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JOEL DUFFIN: It's great to be here with you and hopefully
this will be worth staying late.
As Michael mentioned, I'm Joel Duffin, CEO of Open Tapestry.
And I've been working in the space of open ed education for
about seven years, and in software for about 20, and did
graduate work in instructional technology.
So I have a deep interest in how people learn and how to
use technology to facilitate that.
I'll be talking today a bit about how to fast-track your
MOOC, using open content.
And we'll see what that means shortly.
As Open Tapestry, we help organizations teach and learn
using the open web.
Of course you might argue everyone kind
of does that now.
But we'll show you specifically what that means.
So MOOCs, the whole movement of MOOCs is good, and even the
precursor to that of OpenCourseWare.
What did they do?
Well they brought a lot more people and a lot more content
to the table.
But the value of education is not just that more people are
in school, but rather that it's a good education, that
they're actually learning.
Similarly, MOOCs do not achieve their potential simply
by being massive.
In order to deliver on their promise, they need to be
engaging, effective, and efficient.
So those are some of the goals that you should keep in mind.
And one important way to help accomplish those goals is by
making them open, which seems ironic since that's
kind of in the title.
But as many have noted, many of these are not in fact.
When I say open, I don't mean just open access.
But I mean open in the sense of the four R's--
they're reusable, they're remixable, they're
redistributable, and you can revise them.
So that's what we're talking about when we say open.
When a MOOC is open up in those senses, it means that
anyone can learn from it.
Anyone can use it to teach.
Anyone can improve it.
And people can do things with it that the
creators never imagined.
So this is what we're talking about.
And so something has the opportunity to be evolved and
become again more engaging, more
effective, more efficient.
So many times MOOCs and other OpenCourseWares, they come as
a monolithic block, like here is a course.
Well, that's a good thing, right, because you don't have
to create and start from scratch.
You can take this course and just adopt it, good.
That's a good thing.
But what if you could add to that and take away to refine
it to meet exactly the needs of your students?
It's this flexibility to add, subtract, refine that allows
you to personalize and go the extra mile that's needed to
meet your students' needs.
So imagine this metaphor of you've got a hotel, but what
you really wanted was a hospital.
They're similar.
You've got beds, and you've got a desk.
And you've got the internet.
But there's key ways in which they're different.
So if you wanted a hotel, you're great.
But if you needed a hospital, maybe you've got a problem.
Similarly, with the MOOC, if you don't have that freedom to
do those changes, to make those
changes, you may be stuck.
But what if you could take this hotel and add an
operating room, add a lab, add medical equipment, and get rid
of the hotel bar.
Now you've got something that you want,
that meets your needs.
Similarly, with the MOOC, if you can make these
refinements, you can personalize it and deliver it
in a way that meets your students' needs.
So you've got a couple choices today.
You can start with a big course, or you
can start from scratch.
Either of these is particularly great, but
imagine if as we've been talking about, you can start
with this foundation of a good existing course and modify it
easily to meet your needs.
This is the MOOC nirvana that we're talking about.
So you're thinking, well, that's a great idea.
I'd love to be able to do that.
But where am I going to get the building blocks?
I don't have the expertise to do all these things, to create
the resources, adapt it.
That's going to take a lot of time and money, and well,
great the resources are out there.
But I'll either have to purchase them, or I don't know
that I have the rights.
And of course, I want to deliver these inside of
Canvas, because it's this is awesome platform that lets us
deliver this course and manage students.
So these are some of the problems.
A recent survey by The Chronicle of Higher education
said that on average, professors are spending over
100 hours to prepare for their MOOC.
And that seems probably a small estimate.
And they're not getting paid any extra.
Similar with MIT OpenCourseWare, they estimate
$20,000 to $30,000 per course to deliver these things.
So this these are problems.
So what I'm hoping to show you now is some of that nirvana,
that MOOC nirvana.
So imagine I'm a professor, an instructor, at a community
college in California.
In order to meet this rising capacity, we've decided to
begin offering MOOCs.
I know that should be a bunch of content out there to teach
the class that I'm trying to deliver, which
is on computer literacy.
So I come to Open Tapestry, come to our home page, and I
click on this courses link.
This brings me to the catalog here in Open Tapestry, where
we've got hundreds of courses that are open license.
I think, oh, that might be a good thing, if I could take
one of those and just adopt it.
So here there's a category, a department of professional
development.
Go down to that, and see if there's some courses here that
might align with what I'm teaching.
Sure enough, there's a computer skills
and literacy course.
