1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,070 2 00:00:03,070 --> 00:00:05,890 GEORGE SIEMENS: Given the challenges of publisher experience, 3 00:00:05,890 --> 00:00:09,550 given the challenges of faculty writing their own resources, 4 00:00:09,550 --> 00:00:13,570 creating their own content, one of the projects you're involved with most 5 00:00:13,570 --> 00:00:18,070 recently is an attempt to alleviate that experience from the faculty side 6 00:00:18,070 --> 00:00:20,800 and reduce the cost of educational content resources, 7 00:00:20,800 --> 00:00:23,230 certainly for students and for university systems, 8 00:00:23,230 --> 00:00:28,120 which is really critical for systems that serve low-income or minority or-- 9 00:00:28,120 --> 00:00:31,250 students that fit into that low socioeconomic status profile. 10 00:00:31,250 --> 00:00:32,409 And so this is Lumen. 11 00:00:32,409 --> 00:00:34,750 Can you talk a little bit about that company, 12 00:00:34,750 --> 00:00:39,870 and what your genesis, or the intent is of that organization? 13 00:00:39,870 --> 00:00:43,300 DAVID WILEY: Yeah, I mean, the genesis was some Gates-funded-- 14 00:00:43,300 --> 00:00:48,940 some grant-funded work that was done, originally asking the question, 15 00:00:48,940 --> 00:00:53,010 can we persuade faculty to adopt open educational resources 16 00:00:53,010 --> 00:00:56,530 in place of the textbooks that they had been using before? 17 00:00:56,530 --> 00:00:59,310 And you know, there was a several-year project 18 00:00:59,310 --> 00:01:02,250 with a couple of waves of funding to it. 19 00:01:02,250 --> 00:01:06,950 And we like to jokingly but honestly say that I 20 00:01:06,950 --> 00:01:13,350 think we've been involved in more high-profile, high-failure OER adoption 21 00:01:13,350 --> 00:01:15,810 projects than maybe anybody in the world, 22 00:01:15,810 --> 00:01:20,040 because in those early days when nobody was really doing it, 23 00:01:20,040 --> 00:01:21,760 there were a lot of mistakes to be made. 24 00:01:21,760 --> 00:01:27,190 And I think we found many, if not all of them, in terms of how to support that. 25 00:01:27,190 --> 00:01:29,940 But I think one way of thinking about what Lumen does 26 00:01:29,940 --> 00:01:35,890 is saying there's lots of work being done in pockets around these OER. 27 00:01:35,890 --> 00:01:39,580 So you're going to sit down and spend your whole summer pulling together 28 00:01:39,580 --> 00:01:40,484 all this material. 29 00:01:40,484 --> 00:01:42,400 And the thing that's absolutely crazy about it 30 00:01:42,400 --> 00:01:45,310 is that there's 20 other people, 100 other people, 31 00:01:45,310 --> 00:01:47,410 staring at their summer, asking themselves, 32 00:01:47,410 --> 00:01:50,670 am I also going to spend my entire summer doing what, 33 00:01:50,670 --> 00:01:54,190 pulling together open resources that have these-- 34 00:01:54,190 --> 00:01:56,670 permission to engage in these five R activities. 35 00:01:56,670 --> 00:02:01,460 Like, why is every person starting over from scratch, right? 36 00:02:01,460 --> 00:02:03,910 Well, why don't we bring faculty together, 37 00:02:03,910 --> 00:02:07,330 have them collaborate, like cross-institutions, teaching Intro 38 00:02:07,330 --> 00:02:10,210 to Psych or College Algebra or whatever the course might be. 39 00:02:10,210 --> 00:02:13,210 Have them collaborate to produce something, and then have that something 40 00:02:13,210 --> 00:02:16,720 that they've made be the starting point for the next faculty 41 00:02:16,720 --> 00:02:17,980 member that comes along. 42 00:02:17,980 --> 00:02:20,980 And then have whatever they've done be the starting point for the next. 43 00:02:20,980 --> 00:02:23,800 And this kind of snowball development model, 44 00:02:23,800 --> 00:02:26,920 so that when you think about adopting OER, it's not saying, 45 00:02:26,920 --> 00:02:29,080 how do I replace my quiz banks? 46 00:02:29,080 --> 00:02:31,317 Where do my PowerPoints come from? 47 00:02:31,317 --> 00:02:32,650 How am I going to find the time? 48 00:02:32,650 --> 00:02:35,780 Where do you even find all these little OER that are supposedly out there? 49 00:02:35,780 --> 00:02:37,649 How am I going to pull them all together? 