 Good morning. I'm so excited that Moodle chose Minnesota for its first U.S. Moot. I'm raised just about an hour north of here and the Surly Brewery, the Saints game, I mean you're hitting the best spots for sure so this is wonderful. And it's also kind of special because how often does a hometown boy get asked to speak in their hometown like never. Experts always come from the outside don't they? Right here in Minnesota like this is just Dave. He has another crazy idea I don't listen to him. So anyway you can be the judge of that but in the next 45 minutes whether it is a crazy idea or not. So I have a question for you. I want to find out how many folks here, I have multiple choice questions so I need you to raise your hand. You can you can vote as many times as you want. But what I want to know is why you came here. Why you came to this meeting and so here are the choices. You love course management systems. Okay there's a few. There's a few. Alright. Because it's held in beautiful Minnesota. There we go. That's the right answer right. And if we were to hold us in January keep those hands up. Not quite as many. Alright. You like things that rhyme with poodle. One. Do we have security here? Last choice. That we want to provide the best. This is obviously the right answer right. You want to provide the best educational learning experience for all your students and you believe that open source software open source course management systems are a good way to do that. There we go. Alright. So and that's pretty clear. I mean just off the moodle front page. It's about community. Read every sign that's in here. It's clear what this is about. And I'm going to talk about a very related theme here today. And it's open education. And I think open is almost more of a philosophy than anything else. It's about this free exchange of ideas. And and having no barriers between you your students and getting down what you want them to get done which is learning. Right. I want to start out by backing out a bit. I'm going to be talking about textbooks which are kind of a boring I mean textbooks really. But I it's not really about textbooks. It's really about this. It's really about our belief. And I think I was assuming that we're all in agreement here that we believe that all students should have equal access to education. To higher education. And when I first saw this this is from the U. S. Declaration of sorry the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights. When I first saw it read this years ago my first reaction as from a very U. S. centric perspective here right here was all those poor people in other countries that don't have that good access to higher education. But as I got involved more and more in certain projects I realized that there is a gap here as well in the U. S. and in any developed country to be honest. Well not all of them but we won't go there. This is a study that studied like the first decade of this century basically of the 21st century and they're basically saying that there were 2.4 million students who who graduated from high school having done all the right things took the right classes got the right grades every college qualified that's that college qualified college qualified. But for whatever reason they didn't not sorry I should take that back not for whatever reason because of cost they didn't complete college. There were a lot more people who didn't who were those types of students and didn't complete college but these are the ones that the study attributes to cost that they didn't finish because of cost. And the point I want to make here early on is that cost in higher education is different the situation is different than it ever has been before. If we look at higher education this is across the U. S. We in public in public higher education we get our funding mainly from two sources tuition and fund state funding right. The green line there is state funding the red line there is tuition. So look on the left side of the graph here this is when I graduated around here. Go ahead do the math. And look at the percentage of my education that I was the was my burden was my what I needed to contribute and now look at where we are now. Minnesota itself specifically isn't special well it is special but not in this case. It's actually crossed the line now so students are actually paying most of the cost of higher education and this is true in most states. Not all but most you saw the average U. S. average there so it's different than it ever has been really. And this may seem a little damning to the University of Minnesota but it's just the data I have and you'll find this to be true everywhere if you have if you can find the data. This is a graph of the number of hours at minimum wage that a student would need to work to afford a year of tuition at the University of Minnesota. So look at on the left side of the graph the 60s all the way through the 80s were talking two to four hundred hours and if you do the way out there that's a that's a summer job. That's a full-time 40-hour week for nine or ten weeks you're covered. And you hear that from people who went to school back then about how they they work their way through school and why can't kids today work their way through school. Well this is why. A full-time job 40 hours a week is about two to is about two thousand hours. So I mean now we're talking they'd have to have a full-time job pretty much all year round to afford a year of tuition and again this isn't special the University of Minnesota this is just an example of the example data. It's different than it's ever been before. So because so you know if you think about it so to afford higher education I'll go back to this one for a second. There are really three options to afford it. You either have the money you work to earn the money while you're going to school. Well this is what you're up against if you're gonna work to get the money. You so you either have the money you work to get the money or you borrow it right. And so and I don't care what day of the week it is Google like student loans or student debt or whatever it's a huge