As I mentioned, there's hundreds of these courses in
here, which we built from the open license courses out there
on the web.
This particular one, I look at it and I see it's built by the
Saylor Foundation, that they've gone out and gathered
good resources from around the web, organized them into the
content of a course, and annotated them with the things
that they want their students to do.
So this looks good to me.
And I think, well, this could be a good starting place.
Here's the hotel.
So I choose Copy.
It copies this course into my own space.
Now of course I use Canvas to deliver my MOOCs.
So I notice there's and add to Canvas button.
How about that?
So here's all the pages, all the content, in
this existing course.
I click Add to Canvas, and it shows me my list of courses.
It knows my list of courses, because I've
OAuthed with Canvas.
And I've said, OK, you can make calls on behalf of me.
So it talks to the APIs, finds out what courses I have, and
lists them there and says, OK, which one do you want to add
this tapestry or course to?
I go ahead and add it to this course I've created for
computer skills and literacy.
And now it tells me, OK, it's been added
to your Canvas course.
I come over here, refresh the page, and I notice here on the
sidebar, I now have this course or this tapestry added
to my Canvas course.
So now my students to click on that link.
And what they'll see in here is this course from Saylor.
And I'll point out a couple things here.
So it's being displayed right inside of Canvas.
And we inject this toolbar across it.
This is one way we present content in Canvas.
You can do with the toolbar, without the toolbar, in Pages,
in any place the editor shows up.
I'll show you some more of that.
But another thing to notice is that even though this is a
page hosted somewhere else, we've overlayed some
instructions to the student-- here's how you should interact
with the page.
So you can take a page from anywhere, overlay some
instructions onto it.
And then we've got navigation and other aids up there on the
toolbar that you can add.
So a student can move between the pages.
They can access this content.
As an author, you'll notice there's some
editing tools up there.
Because I'm logged in as an instructor, I can edit this
stuff right here.
If I wanted to annotate any of these pages, or if I wanted to
add some new content to them, I could.
If I wanted to delete this or reorganize the outline, all
that's possible.
So here's this table of contents, showing the content
hierarchy from this Saylor course.
So you're seeing here in a few minutes, we've taken a Saylor
course that exists and put it into my own space where I can
modify it, and brought it into Canvas.
So now you've got a starting place, this
foundation of a course.
And again, the goal here is take something
good and make it better.
And don't just reinvent all this content.
Don't think that oh, there's nothing out there that meets
my needs to teach computer literacy, because no one's
ever done this before, but to start from that and then to
build on it.
So here's showing one view of the pages here.
And if you wanted to restructure that, you just
move things around.
Of course, this is displaying on kind of a small monitor, so
you don't get the full effect.
Another thing you can do is OK, I think this stuff is
good, but this course probably needs some more meat.
I need some more content.
So I search the Open Tapestry index over here on the sidebar
for software.
And then I can see all the resources
that are in our index.
Our index has hundreds of thousands of open resources.
And that I like that one.
I could have previewed it.
And now I've dragged it into my sequence.
So here it is in my outline.
In addition to searching our index, we integrate with all
these other indexes of open content.
So we recognize there's all kinds of
content out on the web.
But if you want to actually be using content in a way that
lets you remix and adapted it, you should be trying to choose
open license content, if it's available.
So we make that really easy for you.
We provide open license search across Flickr, YouTube,
Google, and lots of different resources.
And we're continually adding new ones.
And as an organization that works with us, if they want us
to search their content, we can do that.
You can add feeds, OAI, RSS.
We can crawl websites, get them all into an index.
We can make them immediately available when offering so you
can be building content from these easily.
So here it goes down and searches Wikipedia.
Here's these various pages.
And again, just as I added that other page from our
index, OK, here we've got the Wikipedia page in here.
So that's great if the content's in our indexes or
searchable through these other indexes.
But what about content that's just out there on the web?
And you know where it is.
How do you get it in?
Many of you, either you or perhaps someone you know, uses
something like Pinterest.
So this is becoming more and more common to use a
bookmarklet, or basically to add a bookmark to your browser
to give you some functionality to interact with pages.
So that's what I'm showing right here.
You can drag this bookmark, or Weave
button, up to any browser.
And now as you surf the web, you can grab stuff.
So here's a page that I found as an instructor.
I wanted my students to get a good sense of where they're at
in their computer literacy.
So here's the free learning organization that's put
together a computer literacy pre-assessment so that
students can quickly see well, where do I stand?
And so I, think that might be nice to add to my course, to
help them thinking about where they're at and
where they could go.
