that we already had a suggestion for the reimagined advisory group is we thought we should do them outside. Good idea. So Kevin and I are going to walk through some of the results that the board has attained in our regulatory work over the last several months. And then we'll open it up to some questions from all of you. But the focus of today, as we've heard from our emails and from some of the materials we've supplied to you, is we want to hear your feedback and thoughts on reimagining the advisory. And so we want to make sure we allow enough time for those breakout groups. We send out the questions to everyone. There's copies of the questions out back and there's copies of the presentation out back. And once we get to this presentation, we'll bring out the two groups and then convene and hear back from all of you. So we're just going to run through a few of these slides to talk about what we were up to the last several months. And this is not exhaustive and this is my plug for all the work that the Green Mountain Care Board and the staff do. We have an immense amount of work that goes into the regulatory functions that the board does. But there is a whole host of other work that we do. For example, we are the stewards of two large databases, the Cures and Buds, which is the all-day complaints database and the hospital discharge database. We have an entirely different advisory group, a technical advisory group that we run, the primary care advisory group. We have a data governance council that meets every other month. We're reimagining the health resource allocation plan. We're working on legislative reports and partaking in quite a few work groups that were set up through the legislature. I could go on and on, but I'll stop there and get into the details of our regulatory work. I just wanted to make sure that this is not an exhaustive list of what we've been doing. Coops and I guess our computer is not working. So, it's shutting down. Can people have copies in front of them on the slides? So, we're going to start with hospital budget results. The guidance was put out for the hospitals in spring of this year. We received all the budgets from the hospitals by July 1st of this year. The staff and the board analyzed the budgets. We had all of the hospitals come in for full presentations to the board. We worked with the healthcare advocates on the review of these budgets very closely. And then we released decisions by September 15th, and the budget orders went out forward to the 1st of this year. The results were that the hospitals initially requested a 2.9% increase in net patient revenue from the board-approved fiscal year 2018 base to the hospital-submitted fiscal year 2019 budgets. After the board approved the adjustments for several hospitals, and these for example adjustments will include adjustments for accounting changes, provider transfers and acquisitions, the submissions reflected a 2.2% increase, or approximately $56.5 million increase in PR. The board approved a 2.1% NPR increase for fiscal year 2019 over the approved and adjusted fiscal year 2018 base. And the hospital requested an estimated weighted average of 3.1% increase in commercial rates. So we'll look at the NPR, I should have said that at the beginning. We'll look at the NPR net patient revenue as well as the commercial rate for the hospitals. So the hospital requested a 3.1% increase in commercial rates from approved fiscal year 2018 to fiscal year 2019 budgets. The board approved a 2.7% estimated weighted average rate increase. You can see on the next page is the historical rates that were submitted and approved by the board. And I'll just, for the hospitals, I'll just note that over the last several years the rates for that have been approved have been the lowest in 18 years. Kevin, do you want to add anything to that? No, I think it's showing that the regulatory work is working and that we have gone through a period of three years of relatively low growth but there is a slight uptick in the trend line so we have to be wary of that moving forward. Great, and I'll also say that I'm going to run through these results and then we can open it up for some brief questions before I turn over to the advisory committee information. The next area of regulation that we took on this summer was health insurance rate review to the 2019 Individual and Small Group plans. The rates were submitted to us in May and were subject to a 90-day review and analysis period. We had hearings in July, two hearings, one for MPP, one for Blue Cross Blue Shield. We had an additional open public hearing, open public comment hearing that week to hear public comments and there were public comments within the hearings during the day and we accepted written public comments as well. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont requested a 9.6% average annual rate increase with an effective average increase of 5.8%. If you look at the bottom, the asterisk, the effective rate increases. This is because of the actual rate increases that will be experienced by remoders in this submission. This takes into account the availability of additional federal subsidy dollars resulting from changes made to Vermont Roger in the 2018 legislative session. Many of you in the room are very familiar with the Silver Loading Plan. So it's important that you look at these two numbers and you look at the effective rate that the actual consumer will feel. And the real important thing here is that the rate felt by remoders is only going to be accurate if there is a successful outreach and getting people enrolled into the insurance plan that's best for them. So we're very hopeful that that message will get out and people will make the right decisions, but there's no guarantees. That's really important. The approved average annual rate could increase with 6.9% with an effective average increase of 3.2%. And that equates to an estimated dollar saved by remoders of $12.9 million. And so that's on the blue cross blue shield side. For MVP, MVP requested a 10.9% average annual rate increase. With an effective average increase of 6.6%. The approved average annual rate increase was 6.4%. With an effective average increase of 1.9%. The estimated dollars saved by remoders for MVP after the board's work was $6.5 million. The total estimated savings between these blue cross blue shield and MVP was $19.4 million. And we got to have a little caution. I feel like I'm Debbie Dowler here. But we do have the most recent filing for the large group for MVP, which is a double digit ask. And we also are hearing from insurers that next year is going to be a pretty tough year as far as what the previous requests will be. This year we had some things going in our favor. There was the moratorium on the federal fees and there was also the tax change that benefited insurers. So we'll have to see where that all sugars up next year. But there's also a lot of pressure to try to increase the thresholds for reserves. And that really input comes from the Department of Financial Regulation. So where that will end up, we don't know yet. But it's just something to keep our eyes on. Absolutely. I'll shift now to the certificate of need work that the board has done to date this year. I won't go through each of these, but they are on our website all the materials related to these decisions on our website. I will just mention that there is also a quasi-judicial rigorous process that the board goes through with the staff on all of these applications and using our COI requirements and ATRAC standards and keeping in mind the triple aim that the application that comes to us is very different in terms of when it comes out on the other side after the board makes its decisions. So I just wanted to note that. And now, transitioning to the work on the ACO model, which I believe most folks in the room are very familiar with, I would just say the things we talked about to this point, rate review, cost of the budget, CONs, these are all levers that the board has to reduce costs for the monitors. But without going to the root cause of those costs and the increases in healthcare expenses, we're not going to be able to cut our way out of this. So this is where the all-care model agreement comes in, where we can actually get to the root cause of what's driving up healthcare costs. And this is, again, most of you are familiar with this, but I'll remind you that the all-care ACO model agreement is an agreement between the state of Vermont and CMS. And it allows Vermont to explore new ways of financing and delivering healthcare with Medicare's participation. And I think this is, on this slide, a nice depiction of where we are and where we're going. We're still very much in transition fee-for-service medicine. I think, you know, the providers in the audience who I think would agree. And where each medical service generates a fee, and this could encourage unnecessary services. And then those services that promote health, phone calls, emails, care coordination between providers may not be covered under the current system. What we're looking at is in a future state where we're looking to move from fee-for-service to value-based care under the all-care model. And the model allows Medicaid, Medicare, and participating commercial insurers to work together with providers to be accountable for the quality and cost of care for people they serve. So this model will encourage the kind of things that like care coordination, emailing, phone calls, doing the types of things that are not recognized from the current system as fee-for-service medicine. Kevin, do you want to add anything here? No. Okay, great. The next two slides I will not go into. They're again, background on the all-care ACO model. The all-care financial targets, which I will just review as a reminder, that we have an all-care growth target, which is a compounded ant, which is a compounded annualized growth target of less than 3.5 percent of the term of the agreement. And then we have a Medicare growth target of 0.12 percent in the national projections. We also have quality targets. The high-level population have goals of improving access to primary care, reducing deaths to suicide and drug overdose, and reducing the prevalence of morbidity of chronic disease. And we do that. We have the quality metrics that are filtered down through the ACO to the participants. So I won't go in depth here unless anyone has any questions. Anything we want to add on that, Kevin? No, just to remind everybody, because people fall on the trap of thinking that the targets are just for people that are enrolled in the accountable care organization. That's not the case. The 3.5 target is actually the population of Vermont, so we have to be concerned about the total cost of care everywhere in the state, whether someone is a member of an accountable care organization or not. And the reason for that number, the 3.5, was that that's the historical growth rate of the Vermont economy, and the theory was to keep it at the same rate of growth as the overall