topic. You know other people saying this is the next housing bubble. So the average borrower and about two-thirds of our students are borrowers. They take out loans. Loans that we know of by the way. They may also take out loans from family members or others that you don't know about but two-thirds of them actually take out loans we know about and that's the average amount that they graduate of debt that they graduate with. That was a few years ago. This graph shows the green line there is is credit card debt nationally. Red line there is student debt. You can see where the bubble happened kind of the financial bubble happened 2008 or 2009. People stopped borrowing for a while right. It dropped. Didn't impact student debt at all. That's just been a constant climb and if if you look at the looking over on the left side here this is 2006. It's at $500 billion and in 2015 it's at $1.3 trillion. Something's going on here and this is only nine years and we're almost they've almost tripled their debt or they're getting close. So again the point is I'm trying to make it's different than it's ever been before financially for students. So what can we do about it? Can anybody in here change the tuition at your institution? No? Okay. Dang. Let's open to talk to you about that. But room and board is room and board right. It is what the market makes it. But the one thing that faculty can control and anyone who works with faculty can influence especially in this in this education realm or you're working with them on their courses and so on are books and supplies right. So that's these are the categories that the campus sorry the College Board when it measures estimated cost of attendance for students this is the categories that they use. Book prices have gone up there was just a story last week saying there are two stories last week. One was saying there's now a $400 textbook that sells used for $300 and they are also that the price of books since 1977 have gone up over a thousand percent of textbooks have gone up over a thousand percent which is three to four times the rate of inflation which which is what that green line is there. That's inflation and the red line is textbook costs. That's due to a number of factors. I would my opinion on that when it comes to economics it's about almost opinion isn't it. So I would say my opinion it's a lot about the consolidation of the market for textbook companies but that's my opinion. The College Board estimates that students would spend about $1,300 a year on textbooks and sorry books and supplies that's the category they use but the vast majority of that is textbook costs. I have a really short video here just to kind of get the student I have three videos here to get the student voice out there to hear these issues about textbooks the issues that come up because of cost so here's all we did was ask this simple question we set up a camera on campus and set up ask this question what do you think about the cost of textbooks. I'm a little worried about the sound here so cover your ears. I think they're really valuable but the cost is just a little too much for students who are already paying a lot for tuition. Find a way to make costs more manageable because tuition is going up everything's going up cost of living is going up and then textbooks are going up. There is definitely a value to them but maybe not for the cost that we pay for them. I mean I guess professors are trying to provide students with books that are reasonable but I mean there are some textbooks that are just they're just way too pricey. You just feel like they're really overpriced yeah. I get frustrated when you have to buy a book that's expensive that you don't use. Textbooks are only used for so long before you're done with them so it's like you know use it for a couple months and then probably never touch it again. If people weren't just issuing new additions and just increasing prices rather stick to what you have. It is kind of expensive and sometimes I feel like I have to buy the textbook because it is required. But it does kind of suck to like throw away so much money and something that you only use for a semester. They should keep the same textbook for several years because the material doesn't change that much. I have purchased them and I don't use them which is kind of frustrating. I think it's outrageous actually. They cause way too much in general I think. I'm guessing that some the things that they said are not a surprise to anybody. I mean you've heard that you probably experienced some of those frustrations as a student nothing there is really new but if you think about what they're saying all of those kind of minutiae of issues that they're dealing with every single one of them has to do with cost. Like the faculty member their faculty member didn't use the whole book. If there was no cost why would they care. They're frustrated because they don't see that they understand the textbooks can be valuable. They just don't think they're that valuable $200 $300 valuable right. So by the way nobody that we talked to said they're underpriced. In fact nobody said yeah this is pretty reasonable. So so what. So I've had faculty tell me I can't tell you how many times faculty tell me yeah they probably spend that much money on beer every weekend or something like that you know. Well this is the why students are dealing with this cost and they're dealing with them in very creative ways. We want them to be creative. No problem solvers. Here's what they do. They'll purchase an older version of the textbook. They'll delay buying the textbook or they just won't buy it at all. This is becoming more and more common and there's data now showing that while the price of textbooks are going up students spending on textbook is actually going down. The only explanation for that that I can think of really is that they're not buying them anymore. And if you ask students on your campus I think you'll find that that's true. So and I kind of quickly go through each of these. So purchasing an old an older version of the textbook is a strategy. It's a strategy that's very common. This is