 And people will, okay, so we are now recording. Thanks so much, Alan. Welcome everyone to our 10 o'clock session, Eastern Standard Time at OE Global. My name's Lena Patterson. I'm so pleased to invite you here to this presentation with James Sklappa Grossglyde, Cable Green, Kurt Newton, and Lisa Petrides. And I'm gonna ask them all to introduce themselves and take it away. Thank you so much, Lena, for the introduction. And it's great to see all of you turned out for this conversation. Really excited to reflect back on some of the work that we've been doing in this open 2020 working group. I know share some of our thinking and more importantly, engage in a conversation with you all about the direction that these conversations are heading. As Lena mentioned, I'm joined here by several members, participants in the working group. We've got James Sklappa Grossglyde, Cable Green, Peter Kaufman, and Lisa Petrides. And I'll ask them in a moment to go around and just give a little more introduction from their perspective about the work that they do and how it connects into the bigger picture. Well, let me begin by reflecting on the nature of this group, where it came from, what its goals were, just as a way to frame the conversation. So the open 2020 working group was convened by MIT Open Learning and a number of our colleagues in this broader mission to just take stock of where we are roughly 20 years after the founding of MIT OpenCourseWare and the launch of what really has become a massive and diverse movement. Where are we? What are the grand themes that are playing out there? And especially as we might be able to have conversations across the different sectors from this rich and diverse ecosystem. What are some new opportunities for us to work together, to collaborate, to develop new capacities that are fitting for the next 20 years of open learning. So we pulled people together from a number of different sectors, tried to get together on a occasional sort of quarterly basis physically to bring our visions together, think about, reflect upon the best practices that were emerging in different sectors and try to crystallize some ideas and move things forward. There are materials that we've documented as we went through this process that are available on a wiki and I put the link to the wiki in the description for this event but I'll drop it into the chat as we continue on. So I'll kick off the introduction round. So I'm a director of MIT OpenCourseWare. I've worked for OpenCourseWare since 2004, a couple of years after it was founded, became director a couple of years ago and I'm particularly thrilled to be working at this moment when there are so many opportunities that are opening up as the world is understanding what open education and open knowledge more generally is capable of creating. I'd like to hand off now to, let's see, we'll go in order of James Cable, the alphabetical James Cable, Peter and Lisa and if each of you would like to just take a couple of minutes to introduce yourselves and tell us about your work. Sure, thanks Gord. Hey everybody, it's great to be here. Good morning from Los Angeles. My name is James. My day job is with College of the Canyons where I'm a dean and College of the Canyons is one of the 115 California community colleges and the California community colleges comprise the largest system of higher education in the United States and community colleges overall serve about 50% of all students in the United States. So we're very much in the mainstream of education and really focused on teaching. My work has focused really most recently on helping other community colleges to develop Z degrees or zero textbook cost pathways built around open educational resources. I've also been deeply involved with our host organization open education global. I'm a past president of the board and just really happy to be here. Thanks. Thanks, James. Hi everybody, my name is Cable Green. I'm the director of open education at Creative Commons. I've been at CC for about 10 years before that worked in community colleges and in systems of higher education across the US. Looking forward to today's conversation. Peter, is that you? You're up next. Hi, sorry, alphabet is tricky. Hi, I'm Peter Kaufman at MIT Open Learning. Thank you so much everyone for joining from all over the place. I work in strategic initiatives and some resource development at Open Learning and one of the strategic initiatives I've been lucky enough to work on is this open 2020 working group with Kurt and with others who are speaking today. So, and others who are in attendance and participating on the call today. So thank you again for the opportunity. Lisa. Hi, I'm Lisa Petrides and I am president and founder of ISCME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge, Management and Education. And since 2007, we have been running a open education library called OER Commons and we also run another couple of dozen of libraries for institutions and higher ed, K-12 and ministries of education around the globe trying to entice and support the discovery, sharing and collaboration around open educational resources. And I'm also the proud trustee elect of my local community college district here in California. And just delighted to be here on this conversation today with you all. Yeah, thanks, thanks Lisa. Yeah, as Peter noted, we have a few other members from the working group. We're also in the participants and as we go through here, we want this to be to open up into a dialogue and a discussion and hope that we'll get to hear from some of them as well. We've got, who did I see? Ryan Erickson-Colas, we've got Richard Sebastian, we've got Willem also. I may have missed others too, but I noticed at least several others coming in on the chat, so that's great. So I wanted to start off by reflecting on this kind of vision statement process that we began with about 18 months ago when the group kicked