 Michael Saylor created the Saylor Foundation because he had a very simple, very earnest and very bold idea. Education should be free. Rapid changes in technology are making the distribution of information faster, easier and cheaper. Increasingly, the distribution of and access to education can be universal. We've reached an inflection point where it's now cheaper to learn to read on a tablet computer than it is to learn to read on paper. More people can access mobile networks in the world that can get access to running water. So network access is greater. And as that happens, you've got this profound, disruptive, egalitarian, utilitarian tornado that's blowing through everything. If I can actually provide 12 million books for free to someone with an iPad, that means I can provide 12 million books to someone for free in the middle of a jungle of Burma. If I can automate education or project it, then maybe people that don't live in the first world can get just as educated as people that do. The question is no longer, does the need exist? The question is content. The question is form. The question is distribution. Countless providers of open content from the humble teacher to the most venerable institutions are opening the doors. Sailors harnessing technology to deliver free education around the world, pushing the open education movement forward and creating greater access to these resources. I believe that open education is important because not everybody has access to the traditional higher education system, whether that's because of financial reasons or whether that's simply because of location. To have this access to an open educational resource like Sailor provides really new opportunities for students who might otherwise have been excluded from the higher educational system. I think having the ability to log on from anywhere in the world with Internet Connection and look at resources that are vetted by experts, that are assembled by experts, and that are trustworthy is really just an ideal way for these students to gain that level of education that they might otherwise be excluded from. Access to the Internet is outpacing access to higher education in the United States and abroad, but would-be students shouldn't have to drink from the fire hose of free information. We've called upon college educators, discipline experts, to help us discover, vet, and organize the very best of what's around. Our contribution is, in a word, design, the transformative marriage of form and content. We unite superb learning materials with well-wrought courses. The product is a portal to substantive, scaffolded, asynchronous education for a few hours, a few years, or a lifetime. Let's take a closer look at how Sailor is curating, developing, and distributing free education. On our homepage, we list our areas of study, including a general education program and 12 complete academic majors. Art history, biology, business administration, chemistry, computer science, economics, English literature, history, mathematics, mechanical engineering, political science, and psychology. As an example of how our full courses of study are laid out for the students to work through, let's consider the history major. Selecting the link for history brings up a description with detailed instructions on how to proceed, followed by a roster of courses designed to capture the range offered in a typical college catalog. The history major within the Sailor curriculum is similar in some ways, but also differs in some ways from your typical university or college curriculum. Where it's similar, of course, is that each course replicates roughly a 15-week semester course that you would have at a college or university. The materials are very similar readings as well as analytical materials, and that allows the student to achieve that same level of understanding that they would in a typical college or university classroom. And we also, in the course structure itself, we offer all the same basic courses that you would have to take in a history major at a college or university, a basic world history curriculum, U.S. history, or Latin American history, or even Asian history. Where we differ to is that we offer a diverse range of courses that might not typically be taught at a university. It's certainly not every semester. We offer some courses that we were really excited to put together, but that would be courses that a professor might teach perhaps once in four years. And so the way we structured it is that we have these unique courses that are always on and they're always available to anyone who has access to the website. I think offering these diverse courses really gives the student a much broader and deeper knowledge of history. Once a course outline is created, our professor consultants search for and vet open education materials for various content creators in the higher-ed landscape, matching content and form to build a dynamic learning environment for students. For example, in History 104 Historical Methodology, the art and craft of the historian, our professor consultant, Dr. Benjamin Schwantis, has incorporated a wonderful openly licensed lecture from MIT, a seminar in historical methods by Professor Ann McCants. While this lecture has tremendous worth on its own, the value is added by placing it in a larger structured learning context, among other materials. Similarly, in History 201, the history of Europe from 1,000 to 1800, our professor consultant has decided to include an openly licensed Yale lecture, the Enlightenment and the Public Sphere, by Professor John Merriman. Again, a great lecture, but now it is connected to a larger learning landscape that students can access in one place, sailor.org. To see how all these fantastic OER materials are connected and incorporated into the sailor structure, let's examine a course, say History 212. Clicking on its link brings up a page with a short introduction. Just below that, the student will find the course overview, everything he or she needs to read, watch, listen to, click on, and learn. While we're here, it is important to note that each course is designed to provide a student with the same level of information contained in a traditional college classroom setting. We've listed time advisories for each unit to let students know how long it should take them to work through the materials. We also list learning outcomes to highlight specific lessons