So when I click that Weave button, it gave
me a couple of options.
It lets you bookmark something or click
things out of the page.
So here I clicked the Weave button.
And you can bookmark the page, you can click content out of
the page, or you can actually edit the page.
So I like this whole page.
I'm just going to go ahead and bring it in.
So I choose the tapestry I want to put it into.
And there it goes.
And so here's this course I've been building.
And now that content is on automatically going to show up
inside of Canvas.
And so you can see that when I'm viewing that, our
toolbar's injected across the top.
Now here if you have links to a bunch of pages that you want
to just add all at once, just select them, click our Weave
button, and now you can bookmark all those pages
directly into the course.
So again, we're reducing the amount of time and expertise
required to adapt these courses.
We started with this good base.
Now you can quickly and easily modify this.
So you can see here these bookmarked pages that are now
inside of this course.
So I'm thinking, well, my students need to know how to
troubleshoot computers.
That's part of what I'm thinking about in teaching
them computer literacy.
So I go to my favorite site that
provides helpful diagrams.
And I think, well, let's grab this diagram to help people
troubleshoot computers.
So this time when I click the Weave button, I'm going to
choose the Clip option instead of Weave.
And as I move around a screen, it highlights that different
parts of the screen.
And now I can choose to clip them into Tapestry for
inclusion in my course or for building new pages.
I can do the same thing with videos, with presentations,
with Java applets, with Flash.
I just grab it.
I'm using the selector as I move around.
Or if I want to, I can select part of the page and then
click the Clip button, and then I'm clipping that part of
the page out of there.
So again, these are all just ways to get content into your
course, again, grabbing from anywhere on the web.
So authoring is as simple as surfing the web.
My kids could do this.
So one of the things to note is that while this is
happening, we're detecting licenses.
So with a Creative Commons licences that allow you to
define in a machine-readable way how pages are to be used,
we detect that.
We store it off.
And then we attribute it for you.
So this is again part of lowering the cost of
developing, and maintaining, and adopting content.
So here's a page I found from learnfree.org, again about
troubleshooting.
And now instead of bookmarking this page, I'm thinking, well,
this is mostly good, but I have learners that learn
better through video or images than through reading.
So this time instead of bookmarking or clipping, what
I'm going to do is I'm going to edit or mash up this page.
Now that I've done that, I can click anywhere in the page and
start editing.
So I can edit the text.
I can delete things, or I can come in here and I can choose
from content that I've clipped.
So here's this diagram.
I think, wow, that'll be helpful.
And I go ahead and add that.
And now I scroll down a little bit more, and I find a place
where I'm going to take that video that I found on
troubleshooting.
And I'm going to drop that video again.
So again, I'm thinking about my learners.
I'm thinking about building on existing content.
But I don't have to live with it the way it is.
I've taken this existing page out there, and I've
created a mash up.
So that this page now when I save it off into my course,
and my students come to it, they're going to see it the
way I've changed it.
So it's going to pull from the original page and then it's
going to apply these changes to it.
And that's how they're going to see it--
so again, easily drawing from content anywhere on the web,
and modifying and improving.
So the question is where does this information get stored?
Good question.
I'm not sure if I'm lying here, but I'll tell you the
best I understand.
I think what happens is we store off a snapshot of it.
Oops.
Got to watch for that menu button.
I think I got it stuck.
So one of the concerns people have is what if I link to a
resource in my website, in my course, I'm pointing to
someone's cool page, but then all of a sudden,
that page goes away.
That's a real downer.
So one of the things we do is we store off
a snapshot of that.
And we can ensure that you always have access to that.
And we can notify you when it goes away.
So that if you want to make some kind of change, you can
respond to that.
But then as far as how we serve it, if it's still there,
we request it and then we have essentially a change sets that
we apply to that page.
So if that page got changed in a place that we didn't change,
it would be updated to that.
So you can think of scenarios where you'd want that
behavior, and can think of scenarios where you might not
want that behavior.
But one of the principles that we a spouse in an Open
Tapestry is authentic learning.
So instead of using contrived textbook examples, you should
use real content.
So to me that means using the content that's that live where
possible and creating interactions around that and
encouraging students to produce work that's again out
there and relevant.
I'm not sure if exactly answered that.
But basically we store the changes.
We store a snapshot.
We combine them.
We deliver it.
AUDIENCE: So when you bring into a Canvas course software
that's still [INAUDIBLE]?
JOEL DUFFIN: Good question.
He's asking, are we actually copying content into Canvas?
