 So hello everybody, my name's Erica and I'm an educator of everyone from WIWON to elder hostel groups and I've along the way have taught everybody from grade school, like people in grade school institutions to post secondary to community programming and I'm also a storyteller. So I tell stories through the written word on stage and on the silver screen and via the web and these days I've been most excited about telling stories via web theories and documentary storytelling and I'm starting to explore along the lines of some AR and VR storytelling. I'm Mary I'm a Canadian educator with international and Canadian teaching experience again from kindergarten all the way up to adults. I'm also a multimedia artist and I believe passionately in community participation in arts and the ways in which technology can make that art happen right in natural and educational and community spaces and these days I'm exploring I'm very excited to be creating poetry films, augmented reality installations and community arts participatory projects. So just over a year ago I was just over a year ago I was trying to talking with the team behind the documentary screen screenagers and I was trying to arrange for a screening for our masters of educational technology program at UBC and so we were happy to pay their fee for the screening but as it turned out there was a problem and that problem was that our program is all online and so we would have to do the screening online. Now the people behind screen rangers they weren't comfortable with us doing an online screening of the documentary because they were afraid that one of our master's students might copy it and might start sharing it with their communities for free and we sort of had all sorts of different security walls that we could show them that we could do but they still weren't comfortable with the idea because this was their way of creating sustainable funding for their project was through paid screenings. Now as a documentary filmmaker that I have to admit that annoyed me. My team and I create we create documentaries to do social good to get people thinking and hopefully to have a positive impact out there so we want people to watch we want people to share and we especially want schools watching and sharing. However we do understand that to make projects such as screenagers you're looking at tens two hundreds of thousands of dollars so you do need to have a some sort of funding mechanism and something that's sustainable for them and I had to admit that their model was much more sustainable than the model I had in place at that time. So this has led us into researching sustainable funding models for storytelling and arts projects with OER and free aspects to them. Now we're purposely not limiting this to just projects that are OER and there's a couple of reasons for that but one of the main reasons is the types of people that are creating storytelling projects are often not educators. They might have educational value to their projects but they might not understand how that space works and they might be completely unaware of what an OER is. So what our goal is in the research that we've been doing the last few months is we're basically trying to create a resource of possibilities for both the OER community and also for that broader creative community. And so we began our research with this gentleman, his name is Said, wonderful fellow, he's up at the Emerging Media Lab at UBC and we started by exploring one of his first projects and so this is one of the earlier projects at the top there that the Emerging Media Lab did and it's called the Stanley Park virtual field trip. And the idea with this virtual field trip is they use photo, I always mispronounce a photogrammetry to basically map out Stanley Park as a virtual world. And so the idea is that this virtual world of Stanley Park is being shared online with other post-secondary institutions around the world and their hope is that other post-secondary institutions around the world will similarly create these different virtual worlds from places near their universities whether it's like the pyramids in ancient Egypt or like of Egypt or visiting the Roman Coliseum or all sorts of things like that. Now right now they're just at the stage of having mapped out the park. That ended up being pretty huge, which we're going to talk about in a second. But what Said's hope is is that other teachers at the university will come on board be interested in creating different educational opportunities in this and so one would be like potentially going down into the soil and learning about life underground or going back in time to when only the first peoples lived and used Stanley Park or even going back to like the geological origins of the space. Now as I said, the actual first bit has been huge and the Emerging Media Labs learned a bunch of things from it. Their funding model for funding these projects is very student driven so they count on both student volunteers and paid students along with their institution funding and their project specific grants and students work on a four month cycle with their semesters. So a few things they've learned from this is they need to have industry partners in there so that they're not reinventing the wheel and they also they need to start biting off their projects in smaller more manageable bites so that they work better with that four month cycle. Now in the whole conversation with Said we learned a few other things that have been issues and one of the things is when Said first sat down with me he said sustainable funding in Canada and he said well that's institution funding and grants and I said that's the problem that's not sustainable and I said and also those grants tend to go to the same people time and time again now Said said well that's because they've got a track record and I said well we've got a project right now that's got a track record of winning awards internationally is considered was was listed in 2018 as the top in the top seven web series in Canada and we're still getting turned down for that grant funding. So clearly we've got a problem here and that's what we're hoping to address. We interviewed a lot of really interesting people on projects which was the best part about this. It was a great opportunity to just reach out to anybody I thought was interesting. We spoke with a number of people. Marguerite Bairti her work is at the top she's got an institutional funding that is not sustainable and not comprehensive enough actually for her project. She has a university grant to help her build a database of 360 videos for Italian language learning and the grant covers the cost of a new camera and some of her travel expenses but not her time which I think has been an ongoing thread. I've heard this over the conference. When I spoke with Daniel Williamson managing