 be respectful of everybody's time, especially our speakers. So I'm going to go ahead and get started with an intro. So thank you all for joining this plenary session. I am incredibly excited to welcome two education leaders to share with us today. In this plenary, we're going to hear from both Sharon Liu from the US Department of Education, and also Dr. Harrison Keller, who is the Commissioner of Higher Education for the State of Texas. However, before we hear from them, I'd like to take a moment and acknowledge that today is a holiday in many countries. And I want to recognize those who are honoring this day and those who have served their countries. So thank you, thank you to all of our veterans. In this session, each speaker will speak for about 25 minutes. And then at the end, we will jump to a joint Q&A period for about 25 minutes. So as the speakers are going through, please put your questions in the Q&A panel and zoom. And I will moderate the questions after our two speakers have finished. So with that, I am extremely excited to introduce our first speaker, Sharon Liu. Sharon is a senior policy advisor at the US Department of Education. There, she leads the Office of Education Technologies Higher Education Innovation Initiative that explore the complex ecosystem of lifelong learning, life-wide post-secondary learning, and opportunities technology provides to broaden access to education for all learners. Most recently, these initiatives have focused on occupation, credential interoperability, accessible learning resources, and the Education Blockchains Initiative. Sharon also works in the offices across the government on projects that showcase promising practices in digital workforce development and building capacity for emerging technologies. Part of her portfolio includes the implementation of the US Department of Education's open licensing requirement for competitive grant programs and support for the open textbook pilot grant program. I'm sure many of you in this audience are probably feverishly working on those proposals that I think do next week. Sharon has had a long career. I think I first met her at the Department of Labor when she was meeting a lot of the US Department of Labor's work on the trade adjustment assistance, community collage, and career training tax program, which distributed nearly $2 billion in grants, which also required an open license on the works that were produced under the tax program. And then one quick fact, so Sharon is an aspiring park ranger. So you might have to ask some questions about that. Perfect. Let me turn it over to Sharon. Hi, Daniel. Is the sound good? Can you hear me? Perfect. Great. So I just wanted to say, before I start into my little slide deck, that I wanted to do a couple of thank yous. So I definitely wanted to thank you, Daniel, and Nicole, and the other organizers of this conference. I think I was highly impressed that you pulled it off, not that I doubted any of your persistence or abilities, but for a couple of reasons. So the most obvious is that there is a little bit of chaos in 2020, and a lot of things I think probably were not what we all expected, but mostly because the OER community is such an interesting and diverse and strong community. And these kinds of communities really do require very persistent and understanding leadership and organizers. And so I think that I am so excited that this conference is happening, that it is community led, but that the organizers really did a good job of getting community voice and participation. So what a really fun conference. And I also wanted to thank everyone for actually attending, not because coming and sitting in front of a Zoom screen is hard or not hard, but I think continuous professional development, refining your craft, being better instructors, thinking about policy. These are all, I think, because all of us in this community are really committed to serving students in the U.S. better. And so thank you for persisting through this crazy year being here and actually, I think, still bringing a lot of fun to this. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to run through about a dozen slides very quickly. Those of you who know me know that I do tend to talk very fast and so I will apologize. Please ping me in the chat or let the Q and let the moderators know if I am going too fast or not covering the right topics that you want to hear about. So what I think the topic that we proposed was just how to think bigger about OER. And I'm a very simple kind of person. So we'll go with big, bigger and biggest. And let's see, how do we, oh no. Okay. So great. So I just want to sort of add on, I don't know who writes those. I guess I wrote that at one point, the little bio. I feel a little old because I wanted to, I think what Nicole had written, had, I think, bullied me into writing in there is that it's my actual third presidential transition. I started my career in the federal government at the Department of Labor right when the Bush Obama transition was happening. I was around for the Obama Trump transition. And now I think at some point there will be a Trump Biden transition, which I will also be part of. And it's been a really interesting and Rocky ride. I think interesting is a better word than Rocky because it always is Rocky, but Rocky is not either good or bad. And recently I was actually having a conversation with some new staff that I onboarded to my team, who were actually asking about sort of periods of uncertainty and instability. And the piece of advice that I gave to them is that no matter what the circumstances are, you know, even if there wasn't an election this year and it was just the pandemic, there will always be things that we don't predict our plan for. And the key thing to I think surviving or weathering all of these is to stay focused on work that has lasting impact. Leveraging the opportunities that do present themselves to you and making sure that you use the privileges that you have to provide opportunities for those who do not. And so that's sort of on point with the theme the office of edge. I am a senior policy advisor in the office of educational technology. And our key values here are that we believe that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. And what we want to do is make sure that the technology that is available can have its greatest impact when it focuses on equity. So thinking about issues related to broadband access, accessibility of materials, open education and the myriad of other inside the classroom outside of the classroom infrastructure questions. And in post secondary education in particular, we think that technology when it's applied systematically, collaboratively across programs and institutions can really help address long standing issues of access, affordability and success, and profoundly impact outcomes for students that we serve. So with that, let's jump into open education and the big ecosystem that is that I guess is the impact of the five Rs. And this is a reflection I think of how the policy programs and funding of the Department of Education has been sort of over the last few years has developed. So initially, obviously through programs like the tact program that a lot of that Daniel referenced and that a lot of you participate in, we created a large number of content and resources. We've also focused on developing the materials necessary for complete courses that are around the content that's open. We've started to think about pathways. Like I know that there is a lot of investment outside of the federal government as well as inside on like Z degree programs, for example, and then thinking about the ecosystem of credentials. Through some work through the early success of like all of your work actually related to developing content and courses and pathways and credentials, we've been able to build some policies in the federal government that either require encourage or enforce the need for educational materials to be that are publicly funded to be available to the public easily. So I so when we talk about open education ecosystem at the Department of Education, we are thinking about all of these things. We know that our work is primarily in the blue in the policy programs and funding where we support the work that all of you are doing in the purple boxes, the content courses pathways and credentials and I have to apologize. I am not like very artistic and so this is the highest level of achievement that I will like have on slide design. Okay, so so I'll give you some examples. We mentioned the tax grant program skills commons is a result of that some of a lot of the content that was created in during that program is still available on the skills commons.org website and in our existing open textbook grant program and I know that Kim will be presenting later on in this conference. We have three main investments, the open RN project, the Libra text project as well as the open active textbooks project that we have currently funded and just because everyone is probably thinking about this right now. Nicole did mention in the chat applications are due on November 16, which I think is plenty of time to still go to OER karaoke. I think I said that wrong. But essentially in addition to the textbooks themselves, I think there is an acknowledgement this time that there are actually large gaps that are not just in the content themselves, but in bringing sort of whole courses into the open education marketplace, providing technology based strategies for personalization, continuous improvement of teaching, promoting student success, and again working in collaboration with other institutions. I'm happy to take specific questions about this, either now or in the probably not now but