 Good so we'll we're gonna start first of all I want to thank you for being here that you haven't gone with the tourists to see lovely Cambridge Or have actually that you're here with us today and not with one of the other excellent sessions that we have My name is Larry Cooperman. I'm on the board of directors of the open courseware consortium And I am the director of open courseware for the University of California, Irvine And I have the pleasure today of moderating a panel conversation about the whole issue of credit and OCW And specifically we want to get into tease out some of the issues about the future of higher education the future of OCW within the institutions and I have a pretty esteemed panel as well as one one panelist who is remote She's in the United States. Her name is Pritha Ram and she is the The president of open study comm so she's going to be joining us first We have a three minute video presentation from her and she'll be with us for the panel conversation and the audience question-and-answer period Secondly, I want to say that I do things a little nontraditionally. That's why I'm in OCW in the first place And so I may Periodically rudely interrupt the speakers So I apologize in advance for this behavior. Don't do it yourself Although later later during the panel back and forth. It's okay for an audience member to present a point of view When they when they feel the need but there will be an additional time for the audience as well So the structure of this is to first get some introductory idea of the projects the breadth of different kinds of OER OCW credit projects that exist and I'm going to start on my far left That's not a political statement. That's a simply a matter of where he's seated for me with Rory Mcreal who is the UNESCO OER chair at Athabasca University You may have already heard some of the presentations on OER University, but he's going to begin with A brief explanation of what this what this project entails Rory Well, very briefly the OERU is a is not a university. It's a consortium of 15 universities that have agreed to Give credit through their own their own assessment Processes so what we're doing is we're developing pathways to accreditation the first degree is a general a bachelor of arts and in general studies and the different universities Are participating we will have eight courses up Using OER they're mainly assemblies of courses from different universities not not specifically created by one university although some of them are that way too and The idea is that students by taking our Assessment they'll be able to get an Athabasca degree or they could choose another university and Get credit from that university so but let me ask you a question because I've heard Wayne McIntosh say and I shouldn't hold you responsible for what he says But I've heard Wayne McIntosh say that once OER you Really takes off and it's in its initial phases now once it takes off then it forms an ecosystem To which other universities at their peril don't become part of Do you agree with that statement? I believe that's a very strong possibility. I'm not as definitive as Wayne But I do believe that it's going to create waves I think the MIT X has already started to create waves They're doing it people sort of earn aware of that Western Governors University is already doing something similar and that this as it gets More publicity it's going to it's going to create Make other universities think and I think the true test of success of this project will be when the other University start fighting against us and trying to stop us so describe my nightmare scenario where my paycheck stops coming Because you've been so successful, but UCI as sort of a high-bound R1 Institution fails to join at the right time describe that scenario for me I For UCI Irving well, I mean I use it as an example because yeah my personal nightmare I stay up late late at night sweating when I think about this well I I think long long before that your university will realize that the world has changed and that's the fundamental difference and What I expect is that Not it well it could be at their peril as Wayne says is that others other universities will Will offer the same thing I mean the way we're looking at it at the Basque University is we're looking at the cost The the true cost of delivering a course which is very difficult But we'll get some kind of a reasonable estimate and then look at the cost of doing it through challenge exams and other means automated Computerized examination system and what we we believe is possible, and we don't know that yet Is that we'll be able to make more money? From giving out challenge exams to students who study independently on their own Then we do from our courses, and if that's the case then I think We would get a huge number of students that way And there'll be a long tail of students who fail those exams and realize that they need a teacher and Then they'll come and take our courses regular courses with the with the teacher That's a scenario. I'm not predicting anything. Let's see what happens Hopefully I'll retire beforehand Stavros Anthopoulos is the and I think I pronounced it correctly Well is the executive director of Funda, Saoje, Tulio Vargas, FGV online one of the FGV is one of the premier economics business and law schools in Brazil and the FGV online has One of the is really the earliest National distance learning provider on top of this So Stavros, could you describe this this certificate that you hand out? I know you don't even call it a certificate, but what are you doing with your OCW? I'm just gonna talk about the first part and then I'll tell you what we're doing and what's becoming in terms of certification What happened is when we started off OCW? We were surprised with the number of hits that we got in the beginning and then we started off and Actually, we shared some material with UCI with our partner with two courses and went to four and then now we're up to 35 but about three or four months after we started we had something like three hundred four hundred thousand hits in three or four months and People started sending me emails of how they could get recognition for what they were doing on the internet and Instead of answering back to everybody. It's open do what you like with it Emails came back all the time. So we decided to let people register Go through the course Do all the activities that are in the courses and if they grade it seven or more They had the right to print the declaration of participation, which is not a certificate and With that and you charge how much zero? Zero the thing is that these these certificates or these declarations nowadays are recognized by other universities as extracurricular Activities people put them in their resumes as something they did and so forth So it is a way of certifying and I don't know it will evolve and there are some other stuff that I can bring up after the discussions So that's basically it we've printed out 2.5 million of these It since July 2008 So FGV you could say in the OCW context is sort of the MIT of Brazil or maybe Maybe it's the reverse way. I don't know where the FGV That's right They have actually the the highest number of visitors per course in the OCW world So the question again becomes in the Brazilian context are other universities afraid of you like we're afraid of MIT No Not afraid. I don't think we're afraid. We we're getting some universities that are starting to come into the OERs Unfortunately, the most important university of the country, which is University of Sao Paulo is reluctant and resistant but the top university that The state University of Campinas, which is Unicamp is starting now, right? And there are some other small federal universities that are in the movement, but we're gonna have a lot of resistance Because of the way the system is set up, but it's resistance. It's not if we don't hand out certificates and build this This external group around our university will be in a poor Position to it nationally. I don't even know if there is awareness of what you're saying. Okay. Yeah We still have a long way in that sense. Okay, good Well, the next presenter is Becca Khan who we try to figure out what her title was She's with peer-to-peer University and has been from the beginning and is really If there's a central nervous system to peer-to-peer University, she's in the middle of that and she is a traffic director I think her title is community manager, but it's it's not like the person you go to when you have a leaky pipe or something like that It's she she's actually the person then that Manages communities of learners and make sure that the the whole ecosystem that peer-to-peer University represents is functioning And about that perhaps you can take off that functioning part and explain Well, and that's very kind of you to say and when you say from the beginning there hasn't been much I mean it's been very short since we began we launched in 2009 as a completely free and open Community of learning with I think seven courses on a fifty dollar a year peanut butter wiki and we've grown enormously since then and Realized really quickly that scale was going to be our biggest problem because how do you scale up when a you need to develop the Technology platform, but be issues like certification and assessment and credit become really problematic really quickly And we tied ourselves up in knots