So I'm here with Larry Cooperman, Associate Dean for Open Courseware at UC, at UC Irvine, and the current president of the Open Education Consortium. Wanted to ask Larry a few questions about how open education resources are being used today and how we may use them in the future. So thanks Larry. >> Well, let me just ask, I think that your focus now is on K12. >> It is, absolutely. >> And so, the open courseware movement, which started at MIT in, in the early 2000s was really focused on the publication of educational content, so we could solve a big problem. What was the problem? You, when you wanted something, you found something, this is just great. Even, you find it on the internet, and it, and it doesn't say anything about licensing or any, anything. All of a sudden, if you took it down and just used it, by default it was copyrighted unless you discovered otherwise, it was copyrighted. So now you say I want to use it and you have to go and you have to ask permission for it. Well, that's first e-mail, asking for permission. If you're in bad luck, they will refer to attorneys and that will mean months and months if not a, a an eternal delay. So, but if you're in good luck, somebody actually responds and then asks some questions. How many people, is, can be password protected, where they're doing it? All of this meant that the ease with which we can provide educational materials was non-existent. Everything was difficult. Everything is pulling teeth or people in the position of turning themselves into unwitting or witting thieves of other people's intellectual property. And it also turns out that people wanted to publish their materials. [LAUGH] They wanted to say this is an interesting thing that I've done and they wanted to just get credit for it, some attribution but that was usually about it. So, using Creative Commons licenses that, that permit this by default that all rights are rights of reuse are automatic with this. You can download, do what you like with it, modify it usually. The the world started to change, and because MIT started it, it got a lot of attention. And soon MIT researchers would travel around the world and instead of people asking about their research, they're asking about open courseware. So, the same problem exists of course for K12, both in terms of the cost of textbooks, the costs of the materials that we use, the educational resources, but also the difficulty of actually finding something. The good news is that, now fast forward to 2014 and that, there's just millions of pieces of content for every educational level that are Creative Commons licensed. People now understand it a little bit better, they simply mark their paper, their PDF, their Word document, their video with something that says CC by, and all of a sudden, you're required to attribute it to the original author but you've got. You've got something in, that you can use immediately without asking permission. No emails, none of the pain that we used to have. >> Mm-hm. Can you, I know you're a formal, former K12 teacher. Do you have some advice for K12 teachers out there trying to use, find these resources or use these resources in the most effective ways in their classes? Well it, it's actually there's a lot of ways to find things. So you could use, Google's advance search allows you to say, give me only materials that are Creative Commons licensed. Flickr has the same capabilities. So you have these large websites now that have incorporated the idea of, of open educational resources into their DNA. So it's actually very easy to find. I think the problem will be that you find too much, not too little. >> Mm-hm. >> And so some organizations have developed to actually curate materials. Curriki.org OER Commons a number of organizations like this that have focused in the K12 space to provide educational materials to that audience all of it would be Creative Commons licensed. And another place to look would be Me, the Merlot Repository, merlot.org, which is a prod, project of the California State University. >> Mm-hm. >> Where do you see the future going for K12 teachers in using educational resources especially, as you talked about, some of the challenges that K12 teachers are facing? >> Right. >> Cost of textbooks, finding materials, finding too many materials, sort of where do you see the future going? >> Well, I, I'd go back to something that happened to me when I was a teacher a long time ago not actually in my district but in another district. In Oakland, California when the school board actually decided not to accept any of the permissible, the adopted textbooks at the state level. Meaning that no funds were flowing through the state for textbook purchases. And so the teachers in social studies, this was in social studies from the fourth to the eighth grade level, something like that. And they had to actually begin to build their own textbooks and it was a terrible thing. I mean, but on the other hand, social studies teachers would often say good social studies teachers should be doing this activity anyway. They should be actually looking for what's out there, not relying just on the regurgitation of textbook materials for their teaching, but rather, getting students engaged with primary source materials, commentaries, and so forth. Making it all come to life a little bit better. So, this is now the kind of thing that becomes easier, both easier to do so it's actually corresponds to good practice by classroom teachers who are looking for it. >> Mm-hm. >> Absolutely. Yeah, and how did you if teachers want to get involved, not only in using the resources, but actually contributing resources maybe you could talk a little bit about how they can get involved and even how you initially got involved and, and sort of what some of these organizations, particularly the Open Education Consortium, are doing for teachers today. >> Right. Well we've been well we have a, a general mission that includes K12. We've been primarily focused on higher education which is a big gap that everyone is very aware of. So of course, we would accept school districts that wanted to join and but here is what I think is the future for teachers. So you know, I used to be an English teacher. So we would have, you know, English at the, at the high school level of 9th grade English, 10th grade English, and we'd have the general college tracks. And the, which would be the honors track. >> Mm-hm. >> Then what we'd call 10 A, and then there would be the middle group, that was accepted for UC credit, and that would be 10 B. And then sort of a lower group 10 C, that students who are really struggling in it. And at every grade level so there's 11 A, B, C and so forth on, on, on through AP English. So the, the issue is, every one of us was working inside of our four walls. And we've always, in the best, you know schools of education, they always talk about the importance of actually both observing other teachers but also collaborating with other teachers. The technology now exists for massive communities of teachers to actually work together. Like, what is a great course in English that's designed for learners of English, that's designed for students who are struggling, that's designed for students in danger of, of dropping out. Or at the other level, what should we be doing at the advanced placement level? >> Mm-hm. >> And it can be, all of it I think at every level is about the acceleration of learning. But in order to design the best possible courses for very specific target groups you really need hundreds if not thousands of teachers casting their eyeballs on what they're doing and commenting in communities about this. That possibility now exists. The same process we have for MOOCs can be something where, I know of one project in which the purpose of the MOOC is create a course. And that's what we can be doing, organizing these communities like that, so that they're actively engaged in the actually the development of the course. And then, you'll start to see, well, why do we need the textbook? >> Yeah. Because, it's, now we've got a living thing, it's going to be openly licensed, you can change it classroom to classroom, school to school, district to district, state to state. You can do what you need with it because you're starting with the idea of openness and the idea of massive communities. Being part of that is very exciting and I think it's the future of educational production, of production of educational content and of a new form of instruction as well. That's great. I love that this, this mission to be able to, to encourage teachers to collaborate with one another and really build together. And I think that has a real international dimension to it as well. And, you know, how do you see that fitting in, or, is, are these the kinds of resources and collections and communities that countries that don't have access to this kind of material or experts could really capitalize on? >> Right there's even small pilots, for example, in Colombia, there's the Fundacion Charisma and they are doing a project with just about 12 teachers at an, at an elementary school, in which they're, all of a sudden, all the educational content is part of co-creation. So just at that level, at the school level, you're breaking down the walls and you're, and everyone has to think now, what's the best way to teach? because that's where the contents derive from. It's that it all is part of instruction. It's not just something you read at home or something like that. So these kinds of projects absolutely have an international scale and the ability, of course, for teachers to collaborate across cultures, across borders and so forth, and that was very exciting. >> That's really exciting. And thank you so much for taking the time today- >> Thank you, Melissa. >> To answer a few questions, and really help folks get excited and passionate about the Open Education Movement. >> My pleasure, thank you.
