 Great, thanks a lot. So my name's Kathy Perkins. I direct the FET interactive simulations project and I just wanted to comment that in Joyce Talk this morning He mentioned this too long didn't read comment by students and and emphasized play and so hopefully this kind of project is Resonating with him and others that have this reaction including our students. So FET the FET project basically focuses on one main mission which is to advance science and literacy Science and math literacy and education worldwide and we do that by marrying advances in how people learn with advances in education Technology to create interactive simulations that provide powerful new tools for teaching and learning science So far we have over a hundred and fifteen simulations and growing mostly in physics and Chemistry with some efforts in math biology and earth science We have over 700 teacher contributed lessons around these simulations We conduct research on simulation design and use and we support Translations so the simulations have been translated into 67 languages and the website into 25 languages This is our usage curve. So right now we're at 25 million simulations run per year and growing We see usage across all 50 states and 200 countries and territories and we expect a growth rate of about 65 percent for 2012 and the simulations were dominantly used during school hours from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. So one of the requests for this presentation was to identify learners facilitators and builders of our projects So the learners are elementary students middle school students and college students We also the simulations are also used by pre-service and in-service teachers both in terms of developing their content learning around stem And in terms of developing their pedagogical approaches And we aim to address learners worldwide We also support a variety of where students are learning so in class in lab at home Both with homeschooling environments and homework online both traditional classrooms online or blended environments or online learning and informal environments and we want to do that both in places where you have Internet and you don't have internet The simulations are designed to be these flexible tools the the goal is to provide an environment where students can learn through discovery and inquiry and play but They are flexible so teachers can integrate them in a whole variety of ways So we have teachers integrating them in the most Traditional senses up to the most innovative senses and in this way We kind of view the simulations as a soft entry point for education reform they provide a lot of teacher choice and they provide us Access to teachers who are teaching in traditional methods. So one of the things we're kind of looking Towards is how can we use that access to help advance teacher pedagogy in general? So to support all this that one of the main ideas behind the simulations that they have to be both flexible and accessible The builders are the FET team so that combines faculty postdocs teachers developers The lesson builders are the teachers. So that's We have a lot of teachers around the world building lessons and we provide opportunities for them to contribute and share that up through our website the facilitators are of course our funders our translators our Licensing and legal support collectors and distributors third-party users both commercial and OER providers And then of course our teachers who bring the simulations to the users So in terms of quality a Real focus for FET is on providing high quality tools And this is just a really key focus for a project. So that requires funding We really base our tools in research on how people learn on multimedia design on on student difficulties around the content and content learning we Pull in expertise from education content teaching and software development and we do a really Tight iteration on testing every simulation is is tested with students through student interviews and Feeds back into the design until it's reaching all of our goals Now this is a place where what one of the questions in my mind is is Where do you open things up and bring in lots of people to build and where do you decide? We're gonna build it because we want to maintain the control and over that quality So so in our project This is a place where we maintain the control and we provide a really high quality tool and that's That's what we're trying to do But where we kind of open it up and and and and provide a lot of flexibility is in its use so we also Create activities and study use and pull from the research on how people learn and what we learn from Interviews and we pull in different expertise, and we conduct research, but but the use is is Is a much more complex Scenario right each teacher is in its in their own context. They have their own structural barriers. They have their own students and they have to be able to use this tool in a way that works in their environment, so we need to Pull in the teachers Teach them about what we learn about simulation use, but also rely on them to to Contribute to the innovation innovations and how simulations can be used now We see a lot of use from them like I said from the most traditional to the most innovative Uses for the Sims Supportive policies the OER requirements by grant makers the Creative Commons licensing support Obviously calls for funding and STEM learning is one policy that really helps us keep us going keep us supported The common core standards have provided a really great opportunity They provide targeted learning goals for us that really get into the That focus more on these deeper learning issues that we really are trying to address with the simulations And they provide new opportunities for getting new materials into curriculum The tech standards I would say are a challenge for us we got we Our goals are cross-platform use and cross-technology communication and we were doing okay on those goals until the tablets came out So now we have to use more standards and we need More resources to adapt to these standards. So it's kind of a moving target that's causing difficulty for us What do we choose for iPads for androids? HTML5 is really immature. Anyway, if anybody has suggestions on that, I would love to hear it and then also looking towards the assessments as a as a driving focus the simulations could be Could provide new opportunities for assessment and to do that we have to look at the usage data coming out of the Simulations and there isn't really a standard for exchanging that sort of format