaningful change in organizations that are nice closely related to because it's what drives change management or legislation or is it bottom up and how can we embed it in your organization, which is waiting to embed it. Right. Which direction is it coming from? Yeah, yeah, right. So I'm from the Republic of Ireland, and I want to actually have the policy inside and how things function. Back in Ireland, I think I would have some takeaways from here, which I want to see and compare to how things are done in Ireland and also apply to a very different context. Right. Yeah. I'm just curious about the different outcomes between top down and bottom up drivers. I'm much more familiar with bottom up drivers. So right. This is novel. Right. Right. By the end filling the purpose of open education, the search for our argument are stinging. Yes. In an organization. Right. Thank you. Right. That is all right. She's working. OK. All right. So let's sign in for legislation. Really, what that background was, Colorado, and how that changed. In 2017, our Senate Bill was drafted. That formed our OAR Council and alongside it funded $20,000 to commission a report about what application was, what would be the most impactful way for Colorado to adopt it. And that helped set the stage for our future events. So really just began with a simple bill that formed the OAR Council defined open ed, which we're going to get to and what that means for our state. And then outlined that OAR Council 2018 after that report had been commissioned, there's recommendations. Somebody was hired to draft and research that report who's Tony Spielhoy is a is a name in the open ed US world. House Bill 18 established the OAR grant program. So this was a second piece of legislation that expanded the OAR Council went from 10 to 12 members and then established $500,000 in the first year of funding and then one million and then one million. This was set to expire in 2021. That that spring, another bill was proposed. And this was really unsure what the future would be. Would have my I can't take credit for any of this for the record. I joined late in 2021. My predecessor was a part of things. A lot of the founding OAR Council members are the ones who did this work. I've done a lot of back interviews. So if we don't answer your questions during the session, come find me because I did quite a few interviews to prepare for this. Yes, and I was around since 2018. And so the Centipel 21 expanded the grant program for another five years, allocating five million dollars more, one million a year. This is set to expire in November 1st of 2026. That's also when I lose my job unless we expand further out. But that's been a huge influx of funding. The amount of work that Colorado has done because of the funding is pretty critical. What drove the 2017 bill? What was the meet? We are going to get to that. But yeah, that is a great question. Something I want to highlight and what's really important to you, and if you're not getting funding yet, the fact that we have codified into law what OAR means in our states is a big deal. If this is your first win as part of legislation, I personally think that's enough of a win. I mean, that's probably going to get tied down to it's like not in its own reason or it's funding attached. But the fact that in 2017, we identify what OAR was for our state. And this does specifically says we're under an intellectual property license that permits for use or repurposing. So this matters. Now, there is this nice little line here that says it may include other resources that are legally available to students for free or very low cost. I read that as a lesson that we are. Very helpfully, I had already joined the department. The 2021 bill has already been passed. They cut that out. Literally, like if you read the piece of legislation, it is cut. Because that's not how we are. It's low cost. In our state, we do define $20 or under as low cost, which also makes sense, right? When we have definitions, it helps. It helps us communicate to administrators and lawmakers and faculty what the values are. We need to define our terms. This is the win in and of of itself. The funding does absolutely matter. We're very thankful for it. But so the 2021 bill, which was signed, do you need us there? Well, yeah, no, you're left. So that renewed the OAR grant program for those five years and allocated it for the $1 million. That's a really important piece. It allowed us to continue this work, allowed us to continue being able to support, continue that statewide conference. Through this, we also fund other professional development. I was able to award scholarships to the Creative Commons training and we do open education network trainings, which is a really important organization within like the US to Canada area. But again, this is expiring in 2026. If this is all the funding we ever get, we are luckier than most places and we know that. But we're looking forward to what happens in 2026. Can we still continue a position? Do we put another piece of legislation forward? How would this operate? With the OAR council, this is created through that legislation, as I said, Jamie's a chair, there's five faculty, three librarians, one instructional designer, one administrator, one IT professional, one student. This is outlined in law. I can't add more back, like there's so many librarians I would love to bring on to the council. And we have two non-moting reps from private institutions. That was my alarm. Three designees from state government, that's myself, from the Department of Education and the State Library. It is required in law that we have a variety of representation of institution types. For example, in the states, we refer to them as community