off. Acknowledging that we come from a wide range of different sectors and the work that we do on a day-to-day basis is really grounded in all these different realities. We asked the participants in the group to their view of what their vision statement was for open education, what they would like it to be now and what they'd like to become in the future. A lot has gone on in the last 18 months. Some of it, I'll say planned, but a lot of it unplanned, a lot of it disruptive. And I'd like to ask our panelists to reflect on their view of their vision for open education and how that's evolved. So over the past couple of years, let me start, we'll go, we'll start by the same order if we may. James, would you like to reflect on that? Yeah, thanks Kurt. Well, when I think back to a year, year and a half ago when we first convened, one of the major points that I tried to make was to focus on the needs of learners and what the ultimate needs of our learners are, whether they're formal learners or informal learners. But the needs of our learners go beyond simple instructional materials. If we talk about moving from costly instructional materials or closed knowledge to free instructional materials and open knowledge, that's great, but that's not really what our learners are after. Our learners are after skills, knowledge, a better life, full participation in civil society, particularly those of us who were involved in community colleges, is really focus on expanding access and bringing more people into higher education. So again, that was one of the main points that I was trying to make throughout our conversations over the past year and a year and a half. And I think if anything, I feel more urgent about that today than when we first convened with what we see going on in American politics, but certainly in politics all over the world. There's more of an attempt, I think, by some traditional elites to close knowledge and to erect barriers to access and full participation in civil society. Our friend Katsu Shigetsu yesterday in the opening session gave us a tour of what's going on in Asia, made the point that when Japan Open Course where first started, they encountered a lot of opposition from traditional academics, precisely because as he put it, education was about secrecy. And open education threatened the secrecy of knowledge. So I feel, yeah, again, greater sense of urgency about breaking down the barriers than I did a year ago. Thanks, James. Cable, I think you're next. All right, let me just make sure I'm unmuted. There we go. Let's see, last few years, I would say two big things changed in my view. One was we got what's called the UNESCO recommendation on open education resources. So for those of you that follow what UNESCO does in this space, they have, over time, all the way back to 2002, been very involved in the open education space, particularly in the open content space in OER. In 2002, they coined the term OER. In 2012, there was the declaration on OER from UNESCO, which was essentially a heads up to governments around the world that this was something that was important that they think about as they are planning and working on reforms within their education systems. And then in 2017, there was a big world OER Congress where five years after the declaration, countries came together and said, here's the progress we've made, here are the challenges we're still having. And then just this past November in 2019, the UNESCO member states at their general conference unanimously adopted the UNESCO recommendation on OER. So if you haven't seen this, I'll share the link in the chat after I stop talking here. It's worth reading and what's important about it is it's an international framework from an international governmental organization and one that's part of the family of the United Nations that says, hey governments of the world, open education is important and here are the very specific actions that your government can take to advance open education in your countries. And not just about content, but around policy, procurement, sustainability, professional development opportunities, there's a whole slate of activities at a very specific level. And then the various NGOs of the world, ISCME, Creative Commons, OE Global, Spark, OER Africa, many NGOs have come together, and that's not an exhaustive list, to work together to collaboratively help these national governments learn about and implement this recommendation that they all voted yes on. So I think that's a big deal. So the end state of that is to solve what's called out in sustainable goal, sustainable development goal number four, which is all about access to education for everybody. The second big thing that I think we've seen really in the last probably three years is this acknowledging that content is still really important and policy work is still critical, but to really go after and talk a lot and spend more time and effort on the third area of open education, which is really inclusive pedagogy. And there's with everything that's been going on in the world from COVID to looking at systematic racism in our systems of government, education, various sectors of society, a big discussion about open education being a place to have conversations about equity, about social justice, and not as the only solution for that, but as part of the solution. And so there's a lot of work happening right now to think about who's developing the OER. Where is it coming from? Whose voices are in that conversations? Is it supply or demand driven? What do the supply chains look like? How do we make sure that everybody is involved in these conversations and not just a few from one part of the world? Thanks, Kurt. Peter, over to you. So I'm really grateful to be part of this open 2020 working group, as I said, because it includes so many such a combination, I guess, of visionaries and activists, but also like practical people, implementers, if that's a