Yeah, fine. Good afternoon everyone. My name
is Anita Walz. I am the open Education, Copyright,
and Scholarly Communications Librarian here at Virginia Tech and I
am really, really excited to welcome you to Open
Education Week. We have several more events this week
that you can participate in. Uh, if you
have a copy of this handout or you have access
to our website, you'll know that there is a
project showcase lightning round um, session coming up at
2 15. there's also a session tomorrow morning at
905 by my colleague, two colleagues of mine on
sharing original learning materials called that I may share.
So if you're from Virginia Tech, you know,
that's like that. I may serve. I like
that a lot. Um, so I'm pleased to
have all of you here. We have quite a
few people who are also on online and participating remotely
. So hello to you. I believe that you
are all muted at this point. However, if
you have questions, please raise your hand, please
use the chat box and we'd like to open up
your lines during the Q and A. So that
we can hear you and you can hear us.
Um if you cannot hear, please also let us
know that. So uh my supervisor and colleague of
Professor Gail Mcmillan is going to introduce our speaker today
. Awesome. Doesn't okay yeah, thank you.
Need to um Julie Speer. The Associate Dean for
Research and Informatics was going to do this introduction,
she would do much better job of it I'm sure
, but just got young Children and was called away
at the last minute so I'm introducing Robert in her
place. So Dr Robert, Biswas-Diener is highly
sought after speaker not just on education, open education
but on topics of courage, happiness, strengths,
wellbeing and culture. His research interests in income and
happiness, culture and happiness and positive psychology have led
him to areas such as India, Greenland, Israel,
Kenya and Spain. He holds a PhD from the
University of Tromso in Norway and is author of more
than 50 academic publications including the courage quotient and the
upside of your dark side. He is currently co
editing a book entitled Open the philosophy and practices that
are revolutionizing science and education. It's with Ubiquity Press
, which is interesting. We're just starting to look
at Ubiquity Press here at Virginia Tech. He's a
senior editor of Nova, open education Resource, providing
free materials to students and instructors of psychology. Each
year, Nova saves students over $1 million dollars in
textbook costs. He currently lives in Portland Oregon and
is joined here today by several members of his family
. Perhaps he'll introduce us to. Right? Yeah
. Mhm. Thank you so much for joining me
today. It means the world to me that you
are willing to spend a little bit of your time
with me. So I appreciate it. Thank you
for all of those who are joining us remotely as
well. I appreciate your time equally as much.
I would like to start by apologizing about my face
. Um when I teach at Portland State University,
as I occasionally do in my capacity as a part
time instructor of psychology, my students tell me that
I have a mean face. Um and I usually
say, shut up! I uh it's just the
face I was born with. I want you to
know that that I'm actually a nice person. I
totally am open to to your skepticism as to your
questions. I'm friendly and if I arch my eyebrows
, it simply means I'm thinking or I'm highly engaged
. So know that ahead of time. I'm not
mad at you. I like you. I will
be speaking about Open today. Open as a movement
as I think of it. I will be talking
to you a little bit about the definitions of open
, different aspects of open. I'll be talking to
you about some of the most popular open uh practices
and infrastructure about open policy. I'll be giving you
specific examples of open, drawn largely from my own
field of psychology, and I will drop down into
a particular open educational resource at the tail end of
my presentation and that will be nova the project for
which I do serve as senior editor, notably one
of the things I will not be doing is opening
my discussion on Open with a plea for saving students
money. Now, I believe that students are the
epicenter of higher education. I believe that all of
this, everything we do, from faculty to staff
, from curriculum development, to the creation of syllabi
and the delivery of education is in the service of
students. I believe, the more effectively we can
deliver that, the more pedagogical sophisticated we can do
that, and the less expensively we can do that
basically, the better. Unfortunately, students don't make
a lot of the critical decisions regarding the learning that
happens to them, not with them, but to
them. Um and so I am going to opt
for making a far more overtly to instructors who largely
act as gatekeepers for most of open practices and policies
. Like to start, I'm telling you a little
bit about open education resources and I'd like to start
with a little story from When I was a child
, I grew up in an academic household, my
parents, both of whom are faculty members uh during
the longest portion of their careers at University of Illinois
. Uh, they loved books as many academics do
. And our home had a beautiful library in my
youth and it was filled with leather bound volumes and
with not one but two sets of encyclopedias. We
had the complete encyclopedia Britannica as well as the Complete
World Book. And I would love as a child
going up by myself in the library and just pulling
random volumes off the shelf and letting them fall open
where they may and just learning about things like there's
something called the Panama Canal. There's amazing feat of
engineering. There's this guy called robert e lee.
Just these books were just shock, full of fascinating
facts in a size and language that even at my
age I could digest very handily. I credit these
encyclopedias in many ways with stoking the natural curiosity I
had as a child and setting me ultimately on my
career path towards towards scholarship really. But I think
that it's important to reflect on the fact that I
had a number of privileges that are not shared by
many other people. I mean the fact that we
owned two sets of encyclopedias in the home uh is
I think testament in in and of itself to the
fact that that I was already privileged over many other
people. So wouldn't it be nice in the modern
era and now in my adulthood, if everyone could
have an encyclopedia and of course we do in fact
live in uh in an era where encyclopedia is completely
and freely available. We know it is Wikipedia.
It's the online free encyclopedia and it is an example
of an open education resource. I start with it
in part because it is perhaps the most famous example
in the world of Open Educational Resource. It is
free but it is not without its problems and I
am aware of that and I want to hold it
out to you knowing that um when I ran this
by some of my colleagues this presentation, they said
don't start with Wikipedia because people are worried about the
accuracy of Wikipedia. I believe that there are that
there are various reasons to be skeptical of Wikipedia recently
. There's been a lot of talk about the fact
that many of the content contributors to Wikipedia are overwhelmingly
male and there might be biases associated with that self
selection. I believe that popular theories might get longer
column inches than are more sophisticated, more difficult to
explain or more arcane theories. So I think that
there are probably some biases built into Wikipedia, but
I would argue that that's not a reason to dismiss
Wikipedia specifically or open education. Generally, I would
argue that that's a rationale for improving it. And
I will in fact speak later on about a number
of initiatives designed at improving the quality of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a good example of two things. 1st
. open education resources, that is part of the
open movement has to do with creating materials that are
available to all. It is also a good example
of one element of the word open, which is
free, Free to the point of zero cost.
