FLVC OER Summit 2018

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Florida Virtual Campus' (FLVC) excellent OER Summit in Miramar Beach, Florida. FLVC put together an amazing lineup of speakers for the event, and many of them far exceeded even my high expectations. Below are my notes from two of the speakers, Dr. Cable Green of Creative Commons and Dr. David Ernst of the Open Textbook Network. My full notes from the Summit are available here: http://bit.ly/2BMBgXe.

National Perspective - Dr. Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons

• Cable giving a remix of a talk he gave with David Wiley in Maryland a few weeks ago
• “Education is sharing” - and today we can share with unprecedented capacity
• Digital gives us the ability to store copy and distribute at unprecedentedly low cost
• The main thing that prevents us from leveraging this sharing potential is copyright law
• What the internet enables, copyright forbids - it’s like teaching and learning with one hand tied behind our back
• We’re going to talk about permissions, price, pedagogy, and policy
• Open does not equal free - most of the content on the web is already free but could disappear tomorrow, and can’t be altered without permission
• So Open equals free + permissions, and especially the 5R permissions: http://opencontent.org/definition/
• The right to retain is a prerequisite to revising and remixing
• Problem with new digital models for distributing commercial course materials is that they by design do not permit students to retain the content - instead, students lease the content and lose access 
• For educators who are open to sharing their content with the world, it makes no sense to leave your content under the default copyright regime, since no one will be able to reuse it until 70 years after your death
• But there is a solution! Creative Commons enables educators to easily free their content from the restrictions of the copyright regime
• In education, we try to stay away from the no-derivatives licenses, since they don’t allow others to change the work that is being shared
• CC licenses are permanent, irrevocable permissions - a CC-licensed work is openly licensed until the copyright in the work expires
• College Board data suggests that books and supplies cost students $1200  year
• Students increasingly decide not to purchase required books due to high cost
• OER are often more up-to-date than commercial course materials, precisely because they can be continuously updated
• OER Adoption impact calculator: http://impact.lumenlearning.com/
• Z-degrees are gaining traction across the nation - the idea of entire degree programs that have zero textbook costs due to OER
• Instructors are typically going to use a combination of OER and commercial materials - this often makes the most sense, depending on the course learning objectives, etc. - and can also be very affordable if the materials are licensed through the library
• What does Open allow me to do? Beyond just saving my students money and ensuring they have access to required materials?
• OER-Enabled Pedagogy: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5009
• All about getting away from ‘disposable assignments’ that don’t contribute value to the world - students hate them, faculty hate grading them, and they are quickly forgotten by both sides
• US college students spend approx 40 million hours doing homework every year
• Contrast this to ‘renewable assignments’ - students see broader value in doing them, faculty see broader value in grading them, and the work adds value to the world
• Example here: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975
• Publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources - full stop, no exceptions - and not just educational resources, but published research and data
• Money is shifting to Open at the federal and state levels, and also through foundations - all of which are considering implementing open licensing requirements on grants and contracts
• There are still problems with the way that Open is being required - in many cases it is just public access that is being required, and there is no requirement that the works come with reuse permissions
• Cable doesn’t think that OER should ever be mandates - it just upsets people
• Instead, we need to provide support for the faculty who want to use OER, and the rest will come along eventually (or not, but we still shouldn’t try to force the issue)
• What can Universities and Colleges do to support OER?
• Raise awareness about OER and their benefits
• College support for creation, adaptation, and adoption of OER
• Funding to support the above
• Coordinate across Florida Higher Ed system
• Partner with other states
• Need to look at promotion and tenure policies - imperative that these policies support and provide recognition for OA publishing and OER creation/adaptation/adoption 
• Tag OER in course catalogs - state legislatures across the country are passing laws that require this - students have the right to know up front
• Sustainability - ROI on closed vs open?
• Closed is definitely a sustainability problem - students and taxpayers are spending astronomical sums of money on commercial course materials - and in that context it’s unreasonable to suggest that open is not sustainable
• Join the CC Open Education Platform: https://creativecommons.org/2017/09/05/invitation-join-cc-open-education-platfor
• Everything they build is shared under CC licenses 
• For too long we have outsourced our infrastructure and given away our content, and we’ve only just begun to understand what that has cost us
• We need to take back control to ensure a more open, robust, and sustainable future
• CC licenses include two protections for authors whose work is adapted in ways that they do not endorse
• The adapter CANNOT suggest that the original author endorses the work - that would require a separate agreement
• The adapter is legally required to remove attribution to the original author if that author requests it
• Also, even without an open license, anyone already has the ability to misrepresent your work through paraphrasing and citation
• CC is completely rebuilding its CC Search tool to search the entire commons simultaneously, rather than searching across a limited list of sources