word, I don't know if that's a word, but let's try it. And the challenges that we face as educators and as people who work in the information or even media environment are weirdly growing deepening, since even we started this in May, and thanks to the generous support of one of our co-conveners, the Hewlett Foundation, where we had our last, our third most recent meeting. We had a conversation at CC Global touching on some of these challenges. But one that I would like to highlight for us now is like, how does the work that goes into open education itself fit into the larger framework, the larger progressive framework of information and sort of free knowledge, the kind of things that you will see in, if you read nothing else about this working group and never visit with us again, just take a look at the sort of the mission ideal vision statements that Kirk thought of asking our group for at the very beginning in May of last year, they're on the wiki, they're incredibly moving. How does our work fit into this larger progressive framework of information, knowledge and media that Cable was also addressing? Between the third meeting that we had of this four meeting year that we envisioned and the fourth meeting, which is still to happen. We've had like pre-meetings and like prep meetings for the fourth meet, but between those two meetings, a lot happened, including some of the things that previous speakers mentioned, such as the pandemic which flipped us all on our heads, even though MIT and others have been thinking and prepping and are probably every member of this conversation today about online learning, the emergency heightened, but also, the country parts of it caught on fire again and these issues of systemic racism. And I know we have a later call today about some of these questions, like equality, justice and freedom became, rose to the fore in ways that made our mandate even more kind of explicit. And so I'll say there's a lot of talk about suppression in the news these days, these hours, but there's a suppression of like basic reason that's going on of facts, of verifiable truths. And while the rights to publish those things are not necessarily part of the sustainable development goals that we talk about sometimes in our working group, they're not one of the 17. Indeed, education in our country is not an explicit right in our constitution. We have like, there are 180 countries where education is in the constitution, ours is not one of them, but there is a universal declaration of human rights that calls these things out, the freedom of expression, the freedom of information and the right to education. And we need to think about how we can do better in all of our online work to fulfill those grand visions in this moment of pandemic and systemic racism. Thank you, Peter. Lisa, how's your vision doing? Yeah, thank you. And certainly echoing some of the things that my colleagues have just covered. I guess the first one I just wanna start where Peter left off was around inclusion and how the absolute necessity of bringing a more inclusive perspective into open education. Who are those partners that can do that with us? How can they be supported for bringing in their content and their practices and their stories? So it isn't just about how do we find that content and popularize it, but really how do we engage in the collaboration of those communities that we have not yet really engaged with. And this also includes folks who are doing just terrific work around social emotional learning and global climate change and the diversity and social justice issues. How do we really bring them into the fold? And we started to see, I think in the last 18 months, how we can move forward from a community that has been somewhat narrowly focused on kind of the principles and the ethos of open, moving towards the infrastructure and the policy, recommendations, all the way to implementations in the classroom as we define that remotely today. So that shift I think where I'm really, really starting to see in the last 18 months, particularly in those who really are engaging in the community in ways that we hadn't before. I think the second piece really kind of dovetails on that that is there is just much more support and backup for the perspective around open education. So, that it's affordable, yes, that we have free textbooks, yes, but now we're really getting that collaboration and support for teaching and learning. It's been a huge emphasis on professional development in the last eight months, not just here in the US, but around the world. That's just a welcome opportunity to be bringing an open education approach into that. Similarly, the intersection of sort of the disciplines, the professional subject areas, perhaps more importantly, what I'm really seeing now is we're finally seeing the connection of these top-down efforts with the bottom-up initiatives. So we've had both for some time. I think, Cable, you mentioned UNESCO and the SDG goals. That's a perfect example. It was sort of a hat tip to government saying, yep, get involved, we're on this. And many were. And so they are now kind of reaching down to the implementers and similarly, some of the amazing grassroots efforts that have blown into full blossom open education from OER Africa to, I mean, there's so many of these that are doing that now. So essentially it's the intersection that's the finally the meeting of kind of the bottom-up initiatives and the top-down policy and mandates that really do have to be in place to make this kind of more of a sustainable endeavor. Thanks. Yeah, I completely share the excitement, Matthew or Lisa, about seeing the bottom-up and top-down starting to meet in these really interesting places. Curious what people are seeing about how well we're doing at sharing the things that are coming up from this incredibly rich, diverse, grassroots activities that are going on, things that are so grounded in