And I think that's kind of cool. But I
also want to dis abuse those of you who think
that open is simply about money. That that is
the end of the line. In terms of what
open means. It is not just about free resources
, it's about share a bowl and reusable and remix
herbal resources more on that later. So while Wikipedia
is a nice entree, it would be nice to
look at some other things. So I'd like to
give you an example of open publishing. We're going
to start with open science and then go to open
publishing. There are also open scientific practices. So
right now in science, many researchers have proprietary research
protocols. They allude to what they have done with
their research participants but they do not publish the specific
questionnaire they gave the specific prime ng they gave um
, in some cases they describe it but they do
not publish it in its entirety. I think that
this potentially holds back science because it leads to a
lack of identical replication efforts. And it also is
problematic in that we're just not exactly 100 sure what's
going on and we don't have the opportunity to comment
to our colleagues about potential ways to improve research methodology
. So the more open we can make the scientific
process itself. And I think open data would be
a perfect example of that. Increasingly, at least
in my field of psychology, we are really pushing
for more open data sets. The Association for Psychological
Science A PS now has badges that they give to
register data sets that says, hey, if you
want to get into the dataset and you want to
conduct these exact same analyses yourself, you're welcome to
. I think that this is probably a good thing
on the whole in that it really promotes a sense
of transparency among scientists. Probably cuts down in many
ways on academic dishonesty in the most egregious cases.
But it also allows uh, just for for double
checking for, for small errors, allows for different
types of of decision points that are critical to whether
things turn out to be significant or non significant.
I believe ultimately these kind of open science practices are
part and parcel of improving the quality of science.
And that's very different notion than than the Wikipedia idea
of let's just make this material free. Scientists aren't
being charged for this stuff anyway. This isn't about
removing costs, this is about removing barriers. And
that's the other really important element to the open movement
. The more transparent and the more share a ble
concepts, protocols, ideas and resources are, the
more we will be able to improve them. So
open is about lowering the cost of education. But
I believe fundamentally it's about improving the quality of education
. And I think actually that second part is the
more important part of the two um open publishing you
can see because you've done what all people do and
you've spent some time reading instead of instead of listening
to me. Um Open publishing is another element obviously
in academia and the way things currently stand, people
write for publication, but we publish in private journals
that hide most of our academic publications, most of
our research and theory behind pay walls, which are
accessible largely to us to our colleagues um somewhat to
our students, but not always and less so to
the public and especially the taxpayers who ultimately and in
most cases fund are very research. So, open
publishing is an alternative to the existing publishing system.
I'd like to give you an example of it from
my field. There's a journal called The International Journal
of Well Being. I study subjective well being.
Um that is happiness and I happen to be lucky
. I feel that there is a journal that is
completely open source journal. Anyone can sign on or
not sign on. You don't even have to have
a user account and pull down PDFs of any article
ever published in the International Journal of Well Being,
in all fairness, the International Journal of Well Being
, which is a sponsored project from universities in the
United States and in New Zealand. Um it's is
not the most prestigious journal in the world. I
want to be honest about that. If I am
looking for tenure, for example, um This probably
isn't my first bet for social or personality psychology,
my particular field. Um but if I'm looking to
make an impact, if I'm looking for people to
actually read my work and here I would argue that
that's a great reason to write something is that you
want readers. Um I do think that International Journal
of Well Being is a good bet. So let
me give you an example in the second issue of
I. J. W. It's been around for
about five years now. I wanted to write about
positive psychological practices in the Montessori school system. I
focused especially on self determination theory and the way that
Montessori may promote self determination and young kids. It
was largely a theoretical article. It allowed me some
linguistic daring do that is I was able to drop
in uh some interviews with Montessori teachers, a little
bit of Maria Montessori biography. Some things that I
might not otherwise have been able to do in a
traditional journal. And it went through the peer review
process same as as any standard academic journal. And
then five years later I followed up with them and
I said I just want to find out from you
all if you've been tracking the statistics, how did
my article do however you come about understanding its performance
? They said, well the pdf of your article
has been downloaded 8000 times in the last five years
I think. That's pretty good. I don't know
even when I publish occasionally as I do in a
more prestigious journal, How many people are actually reading
it? But here I know that 8000 people around
the globe took the time to download this article now
. I don't know what they did with it.
I don't know if they were using it for scratch
paper or what. Um so we can't be totally
certain, but I do know that the removal of
the paywall, the removal of any kind of barrier
to accessing it allowed it to be more shareable.
In one place. It was very heavily shared was
within the montessori school system. I don't believe that
that otherwise would have been possible um in in the
traditional academic setting. So this is an example of
an alternative form of publishing, open publishing. Um
and again, a good example of sharing and not
just economically free. When we talk about open,
we largely talk about the five ars of open,
the five different elements of of what open allows you
to do. It is retain redistribute, reuse,
revise and remix. If you were to create an
open material, whether that was an open course syllabus
, an open activity for a class, uh an
open chapter on your particular area of expertise, you
would retain the rights to that material. I think
that that's kind of a cool thing. You would
retain what you yourself created. Anyone who wanted to
use it or share it would have to credit you
back, but you're welcome to share it anytime you
want. I don't know if you've ever been in
a position where you've published something that became copyrighted and
you didn't own the copyright. But it seems,
I think strange and even awkward to go to a
publisher and ask permission to do something like photocopy something
you yourself wrote that would never be in existence if
it weren't for you or you have students in a
class that you want to read what you wrote,
but you have to ask permission for them to photocopy
it. And so I think that the idea that
you could retain control is actually fundamental and wonderful for
the creators of what otherwise is thought of his intellectual
property. You can redistribute it how you want it
if you want a photocopy it, if you want
to sing it as a song, If you want
to publish it as an e book, if you
want 1000 flyers to be printed up, you can
do it, you can do anything you want with
it. You can also allow others to to share
it in a like minded way. Again, they
were going to credit you, you're always going to
be credited with original authorship, but they are going
to be able to reuse it in the ways they
see fit. That is if they want to use
it to teach a class great. But if they
want to give it, um, for example,
uh, to a client, if they're a psychotherapist
, you say, oh, well, this is
for educational purposes. But I've never said that this
chapter on Freudian psychology could be used, uh,
for some other reason, that seems commercial, right
? Because they're paying you as a then the client
therapist relationship. But really what you're saying is is
you all can reuse it just credit me as the
original author, but we use it how you want
without having to ask me permission. Every single time
I was first introduced to this idea by eric Drucker
, who's an article who is an artist who many
of you probably know, but don't know, you
know, he does a lot of new yorker uh
covers, he's a painter and he's done some graphic
novels and I saw him speak one time and just
before he was leaving, he almost casually said,
so by the way, you can use any of
my work in any way you want anytime you want
, however you want, you can make money off
it. I don't care, just do whatever you
want. All you have to do is credit me
. No, and I thought that is a really
revolutionary thing. I can't believe my ears that you
would allow people to reuse things in this way.
