 The next presenters we have Gary Matkin from the University of California. I'm really hoping he's here. I've not seen him this morning. He's here. Fantastic. And he'll be presenting on beyond the current concepts of OCWOCR. What you should know and why. So thanks very much for your attention. My mom is 94 years old and I read in a Sunday paper one day that a hundred people her age had been asked the question what technology had the biggest impact on your life over the time that you since you were born. My mom was born in 1917 and her answer when I asked that question was the same as the majority of the people who were asked that question. Any guesses of what it would be? Telephone? Why is she machine? Indoor plumbing, automobile, air conditioning, okay radio. Radio is the most common answer to that question of people at age. And you might understand it. It was the first time that a real technology looking like thing came into your house and changed your life. You could hear people from the other side of the country talking. As you look at the history of higher education you find out that the comments about radio among educators were well they sounded a little bit familiar today. It was going to change higher education totally. We now could listen to a lecture from a Yale professor in our own home. We could follow a course and it was going to change education. Absolutely but that's but then you didn't you come along and but did it change higher education? Did any university actually start really doing something? Yeah and people then television movies and television came along right and we had Department of Visual Instruction. Did it change higher education the way it was taught and did it really change things around? It might have but you can still see in the developing world exactly the same kind of institution that we had back then. It changed it but it changed it on the periphery. Now you come along and you see internet and you see libraries with no books with the plugs and you see students. When I was a kid when I was a graduate student I finally got access to the stacks. My god I could go into the stacks now. So I had all this knowledge literally displayed for me, published at any time but the Dewey decimal system was collecting it for me. I could pull stuff out, I could look at the table of context, I could put it on the carol, I could begin doing stuff. Now my son took a degree at USC. I don't think he ever went into the library. In fact well I took I finally took him into the library at UCI and the most amazing thing he thought of was that on the ground floor they had these stacks that were sort of shoved together and you press a button and they would go apart like that so you could get more books. So the point is that we're going through a period of huge change in higher education. I call it the second revolution. The first revolution was the printing press and nothing has really changed that much in higher education in my view. I mean you can argue but since then until now which is the internet. The title of my presentation is Beyond Optimism, Why the Future of OER OCW is Assured. Let's see how do I advance this? So we about a year and a half ago we developed this wow statement for our own organization and people said wow that's a big that's a big goal. That's wonderful but you know it's not going to happen anytime soon but about three months later I said this is not a vision this is a prediction. It's going to happen and by the way if we don't understand it as an institution we're going to be left behind. The purpose of my my talk here is is maybe a little bit different than the other talk. I'm taking I'm taking an attitude of at least 10,000 feet. We can still see the ground but I want to take a look up and over the over the horizon a little bit to suggest what the inevitability of open education means to institutions and how we you in your institution can be a leader in that institution by recognizing this inevitable fact and capitalizing on it be a part of it be an implementer of it because I think it's a big opportunity for all of us who really have this first vision and now make this prediction and one of the reasons we concentrate a lot on we're concentrating a lot on the actual nuts and bolts of of of online about access about download ability remix and so forth but in truth the real place where open OER is going to come into play is in solving world problems. There is not one single major world problem that that doesn't have as part of its solution education. How do we how are we going to how are we going to address childhood obesity we're not going to do it with a pill probably we're not going to do it with a medical device we're going to do with education of children and parents about how to change their lifestyles and so the notion of education is going to be crucial to virtually every the solution of every problem and we we should be looking for ways in which those are a particular idea of open education can solve those problems. They're going to be very they're going to be very attractive to donors who can see the huge impact that open education can have on solving some of these problems and we already know about the numbers of people that can't that won't be able to get into higher education and how much it would cost us to create brick and mortar schools. I have you know what I don't know I don't know but it's what world world yeah that and that's that comes from John you know what I agree with you there's all kinds of numbers on that I I'm using John Daniels figure but I don't actually know where he got it so but there are but there are three things that are impacting higher education that again contribute basically to the notion that high OER is inevitable I think and those three I'm choosing just three I think there are others but I'm choosing the three the first is trend toward universal access which I'll talk about mostly the commodification of education and the increased cost of education that a man for institutional accountability these three items are big factors and in higher education right now and they all come together really I think to support the notion of open education and open open courseware. Let me talk about universal access universal access first came to my attention because my dissertation advisor Martin Crowe professor at Berkeley in 1973 wrote a paper for the OECD where he first noticed for everybody the transition from elite higher