for a long time thinking about credit and certification and then Realized that the best way to approach these problems instead of trying to To give things to other people was to say to our community or what do you want? What's important to you and how do you give that to each other? And as a result what we found is that? Kind of communities of practice have grown up within PTPU we call them schools just for want of a better word But we have several schools running the one which is probably most high-profile is the school of webcraft Which we launched with the Mozilla Foundation about a year and a half ago and within these communities people are able or Community members It's a better term to use are able to decide amongst themselves how they want to Accredit and evaluate each other And we have found that that solved our scaling problems really well because instead of having one facilitator or teacher Who then has to evaluate a group and instead what we find is a community appears evaluate each other or evaluate themselves and award certain Merit artifacts for want of a better word Some people call them badges But we can get into that later and but we find that that that tends to be The easiest way to to deal with the scaling problem So isn't Mozilla now requiring people to go through the school of webcraft to apply for a position with Mozilla? Yep. Yeah, that that seems to be what's happening and that's phenomenal and something that's happened within their community in a way separate To us, you know, we've built a space and we're very happy for people to come and use that space and Do the dynamic things that they're doing in some way as an organization? We can't keep up with the development that's happening in this space. It's moving so fast So whether it's a course on how to write HTML by hand to kind of go back to basics or a course We've got one running at the moment on poetry And we're happy to provide the space for people to do it But but what they do in that space is is really up to them Speaking of that PDPU It has a certain culture that develops as part of it with this the peer learning piece but also as an alternative to university education and I every once a while I get a PowerPoint slide from Philip that has a single sleeping student in the middle of a room like this and the rest of it's empty so again, I start to sweat at night and I have that little fear and and even as as the blog postings of PDPU you'll see people say, you know, the university system is really Diseased, I mean not maybe they need to use word disease, but you know, you know I mean it's there's there's things that could be better Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't think that PDPU is ever going to replace a traditional university And that's not our objective and never has been But I think that we can do some things better than traditional universities. I think we can adapt a lot faster Because our users are the ones who are building our platform and who are moving that innovation forward So it's absolutely what learners want and they can they can shape that space in which to get what they want and what they need and in some areas that's really important and we can possibly do a better job Than a traditional university, but in other areas We're never going to have a school of medicine We're never going to have a school of engineering and that is not what we want to do and not what we should be doing But if a student is sleeping in an empty lecture theater, then some things vary wrong And and I would agree that the place that that it's exactly the kind of place where PDPU wants to be And actually I wonder if we can switch now to the next presentation, which is openstudy.com another group that Offers peer learning and Pritha Ram has prepared a video for us. She is available by Skype So she's going to participate later, but first we have I think a three-minute presentation Certification strategies for open coursework and I thank the organizers for giving me this opportunity in particular Larry Coopman the problem that you are solving as open course with providers is Offering access to the hundred million qualified students who would like to go to a university But do not have a break on which waters institution to go But while you offer online courses one has to always keep in mind the two problems of help and interaction Open study which is that gap by offering an extremely unique solution of Pre-study help through a peer-to-peer scalable platform that is both global 24-7 and low-cost Our impact we have over a hundred thousand users from 40 institutions 160 countries who ask more than a thousand questions a day in math alone 70% of them are answered in less than five minutes our impact Well off the user survey 80% of them report a better understanding of the coursework The typical user flow is can be illustrated with one of Larry's courses organic chemistry a user coming to Watch one of the organic chemistry lectures will encounter an open-study widget Clicking on get live help Sam enters him into the open study study group that's relevant to the course in this case mathematics What he looked at seeds it would be the equivalent of walking into a private Starbucks on Sunday morning With students clustered around different tables working on problems The crowdsource nature of our application allows us to document Competencies and skills through our sophisticated Preventioning system for example this user is a high-level user with many fans Who has already earned more than four thousand medals for answering questions in mathematics? another product that we can offer with our analytics is a Detailed look at the kinds of questions that students are finding difficult or a Perspective into which students are engaged how they're engaged and what they're doing our latest product called the smart score releases on the 17th of April Where we talk about? How grays are just one dimension our product smart score for beyond brains and reports on the kinds of intelligences that are not captured by these numbers and the three that we are launching with our teamwork communication and problem-solving We can also provide a detail analytics to our partners on exactly the kinds of competencies your users are engaged in And finally the certificate of masterly that we're launching with open course where UCI Would report not only on these three attributes Which are derived from crowdsource convention but also on an exam that Proposed on the subject my expertise We were supported by cities of funders Foundation and others, and I look forward to answering any good questions on this matter I can be reached at the following address once again. Thank you very much And Pritha, are you with us? Yes, I'm there. Oh my goodness. That's scary Pritha, so You're you're you are scaring me in multiple ways one is the disembodied voice in the room But the second one is that you are Disaggregating and unbundling what higher education has traditionally done and you're claiming with this new smart scores product That you are better measuring student engagement than with traditional assessment. Could you describe that a little more? Certainly Larry, I'll try to do this in disembodied fashion See the things like teamwork and Problem-solving and engagement if you think about it are actually manifested in a social setting You need a social environment to figure out who works well with who and who communicates well with who Now what open study does is provide that social environment Provide the academic Challenges as it were the problems that need to be addressed with teamwork and then thanks to the technology Has a way of archiving All those interactions so that with analytics You get the true picture So I think this is what's unique and this is where you get an insight into the student in your virtual classroom Your open courseware courses that will go beyond What can be done in a face-to-face? so So Pritha we we have this idea that you're adding analytics and Talk about your relationship to institutions of higher education. I think in some ways It's a different model than P2P you and could you describe that the the distinction as to how you interact with MIT or other other universities that have partnered with you certainly so our model is We provide the social learning platform so anyone that has content Actually, even if it's virtual like yours Larry or it's face-to-face like the southern New Hampshire University or Foothill College. We provide an online platform where People can read what they're reading study what they're studying and then at the point of need They can then access this global community so we are totally content agnostic and in fact we embrace Different topics different subjects different forces and most certainly both brick-and-mortars and online universities The real win actually comes in online universities or online courses because that's where It's difficult to organize that face-to-face Hanging outside that classroom. Let's chat. I have a quick question that kind of an experience. We call it in the virtually equivalent of the greens quad outside your classroom So we are absolutely open to working with all universities institutions and schools of learning and maybe Becca can also comment on this, but there's a Pure learning there there's various research that shows its effectiveness even in face-to-face higher education Could either of you comment on on the