colleges. There's often two year programs. There has to be at least three reps on the council. Stuff like that, like we have to hit minimum quotas, which is important that they educate majority of our students. The critical roles that made this happen was a legislative worker who knew the bill process in lawful open education advocates. Someone mentioned how to identify that person. I think it's important that if we look back to 2017, what drove that weirdly wasn't an open ed advocate. A legislative worker who worked for the joint budget committee who's in charge of educational bills, heard about open ed, was like, oh, I can save money. And reached out to the department of pirate because that's the liaison. And then they helped identify them into callouts. That's weird. That is unlikely to occur. That is a strange convergence. But what is important is every piece of government likely would see value in a return on investment in saving students money. You could reach out and identify who that appropriate person is and try to make a case to them. I think we make them a stake as open ed advocates to talk about the importance of education for the greater good. Because that's not always going to work for the people we're advocating to. I believe an open for the sake of openness, but to a lawmaker, what changes their minds is probably a ROI, most of all, starting off with a small amount of funding. What if it was 25,000? What if it was just 100,000? Like those are still chunks of money, but you can make a difference. You can do a pilot. You can ask them, can we do a one year pilot? The 2017 bill was effectively just to report 20 grand and founded the council, the council members aren't paid. Now we get a little bit of money to try to go to a conference or sponsor if we do a review day. But that's how this happened was there was a legislative worker who just knew the bill process, thought this was worth it, but you can identify themselves. Every single person in this room, I believe, qualifies as a knowledgeable open ed advocate. So you already have the people that can make this happen. And we award our grants, they were RFP, but we can talk more about that. Oh, you have these people too. I was ahead of myself. All right, so then we move on. So the piece that I wanted to share on the back of what Chelsea is saying is I heard multiple accounts of this legislator and I heard very different things sort of, oh, she stepped in and saved us and it was amazing and what would we have done without her? And somebody else said, somebody was standing up and saying the most off base unreasonable things about OER publicly. And so we stepped in and said, can we help you? And then the knowledgeable advocates formed a group. They coalesced and they helped write that bill for stroke with the legislator. So that is sort of who was an advocate, but maybe an under informed advocate. And if we think about ROI or we think about cost savings, I know that might be wildly different in your context and your goals might be wildly different. And that's where this comes in, the importance of having an ecosystem, an entire ecosystem, full of things that are meaningful, full of understanding, and that's what we're all doing here, right? It's preaching to the choir here, but I'll start populating this. I've made a list of different, and I hope you can read it from where you're at, of different elements that define an OER ecosystem and that some of these might define yours and some might not. I tried to create sort of a mixture of things that are important to us, in Colorado and then things that might be important over here in the UK. But it's important to have so many things because what will matter to a legislator or to somebody who you're making an argument to, it's very important to know what stake they have in the ground, right? And think about that. And it might feel flat or one-dimensional and all they want to talk about is cost savings and that's the measurement state, that's the metrics they want to see, that's the data they want to see, that's what they can use to then, my presidents at my university is similar. He wants compelling individual stories, case studies with students and what this has made possible for them, right? But it's all down to cost savings. So I don't necessarily talk about all of these things, but as a knowledgeable practitioner, it's my duty to know all of these things. And so I'll ask each of you to take your second card and write down a few things, either something you see in this list or not, but perhaps the thing that drives you individually the most in OER, in your own context, and then if you have time or if it's important to you, what defines your ecosystem? So maybe a few listings, a few different things that you list down. But this is key because if you don't have the knowledgeable experts gaining wisdom, gaining practice, working in different ways and creating an ecosystem, then you can't have a movement, right? You can't sustain, you can't evolve. And so for us, one example would be open pedagogy. And so this is something we even write into our state funding, into our grants, proposals and into our reports. This is a practice that we maintain in Colorado on some of our campuses. Is it something I would tell our university president? Is it something that our legislators want to really know about? Not particularly, it's not going to help because that's not their stake, right? So it's sort of time and place. So the depth is there, the well-roundedness, the holistic piece of the movement is there, and it will help bring this into being. Like if that lawmaker had gone ahead without consulting advocates in the state, perhaps the funding would have come through but the project would have fallen flat because there wasn't that depth of expertise and knowledge. And also people coming together. So that's one other piece that I gained from the interviews I did is that it's well and good that you have people coming together, having a director, having somebody to coalesce the message, somebody not necessarily just to like, do you think, an expert to coalesce the message is what I'm trying to say. Not like administering grants or administering this or organizing the conference, that's fine, but like to be, just to bring the voice together. And so we have three minutes left in the session so we can answer your questions. Somebody did bring up that they were interested in how the funding got awarded. So we were talking today, our plan was to talk about how legislation got formed and how that funded things. But just to quickly highlight, the state gives us a pot of money. And then the OER council, we've released what's called a request for proposals every fall. There's a 60 day window, people can submit and apply any public institutions of higher education. They submit it's up to 10 pages. We outline what is required, they submit it. We all review it. We recommend what is going to get funding and we have to make it work with that exact dollar amount. And then a commission approves it. So that's that process. It is a very separate thing that the monies are even allocated and then we go through a proposal form. And that's how public, we can provide links if anyone's interested to like, what do our people look like in prior years and there's sample grants and stuff like that. And we have annual reports we submit as well in October. So, right, questions. I'm interested in like, where does the OER live? Like, so how do various faculty get access to it after they've produced it? Is it shared across schools? Like, is it through the LMS? Is it through a? Great question. So the majority of institutions are putting the OER, our grant program requires everything to be on a publicly accessible link. That's the majority is going through an individual institution's IR. And something that was called institutional repository. I think this, but yeah. This. So they were all publicly accessible. Yes. That's the point, that's the point, right? They have to do that. That's also, that's also defined in our law, right? It's defined in our RP. There was also something called the OER repository that I inherited, which just spread sheet of all those links. It's a librarian at Columbia. So we are undergoing right now, figuring out where to bring all these things together. So there was one central point to point to those individual institutional repositories, as well as likely launching a press books initiative, stuff like that, and bringing it together. So to make it more scalable. They're called course heroes. No, it's in various places. And it's been an ongoing challenge. We've talked to the State Library and so there's no, there's no clean solution for it. But it is public. It is doing what it should do. And I'm hoping to see more cross adoption of people not just creating their own OERs from our funding, but going and looking at, for example, University of Colorado, Denver is currently making their entire math degree OER. I'm hoping to see our community colleges and Colorado State or different institutions cross a plug and take their OER, because that's the whole point. And even having an aggregator for all of those different resources. And was that something that could be funded also by the money? Yes, we have a budget within our grant that's identified as website and informational materials. So that's where I'm gonna pull funding in order to do something like a press books or an OER comments. We're figuring it out. I don't wanna have the department itself have a repository just because of the expertise that's required and not knowing it, because we're not a library. So any other questions in the last minutes? If you have additional questions, you could write it on that card with your name and your email address and then I'll collect the cards and we'll hand it over to Tommy. And if you want links to anything, you can also do that. We'll send a general email out. We'll also, of course, be around at the conference and at drinks and lunches and we'd love to chat with you. And I would say we're very lucky in Colorado. I'm very thankful for the support we have and that it's such a well-support issue across parties. But I'm also, and because of other countries and other states and everything, I think we're all doing very good work to move open-ed forward just in different ways. So. Thank you. There we are. Thank you so much, Tommy. Thank you. Next time, should I have your voice? So, is it just time to over? Is it? Listen. Thank you so much. So I'm going to be talking about considering mechanisms and implications of skill and application. As a caveat, what I'm talking about is significantly less applied in practicals than the session that we just talked about. So if you're hoping to get direct and concrete ideas on how to influence policy, you may be in the wrong place. But hopefully we will see some connections because I do think there are significant connections as well. So. But to start, so I live in New Westminster, which is this red dot right down here near Vancouver, in Canada. And I live on the unceded territory of the Pekite there with my kids right now. I have two kids who live with me. But a couple of weeks ago, we were in Inuvik, the red dot up there, in the Northwest Territories, in the Innavala settlement region. So I am a white settler. My kids, though, are innavala. So for them, that is home. And so we were there visiting my oldest daughter who has been working there now for just over a year and a half. It was a home going for her. And so we went up to visit. So while we were there, there was a town to be clear. We live in houses. We had doubts, but we did. I thought it was clear. But we did go out on the land while we were there. And that's very common. Thank you. So this is what it looks like. And this is the cabin that we were staying in while we were out there. And one of the first things you do when you go out to be in the land is you need water, right? What first, you heat up your house because that's smart. The next thing you do is you get water. So this is a picture of their auntie Bernice. This is my oldest daughter. And this is them starting to chisel the pool. And they keep chiseling. And I think this might play a video. It may not. So that's the red chisel. And you can see the speed at which that continues forward. And then you keep chiseling. So this is about two and a half feet down. And then you keep chiseling and digging out the water. So now we're about four feet into the ice. That's my youngest scooping out. We're now where our arms are shorter than the size of the hole. And eventually the water bubbles up. And you can see, so that's the chisel down. So it's about four feet down in the hole. And then you gotta make sure you don't lose your chisel because if you lose your chisel, tomorrow is a bad day. So that's us. And then so we, so I think, I don't know. Yeah, so from there, you scoop out the water and you put it in a bucket and you carry 500 meters to your house. And then tomorrow when you need water, you come out and you chisel off any ice and you do it again and again. So the question may be, what the heck does this have to do with anything? Open education to me, this is, this is a technology, right? This is a process and a technology. It's a technology that involves chisels and buckets and a process of getting water. Whereas when we're in town, when we're in town of Inuitic, we get water from the same river, but it comes through pipes and it's a compensation and it comes through a tap. And that's a different set of processes and technologies. But I, and I still know where my water comes from, like it comes from the same river. And then I go back to my home in New Westminster in Vancouver and the water still comes through the tap. But to be honest, I have no idea where that water comes from anymore. I know that it's clean because there's standards and things in place for that. But I certainly have a different relationship with my water than I do out here, right? Significantly different. And when I think about open education, open education with both or just education and open education are both learning and supports and processes. And this idea that we can use these various scales of processes to achieve education and that they look different, this is less efficient. I wouldn't recommend trying to get water to, you know, two million people through this process, but our relationship to the water and even the nature of the water, the water that, even if it comes out of the same river, the water that we're drinking is a different temperature. It's been treated differently. Yeah, hasn't been tested. It's a fundamentally different process to get there. And I do believe that open education is the same, that as we're thinking about how we get to open education, the tools that we use, the processes that we use, the relationships that we create change as we scale up or down. And it's not good or bad, but it's different. And it's important that we think about those differences. So I did a research study. So I used situational analysis and the idea of situational analysis really focused on this relationality and to think about how processes work, how power relates, processes are foregrounded emphasizing the fluidities of power relationships. And so I looked, was interested in the issue of scale in open education. And so what situational analysis does is it uses three different kinds of maps. So the first map is a relational map and this is where you connect ideas together. And so what I had is six open educators. I got these words from a bunch of open educators for a survey and then I had another group of open educators put these lines and connect things together. And then they annotated the relationships that they saw between things. And what fascinated me about this particular map is that they knew I was asking them about scale. It wasn't a surprise. And they really, really, really don't want to talk about it. They don't want to talk about scale. They want to talk about open pedagogy, OER, access, social justice. They want to talk about reaching audiences going beyond the course. They want to talk about overwork. They don't want to talk about ideas of scale, right? It's something that we have a really hard time thinking about and talking about as open educators. And I think reclaim, is there somewhere? Which... I see DS106. DS106, DS106 made the list. And I feel like Reclaim made the list somewhere there. Or maybe it was in... It certainly made the survey. It made the cover of the floor. It's absolutely there somewhere. So that's one map. And that was open educators. When I asked them, think about open education, this is what it looks like to them. When I took those same ideas out of the initial survey and then chased them and looked like not through what the people want to talk about in the room, but all the other things, I got a very different map of open education. And this is called the social worlds and arena map. Fundamentally, there's this, there's... Oh, there's where Reclaim is right there in the middle. There's the field of open education. And there's all of these people who are engaged in it. And all of these folks have their own needs and wants and desires. And some of them are huge. We've got big tech companies. We've got tech companies. We've got foundations. We've got governments. We've got publishers, right? And they're all pushing and pulling in this space. And so this creates a really different look than the one that my open educators, participants wanted to talk about. And they're both right, right? There's no... It's not one's right and one's wrong. It's just there are two very different approaches and ways of thinking about open education. The difference is this one we don't talk about very much. And all of these different groups, obviously ed tech companies can be different. We, Reclaim is very different than most of the others on the list. And even these ones that aren't in an ed tech space like BGU and VIP kids, these are massive ed tech companies that the things that they're doing are pulling us in a direction that whether we like it or not, they're at play and they have an impact on the work that we're doing and not talking about it, doesn't make it go away. So there's two of my doctoral research. I've got these two very different maps of open education and my supervisor said, great, Tanya, now what? Like what's the relationship between the two? And I said, I have no idea. I just spoke but the good news is situational analysis has one more approach to mapping and in that you do something called relational mapping and with a little bit of work, what I ended up figuring out through all of that information is that really what we're talking about here is different approaches to scaling. And the one on the top, which is a production model of scale, it has to do with things getting more standardized over time. And I wish I'd had the language before but what I took away from this morning's keynote, this is really a process of as far as I can tell, it's like standardizing, making it simpler. It's closing doors, right? It's narrowing the hallway, narrowing the decision path. It's super efficient. That's how we get things done quick and cheap and easy. If we wanna do things fast, quick and easy, that's where we'll end up. Whether you start with little standardized things or really different things, if that's what you're chasing, that's where you'll end up. And that's I think part of the reason open educators don't wanna talk about scale because we recognize this path, right? This is the vast majority of what we deal with in our day-to-day lives. This is what we talk about, right? This is what people wanna see. The good news and what open educators I've found have a nuanced idea but not necessarily the vocabulary to talk about is a different model, not of production but of growth. And the difference in growth is that things go, things can move in different ways, right? So things can get bigger without necessarily getting more uniform or being standardized. The challenge is that we don't talk about this very much and it's unpredictable. So we're here at your low risk. So again, we talked earlier this morning, the keynote talked about minimizing risk. Again, if that's what we're doing, that's what you're gonna do. If you're willing to accept risk, having things be different, it opens up a new model but we have to think about these as trade-offs because they change and the really key here is there's sort of this position C which in both of them was missing. When things are small, they look the same, right? You can't necessarily, when something's, it's gonna be a corporation worth billions of dollars. When it's at two people, it doesn't look different than something that wants to grow differently at two people. It's in that middle stage and it's the middle stage that we don't talk about that changes that. Somebody had their hand up. Yeah, this one and there was presentation about changing the system and being disruptive. Yeah. But if you want to be disruptive, then you have to choose the growth model, isn't it? Yeah, that's, I think that's exactly it. You have to, if you wanna be disruptive, you can be small and be disruptive and not choose a path, right? When you're tiny, it doesn't matter. You get not very big, you get to sort of medium size and if you don't choose a path, you're gonna find yourself on that path. If you, you know, creating a community as a priority, if that's where you set your priority, then exactly, that disruption becomes, there's an opportunity for disruption. I think that's exactly right. So this is a bigger one, right? Just the same, right? It's a straight line and the bigger you get, the more standardized things get and we all have examples of that. And then this other idea, right? And the reason they're dotted lines is because there's never gonna have a guarantee that it's gonna move in that direction, right? You don't get a promise. It's you stick your plants in the garden and they may or may not grow. So I came up with nine findings in three categories. The first ones are related to situational analysis and theory which I'm not gonna really talk about much here if anybody's interested, let me know. The next three though, which I think are really interesting for this group to think about is the one thing that I found is that open educators tend to have big intentions, tend to wanna change the world, right? Doesn't matter if you wanna do it, how you're gonna do it, there's that desire, but we haven't thought about how in the middle, right? We just wanna change the world, but we haven't really thought about what that looks like and that's where we lose that opportunity, I think, to really be disruptive. And our ideas get co-opted, right? I think probably everyone can think of something they've done in open education that in some way has gotten co-opted by a corporation or some other group. There's these games of scientific language. As people fund research, the more research you fund, the more likely what you want to be true turns out to be true, right? And we look at where our funding has come from, and fuel it, and to be clear, foundations, I think, so what you guys talked about, I think when this money's coming from government, I think that's, so it's not that money is bad and it's not that all funding is bad, it's that we need to be thinking about where the money is coming from and the springs attached to that money. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, sorry. And then the third one that really came up is this idea of overwork among open educators. So open educators often, I think, move into these efficiency models because they're overworked, right? What am I gonna do? I need to do something to make my workload less. So good news is that things can change or that we can think about things differently. So this is where in terms of findings or recommendations is that we have to talk about scale and we have to think and clearly articulate what our intention is, right? And we need to ask other people what their intention is when they're doing these things. Except unpredictability and uncertainty, right? You don't get, if you, that's part of what comes with growing is not knowing and then seeking to minimize educational disasters. I think this is the third. Instead of going down that narrow future, where the future gets more and more narrow over time, the alternative is scope is to be more flexible and have more things that make us more able to react to different futures and to imagine different futures. So, you know, our tools and processes are relational and very with scale. If our intentions are big, we'll seek efficiencies. And if we're looking to change in existing patterns, we need to think about what we need to scale. Like we, you know, we don't go out on the land and get water this way. You know, it's not by accident. We do it, you know, we could buy an auger. We could, there's other ways to get water. You don't need to use a right chisel, even if you're out on the land. Choosing to do that is part of, it's part of an intentional decision made because it changes the way that we think about things. It changes the experience of being on the land. And it's a heck of a lot of fun and exciting when the water bubbles up, right? Never been excited when the tap turned on. So, you know, when we think about, I mean, the theme for this conference is advancing OER. And so the questions, you know, to where, for whom, by what means, right? And the pictures here is we've got, we're driving in a car or we're in a skidoo. We can walk, can travel by dog. And then my kids, because somebody suggested it, you can also skate on a nice road, which why not, right? That's a future that, you know, that's not a traditional way of getting around. But you can, right? As long, but you have to have the imagination to think of it and then you can do it. So, so that's, you know, I guess those are my questions to you guys as well. It's sort of to think about, yeah, not just about advancing OER, but like where are we going and who is benefiting and what does it look like? So I think there's time for questions. I really appreciate your visuals about, you know, the different means of scaling. I think those were super cool. And I was sitting here kind of doodling a little bit because I think at Reclaim, we try to think really strategically about, you know, scaling the purpose and not being overzealous, but, you know, also being flexible enough that, you know, we're listening to what the community needs and being able to transform as that shifts. Same thing that technology is always changing and so being able to shift with the times is important. And so, you know, I think in our session tomorrow, we're gonna be talking a bit more about just how we're focused on the applications themselves and how they're building in that flexibility of being standardized to some degree and having that predictability for folks, but also providing enough sandbox space to explore and have these arms that sort of branch out and do their own thing. So anyway, just kind of a comment that that's a really cool visual. No, I think it's so important because that's why I think the water is helpful because it's a continuum of technologies, right? It's not, I know I put them on two different maps, that's kind of how it works, but it's a continuum of it's not, and it's not good or bad. Like I say, I don't think we wanna be carrying buckets to 10 million people. It's not what I would advocate towards, but it's thinking about how those pieces fit together and not writing something off because it's older and efficient or whatever. And thinking about when should we be using bigger infrastructures, technologies, legislation, and when should we be experimenting in sandboxes or chipping away at ice with chisels? And how do we not lose, there's a knowledge that goes with that. Where you dig your water hole and everything else. And the other thing that I'll say that I think at least in my mind is important about the Inevaluate Settlement Region and that water is that through, so they could have had oil and gas, right? They had a, there was an agreement to create a pipeline and they chose not to pursue that future because the Inevaluate decided that the ability to do this and to keep this was more important than dollars in their pockets fundamentally. Even understanding, and so they've done their bit, this is keeping their land is more important than putting dollars in their pocket. That's the decision that they made. Even understanding that if the rest of the world melts down, they're going down with it, right? So it's not a decision. It's not, it's not, it's an again, a tensionality, a decision to create a future. Some people would argue a preposterous future, right? Something that seems like, oh, that's, you're just playing games, you know? This stuff isn't serious. It's got to be about making money. You know, real people making real decisions that affected their real ways that they live in order to create a possibility of a future that creates flexibility where you can both have pumping stations and have clean water and you can still go out on the land and chip away at it. So I think it's important to think about the nuance and the complexity, right? These aren't easy issues. Awesome. Any other questions? Pots? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm interested in this idea of that one scale you had where the idea of, it wasn't, I mean, you separated it cleanly, so maybe I don't understand, but this idea of scale always leading to efficiency and I always feel like when you start scaling to that, like, it's kind of over, right? The fun stuff you've done, like, can you do that with your research? Like, seeing that, like, is that mark of scale also kind of the depth of fun and enjoyment for the work you're doing in this space? I mean, I think there's something that happens right in this sort of C to D. The missing is that, like, there's this underlying assumption of scale above all else. And when you do that and bringing people in, the reason you bring people in is to scale, not to have fun. I think there's something about that. Yeah, when you do that, when you stop taking the time to chip away at your water, you know, when it gets, the most important thing is to get to the end, not to experiment or have fun anymore. I think you're right, I think you end up on a path that it's very, very, it's probably not impossible, right, every path can be turned off, but it gets harder and harder to think, turn back from that efficiency model. And it's interesting in relationships with the earlier talk because you can't scale OER or a state. I mean, you can't really do OER in that context for a state unless you scale it. So you have to do that. So it's an interesting challenge. It's an interesting challenge, but I think what I heard is intentionality, right? They didn't do this haphazard, they didn't take the first venture capitalist who came along and offered money to do it, right, there's thought gone into it. And I think that that's where the healthy tension comes in. When you began out and you weren't talking about tripping away the ice, I was like, okay, I get the metaphor. And I was actually wrong technically about like the point of it, because then you expand it, but I was like, that's what advocating for open feels like. Like what's right, like sophistication, right, you're rolling up, but you are tripping away and you're going, you're going, but then the bubbles come, right? And how much joy and that is worth all the effort and is so pure and beautiful and you have a relationship with the person when it works. And I don't get to do that anymore, right? I'm far away, but, but people who manage grants, they do have a closer relationship. It is actually possible to maintain some of it because it's not like one system in charge of it. The people we give money to, those people then do have relationships with their individual faculty. I'm far away from it, but that one's still happened. Funke and still have it. And I think it depends on the model. So if we chipped away that hole and the whole reason was to build a factory that bought a water, that's a different model. And I think we can think of open educational examples where that we started chipping knowing that the end goal is to make billions of dollars off the water. That's not what you guys are talking about. And so like, I think that, you know, you guys made just a chip and lots of holes, which is also cool. I'm making like lots of holes. I think it's actually exactly what's happening, but when you're talking about, say, more inclusive access, you kind of understand what we are. That's different than what your goals are. And we make choices. And being intentional about those choices versus thinking just, it's all going to be revolutionary. And then saying, oh, shoot, our work has been co-opted. I think that that's a pattern that we've seen. And the importance of the political savvy of the face you have to wear to get some of that is like important, right? Yeah. Yes. I'm wondering in the next model of growth, position E. Yes, because there's always a tension for me between a scaling up or growing and what is defined as success because as something grows up, involves many voices of others. And how can we, and I would like to hear you more because it's related to the questions like for whom and how and where, when it's growing, how do we manage to maybe accept many definitions of success and how can this be positioned? Can we have many successes? Exactly. Yeah, I think that's exact. If you're going to use a growth model, you're not going to, you're doing the opposite of controlling it, which means it's going to turn into a whole bunch of different things, some of which you might like, some of which might really take off, some might not grow, and then you might get some weeds, right? And so then you gotta think about what you do with those weeds as well. Do you let them grow? Because if you let the weeds grow, you're gonna end up with a new garden, right? So now I'm mixing my metaphors, but yeah. But I think that's exactly it. It's that idea that it can go in all different directions and there's gonna be many different definitions of success. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you very much. Yeah. So you've got six minutes to get from here to your next.