education where about 5% of the eligible people graduating from high school get higher education treatment to where over 30% are able to get it that trend was happening worldwide and yet nobody actually saw that as a trend they couldn't there's all kinds of things that were happening all kinds of changes were happening curriculum student services the role of faculty but they all weren't explained really until Martin came along and said look we've got a mass education happening here and it's got all kinds of implications but he went further from between mass elite and mass he said universal education is going to be here universal education is coming by what he meant by that at that time was universal access everybody will be able to get higher education probably through the use of technology he thought about the community colleges and what impact they had on California he saw the huge amount of access that was being provided by community college but he also extended that through to the notion of technology so I'm just going to briefly put these down I'm not going to go over everyone but what is astounding is that in 1973 he pointed these points out as being what would happen what what's going to happen and why universal access that is the ability for everybody to get some form of higher education and what the implications would be so the whole population is going to adapt to rapid change breakdown of boundaries and sequences and distinction between learning and life and some of you may be taking MITx course right now because this is a boring speech but you can integrate that look learning into your life anywhere you anywhere you go and that that complete breakdown of the of the distinction between life and learning being on the subway doing your course or looking at your course it's a complete melding of that so we just like work and life have become merged as we go home and turn on our wake up in the morning and look at our black berries or look at our phones and see what messages those kinds of distinctions are also being completely blurred in terms of learning we go from learning to entertainment to business to family life in a way we never been able to do before but there's also a postponement of entry softening of boundaries great diversity with no common standards aggressive people enroll some of them never come to campus question of special privileges and immunities of academe the criteria shifts from standards to value ads very important a major shift that we see happening now and finally open emphasis on equality and group achievement again it was amazing about this is that this that he Martin Troll predicted this in 1973 so we're we're talking about what what what are the aspects of universal access first learning can be broken down into smaller chunks you don't have to take a two-year degree or a three-year degree to actually get something valuable for yourself and finally as I said before learning can now take place in our day-to-day activities as never before all this adds up to a notion of and the shift toward value ads obviously we're now looking at say the Western Governors University and so forth with these competency-based assessments basically what happens is that the inability to meet the goal of university access as we fail to meet that goal or as we cut as we as we're approaching it but not making it plus the total number of the huge number of providers with no common standards shifts that pushes pushes us toward value ads the measurement of value ads of any learning treatment so again the education will be based on the actual results of education rather than just a grade and the failure to provide evidence of value as will lead to questioning of the special privileges immunities of academe we already see that happening you know what are we get it what do you what do you get when you get a degree from any university what what does that give you the ability to do if you can't demonstrate that and accrediting agencies right now in America at least are really pushing on that what is the desired outcome from your master's degree in public health and how are you going to measure that outcome in the in the graduates and that's a huge of emphasis which relates to the third thing I'm going to talk about so we are always oh how does that relate to of OER OCW well OER is both a cause and a beneficiary the trend toward universal access we see it in very plate various places recent interest in badges concerned about learning authentication validation and certification by the way I attended the Hewlett grantees meeting just before this meeting in Boston and for years we've been talking about there's going to be a turning point there's we're going to turn the corner it we're a tipping point the new phrase just so you all know it is we're at an inflection point inflection point was what was used continuously and actually I can't understand it because everybody says oh all the courses are going like this and so forth where's the inflection here it doesn't but people are getting the idea that we're we have both turned the corner OER is here to stay is not going to go away just like in 1994 we began to say hey this online education is not going to go away of course we hit a bump in around 2000 when the dot-com thing fell off and so people began to question but we always knew that online education was going to grow and of course it has grown we're at that point now where OER is definitely here to stay and it's going to grow the second the second idea that we have which is very much related to universal access commodification I'm going to go through this fairly quickly commodification is where education becomes ubiquitously available at little or no cost and it follows the commodification of two very crucial elements I want to show you this slide this next slide and also commodification pushes the traditional value proposition of an into the periphery so I'll just illustrate these points very quickly let's take let's take what happened to content content became free somewhere along the line and by the way it as it became free some new organizations a very high market value jumped into being maybe not all these are high market value but you get the idea Google made the finding of information free information was there Google made its its discovery a lot easier so that would say well you pushed it to the periphery you're not selling content anymore content is free you're fine