 Thank you. I'm Brandon. That's Gary. I'm Noel Patrick. I'm already getting heckled from the answer, the brilliant audience. Do you want us to use the microphone, Kim? Sorry? Once again, Gary's from the Open University. I've had MIT, been working in the Open Education for quite a while. It's a pleasure to actually be here, actually organizing the conference, as Seth will attest to in the back also. We're going to talk today about a project that's been funded by the Next Generation Learning Challenges at our major cause, primarily the Funding for the William and Florian Hewlett Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Next Generation Learning Challenges is a grant program that's built around thinking a little bit differently and trying to bring to action some of the things that have been going on in open education, primarily around content and moving from content into courses and practice and to delivering actual classes with actual students meeting actual needs. And we'll talk a little bit about the approach we're taking with this project that's built a lot on the Open University models and give you a series of areas in which we think some of the things that we're doing are a little bit different than traditional approaches, certainly the approaches that the rest of my organization has taken with open education. And lead into a set of broader issues for the open education community. And we can talk about how the projects we're working on, start to address some of them, pass some of the other projects that are in the room. The person who's been giving me a hard time from the back, Kim Thottos, is also doing a project, leading a project funded by the same grant program, focused also on developmental math, and nine or 10 or 11 other areas. So Bridge to Success, this is a screenshot of our website. It's b2s.acc.edu. We actually have some handouts and flyers and collateral to if you're interested. One of the questions I was supposed to ask is, is anybody here from a community college are interested in using this from a community college? Great. Here he's going to want to talk to you. Actually, he's going to want to push with content for us and folks to see if we're interested in adopting some of the materials. There are two courses that we've brought up online. Reportions of two courses that are built around materials that have existed and worked well within the open university setting in the United Kingdom. And we're bringing those to different audience and all sorts of issues arise around that. And those are the kinds of things we'll be talking about. One of them is called Succeed with Math. This one's partially launched. The full launch will be in January of this year. It's basically a developmental math course. But it's not a developmental math course the way I've seen some of the other ones that have been taught here within the United States. My good friend, Tom, in the other rooms, talking about his launch are 42 open courses. Looking at some of the materials that they've developed versus the kinds of things that have worked very well in the open universities experience, it's a pretty big gap. So you start with a developmental math, perhaps with basically equations of odd equations and lots of practice. And that's kind of been one of the approaches that's been taken. But what Gary will talk about with the university approaches is it's a much softer introduction and it's a lot more supportive. And that's one of the things that attracted the consortium of folks working on this project to this. So it's the Open University, Anne Arundel Community College, and the University of Maryland University College. Folks that have been doing online and distance education for a very long time. And they've got lots of experience with it, but they know that they can improve. And some of the things that the Open University has done, the approaches they've taken, are very different than what we do here in the United States. One of those is based around learning to learn. It's an openings course, is the phrase, at the Open University. It's a general introduction to the transition between, say, high school and college, between the workforce coming back and starting to take college courses. And we have an educator here, Shelly Hintz, who's been working using these courses with actual students. And if all works well, she'll say a couple of things. Trying to learn a course can really just kind of go over to the different skills that they need to be successful in a college-over-class. It goes over, there's modules on reading techniques, study skills, time management. All of those issues are issues that they're going to be dealing with once they're inside the classroom. And so I think just going through those materials and becoming more confident in being a learner and understanding their own learning needs. And as they can understand their own learning needs. So she talks a little bit about the motivation of what's different. And if you take MIT out of the equation but look at some of the other universities where it worked, Utah State or UC Berkeley, we don't do those things ever in our classes. There's some bridge programs to transition between high school and college, but that's it. It's over after that. It's not something that's kind of an ongoing thing. But that's one of the things that's different about the Open University approach to the support and the tutor system that they use. And so I had to do this with Gary was kind enough to let me do the Americanism of mining the gap. And what we're doing is a lot of different gaps with the project, which are very representative of a lot of the issues facing people. Trying to take open content and use them as courses. Content is sure developed by others. How do you wrap actual course experiences around them? So at the Open University, UMUC, AACC, they teach classes online, but they don't necessarily do things open. And so where does that gap come? And how do you bridge across it? Also, research and practice. We know lots of things about educational research and educational theory. How do we take what's worked in one setting and then transfer it to another setting? Differences between the UK and the US and theory's got a couple of great examples around this. And then also the Open University approach versus the American Community College approach. There's some similarities in the types of students, but as Gary will explain, there are lots of things that are different than we've had to work through and work around. And finally, the issue of development on math and bridging between high school and college with preparation levels between being out in the workforce coming back and starting a degree program as a pretty complete degree program. And now I'm going to try to do everything. So that's me. So I think really from our point of view and from your point of view, it's about kind of giving you the experience that we're