economy. Great. Thank you for adding that, Kevin. Very important. So some results on the work that we're doing around the all-care model implementation and ACO regulation, some of the activities that we've been undertaking in this summer and currently. We are continuing the ACO regulation from last year's budget and certification per Act 113 of 2016. The board has the statutory authority to both certify any participating ACO in the state of Vermont, as well as review and approve their budgets. We are moving currently, we're looking at the 2019 ACO budget. The guidance was issued for that in July of this summer, this year, and we did receive that submission earlier this month. We are in... The policy team is back at the office doing deep dives into that submissions. We'll be out with questions to the ACO, and then the ACO will be coming in to report on their budget October 24th here in this room. And then our target approval date, target, we're shooting for November 20th, and I wanted to mention that there is an open public comment period on that ACO budget until November, that target date of November 20th. Obviously, if that changes, then we will change the public comment period if we have to wait longer to approve their budget. But I would encourage folks to get on our website and look at this submitted one care budget. It's full of very, very important and meaningful information that I think all of the folks in this room would be interested in learning about. The All Pair ACO Model Program Development implementation, we're preparing to set the financial targets for ACOs that are participating in the 2019 Vermont Medicare ACO Initiative per the All Pair Model Agreement. We, at the state level, can design that program. We work very closely obviously with CMS and CNMI, but that is what we're doing right now in planning that program. We're also finalizing specifications for total cost of care and other measures described in the All Pair ACO Model Agreement in order to support reporting to our federal partners, CMS and CNMI. And we're working with federal partners on potential agreement changes, including consensus changes to quality measure sets, plans to tie Medicare financial targets to quality performance at several operational changes. I'd also encourage you in your slides you have a link to some implementation reports that provide a really good snapshot of where we are with the All Pair Model. We submit those quarterly to the legislature. And last slide, I promise. All Pair Model activities plan for October and December of 2018. We're continuing to monitor for the 2018 budget and ACO certification. We're doing, as I said, the review of the 2019 ACO budget. And we are, again, working on some of the developments and changes to the future All Pair Model Agreement here in the state of Vermont. And I will stop here for questions. I just want to give one other update, too, in that one of the goals that we've been working on this past year is to try to strengthen the data team. Thank you. And the goal is to bring back the house work that's being done by outside contractors so that the monitors are meaningfully deployed. But also to make sure that we have better data to make better decisions. And very soon, hopefully, within the next couple of weeks, we'll have a job offer for the last remaining position in the data group. And that should really move us forward. And I believe that we are bringing the costs down and bringing up the quality of the data. So that's a very positive thing to report out. Yeah, and our data team has expanded under Kevin's leadership. And we're actually looking, as he said, to bring more of that analysis in-house instead of using outside contractors. And I'd encourage you to look at our website. And I can follow up and send this to you proactively. But we're developing some standard reports and with our data team. And I think that that's all because we have the staff to do that. So I think that's all I have in terms of updates. Do you have anything else? That's it for updates. Do you want to phase into the webinar? I was thinking we could open it up to questions. Sure, let's open it up to questions. Or the board members have anything else to add? Sure, go ahead. This may be something that I just haven't seen. Do you have any early results on the population health outcomes that we've identified, the access to primary care reduction and suicide and travel, et cetera? We have information that the ACM has submitted in their budget. And I will follow up with our team and see what we can give you. As far as I know, we don't have any, on the large population health goals, but the ACO, I'm looking at Spencer, he's right in front of you, has in their budget submissions some work that they're doing on population health. But let me follow up on you with you on that to get specifics. O'Connor has some information. Yeah, as part of our processes we have a meeting as a data team and where we go through, we have the chief of the okay model team made and so we'll submit questions back to them. The HCA also submitted questions and so we sort of clarified these things and some of the metrics we got. So I expect in the coming weeks to hear back from them. And then as soon as it's accessible, I'll say how about presentations on that. At the board meeting. We've also seen some positive early results from the Medicaid program as well. Right. Yeah. But we'll get that information out to you. It's a great question. It is. Okay. Yeah, on the hospital rate increases, do we have information like how far above or below hospitals fell on this increase? Like if they ended up making a law we're losing the average rate. The target, yeah. Isn't that patient revenue? Yeah. So, yes. Do you have that? Okay. And I can set that to you. Great. Thank you. It was really a story of two worlds in that we had a number of institutions that came in according to guidance or below guidance. And then we had others that came in much higher and of course the ones that come in much higher in this particular case, you could lump them in the category of smaller hospitals and ones that we have concerns about moving forward to make sure that they're financially healthy and able to be sustainable in the long term. She was just curious, would the lower rate increases how that's effected over the past few years for all hospitals? Yeah. Yeah. And also, do you have a question? I think this is just a quick question. With respect to the all payer model comment, I guess that it seems to me that we're sort of institutionalizing the past history of excessive cost growth in healthcare. I mean, we're sort of using that as the starting point and then saying 3.5% a year on top of that objectives. And it concerns me because, at least from my perspective, kind of key driver of healthcare costs over the years has really been this volume driven business model that has started in the 80s, I guess, with our G-System. And I mean, there have been a lot of effects from that that we have built this, we've created this huge over investment that seems to me in healthcare and police and facilities and equipment. And now we're kind of taking that as a given and we're going to grow it further from there. And I just wonder if we're going to really accomplish what we hope to do. Clearly, there's some things on the individual health side where there's lots of opportunities that are better done on the cost side. I wonder if we're not starting from a place that we're guaranteed to not kind of succeed. So, I understand your question and I agree with you about the past system being broken, but I think it would be unrealistic to think that we're going to reduce overall costs in the system. But if we can bend that curve all the time, it'll have a similar effect. And if we can get people out of the habit of the mentality that we had a good year because revenues were up, then we're really making some strong progress in that direction. When you brought that up, I was thinking of Joe over there because I always remember hearing the stories... Okay, lead possession. The stories about how the federal government locked in their reimbursements for home health based on the past. Louisiana was about four or five times the lot as far as what the costs were. I don't think it's not a fear system to begin with, but I don't quite think it's not a fear system here. Maybe some of the other corners just... I'll add a little bit of something. I think that the other piece that's changing is you're right. We're using the baked-in base that has excess utilization in it and we're saying let's bend the cost curve on the gross side. But the other thing that's happening because the incentives are changing is the hospitals are changing how they allocate that pie So we've already seen through the hospital budget process we're seeing hospitals, for example, investing in social workers in their EVs. We're seeing hospitals place practitioners in school-based clinics. We're seeing hospitals invest in housing in their communities. These are changes that we have not seen before. So I think the size of the pie that we're starting with may be the same, but how those slices are allocated is changing and we're also bending the cost curve. So that's at least the way I look at it. I'm seeing really strong progress in how those investments are made. Many years to actually see the results is that everyone knows about population health measures and it takes a while, but I'd agree that we're doing things here in Vermont that many states are not even touching. Just remind everybody to speak louder. Sure. I just might add to that healthcare is 20% of the Vermont economy and it's just not something that you can move the dial real quickly, especially when you're dealing with something so important to our society, which is healthcare. But I think if we were to take this chart that's presented in your packet and draw the line about healthcare costs nationwide as another benchmark, not just Vermont versus Vermont, but Vermont versus other states, you'd see that we're coming in on the right side of that line and so I think over time, incrementally, without being overly disrupted to the system, we will be in a better place four or five years down the road. I just want to be mindful of the time. I know there's one more hand. Can we take one more question? Go ahead. To echo the concern about the institutionalization and sort of following on what has been and created and hearing the board talk about all the effort and time invested in these major institutions. I don't hear, and I was hoping to hear from the board any attention given to the other healthcare pieces that are more community-based, that aren't hospital-connected or the big institutions in tracking them in any way. Like, what are they doing? What are their results? How much reimbursement? I haven't gotten any information about the statistics on healthcare businesses that support healthcare within the communities that are not hospital-based. In one other point, I don't see why we need to have hospitals even do more.  