 I'm Paul Stacey here. It's October 12th, 2018. I'm in Niagara Falls, New York. I want to see the falls. Well, it's pretty good. That's the view of the falls from the US side and then far in the distance you see the falls in the Canadian side. It's kind of windy and cold today and wet. So if I stay too close to the falls, I'm going to wreck my computer so I'm going to move up here. I'm at the Open Education Conference. This is an annual event, perhaps one of the biggest open education conferences in the world, but it's primarily focused on us. It's always hosted in the US on North America. Nonetheless, I think there's been some significant news coming out of this conference that I thought I should take a moment to share with you. At the end of the keynotes today, this morning on the last day, it was announced that over the last five years, open education has saved students a billion dollars. It's a huge number and one of the significant benefits of open education is this lowering of costs and the ability to pass on that cost savings to students makes education more affordable and accessible for them, which I think is a wonderful benefit. Of course, not the only benefit associated with open education, but a significant one. Related to that, it's been obvious at this conference that there's a growing theme and focus on the sustainability of open education. As we move beyond sort of startup projects with short term funding to looking at how to bake open education into the mainstream activities of a school or an institution and see it sustain itself and continue over time. I think that's a really healthy and important discussion and one that I myself have been engaged in. So yesterday I participated in a panel talking about the economics of open. In that panel I released two documents which I thought I'd share here in this update. The first one is at this URL, bit.ly.slash.stacy.biz. It provides a table summary of the 24 case studies in the book that I co-wrote with Sarah Pearson called Nade with Creative Commons that looks at open business models of successful organizations around the world. That table summarizes what the business is, what they do, where they are in the world, what open license they use, how they generate revenue and have a sustainable strategy, and what motivates them. And if you're looking at sustainability in open education, I encourage you to look at these success stories from other initiatives around the world. Another document I released at that event was this one, bit.ly.slash.stacy.com and strategy. This is a document that describes 15 behaviors associated with being a good and effective participant in the open education space. And as we see more and more entities look to engage in open education, including for-profits and not-for-profits, there is a need to have some guidance around how to not deploy and make use of market-based methods but instead use commons-based methods as part of your approach and engagement with sustainable strategies for open education. And so that document looks at detrimental behaviors and then looks at positive first step behaviors to get involved and then progresses along a continuum to optimal. And so if you're looking to assess your own engagement with open education and devises successful strategy that would be welcome and accepted by the open community, that document might be helpful for you. So sustainability and growth of open education is an important theme at this conference related to that, too, is the spread of open education to the K to 12 sector. There's way more sessions here about K to 12 than I've ever seen before over the years. And that's a really positive thing as we see the benefits of open education migrate into all of the sectors of education, not just higher education. I think another piece that I'll maybe briefly mention as part of this update is I'm doing another session this afternoon with our communications director, Susan Huggins. It's the open education consortia's 10th anniversary. And so together we're doing a session that looks at 10 years in the past of some of the things open education consortia has done over the past 10 years. And then I'll talk about 10 years into the future and identify the top 10 things that I hope to see the open education consortia do going forward. So that should be a fun session. That's kind of it from a quick little update from me here in Niagara Falls, New York. I thought I'd pass along some of these snippets of interesting news and findings coming out of the conference. Hope you enjoy it. Speak to you again soon.