students can take away by successfully completing a course. The time advisories and learning outcomes are designed to help students navigate the asynchronous learning environment. Furthermore, our materials are placed in sequence. Clicking the first resource uncovers a link to the material and some brief instructions. When finished, the student can move on to the next resource working at his or her preferred pace. As in all our courses, the consultants first look to open education materials for resources to incorporate into the learning experience. For example, Professor Schwantis has included a reading assignment from a public domain American History book published online by the U.S. State Department. Our professor consultants work hard to find high quality open educational resources from a variety of providers. When they don't find something that meets our needs or standards, we find high quality copyrighted material available freely on the Internet. Then our permissions team reaches out to copyright holders to simply ask for the rights to host or re-license those resources, such as this presentation on the history of slave trade routes. We now host over 1,000 high quality educational resources from this process. We first look to existing OER materials and are pleased with a positive response to our permissions initiative. We also have examples of open education content created specifically for sailor.org by our professor consultants. In History 2012, American Civil War to the present, I developed a series of lectures that complemented the reading materials from each unit of the course. And I used the resources such as recording tools, Microsoft Paint, a drawing pad to create these online blackboard lectures that would help engage the students, showing them images, writing key terms or perhaps key descriptions on the board. And I say board, I mean literally the screen of the computer, as I would go along and present perhaps a 15 or 20-minute lecture. And these lectures are tools that are, as I said, complement the readings for each unit and give that student a broader, more engaging experience of having a professor sort of help analyze or help explain kind of the highlights of the materials. And so in most cases a student might want to listen to the lecture first and sort of gain a better understanding of the highlights and then engage in the readings, or I'm sure some students could approach it just the opposite, could do the readings and then listen to the lecture in order to sort of confirm or explain to the materials that perhaps they didn't quite understand in the readings themselves. Let's turn to these types of lectures which are distributed under Creative Commons Attribution or CC By license. In a number of our courses, our professor consultants have created original OER materials, such as readings, assignments, and assessments to help the students measure progress along the way. For example, in History 101 Ancient Civilizations of the World, our professor, Dr. Konchi-San's Canberra, created a reading titled, Society and Religion to supplement existing OER materials and made the reading available under a CC By license. An example of sailor-created course assignments can be found in History 102 Early Globalizations. For this course, our professor consultant, Dr. Dean Costin-Terras, has created reading questions for most of the course units along with answer guides to allow students to check their work. These materials are also made available to the larger educational community via a CC By license. Each course culminates with a final exam administered through the open-source learning management system Moodle, where the student can obtain a certificate of successful completion. We believe that our course wear is truly high quality, but how can we be so sure? It's all very well to ask a highly qualified professor consultant to build a course and select its resources. But we're taking an extra step and have committed to engaging additional professor consultants in peer-reviewing all of our courses to ensure that we're doing the very best we can. When we are peer-reviewing a course, the first thing we look for is accuracy. We want to make sure that when we send a student to a website, we want to make sure that everything on that website is right, because the internet is a blackboard that when you put something on it, it never goes away. So if you're going to do it, the sailor foundation always wants to make sure that it's done right. So having experienced designing courses not only at sailor, but also at a traditional accredited institution. The best part of that is that it's not only just on you, but eventually your courses at sailor get peer-reviewed, which is something I never had the opportunity to have at a traditional accredited institution. So at sailor, now you have people that do teach at other universities and institutions looking at what you're doing and commenting and giving you feedback. So in some ways, it's almost even a better process. Now that we've explained how we develop our courses and looked at some ways students can utilize the resources on sailor.org, we'd like to share a little about some new projects, student e-portfolios, and the Media Library. We're developing an e-portfolio system to help students track their progress. With this tool, students can declare a major, enroll in courses, view their transcript, and access their earned badges. They'll also connect with other learners around the world, sharing resources, asking and answering questions, and building networks. While portfolios will allow students to stay on top of their course progress and grades, our forthcoming Media Library will organize every resource from our courseware into a fully searchable, robust database, open to the whole world. The future is bright for open education, which we think translates to a bright future for hungry learners. The question is, how far can we go? OER can go really as far as people's imaginations. I think education is absolutely a right. I think that everyone can learn. Everyone does learn to whatever extent they're capable. And I think the more and more you make it accessible to people, the more they'll learn and the better lives they'll have. We agree the sky is the limit. We look forward to working with the OER community to help further connect the dots and pave the way for students to obtain quality education at zero cost.