He said, well, of course I created now
. It's out in the world. And if you
think you can do better than I can with it
, if you think you can make more money than
I can with it, why can't we both make
money? It's not like somehow the money you're making
is going to pull away from the money I'm making
with it. Unless you think that your market and
my market is the exact same market and it's not
. And I just thought, I didn't know if
I agreed with that or disagreed with it, but
it was unusual enough, even radical enough that it
started my wheels spinning and they spun right into the
last to ours, revising and remixing when I speak
with people in higher education. And I tell them
, hey, there's this great thing called open,
We want to remove barriers. We want to give
better materials to students who want to give better pedagogy
to instructors. They basically give me the thumbs up
until it comes to these, I say. And
when you create things, other people might revise it
or they might totally remix it and suddenly you can
hear the brakes screeching to a halt and people are
like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what
do you mean? People are going to revise my
work after all, I am the king of this
50. Um, I am the expert in my
own field. Who is it that has the requisite
knowledge, the literary acumen, the scientific widely nous
that I have that could possibly have the authority to
revise my work. And I would argue here nearly
anyone that's again a bit of a radical idea for
most people. So let me just show you an
example of how it's actually done because what people are
worried about is not what actually manifests. If I
write, let's say a chapter for a psychology textbook
about the classic Ash experiment on conformity. And if
any of you don't know that, I'll just teach
it to you very quickly. Uh many decades ago
, Solomon Ash brought folks into the lab. Most
of these people were not true research participants, they
were confederates working with the researcher. One of them
was an actual research participant. And they went down
the line showing a series of lines some longer,
some shorter and said, which is longer. And
the confederates erroneously labeled the short line is longer defying
obvious fact and observation until you get down to this
one poor soul, this this final person who,
who's the real research participant. And they look at
the short line and kind of shrug and say,
well, I guess it's longer. Um, and
this is a study on conformity. I'm not,
I'm just teaching you the broad strokes, but let's
say I wanted to write a textbook that would teach
that to students. Yeah, and I want to
teach them about a replication of it. And I
say, hey, yeah, a conceptual replication of
Ashes research might involve both male and female students.
Ashes only had male students in the original. So
in a conceptual replication, we might want to add
females to see if that generalizes. And instead of
doing the lines longer and shorter, let's do something
different. In our replication of the research. We're
going to have participants who misidentify a cat is actually
being a dog and that's what I write as the
example in my research all well and good. I
think that's quite fine. But let's say that you
at Virginia Tech or any other school. So you
know what? That's just a weird example. I
just don't like the idea that that's the best example
of conformity that you get 10 people misidentifying a cat
saying no, no, that's clearly a dog and
I just belies credibility to me. It's just a
little too weird. What I would like to do
is drop in a different example myself. That's an
example of a revision right now with the traditional textbook
, you cannot do that. You have to do
it in the actual class itself. And typically what
an instructor would do is say, well, what
you read in the textbook was this. But what
I really think is this new act as a curator
of knowledge in that capacity. But I think that
it's probably okay to just drop in a new example
and open resources allow you to do that. You
can drop in an open example that says, let's
not go for really, really weird examples. Let's
see if Yeah. Mhm. Let's say what we
really want to do is have participants misidentify a photo
of the president. That seems a little bit better
than the dog and cat example because no one would
really misidentify a dog in a can, but it
seems more believable that people could misidentify the president and
you want to drop that in this example, you
can do that. You don't have to write and
ask anyone's permission to do it. It just works
for you. Yeah. Here is an even better
way I think to do it. Uh This is
a research methods in psychology textbook that is open licensed
. That is you. If you happen to teach
research methods, go ahead and sign this to your
students right now, they won't pay a dime.
It was originally written by paul price but it was
written as are many textbooks for an american audience.