on the research on pure learning? Yeah, okay, sure So the research on pure learning is very very old I have few said I know you know well at the edu-cost was one of the early publishers and he published a long time Johnson and Johnson talked in the 80s About what collaborative and cooperative learning the premise is very simple as Someone articulates an explanation Their learning of their own learning is much deeper and in articulating an explanation in constructing that understanding as you can imagine They they learn better and the person that's asking for help Because the help is being asked of a peer They are more willing to be accepting and receptive and the outcomes are more likely to be at their level so pure winning is a pure learning is a win-win scenario and so the two Articles that I cited the Johnson articles and the I refutes are You know have been around for the longest time Great. Thanks, Prita. Well now I want to turn to the the FGV online of the United States It's small institution in Massachusetts And Steve Carson is I always call him the foreign minister, but actually he's the external relations Director for MIT OpenCourseWare and I he needs no further introduction So I'm going to simply ask him to introduce the projects. He's associated with it MIT and those that he's not associated with To explain how MIT is proceeding. He's not kidding. MIT is a small school. We only have 10,000 students. So Yeah, so my name is Steve Carson. I'm external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare And I'm very happy to have the public opportunity to say I'm not working with the MITX team And I'll be happy to talk about what I know about MITX But I don't have a backstage pass And so most of what I'll be able to say you could probably also find in the in the FAQs in the media That's been released around the project That being said I want to I want to explain what the two projects are by going back to two concepts that have been talked about Some more explicitly than one more explicitly than the other today. The first is this concept of disaggregation Gary spoke about it this morning a little bit and It really is key to understanding what open courseware MIT OpenCourseWare is and isn't now this was just the first attempt at making an open courseware and Not all open coursewares will fall into the bucket that I'm going to place ours in But the second concept that's been mentioned here already is the concept of scale And I think when you want to understand what's going on with education today and understand projects like MITX or Coursera or the Stanford courses I Think scale is very important component of what's going on. So first disaggregation a very simple model of disaggregation is that If you want to oversimplify education one way to do it is that it there's content provided to students There's a learning activity that's built around that content and there's some sort of assessment and certification Process that goes along with that and when you're on campus all of those are tightly integrated package But whether the MIT faculty realized this or not when they created open courseware What they did was they just chopped off the content piece and they published it online And so what you get if you come to our course or the materials that our students in our classrooms get from their Professors in support of the the learning experiences on campus and certification on campus And we are simply a publication environment We just take the the documents turn them into PDFs and upload them where we've come across other kinds of digital assets on The MIT campus will include those if we can But again, it's it's a straight-on publishing effort and the reason why that worked in 2002 was because the internet had allowed Publication to scale from early on it's web 1.0. I have a teacher that says I love web 1.0 We are clearly a web 1.0 effort and there's a lot of benefit from web 1.0 It may seem old-school, but it's done a tremendous amount of good in the world in the dissemination of information So that was what happened 10 years ago and 10 years ago a lot of the Industries that were just publication or content push began to crumble under the pressure of the internet the business model started to fall apart now there's there's a lot of people who said it wouldn't happen to education and The reason why you didn't see it happening in part was because the the other two elements the learning Interactions around the content and the assessment and certification piece were not yet able to scale online The way that the content was flash forward 10 years Facebook Twitter social media all of a sudden interactions on the internet do scale in a way that they didn't 10 years ago and What we're beginning to see also now is that assessments are beginning to scale especially formative assessments? Summative is a little bit more different. It's a little more complicated but So MIT open course where the project I work on is just the content push piece MITx is an attempt to create a scalable online Educational experience and this is what the these massive online courses tend to be and those are all three of the elements beginning to scale now You can see with peer-to-peer university. You can see with the open study that Some of these things some of these learning experiences exist independent of content and you might imagine that there are going to be certification efforts that exist independent of the learning experiences, so We have a in the open courseware ecosystem or the open education ecosystem We have had this sort of disaggregated growth of these independent pieces now with these MOOCs I think what you're seeing is a reintegration in some cases of those pieces so MITx is a set of content That's designed natively for online learning. It's a learning community And it's an opportunity for certification MIT has committed to providing a non-credit certificate Under some brand. I don't know what it will be. It won't be just MIT. It will be MITx or something similar to that So it's an integrated piece in addition to the the course offering the entire agenda of the MITx program also includes research into online learning and It also includes the creation of an open-source platform through which any university can offer a similar course So it's a much broader agenda than that. So those are those the two projects that we have going so, you know Ten years ago I was part of a video conference with MIT at the University of California With represents from each of the campuses at UC to understand this MIT OCW project Which the rumor was was going to destroy higher education as we know it and would put us out of business And so I we you know already had that idea now, you know after a few years I got over it But fat flash forward and even Rory and I were on the panel at e-learning Africa and I think Bakri Diaz here we were on stage together and Somebody asked the question last year. They said well, isn't this really just a question of one course to rule them all? And so it's a north-south imperial imperialist effort and effectively whether it's intended in that spirit or not this Ability to crowd out other courses from the from the higher education panoply If you will Yeah, it does that present a danger to us and Steve. What would you what would you say to that? Um, I would say I don't know I mean it's an interesting environment right now When I was at South by Southwest a few weeks ago Philip Schmidt who's with peer-to-peer university gave a presentation and he had that sort of classic World War two poster the the keep calm and carry on poster and next to it he had another poster that said now now panic and freak out and I think we're kind of at that kind of a moment in the higher education I think there's a lot of uncertainty out there and I think for those of us in the room It's a great opportunity to foster panic on our campuses You can really get people anxious and I would also say never waste You know a good opportunity or a good crisis for that matter, you know, so I think it's an opportunity to get the attention of Senior administrators get them talking about these issues and get them thinking about open education I think in the past ten years you could choose to have an open education policy or not I think in the next ten years. It's going to be you know a danger to your institution if you haven't confronted open education in one way or another I don't think it'll destroy institutions, but I think it will change them Becca could you comment on this issue is can higher education be a Do-it-yourself affair? Yes, and no I think In our experience, we have found that the synergies are really easy to create So one of the schools that's worked really well at P2P is called the school of education and it's a space where a Small group of teachers in the US are using the P2P platform and model to work on furthering education Programs and courses and challenges for teachers and fits very neatly together and there's very little Conflict ideologically at least difficulty and I think it depends on What you're wanting to do and and please bear in mind that you know speaking from P2P you We are very quick to acknowledge that we do tend to sit kind of on the fringy side of things And we are not ever going to be completely traditional in our offerings or in the way that we approach This learning process and and subjects, but I think that that it's very easy for things