a student last year who told me this. He said yeah they asked me to buy an $80 French textbook. And I found on that was three editions. I was two editions older and it cost eight bucks on eBay or not on Amazon. And he was thrilled about it. Like he saved this money and he but he also knew and he admitted this that he was taking some academic risk there wasn't he. Because if there are if there are assignments or readings or things like that that don't match up with that old book but he was willing to take that shot and this was his justification which I loved delaying buying a book. I think delaying buying the book has become the norm. Sometimes because they're trying to figure out how to afford them and they're just like I gotta hold off on this. Sometimes because they have to wait for their financial aid check to come in which usually doesn't come until after the drop date. Right. If they're in the GI bill is the same situation there's paperwork and time that it takes to actually get the funding to buy the textbooks. So some of these students even though they may even they're waiting for the funding that means that they are spending two to three weeks without the textbook before they even get it while they're in your class. Right. So but they're also I this fall I will have three I have three sons they'll all be in college this fall. So if we can fix this today I would really appreciate it. Thank you very much. So and this is what they do. I'll ask them. So did you buy your textbooks yet and well I'm gonna wait until I really I'm gonna see if I really need them or not. In other words I mean that's that's what I'm saying is kind of becoming the norm. They're trying to see if they can get by and that's a problem. It isn't what we want our students to be set up to like see what they can get by with. We want them to have the content. We want them to learn. Right. Here's another short little video where all we asked was this simple question which is just asking have you ever delayed. He's wait he waits till he's falling behind. Right. There I've seen now three studies that have numbers in the 60 to 70 percent range of students who say that they sometime in their academic career just have not purchased have because of cost could not purchase the required textbook. Required textbook. Right. So I guess if you don't remember anything else from today on ask you to remember this. This is a survey from Florida of a top over 20,000 students asking their asking them about their the impact of textbook costs have had on their academic career. And if you think about your institution even forget about classes even and they're learning in a way. Think about institutional goals of retention and graduation rates and student success. Look at that. I mean what an impact this is having a negative impact. There's no institution that should be OK with that really. I have one more video and this one we just took a couple months ago. I just kind of cut it together in the last few days. So it's just kind of a bunch of shots of this of one student. We basically worked with the student government to they took a they surveyed all the students at the undergrads at the University Minnesota and then pulled in a bunch who to interview about the impact of textbooks textbook costs the high textbook costs on their on their academics. Business student at Carlson right now I'm a freshman so I'm pre-major but I'm looking to study entrepreneurial management and maybe a minor in management information system. I actually decided to buy only two of the required textbooks after kind of poking around and really asking people have taken the courses because I simply couldn't afford it. That's when I said I took out two alternative loans from my brothers. That was to pay for the cost of textbooks on top of the tuition. And so I have two of the required textbooks. I'm sharing a third textbook between two of my roommates and a guy down the hall. And yeah it's in the other two. I just I don't really worry about it because I mean I don't have enough money for that right now to be honest. But it becomes bothersome when you have to travel you know to another dorm just to read your own textbook. But I'd say for I mean there's sometimes where they're like I need the book right now I can't I can't give it to you. And so I just kind of have to twiddle my thumbs until late at night when they're done and then I can read the book and then you just like it shorted on sleep or something. And sometimes I've had to stay up as late as three or five a.m. and then go to sleep get three hours get up and go to class because I mean that's when the textbook was available to me and I could have focused on my studies and more and studied more than I wanted to. But I mean a lot of the times it was just you got shorted on sleep or you didn't have enough time to study as you want because I had to pass the textbook off to someone else that needed it. It's just kind of challenging because it's like you know it's you kind of you're struggling to get enough money and it's always kind of the back of your mind to worry throughout your day that do I have enough money to pay for my textbooks or pay my brother's back kind of thing. So it's it's difficult. Next year. Unfortunately I think next year is going to be a lot like this semester where it's I'm going to have to well I'm going to have to find another job because I'm moving actually outside of the dorms because it's cheaper. So I have to find a job because my job right now requires that I live in one of the dorms and I can't do that because I can't afford it kind of thing. So I have to find a new job next semester. I have to probably continue with the paid research thing and then I might actually end up having to schedule my courses around what my roommates and people that I know are taking because if they have a shared textbook then I might have to take that class kind of thing because it's it's something that maybe doesn't interest me but it fulfills a requirement or elective I might have to take that because that's 200 less dollars in textbooks. Well coming from Michigan to Minnesota you know