 I'm Larry Cooperman. I'm here with Dr. Gary Matkin, the Dean of Continuing Education, Summer Session and Distance Learning at the University of California, Irvine. Gary initiated the open coursework project at UCI. At the same time, he became the founding treasurer of the open coursework consortium, the global group that represents over 250 universities everywhere. And it's a position he continues to hold today. And the OCW project that he launched with 10 courses has grown to over 80 courses, but also over 200 hours of video lecture and over 1,000 open educational resources. So, Gary, what's the background for the open coursework project? And I don't really mean why it's a good idea. I mean, why were you personally in a position to be receptive to its ideas? Well, continuing education professionals, particularly at the university level, have always been looking for ways of reaching learners in ways that are convenient to them and also very effective. And when we started an online education in 1994, that was a revolution as far as we were concerned in continuing education. But then the idea of open coursework available to anyone, anywhere, anywhere around the world at any time was something that was just mind-blowing for me. It was like something new had happened, something that was really going to have a huge impact on higher education, particularly at a time when millions of people are going without education and with no way of having the resources in the world to satisfy those people in conventional ways. Now that you've seen this project, we've mentioned that now there's hundreds of lectures and courses and resources, are you optimistic right now about its future at UCI? That as you've reached, maybe even we could say a plateau, you're at a certain point where there's a good representative sample. But what happens next? Do you think it's actually going to reach a next stage? There is a next stage. What is that? Open education on every campus in the world is inevitable. It's an imperative. So when you talk about optimism, I'm beyond optimism. I'm saying that this is going to happen and what we have to do is to be prepared for it and be a part of it. I want to push that a little further. So you say we have to be there because it's going to happen anyway. But is it sort of a good thing or does it have its negative side to it that it's going to be happening? Are there profound changes underway at the university because these materials are now available freely? How do you see that future? Any change is threatening to people. And the history of higher education is a history in which higher education is adapted to change after change after change and still endures. The university is known as the longest lasting institution in the western world along with the Parliament or the Isle of Man or something like that. So we have to adapt. We have adapted. We have to adapt and we will adapt to this new change. And actually the notion of helping people learn will never go away. It will be in different forms. The relationship between a student and a teacher is not going to disappear because of this technology. It's going to become even more important. It will change a bit, yes. We will continue to have classroom based courses where lecturers stand in front of students and inspire them with their lectures or their knowledge and so forth. But we'll have many, many more different opportunities for doing the teaching learning process. One of the most important, for instance, is helping students find the right materials at the time and in the sequence they need them. An open course where it actually helps that process. It facilitates that process both for teachers who will have and instructors and faculty members who will have more materials available to them, much more easily and readily, but also the students who can have not only the guidance of their own teacher in their own course, but also hundreds and even thousands of supplementary materials available to them just a click away. And that's what's so exciting about this for higher education. Yes, it is a threat. It is a threat as every change has been a threat to higher education. But we're going to adapt to it and we must adapt to it and we'll be leaders actually in it. You know UNESCO in 2009 in its report on higher education said that there's a shortage of qualified academics throughout the entire world. And that's a result of the massification of education that so many people are entering into it. So open course that plays into this shortage, how are we amplifying them? How are we solving this critical problem in higher education? Or is it simply irrelevant? Your question goes back to resources again. It's clear that we cannot serve in conventional ways all of the people in the world that need or could benefit from higher education. The shortage of teachers is this one shortage. We don't have the ability to build campuses, classrooms, even the technology that's needed to do that without some innovation in terms of productivity and in terms of getting to these massive people that need this education. So yes, open education can provide needed frameworks, needed pathways for more and more students. And the role of the teacher will be first to find those pathways, to find those pathways, vet those materials, provide the resources that are needed in terms of intellectual structuring and so forth. And then to leverage the technology we have in order to solve that teacher shortage, the bricks and mortar shortage, all kinds of resource issues that we face in the world of higher education. So I'm going to avoid the word optimistic and I want to talk about what is the next stage at UCI for open courseware? Well, one of the things we're doing very aggressively now is to look for ways in which more of our open courseware material and open material can be used more effectively by more people. A recent public press has featured two events that really signal I think the future of a good part of open educational resources now. The first of course was Stanford's hitting the front page of the New York Times with the idea that eventually over 94,000 people enroll for goodness sake in three courses in artificial intelligence, 94,000 people in artificial intelligence. And then of course that was followed by the announcement by MIT that is creating a subsidiary called MITX designed to help people certify their learning or evaluate their learning through the use of, as they use MIT's open courseware. The notion of helping learners not only learn but also have them be able to verify their knowledge and to certify that knowledge is something that institutions including major institutions like Stanford and MIT are going to be getting into and we're certainly looking for opportunities in the world of continuing professional education and even in degree education we're looking for opportunities for students to learn and then gain validation of their learning. So you know when we talk about everyone is going to have to eventually be in this field of open education you could say that UCI is actually a highly ranked public land grant university and it has certain advantages in that sense. Not that we've gone as far as MIT per se but nonetheless the