to work together I mean we we ran a course about a year ago with Joey Ito at Kaio University in Japan and we were able to take his course in real time and It ran and a P2P course ran parallel to that Everything fits it together seamlessly evaluation worked both in in the course and and for credit and within the P2P you space and and yes Sometimes it makes the logistics a little bit difficult But that's just a question of thinking things out carefully beforehand It I don't think it has to be an either or situation at all Okay, what I want to do is is now It is now that basically turn over my moderator privileges of interruption to the entire panel By posing a set of questions But again if you find something outrageous being said and hopefully I'm not the only one saying outrageous things Then please feel free to then jump in and and respond and we're going to give the audience a chance to do that later So if you'll bear with us for a few moments as we get this going but let's first look at the issue of Of what's been called what people have begun to say that universities are ripe for creative destruction And just to put it right out there that there's this Process now by which we've seen industry after industry fall by the wayside and The textbook industry may be living through that right now and then the shoe is about to drop on higher education Who wants to comment? Okay, yeah, I think it's complementary to what we were discussing now There was a study I looked at about a couple of years ago that said that we would have to opt for premium or access You know, that's comforting, right? So you just say I'm gonna be premium. I'm gonna be access And I think what's happening is that? We if we don't go for this creative disruption or rethink the process we're gonna be out There isn't a model and what I think is happening is that the world? The universities as a whole in the world haven't got the courage to sit down together and see how we're gonna cope with this And if we don't do it Market is gonna do it for us not only in the educational process, but The people get an education for various reasons once is one very important one is to get a job Right and if you don't have the competencies that you need in order to get a job Then the university system is gonna fail and in most cases Most people are not fit to go to the working place after they finish their graduation So that's an issue of the gap that has been created between academia and the real world So in areas like computer science and programming certification is very very Well-accepted and it's been there for decades and we don't look at that on the other senses So it's time we get down together and say what can I do in my part of the world as a university with your? University with her university and see whether we have to sit down and discuss the model and It's not an either or process So I see it that the whole world is asking the same questions And we're not inducing ourselves to sit down and see how we're gonna lead this Would everybody be disrupted or is it really a haves and have not situation for higher education? So for example does it impact these developments impact differently University of Phoenix than it does MIT To pose it sorry. Yes, Pritha, please Thank you. Since then I have a business school is one of the guys that talks a lot about this and he's says that in a Disruptive innovation where something is drastically changed not a continuous innovation But a really drastic change to the way you look at things and things are completely different change from teams So it doesn't the bottom of the market. So it starts with In our program will probably be things like community colleges with the lower As you put it but as the one state In the lower In the handbox they get increasingly better and what is happening at the top? You have the brand name say, oh, that's okay. It's not disrupting us. You know these things well These things are not meant for us. You guys secure an opposition, but it keeps moving up More and more people start to accept it It's not only they have not anymore it moves ministry and then it'll come to sort of take over the brand names So what we are going to see the destruction starting at the very bottom and places that are have to innovate This is where their budgets are being factorized or in the thick of it and in the state of california You know So people will have to figure out how to be brilliant all the other elements to change to make education work So you can go and start the people who need to be served And then the same solutions will start to take ground as you move up So I'm sitting here at conference in arizona in cali and there there were There are 800 registered participants But there was a request for almost 10 or 20 percent more. They had to close the registration The conference is about No, no, no, this is good And I'm looking around the room yesterday. It is crowded as hell And in three of those sessions that I went to people said oh how many educators in the room how many faculty I raised my hand because I still have my position at emery, but there are very few others So one question the people are asking is If there's so much construction and innovation going on in education, where are the faculty? The people in the room are from you know, they're They're from outside and there's three or there's several fields emerging there and it's really scary If I was just a faculty I would be scared So one theme is that it's a lot of it is social social learning social everything A lot of people are doing this for just one of the recovery. I think there's mobile and it's going to be mobile It's mobile ipad mobile phone And if you're not on mobile then you're not reaching the people you really want to be reaching And the big theme is supplemental instruction. I know that sounds like a lot of fashion work, but that means people are saying Okay, the diversity is in colleges, but I want to get my instruction And I get it to be to be you and I get it somewhere else And it's very early parents of three year olds are looking for products to get their kids down Because nobody trust schools anymore And the big the last one is also I'm amazed how many people are talking about skills and competencies Smarter is all talking about that. Fidelis is talking about that. And these are people outside And I guess they're serving maybe the Fidelis serves Army People that are going to be army, but there are others coming there, you know, they're not talking to the universities I guess that I didn't have to so I bet whatever's happening from the outside is going to start coming in and a smart university Faculty should be at these places to see what's going on. I'll stop there Let's pick up on that point where are the faculty because you know, this this guy at stanford runs his artificial intelligence course There's a hundred and fifty thousand enrollments. And then he leaves stanford to run his class So where are the faculty on this? What it's what how do you see the future playing out and if credit is awarded outside of universities What does that mean for a faculty? Um In the digital spaces that a lot of this learning is happening Um, the the traditional idea of one person who knows everything who's then going to impart knowledge to others Is a completely old and broken model and is not appropriate at all Um, what we found is that people who come to ptpu Um exist often in other personas. We don't know who they are We don't know what their qualifications are. We don't know that they have a degree or not Although ironically a lot of ptpu people are actually very involved in higher education in their other lives um, but But it's it's just about the knowledge and the passion for the knowledge and the passion for the learning of the subject That counts in our community. And so um as soon as people recognize that kind of Fire in each other's bellies that's when the the faculty ceases to exist And so you're learning from each other within a peer group And and that kind of tiered model just doesn't exist anymore And so perhaps that's that's the problem is that faculty are still holding on to that That old idea. So how should faculty engage with students? What what would be a different model than what we were presenting or or what happens if not? I think that the Aldous minutius in the 15th century changed a lot of this by inventing the portable book It wasn't Gutenberg that changed everything with the printing press It was the portable book where anyone can learn On their own without the teacher the lecturer Gutenberg's books were under a lock and the lecture would come up Read it and everyone would listen and that's how you learn But when minutius, uh, he disrupted education by bringing up this idea that you can learn on your own without a master So I think it's an old concept of by the way books were banned from most universities in europe Uh quite a long time because of this disruption So, uh, I think the idea is that people Can learn on their own in fact faculty all the time are learning on their own, but they don't seem to get it That hey, maybe students can learn on their own as well and Sometimes they need guidance as we all do. So if that's available, that's great But it isn't necessary for learning. You do not need a teacher for learning. Sorry That's a fact most teachers learn quite a bit on their own without without other teachers. So The reality is