That means we're going to hear about Obama and Bush
, we're going to hear about baseball and basketball,
we're going to hear about 9, 11, we're
going to hear about all these kind of very American
types of things. But people in Canada who want
to use this research methods book. I think that
would be kind of cool if there were some Canadian
examples. Instead of talking about 1976, the bicentennial
of America, they could talk about 1967, the
100th anniversary of Canada. They can talk about Trudeau
instead of Obama, they can talk about hockey instead
of basketball. They can talk about things that Canadians
might relate to more than simply american culture. And
so uh Raji Janjalani who lives in british Columbia and
a colleague chungcheong, both of them got together and
simply internationalized this volume. They converted everything from the
english system of measurement into the metric system. They
converted the american examples into Canadian examples and they didn't
have to ask anyone's permission to do it. Now
. If you go and ask paul Price. Well
, what do you think about this? I think
he'd probably say great. I just maximized my impact
. Now, maybe twice as many people are using
my book or people are liking my book even better
because it has a local flavor that helps engage them
better, pedagogic li it's superior than what might otherwise
be feel free when we get to the Q and
A to ask questions about this or anything about revising
or remixing because I know it is one of the
most problematic elements for people I'm going to give you
just also one more example right now I'm editing volume
on open practices. The book itself will be open
that is downloadable and freely available. And I'm getting
chapters in from these authors all around the world and
I just had a chapter come in and I think
he's probably okay with me telling you his name from
Wayne, Macintosh and New Zealand. And I gave
him some editorial feedback. I said Wayne, Wouldn't
it be nice for our readers if you rearrange the
order of some of these examples and what he said
to me is go ahead, go ahead and rewrite
my chapter in the way that you think it will
affect your readers. I'm not the editor, so
I don't know what your editorial vision is. I
don't know what you think is going to be the
most engaging to your readers. I do know what
I'm talking about. Don't change my content Substantively but
change my style cosmetically all you want and I trust
you to do that. I am not so prideful
of every semi colon and clause in my work that
I can't allow a change in that. And I
said as a courtesy, do you want me to
send the revision back to you? Nope. Go
for it. It is open licensed. Feel free
to to remix this content and the way that is
going to improve it for your purposes. And a
lot of people would worry, won't that reflect poorly
on my reputation. So I do think there is
a little bit of trust involved in the open movement
. Wayne has to think that as an editor,
I want a good product. It's the same trust
that you put in the pilot of your airplanes,
right? That guy or that woman also wants to
live. You have to trust that they want to
get home every bit as much as you do,
right, That they're not, they don't need to
be, they don't need to be altruistic in their
flying. They can be selfish and that's good enough
because you will also benefit from that selfishness. one
of the most common questions I get about open materials
is the idea of money, you heard me say
in the case of eric Drucker, the artist,
he said, go ahead and sell my artwork.
Even now, that is very off putting to purveyors
of intellectual property for any of us who have toiled
away for our careers to carve out our corner of
academic thought um with which we are principally known as
the expert. The idea that someone else would take
our ideas and sell it is anathema uh, to
, to our system of commerce, to our understanding
of expertise. Um it just in many ways is
offensive and I completely get that. Um so what
I usually say in response is well, are you
making so much money off your intellectual property anyway,
and if you are then it's probably a legitimate concern
and if you're not probably quit worrying about it,
but I do think that there's just sort of a
fear that someone else might cash in and make millions
millions of dollars like scrooge Mcduck, just be swimming
in their piles of gold they made off of your
intellectual property. And it would just frankly feel icky
, like how could you spend so long writing something
and then have someone else profit off it? Well
, you're already doing that, that is what the
academic system is. Like if you ever published in
a journal, someone else's profiting off your work,
it's built into our system. The people who are
profiting off your work more than any other person is
academic publishers. Academic publishers are making more money collectively
off of people who publish academic work than any individual
academic. No, single academic has made as much
as a publisher now. It's true. They're they're
taking from so many different people, they're sort of
making a little bit off of all of us and
they're providing a service legitimately. I understand that,
but I want to disabuse you of any kind of
worry that someone might profit off your work because they
already are. I would say if you want to
profit off your work, just go ahead and start
trying to profit off it yourself. Instead of trying
to put barriers up to other people profiting off it
, putting up barriers to other people profiting off,
it is not going to make you a profit.
Yeah, this is important. There is a license
in place. The creative commons license that provides the
fundamental infrastructure for how open materials are created, used
, distributed, revised, sold, etcetera. Creative
Commons was an attempt to answer intellectual copyright, intellectual
copyright serves many good purposes. I'm not here to
sort of throw copyright out just in the same way
, I wouldn't want you to throw Wikipedia out instead
. I'd want to improve copyright just as we want
to improve Wikipedia and what creative comments has done is
created an alternative licensure that allows you to choose one
of six different licenses. These six different licenses go
from the least restrictive to the most restrictive, the
most restrictive you can see in the lower right hand
corner. It is a creative commons license that requires
that anyone who use your work for any reason must
make attribution to you. That is they must say
who it is by. So you see that little
B. Y. That's attribution. They cannot use
it commercially. You see the dollar sign crossed up
. They can never use your work commercially. That's
how you can protect yourself against profiteers if that's important
to you and they cannot distribute it. But but
they can they can use it in the upper left
hand corner. You have the least restrictive license.
They can do anything they want with it so long
as they provide attribution back to the original source.
And then you have every variation in between. So
I think this is a great tool for empowerment for
people who want to create materials that are of high
quality but want them to be open, want them
to be remove obstacles to sharing, because this allows
you to choose the amount of sharing or the method
of sharing or the ways of shared with which you
yourself are comfortable. If you want to stop people
from doing any commercial use of your work, you
have the tool to do so if you are not
that invested in this particular material and you want it
to be shared as widely as possible, you have
the tool for making exactly that happened. I'd also
like to talk just a tiny bit about Andrew Gaggi
. This is a word that I've heard relatively recent
recently that I'm pretty charmed by. So we all
know pedagogy but of course the root of the word
pedagogy pedal has to do with instructing Children. But
in higher education we are instructing adults and that means
that the Androgel G must defer necessarily from pedagogy.
The idea of pedagogy is what we know is the
sage on the stage. I do a lot of
lecturing, I am the font of knowledge and I
am going to through my curation inside this wonderful mental
hopper tell you only the most important things for you
to know because I know what's best for you.
That's how we treat Children. Andrew koji is the
idea that the learner can also be a participant in
his or her own learning. That is you're empowering
learners as adults to act like adults and participate as
equal partners. That's why you sometimes hear the phrase
instead of the Sage on the stage, the guide
on the side. Um and people who have this
mentality work far more to do engaging classroom discussion.
This is something that's always happened um in the humanities
in terms of seminars, but in terms of large
classes, um intro psychology for example, it's often
been a lecture style course. So, so really
what I think open does is it allows us to
share what we can call pedagogy, or if you
like the word Andrew Gaggi, we can share techniques
for improving education, making sure that education is a
little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more engaging
and ultimately more effective. Right now. There are
a few barriers to people sharing what they do.
Young faculty members pre tenure sometimes worry that that if
they come up with a great classroom demonstration of a
particular phenomenon or concept, they don't want to give
it out because this is one of the reasons why
they're getting such high teaching recommendations. If they give
it to their tenured peers and raise their teaching recommendations
, well then where's their unique contribution? I would
argue their unique contribution isn't coming up with the wonderful
uh demonstration to begin with. And you only harm
students by clinging to it. That is harm all
students and you help students widely if you're willing to
share it. Mhm. A few examples of Andrew
Gaggi are the Wikipedia initiative. This is something that
the Association for Psychological Science took on. Um And
it it partnered with Wikipedia and A. P.