Why would we want them to get into housing or schools? What's the point if we can do it more effectively, efficiently within communities, empowering the people with passion in healthcare within the communities? The whole theory of healthcare versus fee-for-service is to have that collaborative effort so that you're keeping people healthier so that you're trying to coordinate the care so that the person isn't readmitted to the most expensive setting, which is the hospital. So, in theory, that's what we're all working for, whether or not that's actually happening in practice is still to be determined. Is the board aware, though, that physical therapy hasn't received any more money and has been on the same needs as a larger hospital at needing expenses but has not gotten any more from insurance companies? Is the board even aware of that? I'm not going to get into other things, but the point is I don't think the board is aware of these other parts that are smaller pieces. Could I jump in? Sure. Would you mind? So I think what we try to do, because our regulatory authority is over hospitals and it's not over the community providers, we have no statutory role in terms of those providers. But what we try to do is stay aware through looking at the data, through our public comment process and also, for example, we periodically have panels on different topics and that's, I think, one of the ways that we try to stay on top of the issues in other sectors because obviously we care about those and it's important to understand health care as a whole, including what's going on with community providers, but for the most part, other state agencies have the role of overseeing or understanding in depth those sectors. Not so much physical therapy, but for example, designated mental health agencies that AHS has a role there. And so I think what we try to do is balance our statutory responsibilities with also other mechanisms to get information about the burning issues that are out there that we don't have authority to do anything about, but we have an interest in. And I was sad with the ACO. One of the things about that does, not that we directly deal with the therapist or other community providers, but per Act 13 they are directed to work with those community providers. So thank you for that. So we're going to switch to the second segment of the morning, which is to look at the advisory committee structure. In your slides you have some summaries of what we've heard in the past from you and we heard that this group, from your perspective, class disruption that perhaps for some of you you think that the members feel that their time and expertise aren't optimally utilized and that you feel that your concerns aren't heard by the board. And we really take this seriously and I thank you for those comments. And one of the reasons we're here today to work on this is because we've heard you and we want to make this a more meaningful experience for all of you and from my perspective to get that information back to the board and to others, whether there's information that we do not have regulatory authority or we'll make sure that the folks who do have the regulatory authority get the information from you. So this is really timely too yesterday had to appear before a joint legislative committee that's going through and taking a look at every single board and commission and advisory group in the state and some of the questions they were asking is how do you manage 51 people on an advisory group and things like that and you can see from today that we probably have less than half of the advisory group here. So what we'll do and we do break up is I'm going to walk around and just give each person a number and we'll break up into three groups and the ones will start down here at this corner. The twos will start over here at the second level. I said three. I want to ask you a handful of discussion. We can do three. And then we'll do the third one in the back. We're going to do five groups but I'm going to ask a couple of the board members to team up because each one was prepared to have their own group but I think given the numbers that are here to have that meaningful discussion in the group I'd like to get at least six people in every group that are not from the group on the board. So again we'll have we'll keep Jess. You're going to leave one group and I'll have Kevin, Mike, Joe with that. Robin, you'll have Jess, you'll be group number one. So you'll be down here. Robin is group number two. And you'll be right next to where you are, Robin. Okay. And now I have to choose between board members. Just say it's Tom and Raine together. In the back corner over here. And then we'll have all of you just count out one, two, three. There's no self-selection here. I'll take yours. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. And one. So before you disperse, please follow the questions. You're going to have copies of those for your group. And the staff member and the board members will facilitate this. We're going to meet back here at 11.30 and we'll report out the information that you shared with us. Have fun. Thank you. 31 or 224. Let's see, we have 20 minutes and three groups. And we'll try to figure it out. So we'll start. Yeah. All right. We have a great group. And our group spent a lot of time talking about how to improve, I would say, the focus of the advisory group and adding some clarity in terms of the advisory group's purpose for the board so that people felt like they were coming to provide meaningful input and that they also felt like they had some follow-through afterwards. So for example, ensuring that we were doing maybe a little better job of articulating how we were using the feedback and information so that it didn't feel like people were coming and providing information into a vacuum and didn't really understand how that was, whether it was not being used. We talked a lot about group size and how to structure it because of course there's a tension between having a manageable working group size if the purpose is to tackle a specific topic or issue versus having a fully representative group which necessarily has to be much larger. So a couple of ideas around our group were could we have a larger group where the purpose was really informational so the board providing information about our work and what we were doing and the results of our work and then having more of a work-group structure which I think for us it presents a staffing challenge if it were too many work-groups but there are ways that we potentially could tackle that either by having a work-group self-staff or keeping it to a limited number where maybe as a board we pick a topic or two that we're going to have a work-group on that's more targeted and then those targeted work-groups we need to be more like 10 to 12 focus on a specific issue and involve people with expertise or interest in that specific issue. In terms of topics of interest we talked about transparency evolution of the ACO regulatory interconnectedness between our different regulatory functions employers and employer engagement population health and also kind of views of consumers we had a great idea of maybe trying to incorporate this in a webinar slash Skype format so for folks who really are coming from a long distance they could participate in that medium instead of having to drive what that means. I think you're getting most of them and also just kind of operational stuff you know making sure Robin mentioned making sure that whatever is discussed here at the advisory gets back out to the advisory and if appropriate share with other entities like legislators etc. and also I think with this view that members here if there are representatives of different advocacy groups if they can actually take the responsibility to filter back into their group the information that we discussed here at the advisory we talked about the space and this is not a great space for breakout groups I think that we know we hear you and so we're folks to share with us some ideas on different free spaces and times also just different times to meet because sometimes for for instance a primary care provider 10 to 12 in the middle of the day is not great but then you get into if you do it earlier or later if you have people traveling that might be an issue but that's the idea of having maybe a Skype alternative would be helpful. I guess the last thing I would mention we did have some suggestions around could meetings be more in this sort of goes with the work group concept I think, be more problem solving focused and or thinking about kind of a healthcare system and moving forward and as a bigger topic while then also understanding that some of those topics don't necessarily tie back to our let's ask for a charge or focus so we had a budget thank you our group was great now we're eager to hear I don't know what number it was what was the group up there Sarah? come on up here Susan there was too much laughter in your group you did kind of block out our ability to hear a focus but I did notice we said that I just want to point out that you did save the best group for last I just want you guys to go next I wanted to know about that that our group was also really fun and even our problems here so I picked out some kind of key high level themes and I'll ask Morina to chime in on this as well we're going to talk about topics and what this group focuses on and about processing group management so in terms of topics our group I think that there was consensus that we should be soliciting topics from members through surveys or at our meetings for the next quarter topics should be more member led and not just limited to areas of the board regulatory authority and these meetings should be a way for the board to inform the group about what we're doing and the results of our regulatory process even our other work but it should also be a way for the board to think outside of that the quotes that I wrote down the state of the brain is out of the box so we can really be exploring a wider variety of issues in addition to a combination of kind of updates on Morina's work and digging into new topics we should also be looking at national and international best practices so where other states or other countries are doing things that are really cool that Vermont could learn from or partner with or pack on to those are things that we should be discussing in this group and then there were a couple of topics that specifically came up repeatedly those were things like work boards of hiring and training technology and health information exchange and geographic disparities and access and resources in terms of group process and management our group consistently was urging us to become a little bit of a smaller group so limiting the group size to allow for deeper discussions and then inviting experts or subject matter experts to folks in the community with particular interests when we're discussing a particular issue that might not be at the center of most of our