there And what's going to happen is the dependence so faculty everyone's thinking when they think of faculty They're thinking of somebody in a tenured position in a in a university But in canada and I believe in the united states at least one third or maybe even half of them Are not in a tenured position So they don't have a fire in the belly. They have hunger in their belly And they're willing to go with wherever the opportunity goes. So they're not in such a safe position as they think they're They see themselves as the guardian of that conservative university territory and They're not in a stronger position as they believe At one of my sister campuses uc davis The agriculture department has just recently said we're going to give out degrees with credit the traditional way But all students must have a portfolio to graduate from the sustainable agriculture program at uc davis It was built on competencies and then series of activities and it was meant to be what you bring at at graduation to an employer to To a graduate school, whatever it may be so comment on this idea of portfolios. What are you each doing? with portfolios In terms of the the whole credit issue that is are are you To what does credit even mean or even non-credit credit if you know what I mean because it's we we do the same thing I want you to interrupt you and go back to the previous point of which we're going to comment on that. Okay I don't I'm not so radical as both of my colleagues here Because uh as people some of us Like all of us here and most of us We we like to be teachers And in these environments, we also going to find other people who like to be teachers And if we think that we're just going to have people learning by themselves Then knowledge is not going to go forward. It's just going to change hands. You have two and a half million learners. Yeah, that's what I mean It's learned on their own. Yeah, but listen what we have to do. I'm not I'm not against that Is we have to take full advantage of what? Professor Curly said this it took me about a year to understand it and I'm convinced We have a new means of communication among us And if we don't take the cyberspace as part of the learning process We're not going to change anything Because you're not going to change the way people learn or interact. You have to use this to enhance communication Interaction sharing dissemination, etc Independently of where you belong in the system Which means that I can interact with a 13 year old who's just as genius as I am if you are and we're going to create new knowledge And then on the other hand I have people who are going to exchange explicit knowledge to survive because they're hungry or whatever you want to call it So I think the the idea is how do we once again get off the silences that we set up? And think that we've come into new solutions of how Man learns and we haven't come to that Because if the technicians turn down the systems, we're going to have to go back to the books So I think the risk is higher for people to to strike and say we're not going to put up the The wireless anymore, and we are the only ones in order to put it up That's much more of a risk Rather than thinking that we found a new way of learning So I think we have to sit down and see what this new Ambience Is brought to us and how we can get pedagogy and the technology together into something which is Not going to go back because we use this in our day-to-day life in our professions And we don't need online courses for that necessarily We need that to support the learning process And and that's the key issue because when I go to itc Conferences people try to convince me that they've changed the way people are going to learn When I go to more academic conferences, they say the itc is just getting in the way of how people should learn And it's time we bring these two concepts together and Do not discuss of course we're going to enhance And you've said that already. I think we spoke about that last year at Bali I'd rather have 20 million people trying and 2.5 million getting something done Then just giving one million the opportunity And that that's what's in our hands Yeah, and then we have to find ways of how to interact with that In all the senses of how to bring in the content how to assess And that's the new roles that we are not discussing properly in terms of a model You know, I think you're hearing both the the keep calm and carry on and the panic and freak outsides of this And I'll go ahead and give a little bit more of the the keep calm and carry on just to balance things out You saw the numbers gary put up earlier on how many universities we'd have to build how many people need education And it's it's a lot of people regardless of what you know, the actual Source of the day is there are a lot of people out there who need education And the other thing that's changing in our world is the amount of education everybody needs You know the phrase lifelong learning has been around for a long time But but frankly we are entering an era when lifelong learning is a necessity For people in many fields, you know You hear this all the time that by the time somebody graduates from an engineering degree What they learned in their freshman year is basically out of date by the time they've left school So I think there's a lot more education out there that's going to need to be done And we're going to have to essentially be firing on all cylinders to even come close to meeting the need that's out there So we're going to need traditional. We're going to need non-traditional Approaches and I think that so I'm not looking for even you know community colleges or state colleges to to evaporate anytime soon Another sort of keep calm aspect of this is we haven't solved all of these problems We're beginning to see the glimmers of how to scale social interaction We're beginning to see the glimmers of how to scale assessment in different ways But you know there are cautions in there for instance the the whole community the the social Aspects of this sort of fostering interactivity I mean there are a lot of dangers with the way that we consume say journalism these days in the new digital era because we only sort of Listen to Those voices that we want to hear and there's a danger in this Open self-directed learning space that we're only going to study the things that we're interested in and you have the potential for People to say get very interested in you know complex and clever For Financial instruments not the point fingers or anything but to have not had the kinds of discussions that might give them Better judgment in how to deploy those kinds of instruments or you know to take another example from south by southwest You may have seen there was an advertising company that Did this gimmick for a wireless internet service provider by hanging Hot spots around the necks of homeless people and having them circulate through the The conference and you know a little more study of things you wouldn't naturally You know go in study might have helped you to You frame that a little differently in your mind and and consider whether that was really an appropriate thing to do And so I think one of the one of the advantages to The the school environment the the on-campus environment and yeah, this probably could be replicated online at some point But is the opportunity to be confronted with Points of view that don't naturally fall in line with your own And I also think that the on-campus environment is a very important environment for learning how to learn In a very intense environment when we get people come into the mit open courseware office They often say to us that's great. It's wonderful to have the materials But how do you get mit students to think like mit students? And that's what mit teaches it doesn't you know, obviously it teaches the the technical subjects But it also teaches how to solve problems how to work in groups how to communicate effectively and To think critically and these and these are the skills that are going to allow us to be lifelong learners And these are skills that I think are still most effectively learned In an in-person environment and on-campus environment So I I see the two working in concert where people will probably still spend four six eight years Maybe in traditional education, but then are going to spend a lot more time Self-educating and participating in informal education communities as they move on through their careers So we shouldn't forget the pre-test still with us But I also at this point want to bring the audience in you have been very patient And now it's your turn to just you must have a ton of comments to make it by this point So we have to get the the mic going because I see a hand all the way in back. I i'm blinded I can't even see who you are. It's Andy. It's Andy. It's Andy. It's our host I'd like you all to comment on A point of sort of made in passing about it's better to give people the opportunity So you've got 20 million opportunity, you know, if only one half million succeed or whatever Because if you take something like Stanford course you mentioned I've had it was 120,000 star It started at 150 but it doesn't matter the numbers the numbers it seems to complete it was only about 20% of those who started Now all those who didn't complete What if they think of themselves as failures? Have we failed them by providing something which is a single swim type