the local needs, the way that learners and educators are trying to work with things. How are we doing at sharing those learnings more broadly and creating the kind of collaborations and infrastructure that we need so that within that incredibly diverse situation we're building, we're all building collectively. What are you seeing? How's that feeling to you? Well, I'll start off, Kurt. I'd say I'm very inspired by the Open Education Conference that took place, that was centered or hosted in the United States last week, which attracted 1,500 participants. Just two years ago, the conference attracted 400 participants. Then last year it was 800 and this year it was 1,500. The central theme of the conference was equity, diversity, and inclusion, so bringing more people into the fold and more people into the idea of open education, but also re-centering or centering the purpose and being explicit about what the purpose is of open education. That is to, again, bring more people in, help more people and more perspectives and more stories and more voices, fully participate in society and shape our future and not receive knowledge from someone else or some other entity. So I think that's incredibly inspiring and that's coming from the grassroots, really. And that's also what I see in my very local work or my work in California, namely that the typical faculty member who is interested in open education or adopting OER, creating OER is doing so more these days out of a sense of reshaping the narrative, reshaping the materials that students are using in the classroom away from that received elite knowledge that's produced by some commercial publisher a million miles away and that is more focused on the community of students that you see in front of you. So I'm really inspired by that. Nevertheless, as Cable mentioned and others have mentioned, within the United States, at least there's a very urgent task to bring more voices and perspectives into the field of open education. As much as you can call open education a field, it's a, in the United States, it's a blindingly white field that reflects white culture and white approaches to education. So we really have to be very intentional about moving beyond that. So back to you then. Yeah, that brings to mind something you had, a way you'd ask the question, James, in a previous conversation about like, to bring in those voices, what if we were more intentional about bringing in folks who don't think of themselves as part of open education, but whose goals are so directly aligned with what we're doing to make really powerful common cause and where might some of those opportunities be? Yeah, well, thanks, Kurt. At the risk of being critical of myself and my friends here, I think open education to a large extent, at least in the United States and to some extent in Europe has been quite insular and Lisa referred to this quite self-satisfied. We're doing a wonderful job because of whatever metrics we're pointing to. Because we have these wonderful conferences and we have wonderful conversations with one another, but we're not necessarily framing ourselves or describing ourselves as a tool to achieve larger goals. What are the larger goals that we're actually after? Is the end goal that everybody uses an open textbook? Well, no, what is the end goal that forces us to ask that question and to present ourselves as tools to achieve larger goals that align with other education reform efforts or other civil society organizations. So that's kind of a very broad answer to the statement, but I think it's really important for us to get out of our own conversation and to join other organizations. Yeah, I wanna just add to that. And for those of you who have your video on, it was a very foggy morning here in Half Moon Bay and the sun just came out, which you can see some. I'm gonna have to get everyone to close a shade in a minute, but I'm blinded by the light, which seems to be a good metaphor at this moment here. Following on what James said, I think to what we're going to see and what we really need to do as a field is to acknowledge that sort of where are these tendrils kind of the groups that have not been actively involved in those communities and what does it mean to kind of have the power distributed throughout these communities as well? Because it has been somewhat insular and therefore somewhat siloed from some of these other systems and that can be everything from technical infrastructure, like the importance of taking all of our libraries and making sure they integrate with everybody's learning management systems to where are other centers of gravity, where are other existing fields that have their own structures and power structures? How do they now step in within their own communities and that they don't have to become just sort of absorbed into what we know as the community? And I think there's a certain kind of letting go of what we have today to be able to do that and to really just be open and listen to saying where are those things? And they're coming from the historically black colleges and universities here in the US. They're coming from discipline specific professional organization, trade organizations which have a lot of content knowledge which people haven't really bothered to say where is that knowledge and how is that knowledge being transferred openly in prison education programs, right? There's so many areas that we have just begun to kind of scratch the surface of. Yeah, yeah. I think I noticed at open other last week there was a session on welding, right? How exciting. Peter, you've had your hand up and then we're starting to see great some questions coming up in the chat. So... No, just for a second, it would be great if we turn our attention that direction too. Yeah, if we can like with our mission drive and with some of these principles that are in the vision statements like jump species, like the virus does and go like outside