having to go through as we deliver this course or make this transition from using our OER material and delivering it in different contexts. So with that in mind, I think there's something pretty unique about the way in which the Open University goes about developing these courses. The way in which we have a group of academics that come together and we send all of that in relation to the student experience. So there's a whole heart and a charm. Well, it's quite interesting actually. I was going to say for you, but it's quite interesting. But there's a whole quality assurance and quality enhancement function that actually is built into that process that we go through when we build a course. And with that taken into account, the whole ethos around the way in which our courses are delivered into students, particularly these opening students as we call them in the UK, it's much softer. It's a much gentler kind of start. They won't see a math equation for a good few weeks. It'll be talking about the experience of being a student and what it's like to use math in everyday life and so on and so forth. So we won't confront them immediately with a test. Because they already have an anxiety about math. So we're going to give you a test and we're going to heighten that anxiety. So it's a completely different kind of process that we go through a different kind of study experience that the Open University students would have. And alongside that, there's a whole set of scaffolding that kind of goes along that supportive scaffolding. But it's there for the students in terms of the way the tuition function and the way in which we, you know, the forums, the student forums, so on and so forth. So in those aspects, but particularly, I think, attractive to the community college environment. So I think that kind of leads us nicely on to the courses. So in a sense, we've delivered the course yet. We've delivered the courses. And, you know, we've had to go through that process, which is a process which I think is of interest, of, you know, how do we make that material, our material, contextually kind of right for your students and, you know, some of it's dealing with some language kind of issues and so on. So that process cuts across all different aspects of the delivery, I guess, the production of the OER material. So we've had to find some academic faculty members to take part in that process with us, for us. And, you know, there's different kind of viewpoints, depending on the individual we've asked, depending on the community college that they're working on in as to how they go around making those changes or feel they need to make those changes. So there's a whole learning experience that everybody has been involved in this project taking some OER material and delivering it into, you know, a different context. Taking it ostensibly complete, complete courses. Yeah, and moving them, so these courses were paper-based courses. So we're moving into an online environment as well. So, you know, with that in the sense, it's the same thing, it's the same thing, but, you know, some community colleges are choosing to slice that material up to deliver it in a piecemeal kind of way to their students and not give it to them as a whole thing. And I think that's true of AACC. Now, other community colleges are mixing it, mixing it with other courses that they're doing. They're already doing math anxiety courses, so they're using this to kind of supplement, to bulk out the kind of material, to provide a different kind of, you know, experience for the students. So, and that, in a sense, kind of leads us into that lovely piece of British title, oh, British title. But what that means is that there are so many aspects associated with the way in which we're having to change this material, interact, and we're wanting to learn all these experiences. So the research, because this is a funded research project that's actually delivering things into students, so what we're trying to do here is that because of the way in which the community colleges are using the material, you know, we've had to adapt the way in which we're undertaking the research to capture the experience of that student or that faculty member in going through this process so that we can take all that back, put it into something I haven't mentioned anything about all that, which is another kind of project and the evidence of where we're gonna be putting all this evidence back in about the way in which we're going through this reversioning kind of process. So there's all sorts of aspects where things are cutting across, lining up in terms of where we're going to consider. One of the greatest challenges we've had with the project is actually the way in which the Open University actually produces it, so making, putting the material through the, through I call it the OU sausage meal, really, into much that we're taking it from print, putting it into something called lab space, the technical kind of difficulties we have into doing that, and we're wanting to share those or give those skills to the community colleges and we found some difficulties with that because we've been hamstrung by the way in which the Open University has its systems and the way in which it does it, so it doesn't lend itself readily for other people to go in there and make those changes themselves or take the material and actually do it themselves. We've had to do quite a bit of that reversioning for them, but we are dealing with those barriers, those gaps in that kind of sense, and we are delivering that training in so these community colleges can take material and can make the changes themselves. I think we're switching back over to you in relation to the evidence, but all of that research that we're doing, capturing through this whole process, the process of managing the project, the process of reversioning the academic faculty, as I said, their thoughts and the way in which they are having to be asked to be using this material in different ways and different contexts to have some practice they feel comfortable with, the actual people producing the material, everybody is taking part in this kind of research so we can put it into something with the evidence of it. I don't know how many people know anything about it. Anybody heard of the evidence stuff? Know what it is? Most people in this room have a card about the evidence in their possession. Would you like to say a little bit more about their part? I don't know. I don't see science fair at all. And a science fair at all. I'm concerned about that. I don't know what we're talking about. Now if you're interested to know more about the evidence, talk to more of the science fair from three to four thirty, we will be having some not only a demo but also a hands-on session so that you can understand. There's many a website where you can go and share your knowledge about OER, knowledge in terms of challenges, flames, but