 Thank you all for joining us today. Usually Mary Lou will be facilitating this meeting, but she has orders from her doctor to not use her throat for a couple days. So I'll be facilitating the meeting today. Now there's a lot to cover, as usual. Let's take a look at the agenda. We'll start off by hearing from Joe and Sarah from MIT on their OCW Scholar Program. And then we'll brief you on consortium activities that need your participation, such as the Open Education Global Couple Four Proposals, Participation in Open Education Week, and nomination for the Open Education Excellence Award. And then we'll come to the membership survey results, followed by two initiatives by the consortium, which are the Open Education Information Center and the OECX MOOC project. And we'll have some time at the end to get questions and comments and discussion items from those who are present here today. Now about MIT OCW Scholar, Sarah is a project manager for OCW Educator. And Joe is probably more familiar to many of you. He's the Publication Director at MIT OpenCourseWare. And they'll talk about why OCW Scholar is such an important program in open education. Now, so without further ado, let me hand over the microphone to Joe and Sarah. Thank you, Mina. OCW Scholar is a program that includes a bunch of courses that were developed expressly for independent learners. So the idea is that if you're an independent learner, you can go to these courses and learn without using any external resources at all. The courses are among the most robust on the OCW site. They have really lots of material. Pretty much all of them have full video lectures. And many of them have what we call recitation or problem-solving videos. There is problem sets and solutions, exams and solutions, readings and lecture notes and things like that. So it's a lot of material. The material is, all these courses really are foundational courses in science and engineering taught at MIT. They're primarily in the first two years of an MIT students experience. And the materials come from those that were used in courses on campus, but they're supplemented with other things that we actually created in collaboration with graduate students and the instructors themselves. So they're really quite robust websites that anyone in the world can use at any time for free. OCW currently offers 12 scholar courses. And those areas include biology, chemistry, computer science and electrical engineering, psychology, calculus, probability, linear algebra, engineering dynamics, and economics. And we have one more in the works, which is in biological chemistry. And our scholar courses are really among our most visited courses on the OCW site. So some people might be wondering about the relationship between MOOCs and OCW scholar courses. And really, MOOCs and scholar courses have similarities and differences. So they're similar in that they're both sequential offerings of materials. They go in an order. And many of them offer video simulations and assessment opportunities. And then they differ a little bit because MOOCs are interactive in the sense that there is usually someone on the other side of the screen as you're engaging in the MOOC. There are usually things like discussion forums. You can often get a certificate. They have a start and an end date. And then the course materials are under an all rights reserved license. And that's a little bit different than the scholar courses, which are really independent learning experiences. We don't require any sort of registration. The materials are permanently available. There's easy downloading of materials. And all of the materials are offered under a Creative Commons license, which means they can be adapted and used. And in the Office of Digital Learning at MIT, we really see MOOCs and scholar courses as complementary. And people and learners and educators might go to a MOOC or to a scholar course depending on how they want to use them. So well, how did we make these courses? They are labors of love. That's for sure because they take a lot of effort from a lot of different people. The time frame is nine months. That's pretty optimistic to 12 months or even longer. And a lot of people are involved. There's at least one professor, MIT professor, and often multiple professors. The OCW staff has what we call a department liaison, a publication manager, the publication director. We have our own production team, which there are three or four people involved in that. They do more technical stuff to see that things can work on the site. But we also use a site authoring team in India. These people work for Sapient, and they build the site themselves. We have video people, too. We've done a lot of video work. So we don't do camera work anymore, but we usually contract out for that. And then there's also a bunch of other people like TAs who can record, say, problem-solving videos. And it's a great opportunity for them to get a credential while they're doing something terrific for the world. So it takes a lot of planning and scheduling and coordination of a lot of different people to make one of these things happen. Everything we publish on the site has our Creative Commons license, which is BYNCSA, so that people can use it as broadly as possible. And we try to make the site as accessible as we can. The videos have subtitles and transcripts that you can download. And so it's an overall maximum effort project for OCW. Some of our latest work involves enhancing some of the select scholar courses with OCW educator pages. And educator pages allow the faculty member to share instructional insights about how they talk the course. And our goal is, enjoying that is really to make material even more useful to educators and we want to reuse the materials with other students. So we've recently added an educator section to 900 Scholar, which is Introduction to Psychology. And the instructor, John Gabrielli, shares insights about structuring a broad survey course, crafting lectures that inspire and inform, bringing demonstrations to the classroom. And we're currently building an educator page for 601 Scholar, which is Introduction to Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. And they share insights about their practice theory, practice approach, and formatively assessing students and other such insights. So we're really excited about that. So I think that we'll end there. And if there is time, we're happy to take any questions that you might have. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Joe. Let's open the floor for some questions on the OCW Scholar program. You can use your microphone or type in the questions in the chat window. Thank you, James. It is gratifying to put up really, really high-quality content like this from MIT instructors. I have to say the scholar courses are really, really popular. The most popular, I think they get about 90,000 visits a month, the most popular one. Our course? Yeah, I mean, we get really great feedback from people. We get about, for the whole site, over 500 feedback emails a month. And many of them are really, they're quite flattering. People talk about how it's a transformative experience for them to be able to get access to this kind of material and to have this experience of studying with these top-flight faculty members at MIT. So it makes the effort worthwhile, that's for sure. Kuna is remarking that 90,000 visits per month is impressive. Yeah, it is. I mean, not all our courses certainly get that kind of traffic. But the top courses are usually our introductory computer programming courses. But the mathematics courses are also very high on the list. And I think between number seven and 10 on our most popular courses is, believe it or not, our microeconomics course. So that's also a really popular course. Let's see, a question is from all the users. Do you have any idea of how many our future or past MIT students? Yes, we do track that. We track their URLs. And I've forgotten what the percentage is. It's not a huge number because we get so many people from around the world. But there is a lot of activity that happens on campus. And I've forgotten what the percentage is. I'm sorry about that. I could look that up if you want. Another question is, are high school students using this to prep for AP tests when their own high schools don't offer the courses? Any data on that? Well, that's definitely true in part because the scholar program is such as it is. But we also have a companion website to the MIT OCW website called Highlights for High School. And that website has an examination preparation component, which is broken down by topic in the AP curriculum that and those topics are linked to resources on the OCW website. And many of those resources come from scholar courses. Another question is, is there a specific demographic where the participants are coming from? To scholar courses, I'm not sure that the traffic has ever been sorted out as different from the whole OCW site in general. But that has about 45% come from North America. And then the rest is broken down. I think it's about 15% from Europe, 15% from East Asia, and smaller numbers elsewhere. Those are the two big other groups, though. So happy to answer any other questions. The traffic overall to the OCW site is about 2 and 1 half million visits a month. It's really quite a lot. The age range, that's interesting. Yeah, we're going to have a survey that's going to come out actually in tomorrow, I think. Well, if you go to the site, you can see it. And it would be a help to us if you filled it out. So but I think the age ranges are really quite all over the place. The justification, well, the OCW scholar program is a grant funded program. We got a grant in 2010 from the Frank Stanton Foundation, a very generous grant to make these courses. So I mean, this is different from the normal OCW approach to things. We had money to give stipends to teaching assistants, to faculty members and instructors. Usually that worked by us giving the department a chunk of money to pay them for time over the summer or something like that. But so we were doing this sort of outside of the normal OCW operation. But the other thing is we wanted to make these courses really as robust and standalone as possible. So to do that, we put a lot of effort into making a kind of complete educational experience, or at least as complete as we could do it. Any other questions? Are you sure you don't want to ask a question? OK, maybe you'll have another chance later. OK, so I always wondered about why you guys put so much effort into that. So I'll look forward to seeing the report on who's using it and how they're using it. It will be really interesting to see how it's different from other OCW courses. OK, well, thank you very much, Joe and Sarah. Our pleasure. Thank you. So this brings us to the next item on the agenda, which is called for proposals for the Open Education Global Conference. So we announced in Banff this past April that the 2016 conference will be held in Krakow, Poland. Now, AGH, University of Science and Technology, is the local host for the conference. And every year, we get comments on the conference location on how they really are the best vacation spots. And of course, we don't do that deliberately, but Krakow happens to be one of those top-ranking locations in travel websites. Now, so back to the more important part of the story. The theme for the conference is convergence through collaboration. This is the call for proposals page from the conference website, which is at, yes, and James is vouching for that. Krakow is a beautiful city. So there are five tracks, as you can see. There is the integration of open practices, collaboration, open education strategy, research to advance open education, open education initiatives in Europe. Now, the proposals are due November 16th. You'll find a lot more information when you visit the website. So please mark it on your calendar. Make sure that you submit before the Thanksgiving Day comes. And another call for participation is with Open Education Week 2016. Now, for next year, the Open Education Week will be held in the week of March 7th from the 7th to 11th. And we'll talk about the feedback from our members on the Open Education Week later on today. But this, if you're not familiar with it, is a yearly event that we have, and it is a global celebration of just open everything. Open education, we work with other organizations who work in the realm of openness, to open access, open source, all other types of open activities. There are many ways to participate. You can submit resources. You can choose to do webinars. You can do local