of education to other forms of activism and like how can we facilitate as open education people the anti-racism movement? How can we facilitate anti... The right kind of activism in the climate challenges that we're facing or in economic equality? Like what can we do? And what are to James's point which he's reiterated in our group conversations what does that map look like? Who are those players? And how do we build those natural along those on those natural affinities? For identifying which group are we gonna work with in this area? And which that to me can then render a 1,500 person conference, God forbid to a 15,000 person conference and then some in there. Excellent. Cable, have you had your hand there? Yeah, I'll keep it short Kurt so we can get to other people's questions. So two quick thoughts. One about vision and one about themes on this same idea of the open ed field reaching out. I've been working with two organizations recently that are both thinking about systematic racism but the way that they're acting is they are building new educational resources for young kids who are in school. So this is like grades two through five and they're building a whole new curriculum that it's modeled on long arc of history but it's an honest history of in this particular case it's targeted at US schools. And so they're taking an actual honest look at racism in the United States and where it came from and how it manifests itself today. And so their vision, if you will is to get these materials broadly adopted to provide professional development around them so that the next generation of students that come up through the education system actually have an honest look at what actually happened and how systematic racism, why it exists in the first place which is something that a lot of us never got until we were in college and were in these classes which were critical thought classes that actually looked at how all this came to be. And so when I say vision, what I mean is I'm now talking with them saying well, if that's your vision then you might consider open as a way of accelerating your vision putting your vision on steroids, if you will because we can get if we openly license it if we put it over in OER Commons where people can find it if we advertise it, if we do the following we can actually get this out it can be translated into different languages. And that seems to be aligning. And so they're now openly licensing their works and turning it into OER. The second one is themes this really builds on what Lisa and James were saying I think there are common themes out there that span different NGO efforts. So one of them is access to education. So certainly that's what we're about in open education that's a big part of why we all do it. Well, so does Black Lives Matter. They care a lot about access to education. So does, well just a few years ago Lisa brought the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People the NAACP to an open education conference. And there was a rich conversation about hey we have this shared goal of access to education for everybody. So another theme is open access to knowledge to help people. And so right now you're seeing at UNESCO they already have a recommendation on open education or on OER. They're now building and have open for comment a recommendation on open science. And of course it's been accelerated because of COVID and everybody knows that open science is the right way to do science if we wanna cure diseases you better make sure that the research and the data is all openly not only accessible and freely accessible but is openly licensed so it can be text and data mined, et cetera. And so I think it's not rocket science we just haven't thought this way before we really have to I think look at what are our core themes that we care about and then do a bit of an analysis of who else has those core themes or those core goals as well and start to reach out. Thanks. I see James you got your hand up I'm also wanting to start pulling in some of the conversation that's going on in the chat or may I pull that in the chat. Okay, so it was a real brief that just to pick up on Cable's point it was a thousand percent plus a thousand percent cable absolutely and also one can get to this point by of saying that we need to expand our allies and present ourselves as tools or mechanisms for other movements by following the data look at the data in education at least in my context you start looking at well what groups of students are not succeeding they're not succeeding because they can't get into education or they're not succeeding because of financial barriers you start peeling away that data and in the United States context you very quickly arrive at populations of students from ethnic minorities or racial minorities so that's a natural point of connection to those organizations that Cable was mentioning but outside the context of the United States I would suggest that you have the similar opportunity and you have to follow the data what populations of students are facing barriers or are not succeeding at the rate of the majority students or students from the majority culture are they linguistic minorities in your country are they people who are minoritized or excluded for all kinds of different reasons those organizations that work with those types of students who are not successful or who are facing barriers based on the data would also be likely allies so back to you Chris Yeah, thanks. Yeah, Lena asked a few minutes ago does openness become a principle or value rather than a discipline? If I get that, if I understand what you're saying should we have a motto like open education? It's not just for open education practitioners it's for everybody, you know that the people who are creating this young person's curriculum didn't think of themselves as open education people but there's huge value in that and reflecting back on a prior conversation