approach even though there are teachers there and things like I say that because this is one of the biggest concerns My institutions every university has Is coping with people's self belief In terms of am I good enough to do this and the fear of failure and It not being a revolving door says I'm coming on take this opportunity. There is an open door Oh, I failed and I get back out again and never returned follow-up comments Or other No, no, I was going are there people who want to reply The the failure issue the 20% In our case 20% is not acceptable in my institution My dropout rate or failure rate is around 11% And most give up Because they can't pay so now we're getting an insurance for that So then I have to agree with Steve although we are an online institution We try to treat the student in a way that he recovers. So if you see that somebody fails We go around and say what was it? Was it tutoring? Was it your problem? Are you not used to the to the it? And then we set a different pace for him So he can recover But maybe beckett can reply because p2p you has people coming in coming out lurking They sign up for a class, but then they don't do because it's off. But in this case, it's all free all You know available. So would you comment on that? Yeah, dropout rates were a big problem for us when we first started as well And it was it was really depressing for the people who were organizing the courses If you've put all the effort in to create this This object and then only four out of the 20 people finish you feel like a failure as as a Coordinator or instructor as well And one of the things that we've done to try and work around this is change the model completely And so, um, yes, everything is free. Everything is available for free But but we think that the one way to solve this is using a model that we we've been working on called the challenges model So instead of having Something that has a very definitive beginning in a very definitive end And you have to work your way through it regardless of your own time constraints personally And you know other commitments that you may have We've created a set of challenges which have the same objective at the end But you can work through it however you want and you build your own personal learning plan Which suits your own circumstances and situations and and we find that that is working very very well Um, yeah, I would imagine it's a very in our case I can give you an example We had a failure rate in a special program We were developing in the northern part of the country everybody sort of failed five out of forty And the problem was they were not accustomed to use the technology So We had to Stop what we were doing Come back and teach these guys to to be more digital Than they were and then we extended the time So but on the free side, how what percentage are actually printing out that certificate of those who Start yeah, the thing is this is an ongoing process. What I can tell you is that about 30% of those who access enroll right and out of these I I don't control what they're doing obviously, but about 25 percent Is the rate of Renewing the declarations right, but I don't know what the dropout rate is because I don't know what time he's gonna the time he's gonna take Okay, but I I would see also in the scenario that I had envisioned where you make it out and there's 20 million students access it Most of them will Be just accessing it and you will you will have steps on the way And you will know whether or not you're capable or not The other point is is that no one else knows part of the fear of failure that I've seen in students Is that they're colleagues and everyone else that and with these online courses They go on forever. So you never really fail. You can just keep Going on so you didn't make it in this year and you don't take the final exam until you're pretty well sure So I don't see I don't see it as a problem. And also I see that For many students, it's a good thing to know that you failed. I I'm not I'm not one of those who thinks that failure is Knowing that you failed is necessarily a bad thing. I think some of them should know they failed Yeah, and I think you know, you need to keep the numbers around these mooks and in context too I mean, I'm a proud failure of both the stanford ai course and mitx A lot of the the sign ups are curiosity people want to see what's going on how it's you know A lot of the sign ups are people who are professionals in the field already who have busy lives and jobs And they just thought it would be cool and they get into it and they say, you know that I just don't have time to keep up with it. Um, so a lot of the failure out there is really curiosity traffic Um, and I think the other thing to to keep in mind about the oer space in uh, actually uh, oh you netherlands and john's hopkins and uh, and I have all collaborated on a paper that documents some of this But open coursework really does act as a low stakes opportunity for people to Try out higher education and and the surveys that we've done at all three of the schools Indicate that that one of the clear Informal educational uses of all of the sites is to try out and see whether you know I'm ready to go back to school and it can act as a very powerful inducement to to go back to formal education Because you can gain confidence at low risk So part of the question is really that in with ocw We've provided access to higher education on a very broad scale But have we provided opportunity? And how does the credit issue play out in this in this uh issue of actually improving people's lives through free resources And and the audience of course you you can pop up. Yeah, did we have went on the right over there? Let's start over the audience Okay Thanks, um, so You want to talk about about how Sorry access We provide access, but but i'll be so in other words If we have an artificial intelligence course by its very nature the people who are going us to even sign up for that Are people who think they can grapple with it But we talked before about the problems of the world and the magnitude of those problems And so we can't start with artificial intelligence, right? So the issue of opportunity that is the provisioning of free resources that then lead to some change In people's lives, whether it's job opportunities or something else or opportunity to enter into higher education How does first of all how does credit play out with that question? And and how are we doing? We have a community of users in columbia who we didn't even know existed until November last year And we met a guy called dany bar tista who came to one of our meetings and he said to us 10 of my friends have gotten jobs by taking courses at p2pu while they're students And with what they're learning in the in the school of webcraft Courses they get internships while they're studying at computer Programming development companies. They work through their courses They work through their internships and they get hired at the end of it And that is not about getting a certificate or a degree or a qualification It's about saying this is my real life as a computer science student at a university in bogota This is what i'm doing in my online life as well I'm putting the two of them together and how can I make this work for me? And I think that for us was revelatory to realize that Through very little effort on our part in terms of trying to chivvy people through a course These guys are taking what is available to them customizing and kind of You know string and bubblegum putting something together and making it work for themselves in a very very real way I want to quickly ask stavros one question. Then I want to get to the audience There's a demographics to your free users and could you describe that and how they're using the free courses? I have Many emails coming in with the same the same result I got a job after I did the course I kept my job. I was promoted All my team took the it course and we've improved our methods here and so forth So these would be spontaneous returns, but in our case Most people who access the the content are people that could not afford paying a course in the foundation So it's high quality stuff Most of these people are people that earn They would be considered class cd in our country, which means an income of around $800 a month And that's that's a very very wide part of our pyramid. Okay So for these guys, it's most of them do it to complement their education To have a glimpse in the subject, which is curiosity And some of them even go in for the methodology to see whether it is effective Yeah, and interesting enough most of them are women 57 percent are women Angel range the model angel range would be from 27 to 35 Yeah, 99.7 percent are brazilians I have a zero three percent rate from other countries and interesting enough portugal isn't the second Uh most or angola, it's japan and the u.s. Yeah, which probably other brazilians who are there who need complementary education What else can I know that that was exactly those points that you're actually you were able to reach Those targeted populations and it's different Then for example the the scamper and we're talking about Non-tutored courses that range from eight to 30 hours. That's all Right Okay, we have some more comments from the right side of the room. I'm sorry. There's there's sorry. Well, thank you It seems to me the presentation has been very insightful