S. Said look, we don't love what you've
done with the field of psychology. We think that
that while there's some pretty robust and decent articles,
we also think that there are a number of articles
on a number of psychological concepts which need to be
shored up, We'd like to see improved. And
we believe that we the experts, the contents experts
, psychologists are probably the best able to do this
. And we would like to recruit our own students
in this process if we can engage our students and
the idea that they can get into Wikipedia and take
the information they're learning right now in class and modify
a Wikipedia article to improve that article. So they
are going to improve the overall quality of learning educational
resources for all. And it's what I would call
a legacy assignment. That is, it is not
a disposable assignment. It's not writing a paper.
The only your instructor will read. You know,
you have an end of one in terms of leadership
and you know that as soon as they're done,
marking it up and giving it back to you,
you're going to recycle it. You'll never, ever
look at it again unless you try and pass it
off to another instructor in another class later on for
credit. But basically there is an assumption that this
is just disposable information with Wikipedia. It's public information
and it endures. And I think that students feel
the weight of that a little bit more. Here
is a student from North uh, from Northeastern University
who says I was encouraged by more than the grade
. I wanted to contribute to something long lasting and
something bigger than myself. And here we have a
very adult type of assignment. I know an instructor
in Minnesota who was teaching a history of psychology course
, took her her class to a local, um
, it was a museum, but it used to
be an asylum for the treatment of mental disorders and
she had them really look at the museum and then
get into the state archives and pull up information about
the history of this building that had never been discovered
before. And because of the information, the students
in this class found, the museum actually created an
entirely new display. And I think that that's kind
of cool. These students thought, wow. Now
in a museum somewhere, there is an actual display
that we created through our own knowledge. And does
that teach the history of psychology you bet. But
it does it in a very adult way using legacy
assignments. The reason we know about these is because
they are made public. The assignments that most of
you, given your classrooms are not made public in
a widely shareable way. But now that you know
about this history of psychology assignment, maybe you see
some modification of that that might be appropriate to something
that you're doing, whether in psychology or another field
. So the more we are sharing our ideas for
teaching and engaging students, I think the better off
both faculty and students are. Now, let's get
to the pesky problem of textbooks. This is going
to be my introduction to nova, the open Educational
Resource upon which I work most closely. This is
the first of several sides of student data. I'll
show you this was taken from about 90 students at
Community College. So two year institution in Oregon and
the single question was, I have been unable to
afford textbooks for some courses. 40 of the students
said I could not afford it, not, I
chose not to buy it. Not. I complained
that it was too expensive, but I could not
afford it. If you would like a little bit
of data from closer to home In a recent sample
of Virginia Tech University students, 300 students. The
expected amount That VT you students would spend on textbooks
and one semester is$600. So go and ask
300 students as was done here on this campus.
How much did you actually spend? You would expect
that number to be 600. It was$325.
They're buying roughly half of their textbooks. I know
here on campus this week, the slogan around Open
education week has been because you don't want students to
have to get a second job just to be able
to afford their textbooks. Well, don't worry because
they're not getting a second job. It's way easier
to just not by the textbook. And I think
that's problematic if, if it's not just the textbook
, but all the ancillary materials that go with it
, the course where and the assignments and the computer
codes and all those things that, that would be
materials that they would otherwise be required for of course
. Um, I think this is happening at an
alarming rate at two year institutions and a four year
institutions. Again, this is from Jamaica to community
College in Oregon. If I had a choice between
a course that used open materials versus one that did
not, I would select the course that had open
materials. The overwhelming majority said, I strongly agree
. If you combine the people who somewhat agreed and
the people who strongly agreed, you see a preference
in students saying I want open materials by and large
. The only people who are saying I don't want
open materials. Our instructors and the instructors have very
legitimate reasons for saying that switching textbooks is a pain
. I get it. You have to have different
test banks, you have to have different power points
, You're doing different lectures, you have to learn
a different set of materials, you have to put
in new book orders forms with the school bookstore.
It is a hassle for people who already are committed
workers and working hard but students overwhelmingly want cheaper yet
still high quality materials. And this is where Nova
comes in. I'm going to tell you about nova
a little bit and I want to for warn you
that it's going to sound like a sales pitch because
I'm gonna tell you some awesome stuff about Nova.
I'm going to tell you how great nova is,
how proud I am of nova. How if you
do anything with psychology, if you haven't walked by
the psych department on your camp is you should probably
use Nova and it might sound sales e to you
. But I want you to remember this one thing
I have nothing to sell. We don't make any
money at nova. There's no cost associated it.
It's all free. So all I'm doing instead of
trying to sell you on Nova is trying to give
you nova and I would just simply ask, will
you take it or not? So what is nobody
nova? Um is a psychologist funded psychologist created and
it is a tool for teaching and learning psychology for
free. We created an online platform that has essentially
free textbooks in psychology. You can download them,
you can share them with your students. You never
have to ask our permission. You can modify them
if you want. You can change the order.
You can uh do all sorts of things with them
. We also have a blog. We have teachers
writing for us sharing their best ideas from their classroom
. What makes them passionate. What clicks with their
students? We have ancillary materials are textbooks are fully
supported by power points by test banks by an instructor's
manual, the instructor's manual spearheaded by the former president
of the Society for Teaching and Learning of Psychology.
So we look heavily at the science of teaching and
Learning when creating best practices for our power points and
our instructor's manual materials. Again, all of its
for free, we just want to give it away
and we do give it away after an initial hurdle
of resistance from people. We have made pretty good
strides. So in preparation for this particular talk,
I looked at the last seven days at Noma.
Um and we have people requesting our test bank and
when they request our test bank, we asked them
a couple questions. What do you want the test
bank for? Is that class? Is nobody your
primary textbook? And how many students are there in
that class? If you look at the last seven
days and you figure, let's just call it$50
per textbook and savings. You you can come up
with all sorts of metrics. You know, some
textbooks are more than$200. But what about people
who rent electronic versions? So I'm just going to
give it an even number$50 50 per student in
the last seven days. Nobody has saved students$15,000
. And that's a pretty typical week for us.