director of OpenStacks and Open Textbook Initiative one of his key points really resonated with me. He said you have to build sustainability in from the beginning. It can't be an add-on and that made me think about well that's interesting and how does that apply to my projects? How does that apply to the people who we've spoken with? Their business model includes earned revenue from sales of hard copies of textbooks. Their online access is free. Partnerships with educational resource companies who provide added value media and technology components as well as grants from philanthropic foundations. A problem with his funding model though is that he would love to be able for them to be able to expand beyond their steam focus but that their current model does not allow them to do so. I also spoke with Todd, the co-founder executive artistic director of Motion Poems. Motion Poems is a non-profit dedicated to the creation of free distributed motion poems, poetry films. They started as self-funded artist and poet. He decided he could see the great potential in poetry films as a genre and expanded into a non-profit which is based on collaboration and partnership. They hire a guest producer each season who produces the films. The films are, each filmmaker is given a small stipend. He says they consider them volunteers but it's $1,000. In my world and where I've been receiving grants, that sounds like a lot of money but in reality it's not. They also offer lesson plans which they create in-house. So it's a great website if you're doing any arts education. I highly suggest you look it up. They have a great big comprehensive bank. And they share lesson plans sent in by other teachers and films created by other students. And the way they get their free rights, I asked them but open and he kind of didn't really know what I was talking about. So it's a free resource, it's not open. They partner with literary organizations and publishers to get rights to the poems that their filmmakers use. So these two projects are both funded through crowdfunding. One of them at the top there, Animals of the Great War. They are the woman who's working on that, Maria. She's went to crowdfunding because they're finding that they're not getting as much money in universities in Italy. But she also ran into some problems with that because the Italian market is not used to crowdfunding yet. So there's a few things she learned from that. She'd do it again, but she would make sure that it was more international the project she was doing. Now, the one who's been really successful with crowdfunding here is this one here, Kate Hackett. And so for her crowdfunded project, Classic Alice, she actually raised over $85,000 between three campaigns. And so she's been finding all sorts of mix and matches of ways of funding her projects. It's probably helped because she initially self-funded, so the audience knew what to expect. She's been finding Indiegogo to be the best crowdfunding campaign for her because they get the money even if they don't raise the full amount. She is playing around with Patrion and her own patronage on her website, which has been a really interesting thing to look at. And then on a smaller scale, merchandise and revenue sharing with the streaming sites. Sarah Radala is an immersive new media journalist whose VR stories are freely shared through her website and her channels, as well as bought and distributed through online newspapers and journals. Her funding model also includes direct sponsorship through organizations and corporations with a vested interest in VR content. One of Sarah's key tips was to take advantage of the shifting freelance community culture, making bigger projects more feasible. Sarah is also the co-founder and co-writer of Immersive Shooter, which is an educational website for those interested in learning how to film Immersive 360. Adding new interviews depends on the amount of advertising they have at the time, but she continues to add her own tips because it's her passion and what she loves to share. I also spoke with Jennifer Hicks. Her work swaddled, although self-funded, it is the actual work as crowdsourced, which I thought was kind of fun and wanted to share with you. Through Instagram, she connects with her viewers who then share their stories. They send their stories into her, and she incorporates those into an evolving, constantly-growing collage. She uses these as investments for future projects. Her artwork is released freely, and her revenue comes from running workshops around her participatory artworks. So where we found the most viable, sustainable models long-term has been with some of the technology companies that are creating storytelling platforms. And so there's two of them. There's a smaller one, Elementary, where they ended up getting turned down from any sort of angel investment funding because the people they were pitching didn't understand why storytelling was important, especially in education. And so they self-funded initially. And now they're looking at models where teachers have and students have access to the platform for free, but then they do institutional licenses. And then there's a lot of, they actually have a product here that could be useful in the corporate world as well. So they're going to be looking at some pay-to-play things around that and some freemium models with, you can get a certain amount for free, and then there's kind of a pay-for-play buy-in. FUNZEE is, they've done lots of businesses in the past. So very quickly, angel investors, partnership organizations, and we will be sharing more of this on our website this summer, story2go.ca. So you'll be able to get the full interviews there as well as the case studies built around them. I think, we've got more or two of your questions. Oh, we do, I'll show it to you. That's a God show, it's taking you off, you know, with the hook. Casting my route, I think it's really interesting, both, I was tweeting away as you were going, are you going to share your presentation? Yeah, so we are going to share a presentation and the reality is one of the resources we're building with this whole thing is to have a database for storytellers, for educators, to, well, yes, partially to connect, so they can connect with each other, but also so that anybody can access all that stuff for free and share it around so that you can see what, like see how other people did it and see what maybe might work for yourself. Great, super, I'll look forward to it. I like the narrative for trade funding and that kind of sustainability stuff, which doesn't really go on in this space in the UK, I don't think. So it's just some really interesting examples here. Yeah, and so just so everybody knows, don't expect that to be available next week, it'll probably be available this summer. That's the goal. Thank you. Thank you.