ability to project outwards from a solid base is there. Is it actually going to be true then for every university no matter what their circumstances are for them at every community college that they would have, they should trod down this path, how do you persuade them that it's worth the resources and resources that you've invested to get the project going? Many of my colleagues not only at community colleges but also at research institutions with major continuing education divisions don't understand open courseware fully. Again why would we in times of financial stringency give our services away for free? You can look at parallels in the content world and the publishing world and in the communication world where you see organizations like Facebook and so forth giving their services away for free but yet being a multi-billion dollar IPO in recent weeks. Our value, the university's value, community college value to people will move in different directions now for instance the notion of defining learning pathways to particular learning objectives to particular professional objectives for people, for particular personal objectives for people. That is a crucial service that our universities and community colleges provide to us. We're looking for guidance as we seek to achieve our educational goals and we already have it in these institutions. Shouldn't faculty be concerned about open courseware in the sense of how it's going to actually alter the institution itself as well as the interest of faculty and for example intellectual property? A traditional way of thinking oh this open and free stuff will replace me. I'll produce this material and they'll capture it and they'll use it and I won't be needed anymore. Personal guidance, individual attention is not going to go away from higher education. That's part of the teaching learning process, it's not going to go away. But we now have the ability to reach many more people. It's wonderful to have a liberal arts college where you have 15 or 20 students in front of a teacher. It's not so wonderful to have an average class size of 1,500 in lower division undergraduate courses at major research universities. It's not that there's anything wrong with that large lecture hall but we're finding ways number one to enhance the learning of the large lecture hall but we're also learning ways in which we can achieve educational effectiveness without having large learning. And so teachers are not going to go away. In terms of open courseware and their intellectual property there are less and less opportunities I think for teachers, for faculty members for instance to produce learning materials which have a commercial value. The printing industry is in turmoil, textbooks are getting to be open and free, textbooks publishers are going out of business, there's not much of a market anymore for the traditional production of faculty members in terms of instructional materials. So the commercial value is relatively low but the social value still remains very high. And one way of capturing that social value is to put it up open. I sometimes tell the faculty members that I run into who question me about this, you're not going to be rich, wouldn't you like to be famous? And that's certainly the case with so many faculty members who really endorse the notion of openness, having their lectures videotaped and put on YouTube and iTunes U and so forth. So yes, the faculty roles will change but I don't believe there's any threat to faculty roles. In fact, I think faculty will, faculty and subject matter experts and research in particular fields is going to be even more important. And the ability to produce that new knowledge and then to get it out very quickly to large groups of students is really going to, it's going to enhance the reputation of higher education at any institution that gets involved in it. Gary, what do you see as the benefits to the, we talk about faculty, what are the benefits to the institution? Well, the benefits to the institution are becoming clearer, more and more clear. The first and most important I think is the benefits to current students and faculty members. When you, when we put up our courses, our undergraduate courses openly, current students can review the courses before they enrolled, see what they're getting into, see how the course is taught, what's required. And while they're in the course, they can go back continuously to this open resource to review, to look at new materials, look at supplementary materials, be guided to supplementary materials. Secondly, we found here at UCI that we can attract new students to our courses. For instance, in the school, in this department of public health, a series of lectures that we placed on our open course for a site attracts higher numbers of applicants and higher quality applicants to our graduate programs. So attracting new students, MIT sees that a very high percentage, over 80% of their students, have no about MIT's open courseware and have used open courseware at MIT as part of their decision to come to MIT. So attracting new students is a great benefit. Another benefit of open courseware and open educational resources is that it stimulates and facilitates accountability and continuous improvement. Imagine that when you put up a course, you're putting up the core of your services for everybody to see. That's the height of accountability. And once you have an open course up, you can change it. So if you want to improve it, when you get data from the student learning that happens in this current instance of the course, you can go back and change that. So the continuous improvement loop and the accountability is also served by open courseware. All this, of course, also reinforces the public service role of an institution. And that public service role, of course, not only is in public and land-grant universities like UCI, but in any university, one of the three missions of a university is public service. This is a way of not only highlighting it, making it invisible, but exemplifying it. Another benefit is that when courses are put up open, they become an open repository, a repository that can be reviewed, gone back to, added to. At UCI, we're developing the notion of collections on our open course for us to fight. We collect materials around an interdisciplinary subject such as sustainability, where we put up not only teaching on the latest research, but resources for K through 12 teachers and students. So collections, the notion of collecting is, goes along with the notion of repositories, of special repositories. We also are able, through open courseware, of disseminating, to disseminate faculty research, especially important in a research university like UCI. One of the main requirements of any large research grant is the dissemination of the research and the knowledge that's gained. What better way to disseminate research than to create a course or a set of learning objects that can be used all around the world by any institution, by any individual learner, and to have that research immediately and openly and freely disseminated? There's no, I can't think of a more powerful way of disseminating research findings in a useful way than in the open educational resource.