with you Lisa you had asked something along the lines of like what does it look like or what do we need to do to make these practices really become the default rather than a thing that gets bolted on to the side it feels like there's tremendous opportunity potential to get into really addressing some of the big challenges that we all see if we can find our ways to do that. Yeah, I would love to address that. I think apps, you know I think that it's a we started it sort of as a movement, you know this was 2003, 2004 within five or six years as we had research some great research from Dave Wiley and I think there's been a lot of ground building work that had to be done around just substantiating that in fact open was as good as proprietary and then we had to look at classroom impact and then we had to look at educator uptake right there's been so there's been sort of a body of research on the bottom, you know that has said, you know here's the work that where it's moved from a movement to a field. I think that that has limited us now in fact, if we just think of it as a field and we are not fully integrated with all fields and that it isn't just this add-on piece and that in fact it's even more than a principle I think it's an approach. I think, you know there's a whole field of open pedagogy now which is really embrace this in this way. So I think the more that we continue to think of open education sort of as its own field it's going to be a detriment in some ways to really thinking about how as a public good, you know education as a human right we have to go all the way into places and people and communities that frankly don't know about open source software whose shoulders we stand on or they don't know about open science they might be the beneficiaries of that. And I kind of want to say do they have to know all the background of what open is and the arguments around licensing and infrastructure that's not even, you know those were so important. So I'm not trying to trivialize those I'm saying building the groundswell was critical to have that research to have those conversations and debates it's now time to really I think bust that open. Yes. Open it up to the panel and the other observations on those lines, no? Okay, I would encourage anybody who's in the audience to continue to put your questions and observations in on the chat. In fact, we have from Richard who has been in the working group with us regarding the insularity how can we broaden input and participation beyond membership and your input from communities that we don't hear so often? I would go so far as to say this is one of the things that we want to do I know is to get out of our meetings and start to have conversations more broadly but I'd love to hear thoughts from other panelists on that. Peter. Yeah, I mean if there's a way to jujitsu the whole pandemic thing and try to figure out how to take advantage of what is, you know this once in a century horror that's visiting upon us we are educating ourselves via Zoom or other, you know screen technologies now and we're doing it on kind of an emergency basis but what are the principles that we should be thinking about? Open ed and OER in particular has been a very text centric movement we're now communicating via video and audio what are the principles that should be enshrined in our teaching and learning in these so that we don't get caught up in what 600 years of print has brought us to date which is a mess when it comes to this kind of licensing so we should be thinking about that and we should be taking advantage of the fact that we're recording whole loads of courses not everywhere how can we share them? I'll pick up on that the point about educating ourselves or capturing the content that we're producing now as part of professional development I think a lot of us here certainly participate in professional development or create professional development opportunities for our networks, for our colleagues as we're doing that let's not repeat ourselves and let's not have as Lisa was sort of suggesting but let's not offer one more webinar on licensing, apologies to Cable let's have a webinar on licensing but let's not have a second webinar on licensing let's have the second webinar be about the question of anti-racism another have the second webinar be about the historical practices in whatever part of the world you're from that made one culture the dominant culture in education and other cultures minoritized so we all can wield that influence as we're educating ourselves I hope to move beyond the insularity let's share that learning with others personally I've benefited from the generosity of the Hewlett Foundation and the Michelson 20 Million Binds Foundation to connect with other organizations in the United States who are working on education reform for particular populations and I've just begun having conversations with them and I will then be inviting them to share their perspectives and what their organizations do with groups of people that I get to work with in the based on open education I'll be expanding the knowledge of everybody hopefully. Yeah, good. I'd like to welcome into the room one of our elephants thank you Sean for bringing them in the question of commercial companies the tension that exists between OER as this ideologically free resource and the need for it to be financially and otherwise sustainable this runs, you know this is a rich undercurrent through a lot of our work and a lot of our conversations and I'd like to put that out to the panel for reflections on where that stands at this moment and where we should be trying to lead it. I'd like to maybe at least to start by offering kind of even a reframing of that question because for the last 10 years I think we've been asking or this question has been asked of us how can it be sustainable if it's not commercial? And I wanna reframe that and say, you know look at the cable can give us