you always no matter where you go college is going to be expensive. But so I pull up and go to Minnesota pack unpack all my things and then I've already done all the tuition based stuff where you know they have on my you you know you turn in all that. So I'm like OK I'm done and then textbooks rolled around and I wasn't quite ready for that. I remember totaling up all of my my textbooks and the cost of them and it was kind of like that's a second tuition. I can't can't quite afford that. I'm so kind of shocked because I I'm completely broke from buying textbooks last year. So I have to take out a loan and kind of manage which ones I'm going to buy. And it's just kind of it always it always the second tuition I call it always kind of surprises me. Just this past year I I've probably spent in the ballpark of a thousand dollars and I haven't even bought all of the required tax that they told me to buy. It's been been difficult. I can hardly stand watching that. It just makes me angry and then it's it's you know people can say well well students can waste money in this and that. But that may be true. There may be students out there that do. But there are also students like this who are want more than anything to get an education and are doing everything. Listen think of the things he was listing there are things he was I don't know if he got he was doing research studies getting paid research studies. He took out loans from his brothers. He was borrowing the students from borrowing textbooks and friends. He was scheduling his classes the classes he was going to take based on where he could get textbooks from. It's not what we want. So I've been told I can be kind of depressing. And so far it has been so we'll stop that. This is just to kind of lay the groundwork to say there's a problem. There's a clear problem here but there's also an opportunity. What would solve these problems. What would be the ideal. We're talking about textbooks. What would be the ideal. Free free textbooks right falling from the skies are free and sure that sounds nice. But how could that possibly be. Well. And the reason that I this this I remember going to a presentation years ago at a conference like edu cause or something like that and seeing the speaker talking about open textbooks. And the questions that they got were what's the business model. What's the business model. How can this be sustainable. And I walked away going yeah that's a good question. I'll talk that in the back of my mind and we'll see if someone figures out a business model for it. And and that's still the question that comes up a lot because here's the business model we're used to write a publisher invests in a book. Invest some money in a book. They sell the book. On selling it. You know they take that money they read and they recoup their investment make the profit. They're able to then pay the authors about you know 10% or so. And that's that's the model we know and love right this is what we assume every how everything works. And it does generally this is how publishers work. So if there are no sales. How could this possibly work. Why would an author write a book for free. Well here's some other models that are possible and actually are happening and have happened. I did once ask that I used to say like why wouldn't I instead of saying why would someone write a book for free. I would I would say I said at a workshop once as I was talking about this. Who would be dumb enough to write a textbook for free. There we go and someone raised their hand and I was like oh what's sorry. But that is exact I was being facetious that that is exactly what it happens is people write textbooks for their own classes and then kind of say here you go world why not what am I going to do that you maybe it'll benefit somebody else. Wonderful. That is a model that I think was the that's a model that happens it isn't necessarily the model that I think a future can be built on because faculty are busy and it's it's kind of the assumption that this is the only way it's a great way to get textbooks but it's not the only way and it's not a way that necessarily academia trusts. Believe it believe it or not. So how about this instead and this is a this is a model that could solve any world problem. You have a funder right we can solve world hunger if we had a funder didn't win me. The difference here is that we do have funders we have funders that are saying to publishers we will give you money to publish this book with one catch it has to be free forever so that students don't have to pay for it and that burden is gone and so that means there's money to pay authors. Awesome there you go there's the model right there as simple as can be and when I say funders it sounds like you need a bank or you need a but there are a number of funders for this funders is kind of a weird word I should think of a different word for this but universities are now getting into this where they are starting to publish a few textbooks are working with their faculty and saying we want to publish in this one or two and they go through maybe they go through the university press or they go for their lot through their libraries or somebody who has expertise in publishing and they're funding it themselves right they're paying the authors and they're using their own internal staff to do this wonderful. The Hewlett Foundation has funded a lot of textbook production real top-notch professional published textbooks they spent tens of millions of dollars on that other foundations have as well. The state of California anyone here from California passed a couple years ago passed legislation saying they're going to fund their creation of 50 open textbooks in higher education. British Columbia and not to be outdone said we're gonna do 60. So there is a letter that went to the White House yesterday actually from a coalition of over 90 organizations including EDUCAUSE including anyway and basically saying anything that's federally funded like any kind of educational materials textbooks whatever that's federally funded ought to be available publicly it only makes sense right we're paying