providing access to it I teens it iTunes and YouTube are the same sort of thing so first content became free or at least a huge amount of it could become free and of course Google is now digitize 4% of all the books ever published in the world and it's digitized we have questions about how it's going to be used but it's content is on its way huge amounts of kind of on their way to being free next thing that happened is communication became free or very cheap and these organizations that are listed here have huge values but they're based on giving something away for free both of those content and communication are huge elements in education of course and the next part of education is learning pathways and we have some beginnings of learning pathways becoming free or very inexpensive so we're on our way to a commodification where like turning on a light switch or for electricity or whatever it's a commodity education of commodity it's a bad word to use for for for edu for educators they don't like the idea of commodification but what when we talk about having a very open access to very inexpensive materials we're talking about a commodity basically I'm going to go through a couple things the notion is how to how to make money while others are giving it away that publishers are really looking at this very hard there's a text about that higher education really is threatened by new competition there are many more alternative providers of higher education free content is coming along and of course accessible repositories are related to free content free well-defined pathways I just pointed that out we can find full degrees online now open for liberation of learning projects huge number of everybody here is involved somehow in a learning project that's related to open it's huge we're looking at alternative standards and values the notion of trying to add value to a badge for webcasting that that sort of thing how do we how do we certify that measure it and a whole bunch of supplemental free instruction that most of your studying a course at UCI you can go to University of Michigan and see how a professor there handle the same course so we're both all of these are both all of these of course are the age-old sort of banal expression they're both opportunities and threats to us the final these are just a couple of examples of of examples of this whole notion of global the badges and so forth the final element that I want to talk about as as driving driving us you see the edgipunk guide the notion of there's communities developing that actually protest traditional education the final element that I want to talk about is cost and accountability rising costs and demand for accountability are the huge are a very huge thing at least the United States and obviously also in Britain and the cost is becoming greater and greater and more of the cost of being put on the families and the parents students it's become a world issue and along with that with that cost rises is an increasing pressure to be accountable what are you doing how are you improving my son or daughter and their light and their ability to get jobs in Texas here there's an example of a government saying you must put up if you teach in a public university you must put up a syllabus within seven days of opening the course and it has to be open and so the governments are getting into the act of let's let's let the parents see what the heck's happening in these classrooms let's go into the classrooms and show what's going on so my final points are this that we can all maybe re recognize and reevaluate our stance within our institutions yes we should continue to advance the OER movement with technology with tools with special programs and examples but at the same time we should recognize that we're beginning to make the transition from a visionary to an actual predictor or implementer of OER secondly that we are moving toward the core we're beginning to influence teaching and learning as it is done on our campus certainly MIT has had a huge impact their OER their OCW thing has had a huge impact on the way teachers and students view the material and use the material and finally I'm saying that we should go from the stance of an optimist to a leader that is we have the chance because we have the vision we had the vision we now see the implications we now see the applications of OER and how how great it can do its work for both students and institutions that now we have the chance to become leaders in our own institutions and not just people out there having a wonderful vision so that's I think that's that's the conclusion of my talk and again I hope that all of us can really understand what's going on keep a broad view of what's what's going on we're a meshed in our day-to-day stuff but let's keep a broad view and keep our community together against that broad view not only now do we have a vision but I think we have a real strong and well-defined mission within our institutions thank you thank you very much for an excellent presentation that was really warmly appreciated by all of us in the hall and wider a field following on Twitter there was a lot of reaction on Twitter as well I'm gonna open up for questions and because I'm the chair and I can do whatever I want I'm gonna ask first question you I completely agree with the ideas of the commodification of education that you talked about and I like the way you highlighted the new models of education are threatening the idea of traditional academia in terms of institutions and such like the question I have is fairly simple who is gonna keep paying and employing academics and why I didn't go into the the notion of part in that commodification segment I talked about how the value proposition goes from from the center to the periphery I don't think that's exactly the right analogy to use in in education but what we have seen as an unbundling of what used to be a unitary unitary sort of thing a professor would get up and lecture or provide information to a student to the students and then they then the lecture would evaluate those students and grade those students well today we know that those things can be unbundled and that somebody a teacher an instructor can teach a course that was actually created by others and that the evaluation of students can be done either with technology or by others and so everything sort of gets pulled apart each one of those parts has a value in itself so for