these numbers the best probably, you know the $6 billion a year that are already committed and spent in K-12 education alone. And then there's of course the higher ed numbers which are even greater than that. There's already money in our ecosystem and in our effort for these things. The idea, there are really two different questions about how to have a sustainable ecosystem versus commercial use. And I think that some people might be thinking with that question when I saw, you know sort of some of the, I'm gonna say the bastardizations of open that we've seen through the years that they're now coming in the flavor and color of things like inclusive access or equitable access. We just all saw a tweet of a couple of weeks ago. These are the responses of a lot of commercial publishers to OER as a way to essentially let's, you know let's call the elephant what it is to kind of cut off open at its, you know at its knees, right? So let's have those conversations about commercial enterprise. It's challenged to open its partnership with open where do we, where have we seen productive collaborations that were meaningful in terms of outcome for students, right? Not for shareholders, but for students. But then there's another conversation about, you know what is sustainable and where is the money that has already been put into these things and how could it be better reallocated to the endeavors around open? I mean, PD, we just were talking about that but just as an example, there's been some money flowing into education around the CARES Act and the pandemic and some, you know really savvy, smart institutions and educators across the country are saying, hey, you know we already have all of this money for PD. Now we're getting CARES money for and it's not like it's, you know we don't have all the money we need for PD but money's flowing in into PD. We're talking about remote learning and what that means for teaching and learning. Let's make sure we embed open into part of that learning. So what are those existing mechanisms for the existing funds? We haven't even done that yet. So to somehow say, you know commercial has to save it because that's how you make money to make it sustainable. They're really two different conversations. So a friendly kind of reframing of that at least from my perspective. Thanks, thanks. Cable, you had your hand up. Yeah, just to build on what Lisa was saying. So she's right, I do love that argument that we have the money that we need. I always say we're just really bad at how we spend it. And so the numbers are actually in the US are almost double what Lisa laid out. It's in K-12, the US federal government puts between nine and 10 billion a year into K-12 public education and it's a similar amount in higher ed. And it fluctuates depending on the year and the administration, but it's give or take nine to 10 billion. And so for me when I sit down with an entity whether we're talking about developing a new policy or we're talking at a federal level or we're at a national level or if we're talking about procurement of educational resources at a local level. Conversations are similar, it is open if we take an open path, is it going to be better? Is it going to be more cost efficient? Almost always the answer is yes. And so today certainly in higher ed we're seeing this pattern and it's starting to hit K-12 now as well is we're seeing these models where the commercial sector won't even sell educational resources anymore. So the old model was in K-12 anyway is that we'll sell you these resources they're really expensive. And then the way that the school districts around the country and in many countries around the world would deal with that high cost is they would keep those resources for over a decade and then amortize the cost over 10, 12 years. So where I live in Washington state our educational resources in K-12 on average are about 11 and a half years old and that's because we're amortizing these costs which is insane, right? I've got, we have a son in high school and his political science textbook is 10 years old and has anything interesting happened in political science in 10 years? I think so, Lisa's been elected, that's what happened. So, that's completely unacceptable. And now when the school district acquires or procures educational resources today they don't even own them, they're leasing access to them. So I think part of our job is to point out the new models which have emerged from the commercial sector and how damaging they are, how unfair they are, how the districts and colleges and universities and students own nothing and yet they pay a large amount of money. And so going back to the OER recommendation from UNESCO one of the things that we wrote into it was this idea of open procurement. And so it's one thing to have a national open licensing policy. So for example, in the United States the departments of labor, education, several programs in state, big chunk of USAID their early childhood reading they all require a creative commons attribution license when somebody takes a grant or contract from them. So whatever they build with this public money must be openly licensed. So that's good, that's a top down angle on this. But it's also important that the local school district or the local university or college has an open procurement policy that says if we're gonna go spend a half million euros buying a set of educational resources we need to make sure we're buying it. So we need to own it, we need to hold copyright. And then hopefully we have an internal open access policy that says we'll openly license those materials and turn them into OER. And so part of it is we don't spend our money very wisely in how we allocate educational resources professional development opportunities, et cetera. We've got the money, we're just bad at how we spend it. Another part of it is our collective failure to recognize that as long as we the public have the money, we