for it it should be available so and also professional organizations Cali is a is a is an organization of law schools nationally and is centered at Stanford I believe and they as a coalition and using their member dues are publishing law books that they are sharing amongst all of their members wonderful what a great what a great benefit of that saving all of them a lot of money so this is the model that works except for one thing there's one catch to this there's one thing missing if someone hands you a textbook a faculty member a textbook and says here you go this thing is free you can distribute this all you want make copies of it and distribute it to all your students or they can download the faculty that members that I know would be a little worried and what would they be worried about credibility would be one thing I'm looking for one other thing it's a legal thing copyright yes the credibility thing I can we can we'll talk about a bit but copyright and copyright is the foundation of our intellectual property world here right I mean it's important it's critical it protects our intellectual work but when people are trying to share things when the intent is to not protect but to actually share it kind of gets in the way because I have had faculty tell me I'm not going to take the chance my intellectual if I am accused of some sort of intellectual property violation that could be the end of my career right I mean faculty work in academic property that's what they do intellectual property the solution to that is the creative commons and the creative commons license creative commons is a non-profit that is basically what their job is is to create licenses they have created licenses that allow people to share so that if you write a book and you want the world to have it and and you don't want a phone call every time someone wants to use it right because that's the normal process hey can I copy your book put this license on it a creative commons license on it and people will know upfront what they can and can't do it doesn't mean you're giving up your copyright it means you are the copyright holder and you are telling people this is what I'm telling you is okay to do with my intellectual property so so the creative commons is the missing link if you see that little cc symbol in the circle and that doesn't mean closed captioned I think that's in a square isn't it I don't know creative commons that little circle that is that means that's a creative commons licenses as attached to it so these books really need to have a license on them so that end users know what they can do textbooks that have those licenses and are produced in those ways are called open textbooks they're openly licensed that's what defines how something is open it's licensed that way like Moodle is open source it's open source because it has a license attached to it saying here's what you can do with it don't worry about anyone suing you for piracy or whatever right not only can you copy it and install it but you can do other things with it and again this is very similar to open source software these creative commons licenses say that you can also do these things so it is I this is I feel like this is this is the right audience to be talking to have this kind of idea at heart that a course management system that is open has open source and allows you to tweak it to meet the specific needs of your students and your faculty it's exactly the same way with these textbooks if I'm not going to go over these but these are the creative commons license components I'll just tell you quickly what they are if you see these so you know what they are they're very simple and creative commons has done a wonderful job of making them this is all legal lawyer stuff right but they have done a wonderful job of making it really digestible for all of us if you see the buy on there the first one that just means you can use this for all these things just attribute the author attribution fair enough right NC means non-commercial that's why the dollar signed with them so I threw so don't sell it you can't make a profit from it you can use it do all these things with it but don't make a if you want to make a profit from it do what you normally would do call me we can talk about it right essay means share alike it means if you make something new out of it if you make a derivative if you edit it or mix it with something else whatever it is you make needs to have the same license that I put on the original work and then ND most people would say this isn't really an open license because it actually locks down some things it means no derivatives means you can't change it you can share it for free but you can't change it and these components are put into these six these licenses and so if you see these and you should see these because they're all over the internet the internet kind of works on cc licenses and we don't really even know it then then you'll be able to see you'll be able to know what they mean so this one the lower left means if you use this whatever it is attribute me in the author and don't make any derivatives of it right so for instance here's the here's the bottom a shot of the bottom of MIT's open courseware page see the license on it you're all familiar with MIT's open courseware right there is actually a license you are agreeing to if you use that content I don't know if you knew that but here's the license that says attribute MIT open courseware at the buy don't sell it which isn't a problem for most of us right and if you make something new out of it if you edit it or remix it share it with this exact same license here's TED talks if you look at the end of a TED talk video it kind of goes by quick unfortunately you'll see the little symbols down there buy so you need to if you use this in your Moodle site you put this video in there you have to attribute TED which isn't a big problem uh you have so you can't sell it which again isn't a big deal for us we're not making money off this and the equal sign is the ND no derivatives piece so for whatever reason the TED organization has said we don't want you cutting