discussions specifically when we're discussing the oral health we need to make sure that we're engaging folks from the dental and oral health community but we may those folks may not need to come to every meeting we also had a number of folks who are just to read this to our charter and really assess the shared expectations for participation in this group and the key quote on the section was that meeting management, good staffing and number of accountability are key Maureen, do you have anything else you want to add? I would add two things I think along with the charter really just making sure that we've set forward one specific goals and objectives are that we were trying to get out of this process and possibly looking at some leadership from the advisory group too to be able to come back and summarize two, three, four, five topics that the advisory group agrees on and the reason we're kind of talking a little bit about that is because we're pretty siloed in the representation across the advisory group and it was kind of getting your brains out of your own silo and saying what can we collectively impact and what can we look at and picking three or four topics because I think for us to be throwing that out to you guys some of the feedback is maybe it's not touching on all of your areas however if the group were to come back and consolidate things I think you'd probably find similar themes that we would be looking at and you would debate that amongst yourselves I think that was really a big part of it as well I can't say it any better than that I mean the aspect that caught my attention was a push for somewhat more self-governance within the advisory board to be able to for them to come together figure out what the priorities are figure out what their charter is and what their vision is and then you'd be able to move forward in that regard and to be able to advise the board at how we might be able to use our levers to get to an end I mean we're not an all-powerful board we've got a legislature, we've got hospitals we've got all these moving parts that we have to be concerned about but you know if the advisory committee can become helpful to us in terms of saying we can do this, this would work it will cooperate with you here the whole governance issue that seemed to be an important product of our discussion and I'll just add that we also had a discussion about a charter I think going back and forth on whether we should have a charter or not I am convinced that we should have something like that that came up as something in our group as well overall the best for the last best for the last we had members and Kristina and I were at staff members we had sort of we're going to probably repeat a lot of things the other group said and I think the things that we heard were really representative of a wide range of opinions and what makes it so difficult to make these decisions moving forward with the future but a couple of things we heard were there's a bunch of different advisory groups across state governments and how do we know what the different advisory groups are doing and is there ways that we can coordinate so that our advisory committee is working sort of in tandem on different issues and maybe sort of a divide and conquer approach to be more efficient the large and diverse nature of the group it may be difficult to come to any consensus there are some skepticism about advisory groups not meant to be vehicle for advocacy what are the options for the group moving forward there was a concern so when we talked about possibly making it a smaller group there's a concern that some people they're part of their day to day jobs are to attend meetings like this while other groups do not have someone that can represent them on these meetings coming down of of the advisory committee we run the risk of not hearing from the smaller groups or those that might not be able to make it here and decisions could be made that would have impact these groups or we might not be able to hear from them and they might have important things to add to the conversation we heard that people like the panel structure could give a great opportunity to hear from a wide variety of voices and continue in education I think we heard on both sides the advisory group felt that they need more education on certain topics but also the general public on issues such as the all fair model even the green mountain care board there's sort of a lack of knowledge in the public sphere of what the board actually does we don't regulate from our health connect or Medicaid rates from our Medicaid it's called green mountain care it's confused all the time and so sort of being more vocal about what our role actually is conversation around can the committee push information forward and push outward to their different organizations to help communicate some of the things the board is doing then we talked about advisory structure as mentioned that other groups have specific seats for different organizations also groups have at large members of the term limits the idea that we need to think outside of the normal group of people that we use specifically senior citizens were mentioned because of their hint because of the way they may be impacted by the all fair model and they not only need to know these changes but what those changes might look like some things are mentioned about hearing more about the ECO and the all fair model of its larger effect on the health care structure and consumers certificate of need there was an idea that the committee could not be so formal but instead it's a loose group of people that have different specialties and the board could choose to depending on the topic ask them for their assistance and they could maybe function with a clear direction knowing that that was the issue they were working on I will say that my favorite quote that we had is the advisory committee is currently like a cocktail party with nothing to drink I'm not sure what Christina has if I missed anything I think you had everything I can't remember who touched on outreach the idea was perhaps the advisory committee could help facilitate the outreach on the ECO and all fair model and just in their everyday lives but also special needs which is probably a great idea do you guys have anything to add board members? what my thought is that there was one suggestion that in between the quarterly meetings and once the advisory committee developed a little bit of leadership and governance that tools like the survey monkey could be used to kind of sift through issues and refine issues so that a lot of time at the meetings could be more productively used and kind of refreshing yourself every time you need just anything? yeah I understand comments that have made which was a good feedback was having the advisory board comes if the topics are out there in advance that people have prepped for it whether they did homework in between or whatever but they're ready to participate when they get here and it's not just a feedback so that it can be productive in the meetings that we have that's great so we have a few more minutes I want to talk about next steps we are going to come tie along this information and send it back out to you some of the key themes I would I don't have the exact date when the new configuration of the advisory will go out I do know that we will have an application process which will essentially be your CV I do know that we want to get representation throughout the state and we want it geographically and we want to have representation not only from different healthcare entities but I really know what you heard today like senior citizens I heard in our group reaching out to more employers so we'll go over all of the information and pull out key themes and send that out to you and then have an application process I'm thinking towards the end of November I think that would be enough time and then we will as part of this review process decide how many meetings and what those meetings will look like and we'll get those on once we have the reimagined advisory we'll get those meetings on the schedules is there anything else you want to add Kevin or any other board members I don't think I have anything to add I'd also encourage you if things things percolate up and you said oh I forgot about this this is a great idea please send that to us you can send it right to me and we'll make sure that we incorporate all of your great ideas I want to thank you all very much for your attendance today I felt like it was very informative and it helps me as I look at the new reimagined advisory committee for the remount so we'll be back here at one o'clock for our regular scheduled board meeting we're hearing a very interesting topic on and I'd invite anyone who wants to come back and listen to this presentation some of our board members recently from the organization Kevin is it's the business round table it's the talent pipeline and while you're talking about that I just want to really give a shout out to Deb for what I think was a very successful conference down at Castleton created seeds for some movement moving forward to try to address some of the workforce issues in the state so thank you very much Deb


I think the first thing I would tell them is to, you know, know where to look. And the second thing would be to look and filter out what very, very quickly, filter out the opportunities where you do not have any kind of knowledge, insight knowledge about the agency or organization. You don't have any insight knowledge about where the gaps are. And you do not have the right skills to match that. So it's very important to filter out very quickly, you know, where you want to focus. And it's better to focus on a few agencies and be persistent and get to know that very well, know the gaps, you know, and try and be at places where you can get to know the small business office, you can get to know the customer. So opportunities that present themselves where it's the agency that you want to be seen and working in, that's where you need to focus. And that's what I would tell all AT companies is stop bidding on everything that looks, it's in your domain. It needs to be in your domain, but it also needs to have familiarity with the customer environment. That's very important.