in the Q&A. But yes, we would love for everyone to apply for this grant, which is due on November 16. So then what do we mean by bigger? If this is actually a lot, right, just those four things alone is entire careers for many of you, which is excellent. And thank you for doing that. But when I say bigger, am I saying that you are not doing enough? And I actually want to say that that's not exactly what I mean. But when I say a bigger open education ecosystem at the department, we've started to think a little bit differently about things. So what is the sort of evolution or the biggest potential of these five Rs? So in addition to the content and the delivery of the resources themselves, like is there a way for us to promote experiences for students? If it's just a course in one institution, what if it was a course in multiple institutions? So what if the experiences could extend across platforms, regardless of where you are currently enrolled and where you will be enrolled later? What if in addition to one pathway, towards one goal, you could have multiple pathways and that the achievements that you have obtained along these pathways could extend across multiple institutions and not even just institutions. But what if they could also extend to the achievements that you have obtained through your working experience or other sort of life experiences? And what if you could take those achievements in in form of credentials with you so that you can access opportunities throughout your entire life? And part of why we think about this bigger open education ecosystem in this way is because more and more, and especially because of this pandemic, we I think that it's becoming very, very real that education for individuals is not one size fits all. Individuals learn over a lifetime. They learn in many different places at many different institutions and in many different types of organizations that provide education. And in addition to just all of the content being free and easily available, we want the experiences not to be locked into one particular platform so that if you transfer to another institution or you learn in a different place, those same types of immersive, personalized, accessible experiences can be available to you there too. So then in that case, we have to ask ourselves the question like what are the technology standards that we need to enforce in order for content to be interoperable? If we want achievements to be to be mobile with students across institutions or their workplace, then we need to start thinking about whether there are open, transparent quality measures so that when courses are evaluated for transfer credit, for example, that we know that students have received and we acknowledge that they can have achieved these same types of skills in a different context and we can allow students to then progress without repeating. And if students then have credentials, what are the credentials that have value in either pursuing additional education or in their workplace? And are there ways for us to have like ascribed value to these credentials so that they have meaning both in the work for employers and for other educational institutions? And how can we allow individuals then to take these credentials with them so that they can continue whenever they need if they need to pause, then that would be fine too. So these are all projects that the department is currently investing in and I'll give you and that are we're also very interested in and I'll give you some examples of some of these. So the department is co-chairing a digital infrastructure working group through the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board that thinks about learning and employment records, pilots that allow you to take the skills that you've learned in a workplace and translate them into educational credits or educational credits along a pathway can be supplemented with and lead to further employment opportunities and across platforms as well. So if you attend one institution that uses a particular LMS, you are not limited in the portability of your records through an applicant tracking system at an employer. Something like related to that that we're really interested in is something called the Open Skills Network, which is a coalition of education providers and employers, et cetera, that want to create open taxonomies and frameworks for discussing what our skills and what contributes to skills and what skills contribute to credentials so that when someone says I am a software engineer and I'm certified in this trade or I have a bachelor's degree in molecular biology that has meaning and it's a universal language that allows me then to access my next opportunity, whether it's educational or employment. You know, other really interesting projects I think are the Open Silivus project and which will I think help, I think this is part of the session so I am not qualified to talk about it but I think it's a really interesting approach. So this is how we've sort of thought about it when we were I think creating our CARES Act discretionary grants and we called it the Reimagining Workforce Preparation Grants. This is a lot of what we thought. This is not a grant that's open right now but I think that there are still opportunities for you to participate particularly if you are in one of the seven states that received one of our grants. In all of these states, the workforce boards had to partner with employers as well as education stakeholders to create short-term education and training programs that were along career pathways. Now because this is one of the discretionary grants that are that the Department of Ed issued, they are required. All of the materials, all of the courses and training programs are going to be openly licensed according to the regulation but in addition we introduced a new sort of open requirement which is that there would be linked open data on the credentials that would be issued. So I think there's a link on the bottom of this slide. Please feel free to ask me more about these and I think there's contact information as well for who you might talk to within some of these states but I think we're really excited about that. Similarly, we have the Rethink K-12 education models where states could propose virtual learning and course access programs. Now again because these are discretionary grants from the Department of Education, they are required to have open licenses on any of the materials that they produce. In addition, again we didn't introduce this for K-12 entities as a requirement but a strong recommendation again that they use linked open data on the credentials that they issue and I think we'll have the privilege of hearing a little bit more about the Texas Project in just a minute. And finally we have one open funding opportunity so after you've karaokeed and written your open textbook grant please take a look at the career education pathways exploration system program. Sorry this is a mouthful but we love the long names and essentially it's you know technology based or technology enabled career and education pathway systems for high school students. Now this isn't a direct high school to post-secondary connection it could also be a high school to career connection but it is an opportunity for us to partner with a lot of the different projects that are ongoing that are related to open data on educational outcomes on return on investment and I think pathways. So the applications are due the ninth so again the order is karaoke open textbook grant and then look at the career educational pathways exploration system programs. Okay and so I'll just wrap with saying what is the biggest and I think the biggest is the the growing community of the five Rs. I had a really so the question I want to ask is what if everyone in all of the world had all of the OER that they could ever want? Would we have fixed all of the systemic issues that exist in our society in our education system? And obviously I think the answer is probably no but I think that OER plays a really critical part in this and I think that like we've talked about it a little bit and I this is and I want to like I think I'll put a fine point on it by saying it like this. So this is a slide that I presented at Open Ed four years ago when things were also very interesting right so November four years ago where were you? So I was giving this presentation about federal policy on open education and I gave these five bullet points on how people can continue to do this work. I said in order for you to be engaged in national policy you should do good work and you should do it together you should tell your story and use lots of data you should participate in your democracy you should buy coffee aka get to know people that work in the federal government and you should persist and be patient and I think that now four years later I'm not sure I would change very many of the talking points and I just wanted to say a big thank you to I think so many of you who have known me for the I think 12 years that I've been in government that have taught me so much about open education and that have continued to share with me the results of your good work. I think that when the federal government and the I think people that are in this are stakeholders in the field who are actually doing the work can talk with each other and have clear lines of communication that is when I think on a national level we begin to make real impact and so without all of your hard work and all of you I think giving me updates on the great things that you are doing telling me and showing me the data and helping us do this I think we would not have made the progress that we have and I would encourage everyone to continue doing this. There