this up or overlaying audio over it or doing mixing it I don't know why that is but it's their choice they are the copyright holders they get to decide that so you know what you can do with them you don't have to call the TED organization say hey I want to use this from my philosophy class is that okay they don't want you to call them they're telling you right here go ahead use it to me this is very similar I just took this photo out here I mean this is the same spirit isn't it really of open source software but it's about course content and about textbooks and when we do this we can solve this bigger problem of affordability and when we realize this I realized this about three years ago realize that one of the problems with open textbooks is that faculty didn't know where to find them because they were kind of sprouting up all over the place lots of people were making them and so we put together a catalog of them a library of open textbooks and it's at open.umn.edu and it's been very well received and it's been going for about it has a three and a half years I guess now we went from about 75 books in the beginning to over I think we have over 185 books 185 books in there now and is growing quickly because I've as I mentioned earlier there's states and provinces and governments and universities and I mean making these things now and it's really going very well and it's available I mean it's just an open platform I mean you can sorry I shouldn't use that term in this audience it's not it's it's an you don't have to sign up for anything you just go in there search for a book download book get it right here's some examples these are created at Rice University they have had a large investment by a bunch of foundations to create some really top-notch books some of these cost upwards of a million dollars to create believe it or not they're not cheap to make lots of ancillary materials lots of you know power points that go with them and quiz banks and whatever else and what their goal is this is this is open stacks yeah you can see it on the upper left their open stacks college and their goal is to make the books for the top 25 enrolled courses in the US and they're more than halfway there I think they're at about 15 or 16 books now here's an example of one and this is probably their most popular book it has it has double digit market share apparently in in the algebra based college physics courses across the country and community colleges and four-year colleges and universities and here's some of the benefits of it being open forget the fact that you can edit it because you can do that forget the fact that you can remix it and do let's just if you just take the book just on its own this is a two semester book right I mean you can cover two semesters of physics with this almost 1300 pages it's available as a pdf as an e-pub you can order it in print and generally what it'll cost something when you print it of course because printing costs money but it'll be about 20% of the cost of a commercial textbook so this is about 40 to 50 dollars and it would be maybe 250 dollars as a two semester physics book that would be probably a cheap physics book you can read it on the web if you want to I don't know why you would but you would I don't know if anyone's familiar with bookshare but basically they've taken these books then and put them into a system for accessible because they're open because we're not worried about people stealing the content right which happens with commercially published they want to pretty keep it pretty locked down so you can't share it with somebody else because it's open it can be shared into systems that make it more accessible much easier and I know the accessibility people I've talked to a few folks here on campus are very excited about open content because they have this real desire to make sure that everything and everything that all the content that comes into our campus is accessible to everyone if it's not they have a lot of work to do to make it accessible so open content is there already there are manuals PowerPoint slides all of that and again this has already gained double-digit market share across the US one other example oh this is this is the Cali which is computer-assisted legal instruction the center again at Stanford and they have published I am trying to remember how many they have now I think it's 20 26 and growing legal books and they change them every year so you'll notice on the titles on the bottom they have years on them because of course laws change so they have to edit them every year so they're doing a wonderful job of maintaining this collection of textbooks for all of their members and there I don't remember how many schools there were did I say that earlier forget how many it's a lot of law schools like 70 or 80 law schools across the country so so when I when I first was asked for a title for this presentation I thought you know the usual reaction I get to this kind of thing is oh that sounds nice sounds really nice but let's go back and we've got to deal with you know our textbooks and and that's absolutely true you do I mean we do we're in that space and so when I titled my presentation it was based on this I love this quote is from Kennedy's inaugural speech and he listed a lot of really aspirational goals exploration of of deep seas and space peace you know nuclear arms proliferation kind of goals and at the end of all of these huge things he says this you know and this will not be finished in the first hundred days nor will be finished in the first thousand or in the life of this administration nor ever nor even perhaps in the lifetime of this planet but let us begin because it's kind of the it's the right thing to do and and I feel like that about this but since I was asked for that title I intended to end on this but I'm going to end on something else and that's actually evidence that we're well beyond that actually so if you take inspiration like from this like I do awesome you know let us begin for this but let me show you some data this is traffic on the the open textbook library site since its launch in the