also projects, resources available and specific interests. I think I'm tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was much better than I could have done. It looks like we've designed this so you can't read it either. So the evidence has been collected. This evidence covers the effect of this and many issues with respect to medication, which you can't really read on the screen are some highlighted issues, the ones that the project's been focusing on and looking at. And you already did a very lovely job, a very lovely color. Of highlighting the issues and the things that we were working on, the way we started to approach this presentation was let's tell you a little bit about what we're doing. But let's also just talk about some of the issues involved with taking existing courses and taking existing content and trying to teach courses around them. We're looking at localizing. So you would think it might be easy that maybe all we have to do is switch some of the spellings around, switch some of the duties around from pounds to dollars. But as Gary's shaking his head, it's been a lot more challenging than that. And at this point, we were just going to open things up for questions from the audience and find out what are the things that we can answer from our experiences that address some of the questions you have with taking material developed by others, localizing it, but using it and looking at other ways and providing support around it. Gary and I can talk about some of the support resources that are in place, some of the things that the community colleges have already done and then are doing now. So we'll go and just open it up for questions. So I'm Margaret Corsek from Western Governors University and we use Babylonian math from the opening, yeah. And so I would say that it can work if it's not translated, let's say, if it's not the primary resource. If it's a supplementary resource that supports other resources, then you know what, you get over it. I mean, then you're not testing to what's in that content necessarily. It's just a good support, you know, to build in our model the confidence for our students. Yeah, and that's something we've experienced. So we've got a particular faculty member at AACC who thinks that material needs reworking quite a lot and we're happy to kind of let them get on with that because from our point of view, that's something they want to kind of evaluate. And then we've got another person from UMUC, I mean, yes. And she's just in the same, I'm happy with it as it is. I can work around with, you know, talking about a trip from London to Liverpool or whatever kind of English kind of bits that are in there. I can deal with that in the way in which I'm thinking that forward. So, you know, and that's another, so we've got different kind of evaluation groups for those individuals. But how do you work that if, let's say the one example where they do modify the content to be more Americanized? Whatever. But is that, I mean, is that then open for others as well then and how does that work with your model? So the way in which we're going through this reversing process, you know, it's actually been sliced off in terms of its reversing. People have kind of backed kind of bits and said, oh, this bit, you know, I really like this bit kind of fits with our community college. So I'll reverse in this bit. Thank you very much. Okay, well, I'll do this bit and I'll be left with it. So it's actually this differing kind of activities going on as we push this material out to the community colleges. But then, you know, once it's finished, you know, it's there. It's there for you to be used today. You know, we've got 33 community colleges kind of signed up and wanted to use it. It's there in lab space. And if you wanted to, if you could get your head around the technical difficulties, you could go into lab space and you're on the cool side of that as well as. So as part of that, we're building a lot of the infrastructure that the Open University has already provided to the world at large, that they use internally and they provided the world at large in lab space where you can make a copy of a course, use it to deliver the course, you can make modifications to it. And as Gears mentioned, there's some technical issues. We're still trying to work around moving from the Open University, it's a very nice production process. The Sausage Factory is very efficient. It's a very nice room, enormous room, with lots of people working on developing current content and assessments and do feedback loops of testing with students and understanding where things are working when things aren't working. That's a process the Open University's been using for 40 years now. But that's a process that's been foreign to most faculty at most universities and colleges in the United States. But so it's part of the experiment then of what happens when we make that available. And some of the examples Gears has been giving, some of the redesign that's gone on sort of to the base course have been by some faculty that have a very particular way of teaching that. And they're taking all of this material and then the reworking that started to make it their own maturity. Sort of, you'd probably say a little too far that it then becomes that much harder for somebody else to take and do that. But that's one of the lessons. Sort of, it's a known lesson, but it's important for everybody involved because what we're doing is faculty development, classroom development, faculty development. In the back. So you talked about the curriculum development and assessment, student assessment in the Sausage Factory. Yep. Tell us a little bit more about what you measured in the UK and how that's come into the feedback. Yeah, so I mean, we have a whole quality assurance kind of loop that we, so. What are the benefits of that, so? Because I'm trying to compare them to what we have here in terms of, you know, degree completion, student retention. Right. So off the top of my head, I don't know. But I'm happy to kind of, you know, take something from you and get back to you. Because I mean, the OU is, because it's completely open, you don't have to come with any kind of pre-qualifications in any kind of sense. So our retention figures in some kind of way, I'm sure people kind of don't want me to kind of say this. But, you know, they don't really stack up to people who kind of say, well actually if you're coming with 4A levels of grade A plus and so on and so forth, you know, so we have a completely different kind of student demographic. Yeah, so students come in here. Yeah. And it's students taking or individuals wanting to take a single class or individuals wanting to do a degree program. So I think a lot of that does, my receptionist, a lot of that exists here, but a lot of the focus is, certainly with the recent funding, is how do you take the folks that do want that degree and how do you make sure they can lose them candidly and reasonable amount of time. And the piece we're looking at is, can you help with the preparation piece, which then kind of works its way through? In the UK it focuses more on the student completion of an individual course. So we, so students, yeah, so students kind of can sign up for programs. So whilst they're doing individual courses, they stack up into a program qualification. The university is moving more towards a program kind of delivery. So students actually make a commitment to sign up to a program. That's something that's kind of coming in due to the funding changes that we've had in the UK. So, So presumably you're a funder at the end that's something to look at, right? Absolutely. You always want some results. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it's about, you know, it's about the students, isn't it? So the students are wanting to achieve, you know, their goals, their success goals, whatever they might be on an individual basis. And, you know, that's what's important, the retention of the student kind of a success. And everything that we do, well, in terms of, you know, the students sitting right in the middle, you know, of everything that we do, so that we, you know, we are developing those courses around. So we've done an awful lot of developmental testing, students in, taking their qualities, and we're all going back in. It's all feeling back through all the time. But the metrics, the metrics, it sounds like a revolving in terms of what program outcomes you're looking for. Yeah. I'm not best placed to talk about that. But there are people in your unit. There are, there are not, there's a whole unit that just does that. All right, great, well, I'll follow. Yeah. Kelly. So, as you think about it, I have an assumption that you're working with a smaller group of partners right now as part of this grant process, but this is kind of currently the model that you would expand and bring in other, other, like the community college parents. Is that the case? Yes. So when you think about the, the variability that comes into this, you know, I find this, I can remember, it's requiring significant customization and another patent never is using something that is much more out of its oxygen to what you provide us. Yeah. Does that, does that impact your scaling or time? Does it need to move more in one direction or the other in terms of it being, being more broadly adoptable, or is that something that you can imagine, that degree of variability continuing at scale? So I think that the challenges that we're perhaps encountering with this project, that we are tackling, I think that it allows for that scalability because we've got the original. The original is there and it's open and available and people can take it and they can use it now and do whatever they kind of want with it. So it's there and available. So the bits in some sense we need to kind of crack is kind of make it more accessible in terms of being able to kind of make the changes that you need, personalization in some kind of way. Perhaps making the other versions, the versions that perhaps fit best with your community college available. So, you know, like I said, that's scalable. No, it's a good question. You know, we're running a marathon to get to where we're at right now. Right. And we have the tools that enable us to do all of that, but we frankly haven't had the time to think, really think through, how do you do any support multiple versions? The initial intent was, there was going to be a kind of master class from which people would be able to take and modify or use as is. I think we sort of got hit a lot sooner than maybe we were expecting, but with the variability factor and that's caused us to have to do lots of different things which goes back to the turd and plan thing of the interweaving and then changing up how we're doing the evaluation assessments and then also providing materials back out to prospective adopters of material. So, the original goal was to provide three courses that you could take and use as is and with assessments and the ability to track that over time. That's really what NGLC wanted us to do. Great theory, not necessarily just great practice and I think we're still trying to work through where that is. So, you have a place now where it was almost more like you have kind of the initial courses and then a few different flavors of those courses. We're gonna start it from that core and what's probably still unknown are those flavors, you know, your... Is there a point? Is there a drop rate that are going to cover most of the institutions or is this gonna be just correct or not great? So, that'll come out of the evaluation. We've got, as I said, we have 33 community colleges kind of interested. We've got the vanilla version which is there already. We're just about to have the, whatever, raspberry rip and kind of that. And then that might lead on to other things. I think one of the key things is that the first course, learning to learn, that was quite unproblematic in the way in which it kind of was converted from the openings course into the one for the British success. Obviously the maths course because it's moved online as well. So we've had a whole heap of kind of challenges there about maths formula and maths and maths, math and math, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, that's some of the issues that we, you know, we are dealing with. And I think we're dealing with them. Yep, absolutely. I have a sense that we're out of time just about that rate. Two minutes. Yeah. One minute. That's one minute. One more question for us. You mentioned technical difficulties. Could you give us a couple of examples of the kinds of problems you're overcoming? If only Guy was here. So I think from our point of view, you know, the OU has got a very, you know, we have our own XML schema which does, you know, which enables us to kind of spit all sorts of different kind of versions out. Now, you can't get at that, you know, if you're not inside the OU. Now, that's something, one of the reasons I guess I've taken it on, that's one of the reasons why that group wanted to be involved in this big from an OU point of view is we need to crack that up. You know, we can't always be the people that they turn to in order to kind of do that, that manual kind of work. And, you know, we're dealing with that XML editing kind of issue by reviewing, not that I'm not tech, I'm tool tech. So we can't. So oxygen XML editor is something that we've been looking at for the OU and something that we have been using as a version for using. On this particular transition for the magical. So that's something we have undertaken to training out the community colleges using that XML editor in order to make those transformations so they can actually do it in-house. Okay, can I take a call up there? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.