is a new team that is coming to the department I think many of you have seen the list and know that there are some familiar faces but this isn't to say that this open education will automatically be a priority. I think we have to continue to tell to do the work and tell the stories and to continue to participate by getting to know the new team and to be really patient because I think that good things are coming. So with that I'm going to stop sharing and turn it over to you. Excellent thanks so much Sharon. So just to remind everybody we are going to be taking questions at the end so if you have any questions from Sharon's talk please be sure to put them in the Q&A. Excellent so now we have our next speaker. I'm really excited to introduce Dr. Harrison Keller. He was appointed the sixth commissioner of higher education and the chief executive officer for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board about a year ago. Dr. Keller is a recognized innovator in policy and programs to improve college readiness and student success especially for low-income and first-generation students. He is the founder and was principal investigator of OnRamps which is a dual enrollment initiative that provides college level courses to tens of thousands of high school students across the state of Texas and the Texas OnCourse Initiative that works with Governor Greg Abbott's tri-agency workforce to improve secondary college and career advising across the state and if I'm not mistaken Dr. Keller OnRamps actually uses quite a bit of OER so that's quite exciting to see. So he came to the Coordinating Board from the University of Texas at Austin where he was deputy to the president for strategy and policy and a professor of practice. Dr. Keller also served at UT as vice provost for higher education policy and research and executive director of the Office of Educational Innovation and the Center for Teaching and Learning. Dr. Keller has taught at Georgetown University, St. Edward's University and the University of Texas at Austin and he holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and the master's and PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University and so with that I'd like to turn it over to our next speaker, Dr. Harrison Keller. Thanks Daniel so I'm Harrison Keller I'm the Texas commissioner of higher education and I appreciate this opportunity to speak with you all about the challenges we're facing some of our immediate responses in Texas and also to share a few suggestions for how I think we might want to approach digital learning so we can bolster the historic transformation in higher education that's already underway. So of course 2020 has been quite a year I'm only about a year into my new position although it seems a lot longer than that right now and in addition to the kinds of major issues we routinely have to deal with we've also in Texas felt the combined pain of the COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis in our global energy markets and the shocks to our state and national economies have been profound so we've had nearly 3.8 million Texans apply for unemployment since March in September our unemployment rate was about 8.3% and that was down from a high of about 13% in May and still more than double what it was at the beginning of the year. Our sales tax collections which are the major source of revenue for our state budget were also down by more than 6% in September but they had been down by more than 13% in May and that was the steepest year over year decline we've seen in Texas in more than a decade so the current recession is also the most inequitable that we've seen since unemployment data was tracked so women black Texans Hispanic Texans low income Texans and our Texans who live in rural communities have disproportionately lost jobs and are seeing slower returns to employment so what we're seeing in all this data isn't like anything that any of us or most of our parents ever experienced because in a period of about eight months we went from having one of the most robust economies in state history to having millions of people out of work and we know that many of those same jobs may not come back meanwhile the uncertainty and the fear that's created by COVID-19 continues to disrupt our daily lives and our livelihoods for our students and their families the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating so even before the pandemic our institutions weren't able to meet all students financial aid with grants and scholarships a few months ago about 70% of our college students were working and yet we still had many students who struggled with food and housing insecurity this academic year there are far fewer of the kinds of jobs that students typically rely on and students have had more trouble paying their bills we also continue to have significant challenges in college and career advising not only because of low counselor student ratios in secondary schools but also because students' connection to the resources that were offered in conjunction with college entrance exams has been disrupted and for our adults one of our recent polls found that fewer than one in three adults without degrees said that they understand the available pathways and marketable skills and details about available educational programs very well all these factors are contributing to a current situation where low and tone students black and Hispanic students and students from rural communities are less likely to enroll in higher education and more likely to stop out or delay graduation and our enrollments and surprisingly are down at the broad access institutions than those students attend now for our colleges and universities the COVID-19 pandemic has entailed massive costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars not only with the new costs of converting to online learning and moving students off campus and setting up new COVID-19 mitigation strategies and testing centers but also with a simultaneous collapse of multiple revenue streams they depended on from housing from food service events athletics and philanthropy this has been the most significant disruption to the operations of our colleges and universities since the end of the second world war and I want to commend you all and all of the leadership of our colleges our universities are university systems for their swift and creative responses that have prioritized safety of our students our faculty and our staff so I know many institutional leaders and faculty across the state I know they've been working tirelessly to support their students continued academic progress and success of course that included converting nearly all their courses to online deliveries standing up a merchant's aid and buying thousands of laptops and hot spots it's kind of flowing below the radar screen that the institutions have also been active partners in communities public health responses not only through hospitals and clinics but also by donating personal protective equipment re-engineering respirators sanitizing masks bringing face shields and contributing in other ways now the pandemic's not yet behind us and we remain in a state of uncertainty about the rest of the school year and so many other aspects of our lives but even as we take necessary measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 we have to look to the future and chart a course to recovery and that recovery starts with higher education so we know this because we've seen aspects of it before and not that long ago so in the great recession the U.S. lost more than 7 million jobs including 5.6 million that had required only a high school diploma now by 2016 our U.S. economy had added more than 11.4 million net new jobs but only about 80 000 jobs that required just a high school diploma had come back so put another way American workers with only a high school education had experienced almost no recovery at all and now we're facing even greater challenges and people without post-secondary credentials are especially vulnerable right now the unemployment rates for American workers who don't have post-secondary credentials are more than twice the rates for workers with bachelor's degrees so these disruptions we're experiencing are accelerating changes that were already underway in our economy and that means that Americans who participate in our economic recovery who are going to fill the jobs of tomorrow's emerging economy are increasingly going to need new skills and high value credentials now at the Texas higher-end coordinating board our primary roles through the crisis have been to act as a resource a partner and an advocate for Texas higher education so in particular we've been partnering closely with our governor with legislative leadership and other state agencies so we can provide regulatory flexibility to help our public institutions adapt to COVID-19 and continue to serve students we've been partnering with state and national philanthropies to raise private funds for emergency student aid and we continue to support our higher education institutions to help them ensure continuity of campus operations and instruction for students the most significant recent actions that we've been able to take have come about because of a commitment by our governor governor Greg Abbott and our legislative leadership of 175 million dollars federal CARES Act stimulus funds particularly the component that's known as the governor's emergency education relief funds or gear for strategic investments in higher education initiatives that are specifically tied to economic recovery the majority of these funds about 150 million dollars were allocated for student financial aid that included 57 million allocated to protect our major student