I think that's kind of cool. That's the proud
part. Here's what noble looks like when you get
on. We created a platform by which you can
look at 100 different learning modules and we have a
dragon drop system. You can see over on the
right hand portion, there's sort of a blank part
of the screen and on the left is where all
the different teaching modules are. You just drag it
with your cursor anything you want, drag it over
to the right and boom, it's in your textbook
. You want to change the title? Just type
it in. You want to rearrange the order of
the modules, go for it. You can see
that there is already a module on the right called
the psycho physiological methods in neuroscience. Yes, we
have a module on that. We're dragging over right
now. A module on research design. If I
want to change the order of those, I simply
drag and drop them where it says new textbook at
the top. I can type in any title.
I want Robert Psych 101 textbook for example, can
brand in any particular way I want. We have
100 different modules, all of which are expert written
that cover every area of psychology. We have very
typical modules, things like research design, that you
would expect in almost any psychology course, we have
very up to date ones, the replication crisis in
psychology that has been edited and revised as recently as
this week to capture publications that have come out as
recently as last week. That's how up to date
it is. Um we have lesser used but very
interesting corners of psychology covered like the biochemistry of Love
. If that's not something you know about, feel
free to get a nova account and read the biochemistry
of love, make yourself an expert. It's pretty
interesting. Yeah, So just a few things about
no better glance. We have 100 learning modules written
by 120 different psychologists from all over the world,
from everywhere from two year Ecologist to Harvard. We've
got the entire range. Um it is learning management
system and screen reader compatible. We really do try
and make accessibility a priority of ours. It's something
that we're concerned about. We have everything supported with
ancillary materials, We have print versions available, uh
there's a photograph of our print version so you can
get a soft cover print version of what is comparable
to an introductory to psychology textbook. Are book you
do have to pay for, I have to admit
because it costs money to print, it's$12,
so if you want a$12 book, there you
go. Um currently we have about 30,000 users that
that grows by about 10,000 per term um especially is
growing in the two year institution, although we've been
formally adopted by by a number of four year institutions
as well as well as uh as uh sort of
an ad hoc material by individual instructors within departments.
Um At some schools we save students six figures a
year just at that institution alone, and that's how
we measure our impact. We want adoption desperately because
every dollar saved we think is making the world a
better place. So the more dollars we save,
the better it is and that's our incentive for making
high quality materials. So one of the very first
things we did in our bid to make high quality
materials is we recruited content experts and here I'm saying
expert with a capital E. When we wanted someone
to write about eyewitness testimony, we got Elizabeth Loftus
, the world's foremost authority in eyewitness testimony. When
we want someone to write about self control. We
went and got Roy Baumeister, the world's foremost authority
. And that's what we have from most of our
modules. People who at least in our field of
psychology, our famous. So when folks say,
well, how do we know your materials are any
good? It's easy just to say, well,
do you think that Elizabeth Loftus or Roy Baumeister any
good? And there's usually sort of a pick your
jaw up off the floor kind of moment for people
when they see that these people wrote free textbooks.
Um in fact, we even have some textbook authors
who have written for us, uh which I think
is very magnanimous people by the way, are not
simply willing to concede the expert writing is enough to
assure quality. The most common question of course is
, hey, do you do peer review? And
I laugh a little bit when I hear that question
, are your materials peer reviewed? Because to think
that we would stop at pure review vastly underestimates.
I think what is possible when you have academics publishing
our own textbooks, peer review is something that a
commercial textbook publisher would do so that they can sell
their book and they could say yes, we peer
reviewed it. We care so much more about our
content about our pedagogy because we ourselves are instructors,
we ourselves are psychologists. So let me show you
what No, but our quality assurance program, it's
expert written, its editorial review that as we send
it through two different editors, it is peer reviewed
. Yes, we definitely do that. It's student
reviewed. We worked with psych I the National Honor
Society for Psychology and had multiple students rate and review
every single module we published. We want to make
sure that students like it and that it's engaging and
that it's clear and that the illustrations an example work
every bit as much as we want to make sure
that the research is accurately reported. Uh We go
through an accessibility review and here I want to admit
to you that these materials are imperfect and our work
in progress. Uh we have a number of embedded
videos in our in some of our modules that are
not closed captions uh or accessible. And so we're
working to revise that because as we get that kind
of feedback from people, we are able, because
we're not a print text book, you know,
that the video, we can just drop in a
new link and change it in an afternoon. And
we try and be very, very responsive to that
. But we do go through an accessibility review.
We go through an empirical review. We're actually testing
this. We're asking researchers to go out and publish
on it and we'll find what you find. We
hope that you find that we're good, but we're
also researchers and we want you to take an objective
stance and find whatever it is. We also go
through international review. So we have foreign instructors um
look at different areas where they think we might be
to american in our language or in our examples.
Um and we try and internationalize our text to the
extent possible. A little bit about a recent study
that was done. Um one of the places,
one of the locations was here in Virginia had an
end of almost 1500 undergraduate students. Um Some amount
used nobody and hard copy form, the majority in
electronic form 170 of them used both. Now I
think that that's interesting that they used both that they
were not limited to one or the other. They
didn't have to just rent their e book and then
never have a hard copy. Um they were able
to buy the hard copy for$12 and access the
electronic version anytime they wanted and indeed they could access
additional modules if they got onto the noble website that
may not be included in the original site. In
this um 65 of the students who said they used
the electronic version, reported actually reading the book and
that's more than Admitted to reading the print version,
which is about 52%. It was 52%. Um
Now I think that that's actually probably somewhat typical.
So yes we want those numbers to be higher than
that. Uh We want our students reading of course
. Um But I think that it's interesting that that
students really did gravitate towards the digital format. Um
If you would have looked five years ago, six
years ago at student surveys um you'd still find a
lot of people preferring the hard copy and print versions
. You're finding some shift in that um as new
students are coming on and they are more familiar with
digital medium and just our digital readers, like large
sized tablets for example, are getting better. We
are finding more and more digital use. Um and
we are now in the process or not. We
but someone external to us is in the process of
testing reading comprehension and in memory for key concepts between
NOva and a traditional that is for profit textbook.
