Let me know when you're ready. OK, welcome everyone to our faculty OER dialogue from Open Education Week. And I hope everyone's having a great Open Education Week. I would like to introduce our moderator for the philosophy dialogue today. It is the amazing Quill West, the Open Education Project Manager at Pierce College District in Washington State, also the longtime president of CCC OER. And she's going to introduce our amazing panelists and take it from there. So thanks so much, Quill, and Nathan and Edward for joining us today. Hello, everyone. So as Inna said, my name is Quill West, and I am so excited to participate in these faculty dialogues. When we envisioned this idea from CCC OER, we were hoping during Open Education Week to invite our faculty from different institutions to talk to each other about what it's like to teach with OER in their discipline, what are some unique challenges and opportunities they've experienced, and kind of just hear the inside of disciplines talking to each other, discipline faculty talking to each other, because we don't often get time to hear that. So I'm very, very excited to get to be the one who gets to do the philosophy group. I'm expecting good conversations. So a few minutes ago, if you were in early chat, you heard Ed and Nathan introduce themselves, because they've never met each other. So I'm going to actually ask them to do that one more time, introduce one another to themselves in front of us, and give us a little bit about their background. So let's start there, if you wouldn't mind, Nathan and Ed. All right, I can start. My name is Nathan Smith. I'm a full-time philosophy faculty member at Houston Community College. And I've been teaching here since 2008. And in 2017, I took on a position as the OER coordinator, which has meant that I have pretty much taken a full teaching release to do more administrative stuff around OER. I still teach one or two classes a semester, but my duties have kind of shifted in the last couple years. Oh, it's wonderful to meet you, Nathan. I'm Edward Haven. I am the philosophy department chair and professor at Los Modanos Community College, which is in Pittsburgh, California. And I've been teaching here since for three years now, since 2015-16. And I really started out just kind of in philosophy, but always had an interest in kind of making my own books and putting together source material. And so when the state grant came along, we had a California Community College state grant for OER. I submitted the grant and became the coordinator. So I am now the coordinator for our college. And we're moving into a new grant that's a federal grant with Libra Text, which is a really cool website that's trying to centralize and make it a little more easy for people to use open educational resources and mix and remix all their kind of stuff. So yeah. Cool. OK. And as a point of activity, just to help people worry it and figure out what's going to happen, this is going to be a dialogue. So we do have some guiding questions, but for the most part, we're hoping to just talk to each other. If you are interested in participating, there is a chat window. So feel free to prompt questions in chat. And if you want to use your microphone, also welcome those voices in this conversation. So without further ado, I'm going to bring up our first part one kind of guiding questions. And I'm not going to read these. I'm going to ask you to choose the one that's most interesting to you and respond to it if you wouldn't mind. And I think last time, Nathan, you started. So Ed, let's have you start if you wouldn't mind. OK. As you're saying, we could maybe do these a little out of order. So the first question that jumps out to me was how was I first introduced to OER? And I think this is interesting. Because I've talked to a couple other people in philosophy. And I think the way that philosophers get into OER is very different than, say, chemistry people get into OER. I think our field is very different in that we do have some contact with primary sources. And these primary sources, especially the classics or even some of the all that kind of earlier material is already in the public domain. And I think we also have a more general feeling towards kind of being open about information and material, like that part of learning and part of knowledge is being open about that stuff. So it came to me first because I just was teaching Introduction to Philosophy. And I realized the book that I was charging for was about $130. And every single reading I was teaching was a primary source that was in the public domain. And so I started to ask myself, why am I making students pay for stuff that's in the public domain to read that I could easily assemble myself. And what I also realized is I'm going to be doing this for another 20, 30 years. Well, I'm putting some effort now to make a book that I like that I'm going to use for 30 years rather than just kind of stick with a book that has a whole bunch of readings I don't include and a whole bunch of extra stuff, and the students don't have the money to buy. And so it just started with me kind of gathering stuff. Gathering stuff that I think is interesting and I thought was cool whether that was, again, public domain, Aristotle, Plato, Locke, Yume, things like that, as well as like the translation of the Daotai Ching, things like that. Or articles online, like the great articles on the Flosser Stone that's on The New York Times, those kinds of things that I could easily just share with my students and engage in kind of really interesting and meaningful conversations. So that's kind of how I got into it. It just seemed like a natural fit for our discipline to move into it that way. Excellent. Do you mind if I just jump in? Is that all right? Cool. So I think I'll just kind of go rip off the same sort of topics. I think for me, I always became aware of open licensing and Creative Commons licensing like in the early 2000s. In fact, my wife is a musician and she, Creative Commons licensed an album that she made back in 2004. And what was cool about that was you could post it to the Commons and then she even got like one of her songs remixed. So I was aware of open licensing because of that and the cool ideas of sort of sharing content and building off of content that was created by others. And then very similarly to Ed, like when I started teaching at HCC, I mean, we had a commitment to reducing the cost for students. So we had been using a lot of primaries. We were also very much focused on primary source materials. And so we kind of, many of you might be familiar with the Hackett Publishing, which is a very inexpensive non-profit press that produces really good materials, but they're very inexpensive. So we were using that for a long time. But then I started to think about sort of expanding and changing the way I taught the class. I come from a history of philosophy background. So it was natural for me when I first started teaching to kind of do this like history of Western philosophy march, you know, just start from like either Socrates or the Presocratics and kind of walk my way. And I had a narrative of arc for the history of philosophy and could go through epochs and so forth. And as I taught for a while, I began to get a little dissatisfied with that approach. And I came to prefer a sort of problems-based approach or a questions-based approach. So now my course is more designed around central themes. We start out with sort of a basic introduction to logic and reasoning. This is for like an intro course. And then we look at sort of, you know, questions and metaphysics and epistemology. Who, what kinds of things exist? How do I know the things that exist? Sort of. And then we might get into things like problems