Okay. You're all most welcome. My name is Catherine Cronin, and I'm speaking to you from the National Forum Office in Dublin, and my co-moderator in the webinar here is Leo Farrell, and we are delighted to be joined by our guest speaker today, Jenrin Wetzler, who is the Assistant Director of Open Education at Creative Commons. Hello. And in today's webinar, Jenrin will deliver the first part of the webinar, which is really just an introduction to OER and open licensing and specifically how to use Creative Commons licenses to do that. And I'll follow up with some specific details about OER to support teaching and learning and how the National Forum is supporting that. And as you can see from our title slide back here, this presentation itself is an OER, so you can see the CC by license in the lower right-hand corner. And we'll talk more about the details of that license and other licenses during the webinar. We have a doc set up, which those of you who have arrived early hopefully have found your way to a document that has the link to the slides and also a place that we can collect questions during the webinar that we can leave plenty of time to answer at the end. I will thank the people who went ahead and added some questions to that document before the webinar took place. The very first question that was posted there was about what open means, particularly in terms of access and equity. And this is a very important question. So I want to say to preface the webinar entirely that this is really designed for beginners to open educational resources and open licensing. And I know that some of you are here in the webinar, have some experience, so some of what we say will be familiar to you. But we know from our discussions across the sector and from wider research that this kind of foundational understanding is what's important for most people. So that's what this is geared at is just people just being introduced to the whole notion of what we are in open licensing. The simplest definition in terms of resources at least is that open means not just that the resource is free, but that it also comes with a set of permissions about how you can use that resource. And generally we'll talk about that in a lot more detail. But it's definitely not straightforward. There are certainly a lot of complexities and hopefully we can get into that in the discussion at the end. So before I introduce Jenrin and her presentation, I would just like to say a few words about the National Forum and our mission in support in terms of supporting open education. So the National Forum is a national body for the sake of those of you who might be from outside Ireland, national body that supports collaboration and enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education in Ireland. And two months ago, as a preface to some of our activities this year in terms of open education, we published this forum Insight, which is just a short document which explains really why we are supporting open education in Ireland. So a key objective of the National Forum since 2013 has been to build digital capacity and capabilities to enhance teaching and learning. And within this, developing and implementing open education principles and practices that are aligned with EU policy and emerging national practice is part of our mission. So this webinar is really in line with that. And if you'd like to find out more about what the National Forum is doing in terms of open education, there's a short URL on the screen there where you can find this particular forum Insight and the resources that we're creating. And I just tagged on there also some of the hashtags that we use when we share information on Twitter. A couple of people were asking me about these. So there's a series of NF hashtags that we use around which are really national forum initiatives. So NF digital is anything that goes out in the national forum space around digital. And then dig HEIE is being used broadly by anyone who wants to share anything around digital initiatives in teaching and learning, particularly in higher education in Ireland. And a year ago at the EdTech conference, we launched this kind of open education in Ireland community of practice. So if you want to share anything about open education and higher education in Ireland, you can just tag it with the open ed HEIE hashtag and other people will find it. And in terms of welcomes, before I introduce Jenren, I just want to say that I want to give a special welcome to, we have a number of audiences, a special welcome to project teams who are working on teaching and learning enhancement projects, which have national forum funding. Because as you know, all of the work of the national forum that we do and that is done through our projects is shared openly. And we know that some of our partners in those projects need support for how to do that. So this webinar is really designed specifically for those projects. But we also know that people are joining us from higher education institutions from further education and secondary from business, you know, all over Ireland and beyond Ireland. So I just want to say I know there are a lot of audiences here in the webinar, and we want to welcome you all. So with that, I would like to give a very special welcome to Jenren Wetzler, who is the assistant director of Creative Commons. Jenren works closely with some of who some of you may know in Creative Commons and Jenren has accepted our invitation to join us today to go into a little bit more depth about Creative Commons itself and how Creative Commons licenses can be used to create OER and support teaching and learning. So thanks very much, Jenren. Thank you so much for having me. So just bear with me for one second. I'm going to share my screen, which is just a continuation of our PowerPoint. One second. Okay, can everyone see the PowerPoint again? Hopefully that's yep. Okay, great. So it's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity that Catherine's provided. And it's great to to connect with international colleagues. So recognizing that many of you probably have a longer experience in open education than I do, or more expertise, I really welcome the discussion and would love to hear from you. So either in the Q&A after this, or you're welcome to email me at anytime, Jenren at Creative Commons.org. And I know I share my my Twitter handle later on, but I'll be honest, I'm at best a lurker on Twitter. So the best option is just my email address. Okay. So this licensed presentation is kind of nested, almost nested within the national forum presentation that Catherine's made available. I wanted to share this attribution statement right off the bat. So you knew that all of the content that I share is openly licensed. It's there for you to use to draw from to remix with other resources that you might want to will make it available after this presentation. And this is possible because this presentation is CC by licensed. So this allows creators to give permissions to users to remix and and use as they like, as long as they give attribution. So here's my attribution statement. This is within the the national forum presentation, which is also CC by. And we can get a little bit more into how these these pieces of content can mix together later on in the presentation. Okay, so in this presentation, I will give you a quick overview of Creative Commons and how we got started. I'll also just talk a little bit more broadly about some of the concepts of open education and OER. As Catherine mentioned, the term open can be a little bit confusing, depending on the audiences and who's using that term. And then we'll actually launch right into how to find and use OER and also how to create and share OER, which can be a little bit more complicated. I actually run a certificate course at Creative Commons for the last two bullet points. So we spent about 10 weeks delving into this in a little bit more depth. So please know if if there's anything that I'm rushing through right now, it's only because we don't have 10 weeks together. But happy to share more information about the certificate course later if anyone's interested. Alright, so what is Creative Commons? Creative Commons, as many of you likely know, but maybe some some don't, is an organization that builds and stewards the legal tools, technologies and programs that power open movements around the world. You can learn more about us at creative commons.org. But in a little bit of our history, we were created in 2001, as kind of a response to a challenge, folks, mostly in the US, we're facing about copyright. So many of you know copyright is the area of law that regulates the way products of human creativity are used. So products of human creativity can be anything from a squiggle on a napkin someone writes down in a bar to an academic book, or article, music, art, etc. songs. So copyright grants an exclusive set of rights to the creator. So the creator has the ability to prevent others from copying or adapting her work for a set amount of time. And that time varies by country. Copyright law was actually first created during the era of the printing press. So it's focused on regulating copy on regulating who is allowed to copy and share with whom. But we're obviously not in the era of the printing press anymore. So we're now in this much more information abundant resource abundant era of the internet. So while copyright places restrictions on on sharing creations, the internet provides obviously plenty of opportunities to share access, adapt resources, collaborate on creations and and access things at a much lower cost. So Creative Commons helps creators around the world share their works in a legal way with the terms that best suit them. We provide the public domain tools and open licenses that have become the global standard for sharing. And so far, this is not a total estimate of full estimate, but we have over 1.4 billion works that are open licensed on 9 million websites. And these works are used by different global movements in open education, in arts and culture, government science and more. And forgive me, I've got a little bit of a cold. So I might be taking sips of tea during our presentation. So let's just jump right into open education. Open education at its heart is about sharing. This is a sometimes an umbrella term that can be used for the mix of educational resources, practices, policies and communities that can ideally provide broad access to effective learning opportunities for everyone. The definition that I, I've liked in the past is open education is about using open resources to expand our collaborative, inclusive, accessible and active learning and our pedagogy. It's about giving more agency and opportunity to students and to teachers. So in terms of the umbrella term that captures our resources, practices, policies and communities, I want to unpack that just a little bit more. So we've got open educational resources, which we'll talk about in a minute. We've got open practices, which can include collaborative pedagogical practices, fostering interaction and peer learning, knowledge creation and sharing and empowerment of learners. They're a way for learners and teachers to, to develop new approaches to co-create knowledge. So it's more of an empowerment of learners and teachers together, which I really like. Policies are formal regulations that that focus on supporting these practices and the resources that fund them that focus on adoption and use of OER and also practices. So we've got the resources, the practices, the policy. And then in terms of communities, I think of it as an open education global movement. There are a number of different communities, each with their own unique needs around the world that are contributing to this broader access to, to