financial aid programs from coronavirus related state budget cuts 46 and a half million dollars for additional emergency aid for students who were suddenly at risk of foregoing higher education because their families financial situations had suddenly changed and then another 46 and a half million dollars dedicated to support displaced workers who need to reskill or up skill to get back into the workforce and the nearly 3.9 million Texans who at some point had stopped out or dropped out of college many of those students are in striking distance of finishing so we're going to support our institutions in re-enrolling these students so they can reskill or up skill get on to a new career path and contribute to our Texas recovery the remaining gear funds that our Texas state leadership committed for higher education about 25 million dollars was allocated to our agency to modernize our educational and workforce data infrastructure and to bolster the quality of online learning including through the development and adoption of open educational resources so as we look beyond our immediate responses to economic recovery these kinds of strategic investments in higher education are going to be essential for our students for our institutions for our states this time of disruption is also a unique window of opportunity when it's increasingly urgent to design and implement new models of higher education that reflect a renewed commitment to our responsibilities to promote access foster social capital increase student success and drive upward mobility at scale now if we were having this conversation a year ago and i'd announce that all of our colleges and universities were going to be able to transition all their courses online within a couple of weeks i would have sounded pretty crazy but of course that's exactly what had happened remember that so there were these old criticisms about colleges and universities being resistant to technology and slow to change and a lot of that got blown out of the water in about two weeks last march and this was amazing now especially with you all let's stipulate that neither the technologies nor the course redesigns have always worked as they were intended especially in the first versions that were rolled out but still what i've consistently heard across our state and across the nation is that as the creative energies of our students our faculty departments whole institutions were suddenly thrust into working on digital learning a panoply of new ideas and experiments have emerged higher ed's been implementing major changes to courses programs academic calendars how they use physical spaces and how they use technologies far faster and far beyond anything we anticipated a year ago so i've been arguing that this is a critical moment when we need to get behind our innovators and higher education share what we're learning about more effective designs for learning and advocate for new resources policies and partnerships that are going to allow these educational innovations to flourish and scale so that's why i was grateful to our state leadership for committing a portion of our gear funds to strengthen the quality of digital learning and reduce the cost of instructional materials to students right now faculty teams at our public and independent institutions across texas are working on applications for grants through our agency to build out and scale work they've already begun with open educational resources across three major strands of work the core courses that most students take and frequently transfer among institutions college readiness materials and workforce education materials and i want to say we deeply appreciate our partnerships with open stacks with ut austin's charles adana center and also with delis delis college's thought partners in this work and his technical assistance providers for our faculty and institutions across the state but the challenges we face today are much deeper than a lack of resources for the kinds of things that we've already been doing we're in the early stages of the historic transformation in higher education and of course many of you all are right on the front lines the way forward is going to require bold leadership strategic investment stronger partnerships and true grit so we can emerge with renewed commitments to our public missions and a better future over the last several months i've spent a lot of time in long conversations and late night communications and texting with college and university and system leaders and board members and legislators and despite the scale of the challenges we're still facing i think we all recognize that higher ed has got to be an essential part of the solution for how we're going to adapt overcome and emerge even stronger as a state and as a nation and this work is already underway but it's going to have to accelerate over the next several months and into the coming years i know that our community and technical colleges are already gearing up to expand access so people can achieve high value post-secondary credentials more than we've ever served before our institutions continue to work at the frontiers of knowledge leading discoveries and insights that are going to power a brighter and more competitive future and all of our institutions are rapidly expanding their capacity to leverage digital learning and find innovative ways to deliver higher education so in this unique time when students and faculty and campuses are suddenly dependent on digital learning what should our approaches include so we can effectively cut across and dampen the current challenges we face in advance our broader public mission at scale i'd like to nominate three components so first instructional technologies second facilitated networks and third data infrastructure so of course instructional technologies are becoming more sophisticated more ubiquitous and let's stipulate that these technologies have often been designed and deployed to support current practices which means that they can reinforce our traditional and more formal conceptions teaching and classrooms and learning but there's a subset of these technologies that are being designed and deployed in ways that transcend those traditional structures so not only on demand but adaptive technologies learning applications and advising tools that are powered by AI integrated learning analytics more intentional focus on intersections among instructional design and uiux design and of course next generation open educational resources that can better support instructional design in deeper learning so i'd emphasize a couple of points about these technologies so first i think that the design of instructional technologies in general needs to be brought into closer dialogue with the learning sciences especially intersections among cognitive science neuroscience and instructional design i'm especially excited about the work that price is undertaken to promote more effective use of the open stacks resources and better course design and i'm also excited about new platforms that are being built to facilitate learning in ways that are collaborative social and going to promote learner engagement now i say also as a dad to two teenagers i suggest that maybe down the road we might want to consider whether there's elements of the kind of coordination and collaboration and learning happening in a context of gaming that might be transformed and transposed more effectively into the context because that was how it comes a great relief to many of us so second point i'd like to emphasize is that our students and faculty have to be supported in the use of these technologies and to be candid i'm concerned about the current state of many of our campus teaching centers and our digital learning support groups for facilitating this work within and across our campuses so over the last few years some of our provosts and presidents has started to look at these as cost centers and had pulled back their support and then all of a sudden this last march those same centers went from supporting a few dozen online courses to several thousand online courses and many of those centers are still scrambling the second major component i'd recommend is technology enabled facilitated networks especially to foster and support well-trained empowered educators so to illustrate the kind of networks i have in mind let me talk a little bit about the on ramps initiative that daniel mentioned uh so that's a dual enrollment program i'd founded when i was at ut austin and on ramps was designed around facilitated networks of university faculty and high school teachers so the program works like this so you have faculty teams at the university lead development of low-cost prototype college courses in corresponding high school courses and training materials working with teams of instructional designers and technologists now and some of that lower cost is achieved by using best in class open educational resources then high school teachers affiliate with the university and they're trained along with the faculty and technology pedagogy and content so they can teach corresponding high school courses and join networks of other teachers who are connected to and supported by the university-based hub and then high school students simultaneously take faculty led distance education college courses from the university faculty and corresponding high school courses the high school teachers receive ongoing coaching and support from peers from university faculty and staff and contribute to ongoing improvements as co-authors they can even assign the students to create new content and then finally the course design the content the training materials are refined and scaled and improved based on data and input from across the