and thoughtful and has really provoked a lot of Questions in my mind and comments, but I so I think I'll focus on just the notion of The disruption and the fear in people's minds of is your job going to be displaced? And are we going to end up with some other kind of system and and I think we've that question has kind of risen It's had many times in higher education And if we go back a couple of decades to online and distance education Everyone thought that students were going to migrate there and what would happen to our classrooms and our campus system Would we still have faculty members teaching in classrooms and of course we do What it did was it opened up pathways for different kinds of learners to access higher education And I think that what we're doing with open courseware and open educational resources and things like the open educational resource university Is again opening up additional pathways to other learners who are still excluded from our system And I think that it's really important that at the end of all of this in some ways People need to get some sort of credential Or some sort of recognition and validation of the learning that has happened in that context That they can give to either an employer or another institution to show that they can move on So I think our thinking in this is evolving and I think as it evolves and and things get tried and it's proven that People are not going to be displaced. I mean your role as a faculty member Certainly will change and should be changing, but I don't think it's really going to go away. Thank you More comments and I saw there were a couple of hands on the right side Hi, um, I'd like to ask about the issue of repeatability of courses One issue for me as an open university student is that courses. I did a while back I have now completely forgotten and I can't repeat them with the ou What's your policy on repeatability of courses because failure is not built in if repeatability is allowed Yeah, well, obviously it's true for the free courses whatever mitx whatever the model. I don't know Yeah, no one has any answers You you can take our open courses courses as many times No, but even even what happens in in our paying courses the the student has his login Wait, wait, wait a second. We have we do have a reply In our paying courses the student can keep his login his logon and his password and he can go in as as long as he wants After he took the course, but he will only access what was actually developed at his environment, so He will not go into a different class or go into chats and for you that are developed by Current courses, but he can have access to everything he went through And he can have permanent access to our virtual library Pritha, do you have any comments about the ability of a student to go back in again and again Participate in the study group forever or as long as they need to and are you capturing statistics on that? Well, I have a very I have a very strong response to that question I feel if a student wants to go back and repeat a course. That's a wonderful thing I think you should be in courage And I think the only situation where you would discourage it is if money comes into the picture So I'm hoping that open university hears this and allows you to repeat the course because How wonderful it is to have someone want to learn the same material over again. So that was my very strong response as far as students who are Who am I absolutely You have you have to remember that in a good community of practice It is a welcoming place And so and I'm sure you'll find this in p2p you as well and any other community of practice Students should feel or learners and whether they're young or old or you know, whether they're 17 or 65 should feel welcome and To join and come back and repeat and ask and go back to it Because it's that relationship that the relational nature of the community that Forsters deeper learning retention And so the success stories Will come back. But only through these repeat interactions um and sustained relationships, so So I'm glad you asked that question because it was sort of unthinkable to me that you wouldn't be able to go back and review Yeah, I think the the whole issue of repeatability speaks to to a larger issue of how the constraints around higher education are changing The reason why you can't repeat that is because higher education is scarce or has been scarce And we're moving from scarcity to plenty and so there's you know, in fact probably no reason why you can't Repeat that and you see that happening in a number of different ways And and you also see a number of the other constraints around what a campus education is all about beginning to dissolve There may in fact be no reason why we have to have courses where students have to come into the classroom at the same time to to learn the same subject matter Uh, you know, they may be able to use some of these digital tools to absorb the information and only come together for discussions Or even not come together for discussions at the same time, but do them asynchronously online So I that's where I think the campus based higher education is going to change I think when you see those constraints sort of fall apart It's you know, I no longer have to settle for the second best class that I was interested in because it happens to fit with the schedule of all the other courses that I I wanted to take I can take exactly the curriculum that I want to take And I can take it, you know at the time that suits my my professional needs as well So I think educators really need to rethink their role on a campus Uh, you know where the fundamental constraints that have shaped a campus world are beginning to change And uh, you know, I I think that This is a Not an mit story, of course But you know, you talk to people in the ocw world and you hear the story all the time about the faculty member who refuses to publish online Because then what would they do with their classroom time? And I think that's a question that that You know educators have to confront because we don't have to Lecture anymore. So what is the classroom time about and I think that that's the direction that the campus is heading in an era Plenty instead of scarcity But you know, you know, the same way the student wants to see the webcasting pool five or six times If you're going to repeat the class, then you don't go and just show them the movie It can be the way around. Exactly. Yeah Yeah But I I would uh, I would think that you'd counsel somebody who wants to do the class again Is to not do that to do a more advanced class I I would I would be very concerned that the teacher Said to a student. Oh, yeah, go on do it again. Instead of saying there's a more advanced class that you should be taking Move yourself forward or another class is complimentary to where you can get credits for But but what if you'd need to go back and review the content in the first place What's the point of going to an advanced class? Would not be setting yourself up for failure again? If you if you fail if you fail the class then at our university you can try again I think it also Oh, sorry carry on No, no, nothing go ahead. I think it also um speaks to the changing nature of what a course is and what these Entities are if it's something that you have to start the beginning of work your way through take an exam pass or fail Then this becomes an issue But if it's not If the learning process is not that then it ceases to become an issue and and these These objects become completely malleable Changeable cloneable Adjustable and part of that is the open nature of the content in which is what makes them so excited If we've got a comment over there And anyone should you know we we tend to be a group of the convinced So somebody should actually think from the perspective of good reasons to violently disagree with With anything that we've set up We're talking about learning as a linear process and we're talking about Learning by people who have a strong sense of self. I agree that the failure rate Can be down to people deciding they don't have time etc But in extent in OER in all of the idealistic aspects of everything that we're talking about I think we're talking about extending the reach to people who don't have a strong sense of self We're talking about people who are not wealthy that they don't have money So they think hey, I shouldn't be learning. I should be actually bringing in some money now doing some real work they have emotional barriers to overcome and What I think all this leads to is your point Sorry, I don't know anybody's name Guy from MIT about what we do in the classroom I think this is the crucial element because lectures are incredibly potentially Incredibly boring to students when they're dealing with all this social media or the fantastic technology related stuff So what do we do we interact and just a quick example I've been learning new software over the last few years and recently I was building a website now There is loads of learning material But you know, I kind of grown inwardly when I see these health pages. Yes, there's fantastic detail I just want to sit with someone it can be virtual these manager chat things. I'm okay with those But I actually want some interaction Yeah, so this emotional and when I'm supervising, you know, dissertations I find students have Emotional crises So if I were to kind of log what my students did it