beginning of of of 2012 and remember what the audience is for this is the audience is faculty so it's not a huge audience to begin with but the first year of traffic we'll now cover in about six weeks and I'm guessing this fall that'll be that'll be cut in half even every semester the traffic just jumps and jumps again we've asked faculty to as I'm running workshops I run workshops across the country at different institutions I'll talk about that a little bit but we ask faculty to go in and rate the textbooks because quality was something that was brought up right like what's what's going to be the issue quality of course it is and it should be the question faculty ask well they listen when it comes to quality faculty listen to each other right peer review so we ask faculty to review the books in the scale of one to five and we have about 200 a little over 200 reviews right now and this is where they fall which is really I mean I just put them in the library I had no idea how good they are I'm not qualified to judge them all in fact probably none of them so that's a great sign that the books that are out there are have some quality and it's not according to me at the University of Minnesota started in the College of Education and Human Development this this initiative in a little over three years we have fewer than we had this little pilot group of faculty and and and it's slowly kind of grown a few at a time but fewer than 20 faculty over three years have saved our students potentially over just under five hundred thousand dollars half a million dollars that little tiny group so thank you so so imagine I mean this is less fewer than 20 people and they don't teach the same course every semester I mean this is a normal cycle and maybe they teach it once here and and these I don't think any of these were large enrollment courses either imagine if it was a large enrollment course so this is happening and in fact as we speak right here today this is your inaugural meeting of the U.S. Moodle Moot right so across campus there is the inaugural meeting which started yesterday of the open textbook network and this is a network of schools of institutions who are committed to advancing open textbooks on their campuses yeah here we go it's a variety it's from it covers community colleges all the way through uh research institutions like ourselves and this list is growing so fast like I said you know when I was asked for the when I was asked for the title of this the size of this group was maybe half of what it is now and we're talking you know three months ago whatever it was we have Minnesota state colleges universities that's 34 that's a system 34 institutions we have the North Dakota University System that's 11 we have the community colleges in Oregon that's 17 so overall I think we're over 75 institutions nationally and my program director is telling me that next week we'll have another half dozen and it's just kind of really really exciting this is happening here they are the blue dots are the system schools or the systems have bought in so if Kennedy is saying didn't inspire you that maybe this can happen or maybe we can make some make make this work hopefully that it is working it's moving forward and and that's I've been in this my background is educational technology my PhD is in learning technologies from the University of Minnesota here and I've been the CIO or I've been at the University working in this area for 15 years before that for 12 years in K-12 and I'm going to tell you that I have not seen I gotta be careful here I guess because I don't want to sound disparaging to any other technology like Moodle but I'm going to tell you that because it's not the case at all I don't see potential in any other technology I mean in in let me put it this way again let me think here how do I say this I see more potential in open textbooks and in open OER than I do in any technology that I've seen in those 27 years as far as improving teaching and learning and if we can latch on to that open content management systems open data open research open all of those kinds of things isn't that what higher education is supposed to be about this free exchange of ideas right standing on the shoulders of giants all of that isn't that the what we're all aiming for I want to invite you to take to use the open textbook library point your faculty to that those of you who work with faculty every day on your courses part of if you think of yourselves as your job is to help faculty or become better teachers then hopefully now after this morning you've got an idea that this could be a piece of that directing them pointing them at these resources they may not work and they may work they may not work that's up to them academic freedom they need to decide that themselves I'll also ask you to take a look at the open textbook network and if your institution is interested in getting involved there's information on that site that'll get you there and we'll start a conversation and show up at your campus and run workshops and so on invite you to next year's institute that we have on campus here this year so thank you for your time um do we have time for questions thank you kind of couple over there thanks Marc thank you David that was excellent are there any restrictions internationally are the books available to us on the other side of the world yes they are and there are openly licensed books everywhere now the creative commons licenses creative commons has offices in oh yeah I don't know this I think it's 80 some countries they have their licenses are ported internationally so that they can I don't understand the technical nature of this because that's a lawyer's role but yes absolutely they are available I'm about to I've I've been invited to a lot of mainly English-speaking countries South Africa Barbados I really want to go there no in the winter no and and yes after the answer is absolutely yes the books are available there as well the licenses should be covered internationally so I wanted to give a shout out for in my area a lot of the upper level open source books are labors of love from people