network so of course finally there is tongue in cheek because the process is never really final so in terms of student success and educator engagement what we've seen is that on ramps courses get far better traction than in our UT MOOCs and in more conventional dual credit courses so why is that because all of these leveraged cutting-edge technologies all of them leveraged strong instructional design but it turns out that the key wasn't really in the technology or even in the instructional design it was a combination of high-touch coaching and support systems that were enabled by a technology stack which we designed to support respectful engagement among the educators through facilitated networks versus more passive broadcast models or disempowering direct instruction models so now in Texas we're increasingly bringing these approaches and insights into other domains in particular at the coordinating board we're standing up major initiatives to strengthen advising from middle school through high school through post-secondary education to adult learners and then we're also standing up another initiative in partnership with institutions teaching support centers to establish a digital learning clearinghouse of assets that can be shared across institutions we're very excited about the potential of these kinds of efforts to leverage the technology and build our educators pedagogical social capital at scale looking further down the road I also I do think it's going to be important for us to train and support and promote educators in a way that will enable them to further enlist their students as co-authors and co-development co-developers not only in discrete assignments but also in the design of their educational pathways we see glimmers of this already but it's mostly happening on the margins and then the third major component I think it's critical for our efforts in digital learning is going to be educational and workforce data so it's increasingly possible for us to link and analyze and map this detailed data about our students pathways through k12 into higher ed into the workforce and bring that data into dialogue with other data like the detailed course level data out of the lms or unstructured data from syllabi and other data about career paths and the skills employers are looking for so we can eliminate what's happening with students within and across institutions and enable us to focus our attention and resources so right now at the coordinating board we're leading an effort for the governor and in partnership with the workforce commission texas education agency to to stand up a new data infrastructure with modern data modeling visualization analytics so we can help create new opportunities to drive improvement reduce costs and increase value these so these three major components of digital digital learning infrastructure that i'm talking about so the instructional technologies the facilitated networks the data infrastructure i think are all essential to enable higher education to advance equity at scale far beyond the traditional boundaries of our physical campuses and our institution's traditional conceptions of who they serve versus more familiar notions of who they enroll so one especially important way we do this is we can create dynamic platforms for rapid testing research and evaluation improvement across institutions with the ability to operate at far greater speed and scale than was ever possible before so finally let me just say a couple of things about policy because in addition to providing funding policy provides essential enabling conditions for higher education to be able to be effective in driving student success and upward mobility so the basic principles is straightforward for new designs in digital learning and higher education to be stable and resilient they're going to have to be designed and built with careful consideration of the context in which we're building so in particular i'd argue that this moment requires higher education policy context that effectively are going to create access encourage cross institutional collaboration encourage innovation support improvement and facilitate upward mobility so as as we consider options i think we can take a lot of inspiration but also caution from k-12 policies but i'd recommend that we we need to encourage not just our institutional leaders but our policymakers to have serious conversations about the kind of capital investment that's going to be required for this transformation to take hold uh student financing options regulatory room for us to innovate the policy guardrails that are going to prioritize the return on investment for students and public data publicity about key indicators that as Sharon mentioned in the transparency of data for deeper dives and then an emphasis on identifying scaling and improving effective practices so we've started multiple aspects of this work in our state but we're still in the early stages there's a lot of hard work ahead and we look forward to partnering with institutions university systems and other partners across texas and beyond so we can accelerate and increase the impact of this work in closing i just want to say again how much i appreciate this discussion today and the work you all are doing and the on the front lines of this work on behalf of your students your institutions your states and our nation so we continue to face unprecedented challenges and our students and institutions have suffered severe financial shocks but i think all of us in higher education recognize that this isn't a time to try to backfill lost revenue and hunker down see what grants we can get hope things get back to normal so now our priority has to be laying foundations and building new kinds of infrastructures for economic recovery and a better more just future so committed educators like like you all whose ideas and energy will accelerate our path through these incredibly challenging times are essential partners in this work and i think we need to hear new voices including communities and institutions employers students whose perspectives haven't always been heard so thank you again for the boy the work you do and thank you for including me in the program today i'm looking forward to our conversations excellent thank you so much really appreciate that talk um i have one quick question for you that uh came up in my mind as you were going through um the discussion and you mentioned the the amount of people who have like stopped out or dropped out that they have some college and no degree and i'm curious if you might be willing to share whatever recommendations you have for folks in this audience who are also focused on those issues are there certain programs or practices that you've seen that have been super successful yeah so we're um so we're taking a little different approach on that right now actually we were standing up and uh and prototyping a new approach in greater houston that we call grad text and so that that's one of the one of the key um insights that that's fueled this work is traditionally we've thought too much in terms of individual institutions engaging students or re-enrolling students as opposed to looking across institutions so so we have this weird dichotomy where on one hand the kind of advising that's provided is typically provided once students already affiliate with an institution versus the way that students take courses is increasingly across institutions and a lot of students and a lot of adult learners are telling us that they they don't have a good sense of what the options are and what's available to them so what uh so one of the things that we're working on now that i'm excited about is where you work across a coalition of institutions in more of a comprehensive regional approach stand up a central intake portal be able to provide some initial advising and you can leverage the technology and we're even like embedding chatbot and some other technologies like that but leverage the technology to to help get a sense of what might uh what folks might be interested in and then you can engineer a warm handoff to the institution so so that way you're we're not just sort of counting on people to go to google and stumble into the right institution where they're going to get appropriately advised excellent excellent well hopefully Sharon's still around are you there Sharon um yes i am still around excellent well thank you both so much for those great talks there have been quite a few questions that have come in um over the course of the the talks um perhaps i'll jump in and um ask you one that i see um Sharon which is is the department working um across the federal government formally or informally to push for more openness especially when it comes to requiring immediate open access to all the results of federally funded research um that project okay so um that so access to data from federally funded research is actually a project that is led um at other agencies i think there's um a database called pub med pub med is where people have to put their um you know the information from and data and their publications so um that's mostly i think pub med is run by nih um or you know other entities so as far as like data um from research um the department of education doesn't have the lead on that but you know the department of education has a database it's called eric and eric is where um i guess we can put the link somewhere it's where um people who receive are the department of education's research funding do have to put their papers and the the data around their papers so um we can put the link somewhere excellent and then there was a request for you um to dive a little bit more deeply into the open syllabus project and i think this is actually kind of