I wish I could give you the final thing.
Just say, oh yeah, we're just as good
as them or whatever it is. But for now
the jury is out so I don't want to over
promise anything. I don't think it's a bad textbook
, but let's let the data speak for themselves.
Um and I do want to mention one other thing
that I think is pretty interesting about. No,
but the fact that the textbooks are customizable means that
I can drag and drop any number of these 100
modules as fewer as many as I want and assign
them to my students. I just press publish and
and send the link to my students Because of this
. For the first time in history, we have
completely re envisioned what a textbook can do. So
I want you to imagine this As the instructor.
I think that there might be 10 modules that are
critical to the course I'm teaching, but I might
be able to open it up to my students and
say, I want you to choose five modules in
addition that you are interested in and every single student
in the course could have a different text book,
an individualized textbook that covers a core curriculum plus their
own unique interest. Now, usually when I mention
this idea, about half the people in my audiences
are like, wow, that's really cool, and
the other half of like, that sounds like a
teaching nightmare. Um I think both both sentiments are
probably correct, but but I think that it may
not be as much of a teaching nightmare management hassle
as you would think, and that is because I
think that you could um tailor it to your own
particular course syllabus, so if you want a student
to write about a particular topic, why don't you
just have them write about a topic that they've already
chosen as one of their elective modules? Um and
they're creating their own textbook anyway, um and you
can see the textbook. So I just think that
that, to me is an exciting prospect that by
reimagining what a textbook is and what it can do
, we're actually totally imagining how a textbook is potentially
used in the classroom. So as I finish up
, I want to just remind you of this one
thing. I just talked to you all about the
different virtues of nova. The reason I've done that
is I just really wanted to kind of take you
on a slightly deeper dive into an open educational material
to, to show you that I think that that
many of these materials, not only ours, but
others are high quality, there are definitely user friendly
. They are pedagogic lee sophisticated. And again,
I am not here to sell you on, no
, but and I'm not here to sell you on
open because there's nothing to sell its all gift giving
. So all I'm here to do is offer you
the gift. And ultimately, again, you have
to decide for yourself if it's a gift worth taking
and if you're the type of person that likes to
take gifts, thank you so much. Uh we
have time for some questions to answer. I'd also
like to invite my colleague and father, uh Ed
Diener up to answer questions as well. He and
my mother both were instrumental in the creation of Nova
. They spearheaded the idea of it. Um,
got together a number of our colleagues in in an
initial conference that led to the idea, um,
and ultimately the practical execution of Nova. So if
you have questions for either of us, be happy
to take, going to get a microphone, Go
ahead. The title, Know about your company name
. What your foundation? What does it mean?
Okay, so the question is, uh, where
did we get the name, Nova? It's not
an acronym, which a lot of people think,
um, not another book association or something like that
. It's it has nothing to do with that.
We just wanted a name that was latin. It
because academics love latin. Um that was short,
it was easy to remember and we landed on nova
. It's evocative I think in its latin roots of
newness, freshness. So it's a little confusing in
Virginia, especially up north because we call it all
that nova. Of course college there is called Nova
, even though it's not related. So it's using
Nova. So that's great and probably they were primed
to do it. It's inevitable. Mhm. Yes
, I should study with monastery that. Did you
say that was on a document? Oh yeah,
you can go to the International Journal of Well being
. Uh yeah, the monastery spreading documented. Absolutely
. So it's a peer reviewed publication just as any
other would be in an academic journal. If you
, for example, googled my name, robert Biswas
Diener and Montessori or International Journal of Well Being,
It would take you right there, you don't need
an account. All you would have to do is
is read it online or download the pdf freely available
. And he spent a listening, I'll tell you
offline. Um yes, I was wondering actually two
questions about one is what's your plan going forward as
far as the content. You talked about how students
and faculty can uh different modules together to create textbooks
. But obviously the city of Psychology is that stagnant
or static? So what is your plan for updating
the continent on an ongoing basis? And then secondly
, um uh as you talk about this uh project
in other countries, what kind of feedback are you
hearing as far as beyond just translations in other languages
? Um Do you want to talk about your thoughts
about updating site texts in general roberts? Afraid to
put me on here because he knows what I might
say, which is Regular text books are updated every
2-3 years in psychology for a reason. It has
nothing to do with the Great Progress in the field
and realize I'm a researcher. I research night and
day. There's a few big findings in psychology every
once in a while. It's not quite genetics where
things are coming out every minute. So we don't
really need quite that frequent of things. And the
reason they do it, of course, is so
you can't use the old textbooks. So there's no
more used textbooks. You have to buy the new
textbook. It's a gimmick. Um, but we
are updating ours, but we don't have a,
so I'm the writer of one of the chapters.
I can go back and look at that chapter and
say, you know what for undergraduates? This is
still pretty up today, even though it's two or
three years old. Can look at another chapter,
perhaps a genetics chapter where you say, you know
, all this stuff on epigenetic has come out robert
. Maybe it's time to get a new chapter in
that area. So we're gonna update over time just
like a regular book does. But right now.
Well, there's several problems with textbooks, but that's
one of the huge problems textbook writers for intra site
are writing that book every day of their life because
they have to just as soon as they finish one
addition, they start writing the other David Myers,
the biggest selling textbook insight. That's all he does
full time. He's retired. He sits there 40
50 hours a week. He reads the newspaper,
brings in new things, read Studies, brings in
new things, but most of these and if you
know, the replication crisis, you don't want to
bring in a lot of things until, you know
, they replicate. So we're doing another book where
I'm saying review the field, but only review what
replicates and the same thing in a textbook you want
to put in their stuff that we really know,
not some cute sort of new things. And I'd
like to follow up on that by saying, uh
, while I completely agree with that, I think
that we do not need as much updating based on
the science as as many people think, but we
do a number of updates all the same. The
most frequent updates. We do have to do with
editorial concerns. You know, we might catch him
a spelling or something small like that. Um,
we sometimes do some cosmetic uh sort of a facelift
to to some of our modules because we've gotten some
feedback from students that it's just a little dense in
its language, um, and and we want better
transition sentences in it, and we're able to do
that very, very quickly, sometimes within an hour
or two of of receiving feedback often, you know
, the same week, something like that, although
we try our strategy is to try and hold off
on really substantive revisions until academic break time. So
, in the summer or over winter break, because
we don't want to change the text book in the
middle of the term when the instructors like, where
did this paragraph? And this new example come from
, the students know, and the instructor doesn't.