And the answer is it depends, as most good questions.
So you can copy content directly into Canvas.
But if you insert it as a tapestry or through an iframe,
then the content lives here inside of our system.
Well, the references live inside of our systems.
So we're looking at how to enhance this.
But one of the advantages of having the content still
living on these sites and referenced through open
tapestry is that if you want to build these little
tapestries that you want to reuse here, and here, and
here, you can sprinkle these in when and however you want.
And you could be updating them instead of having to maintain
all of these.
So we actually let you embed tapestries inside of
tapestries.
You can think of a course that is basically a set of all
these live references to these other tapestries.
And now you can be reusing those in interesting ways.
So this shows our page builder.
So not only can you click content out of pages, bookmark
it and mash up pages, but you can take that clip content and
you can build new pages from it.
So here's this diagram I clipped.
I'm building a new page, so I'm adding a text block.
I'm typing some things.
Again, I can always grab more items and drop them in here.
And again, we're keeping track of all the licenses and
attributing them so that you know where this all came from.
So that's the page builder.
So here's the course module.
So I showed adding the course of the side bar.
This is showing adding a tapestry to a module.
So for those of you who've used Canvas modules, you're
creating your outline of content.
Here my LTI connected with Open Tapestry.
[INAUDIBLE].
I'll back that up just a little bit.
When I access that external tool, it shows me my
collections to make it easy for me to access and insert
content I've gathered.
But at the same time, I could still search out across all
these open sources and grab any of them at
any point in my offering.
So I can bring these in, that sequence, that structure of
content, directly in as an item and a module.
So here you can see, here's this content on copyright.
I wanted my students to learn about copyright as part of
their computer literacy.
But now as I was mentioning, any time that Canvas editor
shows up, we've got an Open Tapestry toolbar.
So if you're editing a page and you want to bring in an
open licensed image or anything that you've gathered,
you could do that.
So you edit the page.
There's our button in the editor.
You find the content you want.
Or you can search these other sources.
This comes to your question.
You can either paste the content in, in which case the
content actually shows up there.
It's actually stored in Canvas.
Or you can insert by reference, basically through
an iframe so that it will be updated.
So now you go on your way, building this page out.
And one thing to notice here is the
attribution is inserted.
So we've detected it.
Now we've inserted it here.
You're complying with the license.
Many people think, oh, it's open license.
I can do whatever I want with it.
Well, a by license requires you to attribute it.
So I heard someone say that that's the
least restrictive license.
Well, that's not true.
A public domain is the least restricted, because you don't
have to attribute those--
technical detail.
So here it's showing you you can quickly look at the
licensing for all of your resources that you've included
in a tapestry.
You can see which ones are open license,
which ones are not.
That little copyright button on our toolbar lets you view
licenses for any resource that you're looking at.
And so you can see we're trying to take the hassle out
of using open content.
So we let you use existing content and make that easy,
instead of starting from scratch.
You can adapt it to exactly meet your needs instead of
living with what you've got.
Your expertise is enough.
You don't need to go get a programmer, contractor.
You can start building today.
And this reduces the time required to do that, which is
part of the equation.
And then we take the hassle of dealing with legal issues by
detecting, tracking, and
contributing all that licensing.
So I guess back to our analogy, we've got the hotel.
And now you turned it into this hospital.
We're able to start from this existing course, and you're
able to adapt it.
And now you can share it if you choose
to put it out there.
Someone else can copy yours and build on it.
So this is all part what we're trying to do at Open Tapestry.
Quick mention on another project that we're starting,
we're calling open embeddable assessments.
The idea is that you can take an assessment and
embed it any web page.
Just as you saw us mash up this page, we're building an
open source platform that anyone can use to take
assessments easily embed them anywhere by
just dropping an iframe.
Just as easy you can embed a YouTube video, you can embed
an assessment and then share that anywhere.
With Open Tapestry, we let you do that as
easy as drag and drop.
So we think that open content is really important, that this
movement of openness helps everyone
achieve their potential.
So we have a free site.
Anyone can go and use it.
Sign up for free.
Organizations that want tighter integration, access,
and so on, we offer hosted instances for them.
So that's Open Tapestry.
I'll be glad to take any questions.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
JOEL DUFFIN: We use a lot of different technologies.
But Ruby on Rails is the primary.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
JOEL DUFFIN: Pricing?
Yeah, so we have right now our basic answer is an FTE model,
$3 to $5 per FTE per year.
And we're always open to talk to
people about their situation.
OK.
Thank you.