events. Now, at this point, what we would like to ask you is to participate in the planning group. If you're interested in participating in the planning group, please send us an email to infoatopeneducationsweek.org. Okay, Yuda just put in the correct email address in the chat window. Yuda and Marcella, thank you. And the planning group will be working on the call for participation in the events, how to organize the events, et cetera. So it will be a very valuable opportunity for you and for the rest of the community to have somebody dedicated to planning activities for the week. Okay, so one last thing that we're gonna be asking you to do today is the Open Education Awards for Excellence nomination. So as you know, we have the Open Education Awards for Excellence in the field of individual awards, site and course awards, and project awards. And the recipients of the awards will be announced at Open Education Global 2016 next year in April. If you have a project in mind that you want everybody to know or you want it to be recognized, please nominate at this URL. Marcella, is there anything else you would like to add? Yes, thank you. So the information about the awards can be found in the site as well. You can find all the past award recipients and the eligibility for awards, et cetera. So do visit the website and do nominate because we do need your participation in activities like this. Now, this brings us to the results of the membership survey. So a couple months ago, we had a membership survey sent out to our members and the purpose was to better understand member needs and plan consortium activities around the specified needs. So the survey was sent out to member institutions and organizations. Not too many responses. We had about 40 respondents. Yet the answers, the responses that we got we figured were fairly significant. So I would like to share the results with you guys today. So the first part of the survey was on using OER at institutions. The question was, do faculty at your institution currently use OER within their daily teaching and learning practices? And 22 replied yes and that was 55% of the respondents. And 18 responded no. The follow-up question was, do faculty at your institution currently develop new OER collaboratively with other academics or institutions? And 58% said yes and the way they do it is like this. So in certain institutions, they were adding OER as a part of a course for creating material or assignments. Somebody commented that all their content is OER. A lot of many of their faculty use MOOCs and OCW in their teaching. And some faculty use their OCW courses as an alternative to publishing their materials on the university LMS. So in a way that's saving the teacher's time. And in one institution, OERs were built into courses by faculty subject matter experts as learning resources. So somebody was helping the faculty to utilize OER more and it was a part of the course requirement to confirm that they've considered OER in their teaching material. And in certain cases, some were translating parts of articles in foreign language in their language courses on institutional policies. The question was, does your institution have policies related to open education? 25 respondents at 63% said yes and the rest 38% said no. And if yes, which areas does the policy cover? And you can see that there were many institutions that have policies on open access, adoption of OER and faculty support for OER creation. Now the response shows multiple answers from each respondents. So some institutions had policies on various topics mentioned here. So the ones with policies installed for open education, many had policies on open data, open access, open licensing, adoption of OER and faculty support. And the next couple of questions were on MOOCs. We asked our members, do you consider MOOCs as open education initiative? And 34 answered yes, whereas six answered no. I'm sure you can assume why that answer is such. And then we asked, does your institution offer one or more MOOCs? So it was about half. 21 said yes, they have MOOCs and 19 said no. And if yes, what platform are you using? Some institutions were using more than one platform. And as you can imagine, Coursera at X and Future Learn were the most popular one. And some had their own platform and others. For those who said no to having a MOOC initiative, we asked, does your institution plan to start a MOOC in the coming 12 months? And eight said yes, they're planning to or they're preparing one. And 11 said no. So we then asked them to comment on MOOCs, what they think of MOOCs. And some said that there were difficulty in joining well-known platforms. And some said they're not ready to tackle sustainability challenge with MOOCs because there's not a business model installed for that. And one institution, one respondent said that MOOCs will be one of the lasting innovations in open education and online pedagogy in the future. It helps university to benchmark its quality of services with a prominent university globally. So MOOCs will contribute to increase, maybe improving the quality of education on a global scale. And somebody else that MOOCs will serve as important tool for virtual student mobility. And encouraging all MOOCs to use open licenses will broaden use of OERs across cultures. And some showed concern saying that they're not sure if MOOCs would be a long-term solution at this time because they think that it's just a real hype. And there was another comment saying that MOOCs have come here, MOOCs have come to stay, but there's no sustainable business or operation, no model yet. So then we had mentioned that in 2014, the Open Education Consortium ran an open MOOC pilot project that allowed OEC members to offer openly licensed MOOCs on the edX platform under the OECX shingle. So an OECX course must be based on existing OERs. And if OECX continues to offer the opportunity, would your institution be interested in running an open MOOC as part of OECX? And 19 of the respondents said yes, whereas 16 said no. So this is a screenshot capture of a couple of courses under the OECX shingle. You can find them on edX if you search OECX. So then we asked our members, if you were to offer an open MOOC with OECX, what kind of assistance would you need? One answer on data analysis, another on promotion. The most popular