education. So just a few points about open education as a global movement. I think there were a couple questions about some of this. I wanted to spend a moment on this. Open as a term can get confusing. Open education is related, but distinct from the other open movements. So there are open movements and scientific knowledge and research, that's open access. There's open data, which is focused on making research data freely available for anyone to use, download offline, analyze, reprocess and so on. There's also open source, which refers to open source code. So the term open can be applied kind of at a meta level to a number of different movements. But also I wanted to note that open can be a term that is used by different stakeholders or even used in, I suppose, misused in some ways. So people can apply open to platforms, resources or practices that are actually closed or not easily accessible with the widest permissions available to reach the widest number of audiences available. Sometimes, at least here, we call that open washing where an individual or entity might use open because it resonates more with the audience that they're trying to reach and access, whether it's for commercial gain or otherwise. And even if the source isn't fully open that they're offering. So in a nutshell, open can get confusing. And I fully appreciate that. In terms of the global education movement, we would have to go back many, many decades, probably over half a century, to look at some of the beginning steps. There have been a lot of pivotal events that have shaped open education and the movement that we have today. But I did want to highlight one in particular, one, the Cape Town Declaration in particular that I think summarizes the ideals of open education. And this was a kind of foundational document that hundreds of learners and educators, governments and educational institutions signed in 2007. So the Cape Town Declaration aims to create a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge, which is a pretty lofty goal. And I think something that really connects so many different communities in this movement together. So this goal is also supported by UNESCO. UNESCO actually coined the term prior to the Cape Town Declaration, coined the term open educational resources in 2002 at a forum on the impact of open courseware for higher education. And since then UNESCO has been a big advocate and promoter of OER. And you'll notice if if you follow the SDGs or Sustainable Development Goals, implicit and Sustainable Development Goal number four is a need for open education and OER and higher education and beyond. Okay, so what are open educational resources? So we talked about the definitions of open practices, open policies, open education as a movement. OER are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no cost access use adaptation and redistribution by others with no limited restrictions. So I think it's important to kind of unpack that a little bit. Oftentimes people think that OER have to be just online, but that is not the case. They can be intangible copies. So I actually, I should have made it available. I have a an OER book that I often like to show people. Okay. So this definition is one that Creative Commons holds. And also that UNESCO's recently updated and holds as well. So I bring this up because I I recognize many of you may may notice different definitions of OER online, depending where you're looking. Some funders have different definitions. And I think over the years, and as the open education movement has grown and developed, the definitions have also evolved. So there are a number of different debates on what should be included in the definition of OER. We are aligned with UNESCO's definition. And one other note on UNESCO earlier this month, Cable Green and many others were working with UNESCO Member States to get a UNESCO OER recommendation approved, and it was so I expect this will be in its final stage in November, most likely. I think that's what he said. But this this OER recommendation builds government support for all the different facets that we need to further OER. So from capacity building and supportive policy, quality OER to sustainability of models to international cooperation and monitoring. This OER recommendation is a really critical step in the evolution of this open education movement. Okay, and Creative Commons focuses mostly on the licenses and the licensing part of this definition. So while we have the the global standard of licenses, I will rep I will recognize that there are other open licenses around the world. I would contend that the Creative Commons licenses are the global standard because they're interoperable, they work around the world and have the clear licensing language that lawyers around the world have worked on to kind of unify. Okay, so another way to think about OER, which might make things a little bit easier is by the permissions that they grant users. So when you have an openly licensed educational resource, that resource will allow users to make and retain their own copy of it. It'll allow users to use the licensed resource in a wide range of ways. So hypothetically, if I gave you this PowerPoint, you'd be welcome to use it in a video that you create, although I'm not sure if you'd want to create another video, there will be a recording of this, which I hope will be openly licensed. The OER also allow users to adapt, modify and improve the content as well. So a lot of times you'll see Google Docs that have a Creative Commons license on them, as they are improved and updated, that is that is possible without infringing on copyright because they're openly licensed. So it's easy on Google Docs, it's also permissible. And then we've got the ability to remix. So openly licensed educational resource can be added together. And we'll get into this a little bit more in a minute, it can get a little bit complicated at times, but you're welcome to generally making sure that the permissions align, combine different resources together to create all new materials. And then you're also allowed to share or redistribute what you create with others. So it's not just sharing the original resource, but sharing the offshoot. And this is, this is kind of an important point. Not all of our licenses allow for OER. A couple of our licenses that include no derivatives clauses have, they restrict the ability to redistribute if you've made, made changes. So we have our CC by and D or attribution, no derivatives license, and also the CC by NC and D, which is the attribution and non commercial, no derivatives license that are not OER. Okay, and then who uses OER? We, we came up with a list. It's not exhaustive, but it gives you an idea of the, the breadth and the scope of the public and cultural institutions that currently use OER. I think we could break this down much further. But for right now, this is just to give you a sense. And I don't know if Catherine has any, any additional folks to add to this or any updates, but we wanted to give you a sense. I think this is a great kind of macro list and, and what we'll do is maybe we'll dive down a little bit more deeply into the university sector after you're finished. Sounds great. Okay, so why is OER important? This is an example of an a piece of openly licensed actually CC by CC zero content that we've added into the presentation. So OER are important for a number of reasons. They improve affordability, which in turn helps students with success rates and learning. So particularly in the US, there are a number of studies that have demonstrated that improving student access to educational resources through OER improves their learning rates, which makes sense. There are examples that the open ed group publications and also the excuse me, the UK open textbooks work, excuse me one second. Okay, OER are also much more accessible than traditional resources. So they allow people to better adapt the resources to meet learner's needs, whether those needs are based on a particular location that changes the cultural, environmental or social cues. They make them more available to and adaptable to learners with disabilities and their needs. They also because they're more easily shared across higher ed institutions, for example, and a little bit more flexible, they often lead to greater innovations and improvements. So one example I like to give is based on a US Department of Labor initiative, they created a repository for vocational training options that are all openly licensed. So this is skillscommons.org. There, you'll find a number of different syllabi and class resources on a range of different classes from all these different technical colleges in the US. Well, one organization in Mexico found this, found a, I believe, a solar paneling class that they really liked. So they downloaded it, translated it into Spanish and then re uploaded it to the skillscommons page. So now even more people with more language needs have access to this content. So they not only made it adaptable to their own community, but then also enhanced the resource for everyone. And then finally, oh, we are also scalable. So it costs much less to share resources with more people more quickly. The cost is nearly zero online. That's not to assume that there are not hidden costs for institutions that adopt an OER curriculum, but it is far more scalable than the traditional hard copy of books, for example. And this is not to say that OER are a silver bullet or a solution to every challenge. But it's just to give you a sense of why we really are passionate about OER. And I can talk more about some of the challenges if anyone's interested. Probably later in the Q&A or afterward. Okay, so now let's move on to how to find and use OER. This is kind of the fun part. You can find OER on a number of different repositories online. I've highlighted a few here, because we're seeing open education efforts at all levels of education, not just higher ed. We're seeing z degrees at universities or zero textbook cost degrees. We're seeing the Global Digital Library, which offers openly licensed children's books in over 30 languages. We're seeing, and I have a number of US examples, but there are plenty of others, open stacks, providing full courses, syllabi quizzes, assessments, videos, etc. OER Commons is a wonderful repository for searching OER. Skills Commons I just mentioned. Merlot is another textbook repository. And you can always go to the OER world map to find out more about different OER initiatives, policies, etc. You can search by country or by keyword. And then finally, we have the CC search functionality. So I want to see if I can share that website. Hopefully you guys are seeing the Creative Commons search page right now. You just go to ccsearch.creativecommons.org. And this is actually something that we've been building that started with images, but now we're moving on to OER. So what you do is you can search the Commons for any kind of openly licensed image or resource that you want. We will be adding to this regularly, but I'll just give an example. I'll say, and I haven't tried this, so I don't know what's going to come up, but I'll say penguin.  