interesting as well because there's a nice overlap with Texas because Texas actually requires all public um all syllabi to be public um and that created a very large corpus in the open syllabus project so um i don't know if you both want to touch on that and what the data that you're seeing as being useful um from the open syllabus project um so i'm not qualified to speak about the project itself um i i just put that in there is something that i'm very interested in and i'll but i'll tell you why i'm interested um so you know not just because of um covid but you know because of a lot of sort of structural realignment we're seeing um some colleges are closing or some students are stopping out to work right and it's actually um in the data i think Harrison mentioned it as well lots of students um don't have the continuous four-year one-time you know trajectory of education anymore and so what makes it difficult is um the transfer process like 40 percent of credits are lost to students when they transfer depending on you know what what they're trying to do right so if i've taken a course right if i'm the average um nces data point then i've transferred three times before i finish um and each of the times i might have to duplicate a class and the reason for that is because um and i think everyone on on on the zoom call knows this when when you transfer you have to demonstrate that like like faculty review the course and they have to say like yes or no i accept that this is like the same quote unquote quality right so um and it's an it's i'm not going to say it's arbitrary as if it was capricious but it's different um for every institution how they review um and if your institution is open you may be able to go back to your old instructor and say i need a list of the resources the references the materials etc if your institution is not um open or if that information is not available you may not get the credit and so having some of that information publicly available openly available i think makes it significantly easier for students who need to make these different transitions regardless of if it's like because this institution has closed or because they just have paused and need to restart do you use that data at all um dr keller open syllabus data some so we've actually been uh this is the kind of data the kind of unstructured data that we're very interested in in pulling in more dialogue with other kind of data that we've got so we have so we have incredibly rich data in texas we of course credit and great information for every student in every public college and university in the state we've got uh k-12 test score data and course completion data we we can even connect that to ui wage records so we've not brought it into dialogue generally with the the kind of data this this other kind of data that's more instructive like at a syllabi or even you know around faculty research and that kind of thing um so i've been very interested in the kind of work that uh that's going on at harvard and a few other institutions whether they're they're looking at that the information from the syllabus as a potential data source so you can identify potential connections across courses and facilitate new kinds of collaborations so in the kind of new data infrastructure that we envision that we're working on right now like we've gotten very interested in like architecture so we can pull in both the structured and unstructured data and and do these kinds of projects at scale excellent great so another question that came in um was around connectivity so jeff writes that uh given how vast the and diverse the state of texas is i'm sure that texas um is encountering similar issues to those that they're seeing in georgia with internet access um so he's wondering how has texas accounted for students with limited or no access to internet uh during the shift to online instruction yeah so it's on the k-12 so it's different on the k-12 side than on the higher ed side on the higher ed side it's mostly been working through the institutions and the colleges and universities um have committed cares act funding to buying hotspots and even laptops and other equipment for students i've been surprised that we haven't seen more issues than we have around connectivity with our students in higher education we expected this especially in the spring to be to be a more serious issue than it turned out to be on the k-12 side it sort of went the other way that we had even larger issues so that we knew there there were large issues but but there was a lot of scrambling to try to get students connected so there there is a major project now that's being let out of the governor's office with the texas education agency as the as the lead agency to develop and promote a more universal broadband access especially for k-12 students chair and i'm curious um at the department are y'all looking into any of those connectivity issues especially as they um retain the higher education yeah so um one resource that i would encourage everyone um to access is called um i don't know i maybe i'll just drop this into the chat um but the nti has a state broadband leaders network um and you can sort of here let me oops let me drop this in to the chat oh no hold on i did that wrong okay here we go um and it's a it's sort it is um a network that is of that it's a basically a list of state by state who is the coordinator for that state of the statewide broadband initiatives so the department of education does partner with nti in the department of interior to examine sort of broadband policy issues um but i think as far as like concrete action the best thing that you can do if you're an institution and you want to have some resources that are from your state then go to this website look up your state and contact that person excellent yeah um i actually worked a little bit on this in houston as part of the mayor's task force and one of the things that we were looking at is taking advantage of all the um discounts available to underserved individuals and one of the things we were able to work out was i think a discount for broadband within harris county which is a very large this very large county uh that has both very rural and um very urban areas and i think we were able to get the broadband access down to ten dollars which i know is not free but significantly less expensive than as previously available um so yeah i think that this work is incredibly important um and i think project connectivity is the big project out of the t.a. and governor's office here in texas and they've been making significant strides making sure all students have devices but thanks so much for all y'all's leadership on on that so uh here's a hard question uh probably a perennial question um and it's specifically addressing some of the challenges um that you you raised here in which was around sort of moving from a a skills-based um or moving to a skills-based educational system versus sort of the traditional uh liberal education it's a very long question so i'm going to quickly try to summarize i'll probably get it wrong so apologies um but basically they're saying you know there's a tension between sort of having the the emphasis beyond liberal education versus these skill-based initiatives and one of the questions that i'll pull out is with a skills-based curricula will learners be left behind as skills evolve quickly um and then the the the author of the question jackie says that in my own mind skills and liberal education need not be oppositional but since many degree programs that provide liberal education are being eliminated or marginalized i worry about losing that segment of higher education so i'm curious if you both could comment on on that because i think it is a big challenge in that in my own kind of history seen this sort of oscillation between the two especially as there's an economic challenge where we start focusing in on skills because we're upskilling but then we might uh slide back out to something that's more akin to traditional liberal education um i feel like this is like one of those kind of questions where like it's like late at night and like there's like a bottle of wine and like like loud discussion involved so um i feel like i think there's like a couple of things that i would say and this isn't because i'm looking to fight harrison or you or anybody else um on the chat but i think that like you know i think it's like a false um dichotomy that sometimes occurs right there's not just i mean it you know we do it because you know of you know ipads reporting right like you have to say what you are um but i think that we create this mythology that there's only like you are like if you can you should go play frisbee on an ivy link league campus for four years right and then be launched into the universe as a successful like aspiring human and then everything else is like everything else um and i you know i think it's unfortunate that we have that because i think there is a question that you really need to ask which is why why do you go to an institution of higher education um and i think that um because people are so different their motivations are different and what we should do is cultivate an ecosystem where all of those um options are equally um available and equally beneficial to people who are searching for them so you know in the context of this pandemic the reason a lot of these skills conversations are happening is because of all the data that Harrison was just talking about who has been impacted by this the most um and you're seeing what you're seeing is that you know women are dropping out of the workforce and you're seeing like disproportionate impact on african-american males you're seeing huge impacts on communities and