of data Influential research. This is the research that we have used and moving forward focusing on teacher professional development developing learning communities. How do we Help teachers use simulations effectively in the classroom these are the kind of research areas that we're going to have to Use more into the future in terms of kind of reflecting on what makes innovative OER I think You really need to start with a need science really had a need for new tools to learn science So it was really a great opportunity for something like FET. We had funding you if you Underly it with relevant research and pull that in and inform your Your tool development by that and then integrate this testing in iteration I can't tell you how much we have learned by having a tight Feedback loop on that and then we've been able to publish that and share that with the broader community of simulation developers and that and Doing this process. I really feel like you can go beyond what's available commercially and I think if OER is going to be Taken up in broad numbers. That's what we're going to have to do like the products that OER delivers it One of the things we should strive for is exceeding what what the commercial industry would naturally produce a Couple challenges I'll leave you for with respect to my project our models of sustainability and then how to educate and leverage The great number of teachers that we have using the simulations. Thank you So again, we have time for discussion and questions Microphone is coming Hi, can you say a little more about the challenge of sustainability because that I think is a big issue that we haven't really discussed in the last day and a half So for our project right now, it's a It's over a million dollars a year budget for our project and we have a lot more work to do There's a lot more simulations and and essentially the commercial industry doesn't Doesn't invest the kind of resources or produce the products that we produce. So we feel there's a big need for that So so far we've been mostly grant funded and grant funding doesn't last forever, so we're looking for models one of One thing I'm kind of floating around here is a model of having kind of named simulations as the Simulation usage has gone up some simulations are used over a million times per year Can we attract? industries that want to feel good opportunity like Dow Chemical or TI or Intel to To make an annual donation and get their name on the simulation in a way that doesn't interfere interfere with the use So it just come up for four seconds and then disappear So so that's one of the models that we're looking at and we with a growing number of simulations and a growing amount of use We if that annual donation model works, then that would be a sustainable model for us We've tried individual donations, then I can tell you that doesn't work Like teachers, you know, we get some teachers interestingly we get with that individual donation At least 50% of our donations come from outside the US like from Italy and South America Like these teachers giving ten and twenty dollars. It's it's you know It's amazing that the US teachers that don't do it compared to the International teachers Hi Thank you for the presentation and I'd like to first say before my question that that is perhaps the best OER resource I've seen in terms of Organizing materials and focus so that when you're looking for Courseware or you're looking for materials associated with a particular topic I I don't think there's anything out there better than that right now and I don't think it gets the credit It deserves it all so so thank you for that Thanks a lot And then my my question is you you do get a fair number of submissions on almost all of your Simulations it seems and I was wondering if you have work to embrace those Educators that are submitting as well as those who are translating and so forth to see if You could work with them to do more in terms of Say even just reviewing Entries that come in or other ways to sort of build a community around those those builders and practitioners And if you're working in that direction, yeah, we We definitely want to work on on community building. We haven't I should say we haven't done that much with the Submitters so far. We do have a person on our team who reviews the submissions but That idea of community community building is one that we really want to to work on and and the idea of starting with the submitters is a great place and the Talk on the peer-to-peer you Seems like also a nice platform that we could try in terms of building that user community we've created Facebook and web and and blogs and stuff like that to try to Increase the number of teachers to the point where we Felt like we could actually have an active discussion. It seems like I don't know if there's research on this somebody Please share it with me, but like At what level does their community that you actually are in touch with need to be in order to start having useful conversations? I don't know the answer to that so we kind of started with that social network thing thing trying to Reach out to the teachers and and create a connection with them And then we're gonna try to move into more of a community discussion But the idea of starting with the submitters is great idea You mentioned a couple of times that you looked into research about Learning and learning patterns. Can you tell us a little bit more of what the key, you know, design principles are that distilled from from that research What do you offer now? Well, so some key principles from that are Essentially a lot of it summarized in the book how people learn so That learning is an active process that you need to engage in that that you can build on prior learning So some of the ways that we build that into the simulations is We make connections to Things that people know like we use a bicycle pump for injecting gas molecules And we use buckets to cue people for pulling out things where they can like Actively engage in it and accuse that interaction We look at the research around specific content learning like that students often Think that elect current is used up as electrons go around the circuit and we kind of Take that idea and we build Visualizations and resources into the simulation that allows students to confront that misunderstanding and directly kind of Address it by by showing the electrons that they're not disappearing as they go around so we kind of pull from a lot of different areas Cognitive load theory we do a lot of scaffolding with the simulations Thank you