So these are just a few areas of where a few sources online where you can search for OER. In terms of how you use OER, it's actually simple once you find what you want to use. You share the content in the way that the creator permits based on the license. And then you keep the creator's license applied to your content. So you have to place the license on the content so future users also understand who made it and with what permissions. So we'll get into a little bit more of that in a minute. But the acronym that we like to think of is TASL. It's TASL title, author, source and license. That's what you want to include on works that you use and also your own work. Okay, one more second. Okay, so how do you create and use your own OER? I'm not going to spend all that much time delving into the particulars here because I know Catherine has a summary of the process in the National Forum Open Licensing Toolkit on the next slide. But really briefly, you can share, you can go to our our chooser and actually walk through a number of different questions that will yield the recommended license for you. So I'll just show that really quickly. One second. Nope. Not the penguins. Okay, so hopefully you are seeing the the CC license chooser, you can just go to creativecomments.org slash choose or find out more in the toolkit. And this, this is actually, this will be updated at some point, but it's a simple tool to walk you through just a very couple, a couple of few questions that you need to answer.  So I'll say, no, I don't want adaptations to be shared, that'll change the license. Or, yes, as long as other people share the adaptations, they share alike. So they basically are applying the same license and using them in the same way. Actually, they don't have to use them in the same way. Then we look at allow commercial use of your of your work. So I'll say no, and that'll change the license or I'll say yes. So then you scroll down to selected license. And based on my decisions, I would be best suited for an attribution share like 4.0 international license. These are the symbols or the icons that would kind of let users know what permissions you're allowing. But then you all you have to do is copy and paste this text and that icon on your document or your resource to allow people know. So we've got the icons, we've got the language and also the link to the legal code. So if you have a website, then you also just copy the code down here and you can paste on the back end of your website. Excuse me. So these are, this is kind of a really quick and dirty overview of our licensed user. Again, we can get into more details on that. I think with the next slide, I will return to our side now. The other the other component of this is, well, they're actually a lot of nuances that we can get to in either the Creative Commons certificate course or in further discussions to kind of break down the in depth use of OER finding them, sharing them and some of the some of the ethos around this, this broader open movement and community. So if anyone's interested, I think I have this up, the Creative Commons certificate can be found here certificate statcreativecommons.org. And that's all I'll say on finding and sharing OER for now. If you want to use existing OER in your resource, things get a little bit more complicated. So I'll share a couple things to keep in mind. But please note that my guidance is not considered legal advice. I don't have a lot of great. So it's technically not legal advice. So when you share unadapted versions of a work within your own, the content is considered collection content. So if you share two or more works that are openly licensed within your own work, and you provide the attributions that's considered a collection. If you if you adapt the content that you're using, then we consider that a remix or a derivative. So that remix content or derivative content is still used within your own source. And we still have to kind of give attribution the same as we would with with collection. So basically, we have one recommended practice, whether you use content in a collection, or whether you remix the content. So what you want to do, as I mentioned this before, is share the title author source and license tassel. Sorry, one second. So the other thing to consider when you are working with openly licensed work that you adapt is that you have to not only you have to make sure that not only the work is compatible with your own license work, but it also allows for adaptations in the in the first place. So what qualifies as an adaptation is actually complicated. It depends on a country's applicable law and that that can range. But we have a couple different resources on this front on this front help. So we've got an adapter's chart, which I can actually click and share. And then we've also got a chart, excuse me, for collection content. So this is under our frequently asked questions page, you can basically look at our chart and see, sorry, I'll use my mouse so you can see because my finger is not showing up on the screen for some reason. You can look at the left side, or actually the top, you look at the left side, though, for the sake of this, and you select the openly licensed content that you'd like to add into your existing content. Let's say we use CC buy, then you can see where there are green checkmarks. That shows that it is compatible with content that you either put in the public domain, or you license CC buy, or you license CC buy share alike. It is not compatible with non commercial use by no derivatives, or some of these other more restrictive licenses. Oops, sorry, it is non commercial, but not with no derivatives. I was flipping down to buy an essay. So what I like to do is just double check whenever I make a remix of content, I just double check that the content on the left matches up with a green checkmark with the license I want to apply on the top right. Okay, and then for a collection content, there's also a nifty chart. And this is similar. So this this kind of shows the the way to to attribute your your collection content and how you can use use licensed content within your collections. Okay, we also have some additional resources that we've shared with Creative Commons Certificates after or certificate participants after a number of questions and challenges with with this area of licensing. So if anyone's interested, I'll make all of these links available in the presentation after after we wrap up, I'll just share the presentation, you're welcome to click through all of these links. Okay, I think I'll stop there because I feel like I've been talking a lot. But I'm happy to take any questions. And I really appreciate your time and attention. I know a lot of this can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. And forgive me for my my raspy voice it's pretty early here in the States. And I think it's maybe allergies. Thank you so much, Jen. Yes, you've been bravely talking through your froggy voice, but it's all very clear. I have a couple of other things back in our presentation. But I see a question from Julie that this might be the best time to answer that. And she's written in the chat. Could you just explain again the difference between collection and derivative content? Sure. So collections and derivatives are, they can be complicated. We've actually gotten guidance from our CC legal team to not not make assumptions on what is exactly considered a derivative because the definition of adaptation can change based on different countries, copyright laws. So, at least in the US, a derivative piece of work is considered derivative if it has a certain amount of creativity to create it. So it can't just be, you know, maybe changing the aspect ratio of an image online. It has to be, it has to actually include more creativity of the person making the derivative content. I'm not sure if I'm making it as clear as I could. A collection is basically unadapted work added into your open license content. And you have to share two or more pieces of unadapted work. And a derivative would be when you you make changes that are considered original or creative, and you add them into your work. So you don't actually necessarily know where the original work stopped and your work began. I think the the analogy that we often like to use is this TV dinner versus smoothie analogy. So you can think of all of the different food components in a TV dinner as almost like collection content within a broader collection. So you've got your potatoes and your, I don't know, your carrots and whatever else that you have in your TV dinner in these individual separate compartments, you can see each of them, you would hypothetically, if this were a resource, you would add the license to each of them individually. Excuse me. But for a derivative, that would be more comparable to a smoothie, where you have all of the same ingredients, but mixed together in such a creative way that you don't you don't actually see where the original content ended and your content and creativity began. It's all kind of an original slurry. So that's one way to think of the difference between collections and derivatives TV dinners, smoothies. Okay, thank you very much. Can you see this lot back to the slide again? Okay, that's great. Let me just get my okay. I wanted to be sure and have some time for questions, but there's just a couple of things I wanted to to say just following what Jenron said, the detail of licensing is so important. But I don't I want to make sure, from our perspective that we don't lose sight of why we do this. And so you know, we're trying to straddle those two things here today in the webinar. So usually, when you look at the definition of open education, it's it says that the why behind opening resources and practices is for three things. One is to increase the accessibility of those resources. A second is to increase the effectiveness of education. And the third one is to reduce inequality in terms of education. So zooming right into the one audience that's here today in the webinar, who are recipients of teaching and learning enhancement fund funding, and have been asked to make their resources open. It's very, you know, for those people, this is very straightforward. So we've recommended a CC by license. And in the gentleman's presentation, you can see why the most open license is the most attractive because you can do the most things with it. So you know, if you're working on a project and you make your resource available, that means anyone at any other institution in Ireland or globally, student or staff can take that resource and adapt it to their own particular context. So adapt it to their particular program, their course, the needs of their particular students, the needs geographically where they are, you know, make case studies that are attuned to the learners in that particular community. So it opens