50 00:02:37,649 --> 00:02:39,440 You might start from a place where you say, 51 00:02:39,440 --> 00:02:41,830 well, here's a course where all the content has already 52 00:02:41,830 --> 00:02:42,704 been pulled together. 53 00:02:42,704 --> 00:02:46,040 It's been taught at several institutions already. 54 00:02:46,040 --> 00:02:47,450 There's a reasonable quiz bank. 55 00:02:47,450 --> 00:02:49,030 It could use some improvement. 56 00:02:49,030 --> 00:02:51,010 There aren't PowerPoints yet. 57 00:02:51,010 --> 00:02:53,080 So maybe now the cost for you as a faculty member 58 00:02:53,080 --> 00:02:56,530 is dressing up the quizzes a bit and making some PowerPoints. 59 00:02:56,530 --> 00:02:58,480 It's not that whole cycle, right? 60 00:02:58,480 --> 00:03:00,630 And the next person that comes along after you 61 00:03:00,630 --> 00:03:03,796 is going to benefit from the work that you did, the same way that people who 62 00:03:03,796 --> 00:03:06,710 came before you benefited you in that adoption process. 63 00:03:06,710 --> 00:03:09,970 So we're really just trying to pull things 64 00:03:09,970 --> 00:03:12,870 out of being these individual, isolated pockets, 65 00:03:12,870 --> 00:03:16,150 so that there's more collaboration, more reuse happening, 66 00:03:16,150 --> 00:03:18,790 and people are able to get started further down the field 67 00:03:18,790 --> 00:03:20,260 every time they start. 68 00:03:20,260 --> 00:03:21,580 GEORGE SIEMENS: So in some ways, it looks like you're 69 00:03:21,580 --> 00:03:22,960 trying to get at two things-- 70 00:03:22,960 --> 00:03:26,840 sort of the latent capacity of knowledge that exists within this system, 71 00:03:26,840 --> 00:03:29,680 and secondly, you're trying to connect people as part of a network, 72 00:03:29,680 --> 00:03:34,720 so that if there's, let's say, you and I and five others that are teaching Intro 73 00:03:34,720 --> 00:03:38,629 to Psychology again, that you do one part, I do one part, 74 00:03:38,629 --> 00:03:40,420 they do-- we all share, and in the end, you 75 00:03:40,420 --> 00:03:44,254 get this resource that's definitely superior, because our combined work is 76 00:03:44,254 --> 00:03:44,920 reflected in it. 77 00:03:44,920 --> 00:03:47,140 So, you know, the benefit of being part of a network. 78 00:03:47,140 --> 00:03:49,300 DAVID WILEY: And in some cases, that network is synchronous, 79 00:03:49,300 --> 00:03:50,860 and you know who those other people are, and you're 80 00:03:50,860 --> 00:03:52,401 collaborating with them in real time. 81 00:03:52,401 --> 00:03:55,690 And in other places, it's more of a stigmergy kind of approach, 82 00:03:55,690 --> 00:03:57,190 where other people have come before. 83 00:03:57,190 --> 00:03:59,779 They've left the artifact in this state. 84 00:03:59,779 --> 00:04:01,570 And when you pick it up, you're like, oh, I 85 00:04:01,570 --> 00:04:03,403 can see the next thing that needs to happen. 86 00:04:03,403 --> 00:04:05,290 And you pick that up and take it. 87 00:04:05,290 --> 00:04:08,350 And maybe both of those things are happening in parallel, in some ways. 88 00:04:08,350 --> 00:04:11,500 But there's so much capacity, and so much, 89 00:04:11,500 --> 00:04:13,870 particularly among faculty that serve these kind 90 00:04:13,870 --> 00:04:16,450 of under-represented or at-risk students. 91 00:04:16,450 --> 00:04:20,709 There's so much desire to support them and help them in their learning. 92 00:04:20,709 --> 00:04:24,040 The faculty are willing to do almost anything, 93 00:04:24,040 --> 00:04:26,440 but just don't know the best way to spend their time, 94 00:04:26,440 --> 00:04:29,671 how to most productively spend their time in pursuit of supporting 95 00:04:29,671 --> 00:04:31,170 and enabling their student learning. 96 00:04:31,170 --> 00:04:35,290 And if you can bring them either into an active network of people, or help 97 00:04:35,290 --> 00:04:39,550 them find something that, here's where this was most recently left off. 98 00:04:39,550 --> 00:04:42,070 Don't go start by searching for 80 hours. 99 00:04:42,070 --> 00:04:43,450 Start here. 100 00:04:43,450 --> 00:04:46,770 And work for six, instead of 80, or whatever that might be. 101 00:04:46,770 --> 00:04:51,217 It's that kind of bringing together and unifying that effort. 