So we typically make our grand revisions twice a year
, um and they are on a very much a
module by module basis. Um, so the replication
module, um, it's something that there's a lot
of action happening about right now and we are updating
that. Um but something like um the conformity and
obedience chapter for for undergraduate textbook, we're not gonna
see too much more happen, although we're open.
Um if a landmark new study comes out or or
replication study comes out, we're certainly open to changing
and then about the international talking with other. Yeah
. Yeah, so uh the question is, and
what kind of feedback have we gotten from an international
audience? So of course noble materials are in english
, so what you expect is the english speaking countries
are the largest users of Nova. Um So it
is being used pretty widely in Australia, in the
UK. Canada is the most widely used outside the
U. S. And somewhat in New Zealand.
Um they often want things in metric system, for
example, they want the opportunity to have more locally
engaging types of examples. So we just got some
feedback from South Africa um saying we want the ability
to change some of this content both to put some
South African specific research in here. You don't have
a lot of studies of South Africans reported. But
of course we have our own journals, our own
Sites, Society and our own research and we want
to drop that in. And of course they're they're
welcome to do that. It is not yet translated
. And one of the interesting things about translation is
having that crossed out dollar sign in the creative commons
. That noncommercial license, which which we do have
right now is a barrier to translation because a lot
of times people want to translate our materials, but
they want to be able to sell it for some
nominal costs, to recoup their own very substantive translation
costs. Um so, so even we wrestle with
the degree of permissiveness and I think each individual institution
kind of has to make their own decisions about that
. Now, interestingly, we still own the material
so we can grant any individual translator permission. So
if someone came to us from tech millennial in,
in Mexico and said we want to translate for our
university, we would absolutely give them permission to and
even to, to sell it if they wanted and
we can do that on a case by case basis
. Yeah, someone else. Uh, you first
. Um, no, it is a great discipline
specific platform. So could you talk a little bit
more about how it could be transferred to other disciplines
? Um, what's the technology that's running behind it
? And then maybe more importantly, is the platform
open and share a bowl as well. It's a
great question and one I wish you wouldn't have asked
because I have to say that it was designed in
ruby on rails and its proprietary, we own the
NOva software so it is not uh open software,
it's not droop Ally or another computer language that would
be open. Um That's not to say that we
wouldn't be willing to share the platform. Um It
just happens to be that we didn't design it that
way. Um but but we're not opposed to the
free sharing or the openness of our platform. Um
so it is very disciplined specific. Obviously we're just
all about psychology, which is great if you love
psychology as much as we do and we're obviously pretty
gaga over it. Um But what we wanted to
do is we wanted to we want a proof of
concept in psychology, we wanted to get psychology right
and show that we could get a lot of adoptions
, very high quality materials uh in the area we
know best before we start rolling it out to sociology
or or business or economics or any other. Um
and probably we would roll it out to the other
social sciences even before we went to the life sciences
or anything else. Um but that's not to say
there are other other groups. Open stacks associated with
Rice University is a great example of um A very
different module. They have free textbooks that cover.
I think maybe they have something like 15 different disciplines
. They're targeting high enrollment courses. Um and also
very open license and you can use those for free
. So they are generalists where we are more specific
in nature. one more comment about that. So
we had a surprising amount of pushback initially with our
textbook, we were surprised economists say textbooks are one
of the areas that don't follow typical economic supply and
demand. Why is that? Because most of the
time you think do I want to buy a ford
or do I want to buy a Bentley? I
think I'll buy a ford because you know what a
Bentley cost 20 times as much in textbooks. It's
not like that. The professor says, do I
want a ford or do I want to Bentley?
I think I'll take the mentally the students are paying
for it. So there's no Incentive for professors who've
been using David Myers. Good friend of ours textbook
for the last 20 years to switch his textbooks.
Good. His textbooks interesting. But although we thought
professors would say wow, I teach 500 students a
year, have a say where I am now 800
a year,$100. A textbook. I would
save them$8,80,000. And and that's huge, right
? If the professor had to pay 10 of the
80,000, he or she would switch textbooks, but
they don't. And we thought that they would be
more concerned and they do express concern, but it's
not enough to get them to switch over. So
where is the pressure going to come? Part of
it is going to come from our quality product And
over time Professor C and new professors use it.
Another one has to come from open source people either
in the university and the state legislature. Other people
who are reminding professors somehow of the student costs.
One of the things that my wife and I were
so interested in Is as education gets broader and goes
overseas, think of the cost of this$1200 a
year paying for textbooks and a lot of scholarships won't
pay for textbooks, they only pay for tuition.
So we're very concerned about the cost of college education
. But then as roberts pointed out, you know
, the quality has to be there too. And
I think it's we're there now and there was one
last question. Okay. Oh, we asked me
a chat, would you ask that? Yeah.
Yeah. And we would like to take questions from
from the remote viewers as well. If if there
are folks who want to give us questions via chat
so far we don't have any. So if you
focus on blind questions, please you have seen up
or yeah, speak up or forever hold your peace
because we we have we have one in, we
have one here in person. So we'll take this
is the last question I guess. Just wait 1
2nd. We're going to get the microphone. Thank
you as far as you know, are you the
only father and son psychology researcher who are advocates in
the world? We are the only father son doctoral
level psychologists who study subjective well being and also advocate
open research and materials in the world, correct?
And we are the leading father and son team competition
that we think we have. And that is Deaner
Deaner, Deaner, Diener and Diener of Biswas diener
because his older twin sisters who teased him mercilessly as
he grew up are now psychologist, my wife's a
psychologist and I am so all five of but we've
never published together, all five of us, but
we can do so for free now and thank you
so much appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you 1303 01:17:44.829 --> A:middle L:90% . Mhm.