answers were course evaluation, best practices, and using the edX platform. So Tuna will be talking about the OECX initiative later on today. So let's save the questions till Tuna talks about the initiative. Now from here on, we asked about a couple initiatives that we have at the consortium. We asked about the open education week. Did you participate in the 2015 open education week? 26 of the respondents said yes. If yes, please list the activities you offered. Some had a series of webinars, seminars or webinars. Some had one or two each day. And there were webinar tour of their site, their open education project. And there were Twitter events. There were colloquiums, short presentations, participation at a conference related to open education, launching a MOOC in time for the open education week. Some hosted a competition on OCW user experiences and artwork. You can see that the activities, they vary. It's, you can be as creative as you can with open education week activities. And then we asked our members, did you use materials from the website to promote open education week for your event? And 15 said yes. And what suggestions do you have to make open education week more effective? And here are the feedback. Get more people to participate. Post a contest, maybe regional. Enable submission and list events on the website early on. Organizing events by region would be more effective. Making all presentations downloadable at once would be helpful. More use of social media and blogging and showcase newcomers so that there's an inspirational case for the community. On quarterly membership meeting, have you participated in an OEC quarterly membership meeting? 22 said yes. If yes, what did you like or dislike about the meeting? Likes the comments for that. It's good to know the current projects of the consortium and hear updates on what other members are doing. On the consortium newsletter, 70% of the respondents did receive the newsletter on the open education professional directory. 21 of the respondents said that they were listed in the open education professional directory and we asked about the information center. So in preparation for the open education information center, we asked our members what kind of information would you like to see in the information center? And the responses were links to slides and presentations, forum, community news, presentation templates, information on starting an open education project, central location for tools and apps, case studies and FAQs. So there's not one dominant factor that people would like to see. The responses were evenly distributed. And then we asked about what their interests were in participating in consortium activities. So we asked, please indicate if you're interested in participating in any of the following initiatives and activities. So some were interested in open education week planning group. Some others were interested in outreach to businesses and corporations. Some others are interested in open education global conference program. And many were interested in helping the consortium with marketing and messaging on the value of openness. And then some were interested in improving discoverability of the resources. And some wanted to be in the committee for open education for lifelong learning. So you can see that our members all had interests in very similar things really and they were willing to participate. So those were the results of the membership survey. And based on those membership survey results, we worked on the open education information center and the OECX project. So let me just zip through the open education information center and just show you a couple of screenshots of what it looks like. If you go to the consortium website, you will see the open education information center under the resources tab. When you get there, you'll see that the information is organized according to different audiences such as faculty, student, administrator, researchers, policymakers. And when you go into each section, you'll see that information is organized in the form of question and answer. And links to presentations, talks, videos and whatnot. Also in the open education information center is a list of events and the forum. Now, what's really important about the information center is that we plan this to be a community effort. So if you visit any of the pages in the information center, you will see a button that says submit information. If you have a good link, a good resource, whatever you might have, please submit that to the information center. We'll review it and make sure that it's shared with the community. The same thing with the forum. It's going, right now we didn't start using it actively, but once we start using it, it's really up to the community to make it rich with content. So that brings us to the last part of the briefing, which is the OECX MOOC project. Una's been working on this, so I will hand over the microphone to Una. All right, thank you, Mina. Can you hear me? Looks like we skipped our first one. Yes, so this is Una Daly from the Open Education Consortium, for those of you who I haven't met before. And OEC started the Open MOOC project a little over a year ago. And at that time, Mary Lou was handling it, and I came on board early this year to work on that project. And the idea behind that, behind the project is to transform open courseware into massive open online courses to increase access and reduce costs. And of course, in this particular case, we're talking about openly licensed MOOCs. Because as you know, there are MOOCs out there that actually have copyrighted material. And our objective overall was to increase access to existing OER and reduce the cost of developing MOOCs. And we have been working with edX on this project, which is allowing our members to develop MOOCs to run on the edX platform and to provide verified certificates for learners throughout the world who might wanna take these. Our research questions, which we are working on with our members who have participated is, how can reusing open courseware make MOOC development more cost effective? And the second question is, how can reusing open courseware increase collaboration opportunities? And we're currently working on a report about that, which will be available sometime this fall. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been our funder for this project, but we're moving into a new phase this fall. During our pilot year, we have offered nine MOOCs from universities in China, the U.S., Spain, United Kingdom, Japan, and one community college in the U.S. And the average enrollment has been slightly over 3,000 students. And just to give you a sample of the universities, our first one was offered last fall from the National Chautung University and they offered 21st Century Energy and Technology MOOC. Tufts University has offered two MOOCs this year and will offer a third one, which is just, which is starting in a week and that's the Biology of Water and Health. And those have been very well attended popular MOOCs. The University of Polytechnic de Madrid, has offered two courses this year, one on Introduction to Helicopters and the other one on Corporate Social Responsibility. Anna Rundle Community College in Maryland has offered an Intro to Business course this last May. Open University offered Teacher Education in India and is planning to offer that again later this year, at the end of this year. And finally, Hokkaido University in Japan has just finished their effects of radiation MOOC. So you can see that these courses really cover the gamut in terms of different subject areas and have been quite popular. And moving into our, now that we have moved beyond our pilot year, we are working on different support tiers to support members who want to provide MOOCs. And so we have it broken up into three tiers. If you are new to the OCX Development Platform, we anticipate that it's about a six to nine month lead time from the time that we start the process. We will be providing instructional design review and some platform support through edX, of course. For those of us, for those of you out there who may have already been a developer on OCX, we have another model where if you're creating a new course, we anticipate that's about a three to six month lead time and we offer so many hours of support up to 30 hours. We also provide instructional design review there and somewhat limited platform support because we assume that you have come up to speed when you created the first MOOC. So for those who are re-running an existing MOOC, so you've worked with us this last year, you're one of those nine, one of those, you produce one of those nine MOOCs that we mentioned, we're offering a slightly different model where we provide about 10 to 15 hours of technical support, we expect that to be about a three to four month lead time and as close to the time you offered, the previous MOOC is desirable simply in terms of the support requirements and a piece of that is that edX has produced this very robust platform, but it is changing on a frequent basis. They add new features and enhancements and change things. They're improving it for the better and so if we're re-running an existing MOOC more than six months after the initial offering of the MOOC, chances are you're gonna have to redo more than 10% of your MOOC in order to run on the platform as it evolves. So those are our three tiers of support and there will be some fees associated with that so that we can recoup costs now that it's no longer being funded through a grant program and I'm happy to discuss this in detail with anyone who might be interested in pursuing that and my email is there at the bottom and I'd be happy to answer questions as well. Great, thank you, Una. Thanks. Any questions on the OECX initiative? While I'm waiting for those questions to come in, I just entered the URL where you can see the existing open MOOCs on OECX. If you go ahead and click there, you can see the ones that ran this last year and as I mentioned, Tufts University is starting their third instance of a MOOC on the 29th which is exactly a week from today. The Biology of Water and Health, this is the second part and it's on sustainable interventions and I think you'll be very pleased if you take a look at that MOOC and at the materials that are available all openly licensed. Okay, all right. Thank you for the comment, Joe. And that's absolutely correct. MOOCs, if you talk to the average person out there in education who isn't as involved in OER, they often will tell you that a MOOC is open access or open registration, I think which is Joe says, which is a more accurate way of putting that. Most, I would say a large percentage of MOOCs out there such as the ones that run on Coursera and other popular platforms, the materials are actually copyrighted which means that a user when they register, they simply, they have a single user license to use those materials while they're on the platform. And so the OECX model is different in the sense that all of those materials in our MOOCs are openly licensed and may be reused. Well, if you have questions after this session, please do contact me there at my email and I'd be happy to answer those and give you more specifics about the fee. Thanks, Mina. Hi, Suna. Okay, so that was quite a bit of information waiting for your feedback. We would love to get questions or comments from you on any of the topics that we covered today. So this silence is because there's too much to think about or was everything just so clear to you that there was just no questions on anything. Okay, thank you, Barbara. Right, so when you do think about the contents, the information a bit more and if you have any comments or questions, do let us know. And if you joined the meeting without registering beforehand, do let me know your email address so that I can send you the link to the recording of this meeting and also the slides. Great, thank you, Jo. Okay, so perfect timing. I would like to close the meeting today then. Like I said, recording of today's meeting will be made available and put on the quarterly membership meeting page on the OE Consortium website. If you have any questions on any of the topics covered today, do let us know. This is how you can get in touch with us. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. You can just scroll upwards in the chat window and you'll see all the links. The chat will stay here till tomorrow until we have another meeting. So you might want to copy and paste the links from today's meeting. Okay, wonderful. Okay, so thank you very much for coming today. We hope to talk to you again very soon.