102 00:04:51,217 --> 00:04:53,800 GEORGE SIEMENS: So what's been the impact, then, of your work? 103 00:04:53,800 --> 00:04:57,040 I know you'd certainly work with a range of colleges. 104 00:04:57,040 --> 00:05:00,160 And I think you serve, in many cases, part 105 00:05:00,160 --> 00:05:04,870 of that group that most needs access and cost reduction. 106 00:05:04,870 --> 00:05:07,000 So you mentioned earlier that through Lumen, you've 107 00:05:07,000 --> 00:05:09,083 made all the mistakes, or a good chunk of mistakes 108 00:05:09,083 --> 00:05:10,390 that you could make early on. 109 00:05:10,390 --> 00:05:13,320 You're in it multiple years now. 110 00:05:13,320 --> 00:05:16,240 What have you found has been the outcome of this approach, 111 00:05:16,240 --> 00:05:19,420 where you're trying to activate latent knowledge capacity in a system, 112 00:05:19,420 --> 00:05:23,079 and you're trying to connect up people who are doing shared work? 113 00:05:23,079 --> 00:05:25,120 DAVID WILEY: Probably the single easiest measure, 114 00:05:25,120 --> 00:05:29,380 which is one that we care a lot about and that we track, is in 2016, 115 00:05:29,380 --> 00:05:35,205 we saved about 110,000 students a little over $10 million. 116 00:05:35,205 --> 00:05:38,330 And so when you look at these students, who 117 00:05:38,330 --> 00:05:40,340 are the kinds of students who literally drop out 118 00:05:40,340 --> 00:05:44,100 of college over the cost of textbooks in a term, 119 00:05:44,100 --> 00:05:47,060 you know, it feels like there's a lot of really positive impact 120 00:05:47,060 --> 00:05:50,220 that's happening, just in terms of cost savings, 121 00:05:50,220 --> 00:05:54,440 which is allowing people to stay in school, which, as we'll talk about some 122 00:05:54,440 --> 00:05:58,850 of the impact research later on, but students whose faculty 123 00:05:58,850 --> 00:06:03,797 assign them OER take more credits than students whose faculty assign 124 00:06:03,797 --> 00:06:04,880 them commercial textbooks. 125 00:06:04,880 --> 00:06:08,480 They actually reinvest the money that they save not buying textbooks, 126 00:06:08,480 --> 00:06:09,356 and buy more credits. 127 00:06:09,356 --> 00:06:11,355 GEORGE SIEMENS: Well, you know, it's interesting 128 00:06:11,355 --> 00:06:14,860 that you just mentioned that part alone, from the cost end, and the-- 129 00:06:14,860 --> 00:06:18,000 who perform better, based on the OER representation, of course. 130 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:22,010 There was a colleague that has done some research looking at one of the biggest 131 00:06:22,010 --> 00:06:25,580 predictors of student dropout is when they buy their textbook, 132 00:06:25,580 --> 00:06:29,250 because in many instances, they have to wait until student loan funds come in. 133 00:06:29,250 --> 00:06:32,781 And if that's even a week after a course starts, they're behind. 134 00:06:32,781 --> 00:06:35,530 For someone who is already a bit at risk, that can amplify things. 135 00:06:35,530 --> 00:06:39,950 So being able to just simply get access to content that's not financially 136 00:06:39,950 --> 00:06:42,720 tied to student loan funds coming in can be a huge factor. 137 00:06:42,720 --> 00:06:47,900 DAVID WILEY: And it's frequently week three, and sometimes week four. 138 00:06:47,900 --> 00:06:52,760 And if you're in a school that's on quarters, where the whole quarter is 139 00:06:52,760 --> 00:06:54,710 eight weeks or nine weeks long, and you're 140 00:06:54,710 --> 00:06:58,070 a third or halfway through the course before you can read the homework 141 00:06:58,070 --> 00:07:00,620 assignments, get easy access to the homework problems 142 00:07:00,620 --> 00:07:03,470 that you're supposed to be doing and turning in, yeah, 143 00:07:03,470 --> 00:07:05,472 the impacts are really significant. 144 00:07:05,472 --> 00:07:07,430 GEORGE SIEMENS: So you're saving students money 145 00:07:07,430 --> 00:07:09,470 with this sort of shared model, giving them 146 00:07:09,470 --> 00:07:15,370 better access to educational materials, and of course, hopefully producing 147 00:07:15,370 --> 00:07:17,120 better-quality learning, as you mentioned, 148 00:07:17,120 --> 00:07:22,232 from students that extensively use OER materials and resources. 