like personal identity or what is the mind? And I found that to be more engaging. That kind of way of setting up a course made more engaging for my students. And then as a result, I had to start incorporating other materials. And that's when I really started, you know, compiling essentially a course built out of open source or openly licensed materials, either public domain resources, in some cases, pre-prints that were made available by relatively contemporary philosophers. And then I began writing segments that sort of helped flush out parts that were missing. Like a basic intro to logic kind of segment. Some overview sections on some of these things. I worked with some of my colleagues to do that. And so that's kind of where, that's kind of how I've evolved in the use and development of more OER in my courses. So that of course raised an interesting question for me about because primary sources are one kind of piece. So you both talked about kind of having primary sources and teaching from a theme-based perspective and then having to add materials, kind of connective materials. Can you talk about how you decided what kinds of connective resources you needed and the kind of approach to creating those resources or finding them if they're out there and available? Yeah, if Nathan's all right with me jumping in, I'll say on this. And I want to really quickly try, but Nathan was saying, I agree on this idea of kind of having more, I do the same kind of question-based, themed-based units around kind of philosophical questions. And so to start to do more of the connective stuff, yeah, my core, my first readers that I made and I still use a lot of them are right just primary sources. And one of the ideas that's come up around the California Community Colleges, which I really like, is this idea of starting to have the students contribute and collaborate, right? Like this idea of open pedagogy. And so I can't say this project is complete yet, but I'm trying to actually have the students start writing the summaries of the articles for one another and start writing the questions, the study questions that will go with them. And the idea being that that'll be part of, right now, it'll be part of extra credit for them to kind of like take on another assignment if they want to kind of do that so that they can actually start making supplemental material for each other and focus on the things that they think are important for each other. So that's what immediately came to mind. I think that's really a great way for philosophy to start doing that, right? The other place, of course, I bet everybody in philosophy knows the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some nice little snippets and articles. And so that's a great way to start doing kind of secondary stuff to be like, okay, if you don't understand the reading as a primary source, like here's a little short summary of it that I can trust, you know, that can give you an intro if you're having trouble with it and then you can come back to the primary. But for me, in the end, I especially think through what we are even more become really, my course is really focused on the primary materials. Like it's really, I want to challenge them to grapple with hard stuff that they haven't read before and to really redense material that they've never looked at before. And I'm like, look, if that's difficult for you, then good, like you should get like, one of the great skills of philosophy is getting comfortable with difficult texts. So those are my thoughts on some of the ways I try to connect. But I'm really interested to see what Nathan has to say. Yeah, that's, I like the perspective. So I just shared a link in the chat window to my, which is basically my, we have a tool called the Learning Web, which is our basically faculty websites. So that's my page. And if you go down to the bottom of the page, there's links for each of the courses that I teach. And you'll find materials there. So if you go like to philosophy 1301, which is the intro philosophy or the intro to ethics class, you would see folders that have PDF files. And some of those PDF files are primary sources. One of the things I've done is like taken, like we go on a popular site, is like the MIT Classics Archive, which took a lot of stuff from the, and I'm, what's the Tufts website, the Classics website that they took the material from. And it's Perseus, I think is the name. They took a lot of that material and then put it in HTML form. Or if you go to Gutenberg Press, that's another place to get a lot of really good public domain materials. But the difficulty there is it's in HTML and sometimes, you know, when you're teaching you wanna have like page numbers. So you can refer students to a page number. You can all kind of be working off the text together. So what I've done is taken like just, it's just really control C and paste into an Word file and then added page numbers and done some little formatting to it. And then I've saved those as PDFs and posted them up there. So that's just a little bit of adapting of public domain stuff. But then I've got class notes on various problems. And this was something that we did, it was a colleague of mine, Gina Calderon, who is actually has moved out on from HCC. But she and I worked together on what we called a model course, which was kind of, we worked with an instructional designer and built a shell. This was in, we were using Moodle at the time. So this was a Moodle shell. And then we basically, we redesigned a course from scratch and we committed to using all openly licensed materials. And then what we did is each of us, we broke up the sections into different things and we then like wrote little study guide kind of intros for each of the units. So you'll see things like PDFs for like, does God exist? Is the mind something different? What is the mind? What is personal identity? What is logic? And those kinds of, those are gonna be PDFs that are based around those class notes that we put together. So that's kind of the connective material that we've added to the course. Yes, my class notes should be openly licensed and that if you open up the PDF, there should be a note on the first page that says it's a CC by license. Kelsey Smith, I guess. Yeah, the importance of that license. So I have one more, I don't... So my background is as a librarian and I'm really, really interested in talking to students about information that it gets excluded from sources. And I think it's really interesting that in often in my experience in teaching philosophy and history and primary source documents, students are presented with the source and no conversation about what sources aren't included and why they're not included. And I'm wondering if you do any of that work in the OER that you're curating. Yeah, you mean like so, for instance, like we might have a commitment to like a non-Western source or a, we tried to put together for instance, a list of sources of women philosophers from the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy. Yeah, that's one of those things with OER that makes it, that's a little more challenging. I think Edward talked about, including like the Dao De Ching translations of that. Some of them are out there. There are some good resources on some of the 17th century women philosophers. For instance, Mary Estelle, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, some of her correspondents with Descartes has been translated and is openly available. But yeah, that's a good point. I mean, there's stuff out there. And we had, I have made a, at least in our department, we do have a guideline, just a suggestion to include a non-Western and a non-male source in the curriculum. But it's, yeah, that's definitely, it's good to include. