 Welcome, everyone, to the presentation Open is Insufficient, How Innovative Reuse of Content Can Extend Institutional Reach. We're going to be covering two main points today. First, to make the case that reusability can enhance the value proposition for content providers and institutions. We're also going to cover requirements for content, text, image, and video in order for that content to be reusable. Who are we? I'm Ken Felt, Managing Partner for Electric Book Company. We're a small company in Richmond, Virginia with multiple years of experience in media and publishing. And we're driven by the belief that instructional media needs some envelope pushing. To what end? We know that quality content costs, so we want to find ways to help our customers improve their ROI of quality content. We also believe that too little instructional content leverages the importance of the human connection. There is a reason why we have professional educators. There is a reason why struggling students seek out human help. Too much technology ignores that need. And we believe that technology's primary purpose, in terms of education, should be to connect people. This presentation follows the perspective of a product development team, reaching out to the OER community as potential partners in bringing some new services to market. The idea for our product is a website that included all the example problems of a textbook. Only the example problems. To serve as a convenient study or review guide. We want the product to be accessible outside of formal institutional paywalls. We want the service to at least have the appearance of commercial viability. The service should run well desktop and mobile environments. And we understand that the one feature that electronic media has which hard copy can never present is the connectivity to other friends, teachers, and mentors. Sometimes, static text is insufficient. Reading the same thing over and over again doesn't get the job done. So what can be done about that? The last element we consider is what we call student demand driven. OER content accessible to a student not because faculty created or selected for a class, but because the student discovered the content to be reusable. I think it's important to point out that the fact that the product is to be commercially viable makes possible these other initiatives. Which leads us to the folks at OpenStacks. Their textbooks are outstanding, but they also make available derivative products with some value added features. What makes them special? All their raw content is available as XML files. They have thousands of example problems and some titles are available without commercial reuse restrictions. They use the CCBY Creative Commons attribution license. So let's quickly look at a couple of value added features that are possible when the content is structured to be reusable. Earlier in this presentation we mentioned that a missing element was the person, meaning how to better use this content in student communications. Here we reuse the content from a physics title in a mobile web page that facilitates marking of a graphic or image for use in emails and messaging. Ever spend time looking at an illustration trying to find an element within the figure that's referenced by the example narrative? This can happen fairly often with technical illustrations or in mathematical figures with lots of arrows and curves. Let's consider such a scenario. Pretend for a moment that we're mentoring a class of physics students and receive an email from a student complaining that they can't find vector r. You're reading the email on your phone, you click the link, and this is what you see. The student said she or he couldn't find the r being referenced in the narrative. Wouldn't it be nice if we could turn on the ability to mark an illustration and tap the part of the figure which shows us where radial vector r exists? We could then copy the URL to the clipboard, paste it in an email, and send it to the student. When the student gets the response, they open up the problem and they see the mark added by the mentor. Oh, that's where it is. And study continues. Another feature. What if we could add different perspectives? Here we're going to consider how to integrate quality reusable video in our application to add a different perspective of a topic. Sometimes reading a problem or solution narrative over and over again still doesn't yield understanding. Visual consuming the static media isn't enough. What happens then? Many of us resort to video searches to find something we can listen to. But are my conventional search results relevant? Which of these videos are useful? How much of the video do I have to watch before I hear someone utter terms that I'm looking for? Here at EBC, our approach makes use of college and university videos which may be underutilized. We create what are called study suites, a binding of the video to a textbook in order to provide some additional resources the student may use. This is what it looks like. This is our university physics volume and what we have done is we've created a study suite by binding all the videos from MIT's open courseware classical mechanic series with this university physics textbook. So when I look for a term called acceleration not only do I get a list of the videos from that series but I also get text representative representing the specific passage where those terms are uttered. That's where we see the term acceleration was looked up within the video, displayed to the user and the user can click it to actually hear the video presented. That's an example of making use of reusable video to make possible new instructional products. So what makes content reusable? Let's start with text. It's important for the source material to be what we call structure friendly. Document structure is critical. Ideally the content should be independent of presentation type meaning something other than PDF or Word documents. Ideally some form of XML. Dita is the Darwin information type architecture that we use to encode for use in delivering to different types of media devices such as mobile or desktop. Polygo is a commercial product that promises to be simpler to use than Dita. How you get to structured documents is through your authoring. Think about XML based authoring like Hereto, Oxygen or X-Metal. But whatever is used the content must be consistent meaning whatever structure is decided on for one title it should bear some resemblance to other documents being designed. And consider a process that makes available a significant amount of content in order to make it reusable and scalable. How can video content be more reusable? Video quality is paramount. Too much video includes professor spending time talking about why the course is important. The only reason the student would be searching for such a video is because they know it's important. They need to re-explain why the student should be watching this. Make sure what is being drawn is legible. Focus on what is being drawn or written not on who is doing the writing. And make sure the presenter speaks slowly. The technology behind audio to text conversion is still a bit rough. What this discussion explained is the reusability of high value content distributed beyond the course setting of expanding institutional reach. Consider persons already in the workplace or graduate students who find themselves in need of professional materials. What about those persons considering formal education? How does your institution's publicly accessible content encourage them to consider more formal programs? Could materials and statistical analysis be used by vendors in the software QC space as part of their reference training material which could of course encourage persons to consider other institutional offerings or certifications. I invite all OER content builders to consider these points. Not to change the way your internal projects are being developed but to consider how all the work done to build these products can have a better lifespan by starting the process to encourage reusability in a variety of different ways. Thanks for listening and we hope to hear from you soon with your comments or questions.