have the power. Meaning the market should be viewed as work for hire for the public education sector. So we'll give you the money as soon as you meet our terms. And hopefully our terms are we the public own the copyright to what we're buying and or we're hiring you to go build what we want. But either way we own it, you build for us, we pay you and then we're gonna openly license it and share it as OER. Just that step, you could reduce the nine or 10 billion in the United States by a significant amount and then shift that budget. We don't wanna give it back to the government. We want more professional development. We want more conversations about open pedagogy. We need better conversations about social justice. We need to get into the curriculum and fix the inequities. And so the opportunity is there. How do we get there? We need all of us, all of us at this conference and all the other conferences this fall to be involved in that work. And even then it's not enough of us which is why these other professional development programs that are going on to train new leaders in open education are so critical. Well said, I'm seeing a lot of applause in the chat cable. James, you have your hand up. You're on mute. That thank her, I of course agree completely with Lisa and Cable, Cable says that so eloquently. I would just offer a couple of concrete examples to remind us that we're at a moment in history. That it doesn't have to be the way it is. It can be what Cable's talking about. There was a time 200 years ago when education was not public education. It wasn't a public good. There was a time when libraries were the purview of the rich and they were filled with secret information like books. And there was a time when firefighters, fire departments were only for the wealthy and they were private services. And somehow society has seen that these are public goods and that everyone benefits when a town doesn't burn to the ground. Everyone benefits when there's literacy and so on. So it's super important that we insist on changing the framework, changing the perspective. And we don't accept the terms of the discussion that others give us. Great. Yeah. I don't know why, but... I just wanted to jump in and say we actually only have just six minutes remaining. This hour has flown by. So I just wanted to do my duty and give you your warning to start wrapping it up. Yeah, thank you. I think this gives everybody a flavor for what these conversations when the working group gets together are like. The time does fly by. I don't know why everything reminds me of climate change these days. This feels very similar to the conversations about we have this infrastructure now that allows us to take free resource, i.e. sunlight and provide it to people in a way that we didn't use to. Knowledge is like sunlight, right? If we can build the right infrastructure, whether it's for renewable energy or whether it's for sharing knowledge freely, we now have the capacity to do that. And there are forces that have led us to where we are right now that thank God they were there at the time. It certainly helped a lot with a lot of development, but we now have the opportunity to really build something new and better that meets the challenges of this moment. Lisa, hand. Yeah, I just want to respond to that and to what James just said as well. You know, I worry about the statement that everybody knows we benefit from literacy because clearly that isn't the case. Not everybody believes that we should be literate. Not everybody believes that we should all be voting. I think we have some of the biggest challenges ever here in the US, particularly in other parts of the world as well around these issues. And this idea that our knowledge and our public knowledge is under attack is really cause for concern. I mean, Cable, James, you've raised the issues of the fact that we aren't making investments that can be amortized, that we don't even in these inclusive access deals that you never actually own the content libraries. Public libraries are facing one of the biggest challenges right now. Publishers won't sell to libraries the digital versions. And so even the knowledge that we have so come to expect and sort of demanded in the public access to knowledge for public libraries is under attack for the same challenges that we're having now to open education. So, you know, I agree right up to that point where we understand these things are important, but the idea that not everybody actually is on that same page is critical and what I think makes this need for open education that much stronger. Indeed, indeed. So we are, yeah, just about out of time. I'd like to just do a quick go around any closing thoughts from the panel. Peter. I would just echo what Lisa said, our knowledge is under attack and we need to figure out who are, who the other members of the, you know, resistance are, you know, the natural and organic members of the resistance, which is maybe not a resistance. Maybe it's the actual, you know, maybe we're, we could just flip it. And, but like those groups that are active, promoting the goals that are in our vision statements are our natural allies and we need to echoing what everybody here has said, find them all over the world and figure out ways of working with them. James. Can't improve on that. Leave it with Peter. All right. Lisa, any closing thoughts? I think the call to action was my, definitely my closing, my closing thoughts. Let's take back public knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. Cable. Yeah, let's, I dropped it in chat. Let's make sure that all publicly funded resources are openly licensed and freely available to the public that paid for it. And let's make sure we, we hold those resources in perpetuity. Good. Good. Good. All right. On behalf of my, my panelists here, I want to thank you for joining us today. Great conversation. Let's go get them. All right. Have a good conference.