in a certain area who've they may have gone after a book deal and there was only 20 people who wanted that book so they just put it online so that's nice that's upper level not a lot of them are sold anyway I wanted to ask you do you think that publishers is there's any possibility that they will take more of a software business model and say you know what instead of selling to students we will we're going to show you all the things we offer in a particular school and you pay us a fixed price per year and you will have access to any of these books they are definitely already there their model right now is moving out of content actually and into services which may be competition for Moodle I don't know if that's what you're asking but they they kind of I think they understand that content is not the future for them because content can be free and so they are right now trying to to work with institutions to license that kind of access that is the model they want actually to say $20 per head you as an institution pay us will give you access to this content it's great for them because it cuts out they use textbook market it cuts out all aspect of choice that students have anymore you know they they make all those decisions about what to buy where and by use borrow from a friend whatever that's gone they are now charged a fee likely course fees that goes to the publishers but then the publishers are also building course management systems basically where there's all this value add in there right there's all there's a test bank attached that's aligned with the course here's a that is definitely where they're going and that's where they want to be it's better it's more profitable I think for them hi Dave hey Fritz so this is gonna sound somewhat cynical but it picks up on your question what will prevent if the funding is coming from outside entities besides publishers what would prevent governments and university systems from then passing that cost that they're incurring to develop open textbooks back into and down to students through tuition increases because one of the reasons tuition's have gone up and and state appropriations have gone down over the last 20 plus years because they could it's a lever state legislatures could pull they knew they could they knew students would pay the cost so that's my question yeah good question right now a lot of the development is is foundation funded so it's kind of free to us right in a way it's free to higher education I'm guessing if your question is how do we keep that from happening I'm guessing we don't I think that what needs to happen is higher education needs to own its own content we need to own this we do that in a lot of other areas we do it in accessibility we are saying we think it's important as higher ed institutions that all students have access to education and we own that we don't look at it as an expense we look it as a mission driven thing we do that with educational technology right we have educational technology people because we believe it is it's mission driven mission important it costs something so I guess my answer to that for us is that it we don't we don't keep it from from becoming an expense think of it though as a trade-off from what it is look at what that could be versus what is which is an eight point whatever billion dollars a textbook industry imagine what we could do in higher education with content with eight point whatever billion dollars the cost would be much much less for us and then therefore for students so good question yes sir hi David great great talk it's Sean Gilligan founder of web anywhere one of the Moodle partners now it's really timely and ironic because literally this morning I've just self published on SoundCloud my short business book and then you're talking about ebooks you can access it at soundcloud.com forward slash web anywhere but when you said no one's dumb enough to give it away for free I thought gosh I put my hand up and perhaps shouldn't have done that but um how would how would how would SoundCloud and my flexible book fit in with the open textbook library if you could just explain that because I've got to say I'm quite ignorant around creative comments I've heard about it right I do agree with you about open content but if you could maybe just advise me how I could link in my free book with your ecosystem that'd be interesting okay first of all I want to make clarify my comment about the dumb whatever I was joking and so I love the fact that people I have a shirt on underneath this that says it has a little creative commons logo and it says I love to share I love that that you're sharing how do you tap into this so to get into like the library and itself and all of that we have a few criteria and these criteria are simple they're we're thinking of changing them but it has to be a full book because learning objects have been done you go to Merlot connections you can do that this is focused because textbooks are easy for faculty to grasp so that's one thing openly licensed it needs to be openly licensed it needs to be in some downloadable format if you're going to exercise editing mixing you need to have it you can't rely on that website to be up anyway there's a lot of other reasons that that is a is a requirement to be in there and then fourth oh this is a requirement that we're changing in fact the group across campus is talking about this as we speak the requirement right now is that somebody outside your institution is using it and this is the only measure of quality that we were using it's kind of I can't judge the book because I don't teach these areas but if it must if it's good enough for somebody else then it will put it in there but we're changing that because that's a chicken and egg thing how can someone else use it if they don't know it exists and so I would encourage you to I guess make sure the book is in a number of formats there's an accessibility benefit to that as well right the best accessible content is when you have content in a range of formats so so that would be it is that it answered think we're out of time we are great thank you very much