149 00:07:22,232 --> 00:07:25,190 I mean, it's certainly a terrific outcome, or a great impact, at least. 150 00:07:25,190 --> 00:07:28,370 Are you finding, at a systems level, because I know some of your projects, 151 00:07:28,370 --> 00:07:31,040 you work not just with a faculty one on one. 152 00:07:31,040 --> 00:07:33,980 You're trying to get that impact across the space 153 00:07:33,980 --> 00:07:36,140 or across the university campus. 154 00:07:36,140 --> 00:07:40,640 How eager are universities to make that cultural change, to think about OERs? 155 00:07:40,640 --> 00:07:42,830 And by OERs, open education resources. 156 00:07:42,830 --> 00:07:44,790 How eager are universities to make that change? 157 00:07:44,790 --> 00:07:46,655 DAVID WILEY: It really-- 158 00:07:46,655 --> 00:07:48,320 this is going to be a generalization. 159 00:07:48,320 --> 00:07:54,447 But I think broadly, it has a lot to do with the kinds of role 160 00:07:54,447 --> 00:07:57,530 that faculty are asked to play, and the types of students that they serve. 161 00:07:57,530 --> 00:08:01,310 So for example, if a faculty member is at an institution where 162 00:08:01,310 --> 00:08:04,610 they're tenured primarily on grant dollars and the prestige 163 00:08:04,610 --> 00:08:09,650 of their research publications, and they just have to not be a terrible teacher, 164 00:08:09,650 --> 00:08:11,510 and they're serving students who are kind 165 00:08:11,510 --> 00:08:14,330 of primarily upper-middle-class kind of students, 166 00:08:14,330 --> 00:08:20,120 then there will be a lot less interest, generally speaking, among young faculty 167 00:08:20,120 --> 00:08:22,010 at an institution like that to take the time 168 00:08:22,010 --> 00:08:25,382 and make the effort involved in making this transition. 169 00:08:25,382 --> 00:08:30,200 But at an institution where faculty have no grant or publication requirements, 170 00:08:30,200 --> 00:08:34,880 they're teaching four or five, sometimes six courses a semester, 171 00:08:34,880 --> 00:08:41,030 they're serving students that they know are coming from these lower-income, 172 00:08:41,030 --> 00:08:45,530 more at-risk kind of backgrounds, those institutions have a huge appetite 173 00:08:45,530 --> 00:08:47,880 for doing anything that they can to-- 174 00:08:47,880 --> 00:08:51,710 again, generally speaking, there are exceptions. 175 00:08:51,710 --> 00:08:55,610 But these are faculty who give their personal cell phone numbers 176 00:08:55,610 --> 00:08:59,960 to their students and say, text me anytime, day or night. 177 00:08:59,960 --> 00:09:01,820 Like, I'll come in on Saturday. 178 00:09:01,820 --> 00:09:04,979 I mean, I have a four-hour review session this Saturday for the exam. 179 00:09:04,979 --> 00:09:06,770 They're just doing everything they possibly 180 00:09:06,770 --> 00:09:09,260 can to try to help these students become successful 181 00:09:09,260 --> 00:09:12,680 and get up and out of the kind of situation 182 00:09:12,680 --> 00:09:15,020 that they find themselves in right now. 183 00:09:15,020 --> 00:09:17,960 There's generally more appetite for engaging in the effort, 184 00:09:17,960 --> 00:09:20,450 for making the time, and even collaborating 185 00:09:20,450 --> 00:09:24,380 among faculty in ways that create what we call OER degrees, 186 00:09:24,380 --> 00:09:28,370 where every single course, from gen ed requirements 187 00:09:28,370 --> 00:09:31,160 through the required courses in the degree program, 188 00:09:31,160 --> 00:09:33,620 every course has at least one, if not many, 189 00:09:33,620 --> 00:09:36,380 sections that use OER in place of commercial textbooks, 190 00:09:36,380 --> 00:09:40,610 so that a student, for example, at Tidewater Community 191 00:09:40,610 --> 00:09:44,719 College in Virginia, who's pursuing their business administration degree, 192 00:09:44,719 --> 00:09:46,760 can go from their first class to their last class 193 00:09:46,760 --> 00:09:48,510 and never even be asked to buy a textbook, 194 00:09:48,510 --> 00:09:51,906 because every course they took used OER. 195 00:09:51,906 --> 00:09:52,406