up the potential for use of whatever resource you've created. So that gets accessibility and effectiveness. And in terms of equity, one of the biggest arguments around open education is simply that, you know, many of us work in publicly funded institutions. And our teaching and learning resources, those that can be should be available publicly. And this is a debate that's going on in many institutions now. But certainly, from the National Forum's point of view, all of our work and all of the work that we fund is made available under an open license. So for those people who, those of you who would like to openly license your work, whether that's in connection with the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund project or otherwise, the toolkit that we published last month goes through the steps that Jenman just showed you on screen live, like how do you actually go in and choose your license? How do you do that attribution statement? Just the mechanics of it, really, are what a lot of people have difficulty with. And that's this kind of four steps in that toolkit that described that. And with that, I think I will just open up for questions. I'm going to go to our documents. Maybe I'm just start with one of the questions that someone added to a document. And I might start out with authority one, which is who owns the learning materials that are created by lecturers. And I will invite others to join in the chat here. But the legal statement about who owns resources for lecturers is in the intellectual property policy of your institution. And these vary actually across institutions. So most of those IP policies have been written with a mindset of protecting intellectual property that can be monetized, you know, and can make money. So this is kind of kind of pushing against what we're trying to do in open education. So many of the universities who are really at the forefront of open education have actually revised their intellectual property policies to explicitly state that they support open education licensing, and teaching and learning resources should be made openly available. So for anyone who's here in the webinar, I advise you that's the first place to go is to to look at the IP policy in your institution. And then I'd be happy to have a conversation with anyone in Ireland. And, Jenren, I don't know if you want to add anything or any of the librarians who are here in the webinar. Yeah, I think as unless it's specified as in individuals contracts at their institutions that they're work for hire, then whoever creates a lecture or other creative content owns the copyright. So institutions have their their own IP rights and their own contracts with with lecturers. So it'll depend on that. But look for work for hire in the contracts. Yes. And a couple of people mentioned Lee Allison, others that it's you know, it's it'll be in your contract. So the when you get funding, though, if you get funding from, you know, from the EU or from the National Forum or whatever, you know, that changes things again. So because the funders will have particular requirements for what you produce. So you know, this is where the notion of open gets complicated. But again, you know, for individual questions that people have about this, I'm happy to have a conversation. But the best place to start is, you know, with your own institutions requirements. So, Lee, would you like to moderate any of the questions from the chat or from the document, perhaps, and and share those? So Jenren, I think was clear about that. And I'm glad this was mentioned because this gets back to, you know, the way we we often use the word open and what it means in terms of licensing. So for example, in a former round of teaching and learning enhancement fund projects here in, in Ireland, many of them were made freely available and that they had websites and they shared their resources. But when I went back and did an audit of the licensing, only a handful of them actually had creative commons licenses. So that means, you know, if someone stumbles across or someone shares one of those websites with someone and there is not a creative commons license on it, the person who finds that resource doesn't know if they can use it legally or not. And by copyright law, they would have to go back to the person who created it and say, Hey, can I use this? And how can I use it? So the creative commons license means that you're just putting something on top of copyright that travels with the resource so that whoever finds that resource knows exactly what they're allowed to do with the resource. So it really facilitates kind of frictionless sharing and reuse. And I don't know if anyone wants to add anything to that. And this interesting point from Rob there that you can see. Oh, I can't hear Lee. But I saw some questions coming in. Can you rewind and start that at the beginning? The mic's on now. Oh, sorry. OK, excuse me. So yeah, just going back to Rob's point on the chat, which I'm sure most of you have seen, but most institutions in relation to the IP, most institutions state something along the lines that in line with longstanding academic practice, the IP is best in the academic for their academic work. But in Ireland, the copyright and related rights act is clear that IP creation in work is higher and lower. So academic practice in Ireland is a customary exception. Thank you, Rob. And this is where I think we can learn from other institutions who are modeling a different practice who, as I said, have gone in and revised their IP policy. So Rob, I would love to follow up that conversation with you because I think there's a possible opening there. So thanks for that. So then going back to the document, are there specific delivery platforms or hosting platforms that are more open? OK, I'll jump in there. And again, anyone else can join in. Many people in this webinar will remember the NDLR project in Ireland, which was a repository for open materials. And these existed in many other countries as well, the US, the UK, and so on. And in recent years, most institutions have moved away from this model of repositories and instead relied on open licenses and enabling people to put things in different places. So the University of Edinburgh, for example, which has a very well known and widely copied open education policy has some repositories that it uses, but it encourages academic staff to put things on YouTube, on Vimeo, on SlideShare, on whatever platforms they wish with an open license. And then they feature some of those examples. So you're relying really on a kind of a network effect. But the most important thing is the license. So again, the National Forum is trying to model good practice and to make things available and kind of showcase open resources. But we can all work in our institutions towards kind of creating those in our respective institutions as well. I'm just going back up to the chat. There's questions from Alison in relation to projects. Content is behind a user name or password login, such as the T-Rex, etc. Sorry, can I ask another question again? So if the content, so it's going back and saying that the chat from Alison, if content is behind a user name or password login, such as the T-Rex, etc. project, is that technically normal? Genre. No. That's not technically open. I mean, it has to be unfettered access. And I'll just add to that. In the open licensing toolkit, we point out that some resources that are created by National Forum projects may, for various reasons, because of working with sensitive communities or other restrictions that may not be able to be openly licensed. And we'd like to have a conversation about that. But the norm would be that we would like the default position to be that they're creative comments licensed. And instead of asking, you know, why things should be open, why why not open? And if there's a good reason why they should not be open, then fine. But the default, we would like to be open. So the last one there, which of them you covered over if you want to add anything on this, what exactly is meant by I think we we probably answered some of that earlier. But I like the the most kind of inclusive definition of open possible. So, you know, free and unfettered access to the for the broadest community possible and for the longest time possible. So if nobody has any other questions, I don't see anything else going through there. I wanted to add something and maybe give another minute if in case anyone else had any questions, because we you know, we've spent a lot of time talking about the mechanics, but the the whole reason why you might choose to use open educational resources, you know, covers a very broad spectrum. And that can include using, you know, open textbooks or sharing open resources with your students, you know, remixing open resources so that they're more appropriate for the learning communities we are working with. But then there's also working with students to get students to create open resources. So, you know, working, there are examples of people who've worked on creating textbooks along with their students and then openly licensing those textbooks that are co-authored by the entire class. So, you know, and that gets to the point of redesigning assessments so that students are designing things that are designed for authentic audiences and open licensing enables, you know, that kind of kind of creative teaching and learning and assessment. So, things like editing existing Wikipedia articles, many academic staff are doing. So, teaching students about creative commas licenses once we have gotten to grips with them can unlock a lot of possibilities in terms of teaching learning and assessment. And the open licensing toolkit is just going to be the first of a series of resources that the National Forum will produce to help support academic staff who want to do more work in that area. So, this moves from kind of OER Open Educational Resources into OEP or Open Educational Practices. Thanks for coming in from Alison there. This is one of the most informative webinars I've attended remotely. Everyone should watch this to understand the basics of open resources. Thank you. Very, very much. Okay, you know, as someone who's worked in open education for a long time, I know this is, you know, just an introduction and, you know, if it's good, Alison, probably it'll prompt more questions than we can answer here. So, you know, on our last slide, I think we have Jenren's email address and Twitter name, also mine. We'd be happy to field any other questions. I leave the hashtags there. These conversations can continue via email, via Twitter or in person. So, we'd be more than happy to continue the discussion. And I just need to say a really warm thanks to Jenren for your time in preparing everything for today and for joining us today, despite your cold. We really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, and thank you everyone for giving up your time as well and just look forward to continuing the discussion. Thank you. Thank you.