Dr. David Ernst, Founder of Open Textbook Network, University of Minnesota

• UN Declaration of human rights states that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all”
• Funding for public ed has shifted over time; tuition is rising and government funding is decreasing
• Varies from state to state - Florida isn’t quite as bad as Minnesota, where students shoulder most of the costs
• So what options do students have? They can work, or take out loans. But the hours that a student would have to work at minimum wage to afford tuition has risen dramatically - nearly doubled since 2000
• Re loans, student debt is becoming something of a national crisis: student debt has risen from $500 billion to almost $1500 billion in the last ten years
• It’s obvious that textbook costs are not the most significant cost for students, relative to tuition (etc.)
• So why are we spending two days talking about textbook costs?
• Because we can do something about it! (Rather, faculty are the only ones who can do something about it)
• It’s our job, as we work with faculty, to make sure that they understand that they have responsibility for managing these costs
• Another reason is that textbook costs have a disproportionate impact on student success
• Average student should budget $1230-1390 for textbooks and course materials in 2017-18
• Freshmen are arguably more likely to purchase all of their required texts, and then they have this experience where they realize that they aren’t worth the price - given the cost, the amount of content covered from each book, the likelihood that they will pick them up again after the course ends, etc. 
• So, students then go on to use lots of different tactics to cope with the cost - they purchase older editions, put off purchasing the textbook at all, share a textbook with their peers, download pirated texts from the internet, etc.
• All of these strategies involve some level of risk to student success, leading in some cases to students earning a poor grade, dropping a course, or failing a course
• We don’t need to go to the UN for direction on this - we can go to the mission statements of our own institutions
• Higher education institutions are responsible for advancing the common good
• Let’s not wait for someone else to solve our problems for us
• OTN is a community of institutions working on this problem
• Dave initially had the idea of creating the Open Textbook Library to aggregate quality open textbooks - but no adoptions came from it initially 
• He would tell faculty about the platform, but they would just get back to work and forget about it
• General lack of awareness and understanding was a big barrier
• So Dave tried to work on educating faculty - but still no adoptions
• The biggest barrier was that faculty were skeptical of the quality of open textbooks
• To address this, Dave asked his Dean to offer $200 stipends to faculty to write reviews of open textbooks, and finally this led to 11 adoptions
• It wasn’t just the review piece, but that was the piece that made the difference in encouraging faculty to actually follow through and adopt
• The OTN Community does leadership training, program development, faculty development and engagement, community problem solving, etc. 
• http://research.cehd.umn.edu/otn/membership-benefits/member-resources/
• OTN has done ~200 workshops so far, with 2650 faculty, 45% of whom went on to adopt an open textbook
• OTN also has a number of working groups focusing on shared problems:
• Engaging instructional designers 
• Other faculty incentives
• OTN mentor-buddy system
• Resources for faculty interested in open education research
• Talking points for dealing with ‘all-access’ pitches on campus
• Template for cross-campus collaboration and publishing
• OTN also piloting a publishing cooperative to drive the creation of new open textbooks