would be less a log of their academic work Of course that relates, but they're always going through some kind of emotional crisis But how does that relate and it's ideas firing, but they need that kind of emotional support I think and then the intellectual stuff follows So how do we meet those needs, you know in an interactive way using the tools? That's my question and do you agree, you know, do you agree that there are those people who need that support? So they won't drop out I'll just quickly reply that for me this I think the issue changes from the access issue that we are We are succeeding at to the opportunity issue where There's some good examples, but we're still at the level of of of failing Which is okay because we always start with failing, but that's where we have to move And that personal support is really important and good that the traditional university should start thinking about doing that And can we keep the microphone moving now? Thank you, Rory I Was going to ask of the success stories the story from Colombia was a great success story Was it the studying or was it the accreditation that turned the key for these people? Well in our case, there is no accreditation So it was definitely the studying, but I think And and this ties to the previous discussion Part of the studying was about learning with your peers both asynchronously and and in the kind of platform space that that we Provided so not only are people working together in labs at times with p2p you content for example, but but people are also Connecting to mentors online through our challenges model that they would never have had access to before either So that peer component that the social rapper around this content is absolutely critical If it's going to work and and that may mean an email To someone who happens to be an MIT student who's doing a p2p You course or it may mean talking to someone who's sitting next to you in the lab in bogota But it's the one-on-one stuff That I think is actually what powers people through these processes But they have a portfolio at the end of that experience. That's essentially what they can carry to an employer, correct? They do, but but there is no stamp from an institution saying that's something I wanted to comment I got an email about five or six days ago from a mayor of a 30 000 inhabitants town in the state of sumpala, which is the The biggest state in the in the country it accounts for 40 percent of all the national product And he was elected the second best mayor of the state And he was proud of that better luck next time Yeah, but a lot next time and he attributed that to the free course he took on balance scorecard And he would set up the controls in his municipality So that's the motivation But that's a spot accreditation, right? He can he can tell that as a story If you live in a society where people are going to ask for the diplomas That are hanged on your wall Then you're going to need the accreditation If you live in a society where people listen to you look at your portfolio and Believe in your experience and give you the chance If you're not competent, you're going to be laid off anyway, right? So it's a question of how the culture goes and how we're going to evolve this in terms of context Places and how the world is going to take it That's my opinion on it But what you get is a spot accreditation and your life improves and that's it and you can carry that Nobody can take that away from you anymore. It's knowledge. It's tacit You can do what you like with it. You filter that through your peers through yourself and you can contribute There I We have time for a few more comments, but bakary Yes, we agree on some questions from him and they didn't come in We can do it again You can repeat it I'm sorry if I I said anything that you said before but my contribution would be that um, the oer and e-learning decent learning are providing a enormous opportunity for a lot of people to learn whereas it is for professional development or for former learning And I'll be addressing the delayed one the former learning You know, um in in sub-Saharan Africa. We have only about four percent Of people accessing high education. So this is it's extremely low And we are looking at ways um through my organization the african culture university what we can do through e-learning e-learning and oer in particular to access To increase access to high education And and that's where the optimism That I have Is well, it's very good, but it's not very practical Because we cannot do that without the traditional existing high education institutions Somehow we have to come up with them and have agreements on how they would accredit for instance self-learning And we we we also will have to address any concern they may have before accrediting And I think that it's very good to say High education institutions should do this to do that, but it's absolutely important Given the need or in this specific Context to make sure that we have agreements That would allow them to for instance Accredits courses that are taken outside of their school whereas it is through oer or other resources So I don't adjust my my contribution to this debate and see if You agree or disagree of my statement And or if you have any advice on how we should go about this this project. Thank you very much Panel This is really hard I come from South Africa a country which spends I think 40 percent of its budget on education And has absolutely appalling rates of dropout At higher education level we we have a system where young people come to south african universities to do degrees That are the really important ones accountancy and And management and and the stuff that they think is going to get them jobs and because they can't afford to pay their fees or their living expenses They have to make a choice between those two drop out in their first year and wind up with a huge amount of debt To the government and so the cycle continues as it has for a long time in south africa And one of the things that we grapple with at p2pu because a lot of us come from that context is How do we how do we clean up the mess in our own backyard? Instead of thinking at this kind of grand scale of you know Helping out people who already have degrees continue their higher learning and The one solution that we can come up with and it sounds idealistic is to think well If we can encourage people to build the type of resources that can be taken offline And so they can be removed from the p2pu online platform and actually be used in a small Um face-to-face interactive way and and building those resources is something we're working very hard at at the moment Perhaps that is the way to start helping people get the knowledge that they need In order to kind of make a difference and a very tangible difference in their lives But this is an extremely difficult question that certainly not one that that's from a southern african context is easy to answer at all But i have to ask you a question because and i want to take nigeria as the example So up until very very recently the number was something like 80 plus percent 88 percent Of applicants to higher education never got a spot in a nigerian higher education institution So the they they simply couldn't get in So the old elite model we talked about with you know five percent attending elite institutions That was still in place in nigeria and only recently they opened up nigeria open university But the question i've got for you then is why isn't it ripe for an alternative Accreditation scheme based on portfolios based on open institutions That would bypass that would essentially serve the 88 percent The reality is well as far as i know In sub-saharan african countries i'm working with The policy makers and other universities are very skeptical about open distance and e-learning And i don't know if there is anyone from a open descent learning institution in africa, but it's a struggle to even Be recognized as providing even if they are accredited that their degrees are the same as traditional So the context is absolutely the environment is not Favorable to to open and decent learning so um But you know there is a need we may talk but we have to act And the actors right now in high education others universities That's why i'm coming back to this question And what we are thinking of as a Solution that will be possible. We are working with the network of about 30 something universities in in 27 countries and what would be trying to do with them Is to have them Accept the fact that they can Accredit courses that are taken outside of their universities Whereas these courses are from open education resources or any other resources. I think that would be a step because You know the thing is And i don't know in different part of Of the world but in african absolutely important when you're looking for a job in most of the countries They will ask you where did you go? To You know So it's extremely important to have some of these universities accredited this got you So I think that for us the solution would be To work with the existing until we can create a environment where People would be comfortable with portfolios and and if portfolios but this is not the case right now We've now reached three o'clock. We are going to turn off the cameras and we're going to Wrap up this session. Thank you very much. It's been a I think a great conversation. Thank you to the panelists