what that looks like tangibly is that i can't finish school i'm gonna pause um and i'm gonna do something else for a little while i would love to come back later so that i don't have to work an hourly job but i don't know what that looks like yet because i think the future of the world is unknown at the moment um so in the job market we have a situation where i'm recruiting and the easiest thing for me to do is check that i require a bachelor's degree from my candidates right so and immediately creates the like zero and one situation you have a degree or you don't um i've never asked you any of my applicants in this context then what can you bring i'm just saying if you do not have a bachelor's you are not eligible and so i think what we need to do is if we are concerned about the issue of equity and using this um as an opportunity as kill Harrison was saying to rethink our infrastructure for our entire economic and education system then we need to ask ourselves the question of how can we actually serve those who need this system the most who would benefit and how can we make sure like what is like how can we make sure that economic mobility happens right and that there is intergenerational wealth accumulation and you know all of these things that don't exist now um that are because of these systemic issues and if it's like one very small thing that i can allow you to say about yourself um the sentence i have these five skills versus i do not have a bachelor's degree i think that like that could open up economic opportunities for you um and so i know that that doesn't really answer the question because you know saying like both and and everything is fine is kind of like a throw away but in order not to fight with people but i also in genuinely to think about like how can we do this for people who do need it the most um and if they can have four years of liberal arts education that would be great but they can't for so many reasons and like what can we do so that they can have a good life too yeah i just to pick up on that i underline a couple of really important points that Sharon made i mean first i i think i think one of the problems in a lot of our higher education policies in a lot of the ways that we run into a lot a lot of problems we run into within institutions also is that is that we have these very traditional assumptions about how we deliver higher education and what constitutes higher education that's that's tangible like there's that feeling you get when you step on campus and then you know when you've gone off campus kind of thing and um and and and it's and some of that is is actually breaking down right now in in ways that aren't all bad i think is and i talked just in passing about you know i think we need to push institutions to not just talk about who they enroll but talk about who they serve and how because they can serve so many more students than they enroll and honestly i don't think they take enough credit for the for this the scale of the students that they serve beyond the the students in their traditional degree programs i think Sharon's point about that you know really understanding like what are the what what are the the needs of the individual students why why would certain kinds of institutions certain kinds of programs make sense is really really important and that's something that gets that often gets glossed over and then we we have hundreds of thousands of Texans right now that even a short-term workforce credential to help them get back on their feet back in the workforce can help transform their lives and and that's something that we we don't have uh we don't we haven't positioned ourselves um in higher education to be able to meet that need effectively now so we're so we're scrambling to figure out okay well how can we deploy new ways and engage folks to be able to to meet this need i think there's some some really exciting things that can come on the other side of that um now also i i'd like to say i i agree that i think it's uh it's not always necessarily in either or i mean i think we are going to see more and more students who are picking up different kinds of credentials while they're picking up their degrees my my my education was very traditional and philosophy but i think we're going to have more and more students who are going to be picking up multiple credentials along the way um and um and we have some disciplines that are already very good and have long established traditions and techniques for how they navigate these issues about sort of liberal education versus technical skills we're we're actually really good at this in engineering and business and architecture really good at in the performing arts we're really not good at in psychology we're not good at in history and so there are more disciplines that we need to build more effective feedback mechanisms so that we can have these discussions and sort out like what are what are the kinds of things that really make those degrees valuable honestly as a humanities guy i think the humanities is tend way tended to undersell the value of those degrees because we don't have those um effective feedback mechanisms built but that that can be another conversation for another bottle of wine well just to plug this session next tomorrow i think we are actually having some pro or not proctored but lead wine tasting so hang in there everybody um so another question that came up was around public data um and both of you mentioned in your talks the need for public data um but the question is what safeguards are in place to protect individual students from being singled out for inequitable treatment um we've seen that algorithms contain biases that result from unfair analysis so i'm curious if um either of you would like to sort of jump in and start that discussion am i going to pick yeah yeah sure i mean i can i can jump in on it we're well first of all um one of the one of the reasons we need to modernize our data infrastructures is so that we can have more secure uh data infrastructures where we strip off student identifiers right away and and um and we we don't have some of the same kind of vulnerabilities that more traditional data infrastructures have had um but um i think this is a i think this is a really important point um you know what we want to do is we want to leverage the data in ways that are going to promote access and equity uh not in ways that are going undermine the options and opportunities that are available to students um in in a particular issue that i'm that i'm especially passionate about is that we want to look into the data to identify high potential students and try to figure out what what are what are markers of potential that don't correlate with income i mean if we know that uh college entrance exams correlate with income and a lot of the conventional measures of potential that we use that are pretty intuitive you know robotics competitions and being an eagle scout and winning music competitions and all that kind of stuff those are great and beautiful things that correlate with income so if we if we are really serious about promoting equity within and across our institutions then we have to push ourselves to use this data to look for other kinds of markers of potential so we can engage talented students earlier in the pipeline so what we you know you don't want to do is use it to i to try to filter out students that might need additional coaching or support so that they can be successful um i don't have a whole lot to add to that um i think that those are excellent points the thing that i would add is i think one thing that's really interesting is that or else you there are really two questions right one about like data and the other about algorithms and i think it's important to keep them separate because but you know in the same way that we have you know data sets i think that one of the things that we should be definitely pursuing especially if you are you know working with a company to help you do this is to to ask them what is the algorithm right like what is the math that they're doing to give you the number that um you are supposed to take action on and continuing to challenge these companies not only to make um you know not only in how they use the data but in how they um are are like engaging with the students as the data is being used so um you know a lot of times you know we look at these systems and we're like okay this is perfect there's a dashboard and i'm going to talk to these four students or like these guys get credentials something um and it's like something that's done to a person right so as the as the subject of the data um this whole world is going around me right and all this math and i don't know anything about it so like what is so i guess i would challenge like administrators or you know technology developers really think about how to engage students in understanding um what it is that their data is how is it being used and how they can then leverage it themselves to access opportunity and so i know that that's like sort of a tall order and probably like three steps ahead of where we are now but um just sort of something to keep in mind like this is what we want we want to give people opportunity but we don't want to do it in a paternalistic way where we're like here is the path for you um but like here are the ways that um here are some things that we know about you what else do we need to know or what would you like to do next and sort of teaching people how to be good data stewards those are all both very very good questions or answers thank you so much for addressing that um so um let me see i think there's one more question for each of you um there's a few more but we probably only have time for one each so one