instance the certification of learning is something we do we have permanent records we can create a permanent record that lives forever on somebody's for somebody's learning efforts and learning accomplishments right now our transcripts maybe are restricted to degrees and credit academic credit but the University of California we can put an extension we can put non-credit courses on there we can put other kinds of experiences on that on that transcript to prove that they've done this done this thing done a particular educational treatment and achieve the learning objectives cert so certification itself can become a part of our value creating learning assessments could be part of our value if some of us have 200 items on a multiple-choice test if we had 6,000 items that were a bank that could be randomly pulled from that then we would be we would be in the assessment business you might say okay so I think we have to look at the individual parts the teaching and learning is not going to go away there's going to have to be maps and guides through intellectual landscapes and one of the things we do as professors we select and sequence learning objects and tie them together in a natural logical way that is not going to go away people are going to have to continue to have that service then they're going to have to continue to be assessed and certified and so we're we're unbundling but I don't think the role of the instructor is going to be less important it might be expressed in different ways but it's going to be it's still going to be there teaching and learning is always going to be hopefully between some form of teaching some form of learner I hope so as well thank you very much there's a couple of questions at the front here I'm going to go to Joe first time to you okay it's actually it's actually a question really about before before certification we've got competency frameworks and the bit I'm kind of interested in is at the moment every institution every state all these they still have they're still making up their own their own competency frameworks in a lot of places what do you think we're going to get to a stage where we're going to start looking at the greater global standards or greater competency competency frameworks I mean if you think about things like the airplane industry means that pilots all have to have the same competencies the internet is dependent on on on standards and I think perhaps the last bit of this mix is actually having a having a shake at that that deepest academic kind of bit of you know we set our own standards to actually we give we give people shared global standards but I don't see how it's going to come yet well I I always look for evidence in front of us I mean you can extrapolate into the future but really where you get grounded is when you look at examples of what's happening so for instance we have law schools the United States we have law schools after you go to law school you have to pass the state bar well that's a third party evaluation of the learning project okay there's those kinds of certifications all over the place but let's now let's take history the accreditation bodies in the United States are saying you've got a masters in history at the end of that your students tell us what your students should be able to do well guess what it's about the same every every school is going to say have a confidence to place the current in the past or be able to think this way and so forth almost becomes a boilerplate of competencies alright so the competencies are coming together and and there are ways now of measuring competencies in history that are going to be recognized so I see the sort of standards thing playing out even in the most traditional of subjects and of course if you're talking about engineers or or surgeons or something like that then you've got very many checks and balances on what happens in the in the classroom thank you much I'm conscious there's a lot of questions in the room so kind of so we can fit the maximum number in can I ask people to make their questions clear concise and short basically thank you well first I'd like to comment on the professors the greatest value that a professor can offer is access to ongoing original research that cannot go away out onto the net and become commodified eventually any particular information will be commodified but then the professor will be doing more research but I'd like to focus on the other end on what can happen at the primary level where right now every country is completely separate and within the larger countries every state or province is almost completely separate and how we reach any kind of uniformity allowing also for the fact that there are local cultural and geographical and what have you requirements I'll take the first question at the second question first and that is that as I understand it and I'm certainly not an expert in K through 12 education but as I understand it United States there are there are significant movements toward creating statewide standards and again those statewide standards and curricula almost lockstep curricula are if you look at you can see differences and similarities but there's a lot of similarities in those standards so that we're now having we now have the advantage and maybe the disadvantage also of having very clearly defined very clearly defined intellectual landscape or a learning knowledge landscape that students are supposed to achieve and we're having tests that see if they can achieve those things okay and it is state to state but it turns out that if you follow Texas or California or Florida as a state you you've got sort of what where the state of the art is because they're the ones who put the most most research into this stuff okay so I do see a beginning of a leveling and lack of diversity in K through 12 education imposed by the state and imposed on the basis of accountability because there are some people say our schools are those schools are failing now we need to do something so that's a quick answer and I say I'm not an expert in K through 12 the other the other situation is that one of the greatest accomplishments I think first in the US and subsequently in Europe is the combination of research and teaching so that the best minds in the field are interacting with the younger minds in the in the field and coming up and producing wonderful work so you see Nobel Prize winners usually doing the work under a major person in their 30s or something like that sort of the average that's great for research and it is and it is associated with teaching the real issue in the United States the research major research Institute institutes educate only a fairly small portion of the total number of students the rest are teaching institutions of some kind including liberal arts colleges it's the role of the teacher really to take the latest research keep up on the latest reason even they're not doing it and put it into their classroom and so there's there's a huge role for the incorporation of rapidly developing new knowledge into an undergraduate curriculum and again openness helps us because we can look at version one of this of this course and say whoops guess what something happened last week in the in the in the headlines let's put that in and we could so it being open and having everybody see it and being able to adjust it to it I think is a huge advantage for us hey Gary morning one of the things you mentioned is about access to education one of the things I see is that the whole value change is changing in terms of new links coming in I want to hear your views about like for example how the communications industry is going to influence this because they've got content good content in attractive media etc so I didn't see that in your equation we're still looking at the education with the same paradigms and we're not maybe looking at who are the new players that are coming into this access world well I'll give you an example Stavros of something I mean I am privileged to be at the treasure of OCWC and so I sit in on the board and we're looking at all kinds of people coming in and wanting to support our work in exchange somehow maybe for some kind of access to the 21,000 courses we have some want the database of 21,000 courses to try to work their particular technology on because the rich database others want some sort of access to the people that are coming to us so Google we got a little bit of money for Google for doing a little bit of an experiment okay these big organizations when we have because we have such a huge scale and 100 million hits on on MIT and so forth we are beginning to be noticed by these vendors who are trying to figure out what the value proposition is on the periphery and so there is a maybe not evident but there's a subtle merging of openness with with commercial interests and so forth these are not something we should reject out of hand we have to be very careful about it but I don't see the I see the distinctions now blurring a bit hi I have a question about leadership I wonder how you see our role I absolutely agree with the soft lab guy that we need to be asked in the right questions and I spent most of this conference formulating new questions in my mind and but I've also felt extremely frustrated at points at the lack of answers and so I was very encouraged to see the open University presentations you were actually beginning to suggest answers and in the corporate world we see a lot of different leadership styles we've also had a lot of presentations which have mentioned how you can't force people to do things while strategy is important you know you've got to get ownership of the idea so one of the few had any thoughts on how we maybe you know the nerds people a lot of I'm not meaning to be insulting but a lot of the people here maybe don't see themselves as being frontline people what form of read leadership should that take or should the diversity be the good thing about it well part of it my background is continuing education so I've always thought of myself as a continuing educator even if that if my subjects are my my bosses they have to be educated about what's going on and but and every institutional setting is a completely as a completely different set of dynamics and and parameters and you as a person have a completely set different set of dynamics and as somebody else and so forth or your position is different but I'll give you for example we engaged deeply in the open education week we're gonna have open education week next year might be a maybe a two or three weeks later as a result of that after having had an open court open courseware site on our campus for about five years I got five minutes of the my chancellor's time and we videotaped him extolling the value of open education and I wrote the his words so he repeated my words into a teleprompter and a week later he said you know Gary I really want to congratulate you you're you're really doing something here you're taking our knowledge base and you're taking it out to people and we're all we're the we're always saying how great we are because we're excluding so many people but here you're doing the opposite it's really part of our tradition so forth now he didn't know about that before he talked into this into the microphone okay so that's just a might maybe a minor example of what can be what can be done so for instance again get involved in open education week figure out what what you might do to to feature that within your own campus and in your community do some demonstration projects we've used the idea of getting some find a good faculty member who really wants to work on very interested in and you know support that person and get an example that other faculty can look at Larry Cooperman runs our open course for a site I said when you get 258 faculty members having contributed to OCW you've turned the corner you've hit the inflection point whatever that's about 19% of our faculty okay we're up to 88 so he's got a he's got a ways to go but once you get enough faculty understanding what's happening it turns and suddenly you're now we have to we have to worry about how many times we're gonna film something because we are our film compact filming capacity is now shorter than the demand for filming courses that we can put them up open so again it's a it's an idiosyncratic to your institution but there are some techniques that you might look at and see what others are doing and maybe OCWC should begin maybe publishing some of those kinds of elements that that can penetrate the thick skin of the institution okay we are unfortunately massively overrun and I could quite happily stand here and have this happen all day as far as I'm concerned but I'd just like to close by thanking all of our presenters Ming, Patrick and Rob and Gary of course and thank you all for your attention and questions so thanks everybody