question that came in um dr keller is around uh the essentially the shift in who's paying for public school um so the the person who asked the question cited that back in 2008 texas cut per student funding for public colleges by about two thousand one hundred and forty nine dollars um the concern is that uh that placed an increasing burden on the student and the the author of the question said that this situation is not unique to texas um is the department of education or the coordinating board pushing for renewed state support of public universities sure yeah absolutely i mean so yeah i think it's uh the the situation um is is maybe even a little more challenging than than in the question so we um our per our per student formula allocation hasn't been never recovered to the pretty great recession rate so so there's been a lot of work that we've done on higher education finance over the last decade or so in texas there have been investments and funding but the but there have been more students have been coming into the system so so if you look at the basis of of the of the funding formula then the nominal rate is less than it was in 2010 so you know i think there's sort of three big fundamental problems that that i'd call out in the finance system that would be on the this question about sort of what's the appropriate level of funding um so one is that we uh in in higher education unlike in public education we uh we we haven't generally made adjustments for variations in student needs and that's something that we take for granted on the public school finance side um across the across the nation and texas is one of the most equitable public school finance systems in the country uh we make zero adjustment on the higher ed side most of the time um so that that's a that's a pretty fundamental problem um another thing that i'd call out is that we we tend to use some certain appropriation in some other states they use sort of historical appropriation so we don't fund actual students in higher ed or in the k-12 side we do so like a superintendent out there knows what additional student who enrolls is worth to them in state funding on the higher ed side we don't um because we're we're always looking back to whatever the basis of the allocation was for the for the last state budget that was passed so so you can add students and lose money on the higher ed side the last thing and the biggest thing that i'd call out that when i think and i think this is going to be um one of the most serious issues that we need to address is there's this disconnect between the basis of funding um the way we fund higher ed and our goals so if so we primarily fund um our universities and our community colleges in their semester credit hour generation and their contact hour generation so that means the students take more courses then you you can be eligible for more funding if they take fewer courses you're eligible for less funding what this means is that if you can get the students through more efficiently if you have more creative partnerships and ways of using transfer courses and prior learning assessment and all these great things for students then the institution is going to lose funding and so we so we don't we don't have the right kind of alignment between our incentives in our higher education finance systems and the kinds of things that we want to do uh with digital learning and for student success and to and and to be able to effectively advance our public mission excellent you got a comment from someone from Texas saying yes exactly incentivize enrollments over retention i think that's a good good idea then so i have we have probably have time for one more quick question and i'm going to use uh the moderator privilege to give you one of my own questions um which is that both of you are overseeing or in agencies that have OER grant programs and i'm curious what are your biggest hopes for these grant programs you can give the shout out a little secret information to all the people who are still on on the webinar about what they should be putting into their applications do you want to go first um are you trying to get me fired i can't answer of course i don't want you to actually give away secret information but you still have i have hopes and dreams um so we have um so i'll um we have three grantees um i i think i briefly mentioned them um that are doing very different projects um and they've taken very different approaches and um so that's the the Libra text the open rn and um the open active textbook so i think that like one of the things that i thought was really interesting and you know this is because the asu team has the benefit of i've just talked to them recently so this is not because i have favorite children oh my gosh totally getting in trouble um you know they have you know this is something that they proposed was like in addition to um an open textbook what if we had open adaptive adaptive models um and what would it look like if the adaptive models could be um the adaptive sort of like modules could be used not just on our platform but on other people's platforms regardless of um what they're choosing to use um and so i think the answer is obviously well you need a set of sort of technical requirements for what it would take to play your like little simulation um and if you can write those out then it becomes you know like a quasi sort of standard for these and so i think they've been working on a little bit of defining what the technical requirements would be um sort of a quasi open standard for um these sort of engaging modules and if that's and and they've been partnering with you know you know oli is oh so this is the asu project um the open active textbook um they have a number of really interesting partners that are all testing this out and so if that's the case then in addition to an open textbook being used on anyone's phone you could have like a simulation being used on anyone's phone right if and then like all of this really rich engaging content would not be locked into whatever um platform that you your institution is subscribed to so then you can move the experiences out of that so i'm excited by this now i don't think that everyone is going to to do this and i don't think they have to i think one of the things that we've always said in our grants is describe to us your need and why this is the unique approach um that can address it i think that's the thing that our reviewers look for the most um so my big advice to people writing to federal grants is to read the question and answer the question as it is asked um and explain and you know if you're going to take a risk or if you're going to try something that's not new it doesn't matter but you need to explain why you're doing the thing that why you would like this approach um do that and then i think you'll get points i'm not saying more or less but you will get points um and you know finally one of the things that i think i'm really really hopeful for is when we first did the open textbook you know and i think many of you responded in public comment this was sort of before everyone was learning online because of covid and one of the things that we are really hoping for is that you know in partnership with a lot of the other efforts that are going on um you know in the transition to digital that people would sort of design um you know digital first accessible first thinking about what are the needs for students with low bandwidth like just the entire spectrum of learners and how a digital intervention a digital textbook can actually really promote learning awesome so for us i'd say um you know uh we we really aren't as interested in more boutique projects so i'm thinking about you know when we for a long time like you go to these uh meetings on course redesign and start asking people well what are you working on and and everybody they say well we're redesigning our general chemistry course we're redesigning our general chemistry course and you sort of go around the table and all these folks are sort of lots of parallel play but we aren't really learning a whole lot about how kids learn general chemistry and where they're getting hung up so what we've tried to do in the way that we have put these calls together is really emphasize collaborations across institutions so the a lot of the policymakers and they'll are interested in open educational resources because they like the free to students part but i think what a lot of times folks miss is the idea that these are really platforms for innovation and and where the real potential is is in is in networking our innovators across institutions right so we can learn more and we can move faster and so that's we we actually put a little additional they're accused in there that you can get additional funding for like you can get additional funding if you're involving students in your development projects you can get additional funding if you're part of a strategic collaboration you know where we'll fund up to five institutions working on with each with their own development grants for working on the same course in in concert with each other in a course we have excellent technical assistance providers who are leaders in in this field including rice open stack so we're trying to encourage folks to to work beyond the boundaries of their campuses so that we can accelerate the pace of innovation in our campuses well this has been a really fantastic discussion i've learned a lot i'm sure our audience has learned a lot um thank you both so much for taking the time to chat with us i i'm so excited uh for everything that your organizations are doing and i can't wait to continue working with you both have a good rest of your day thank you thank you thank you daniel thank you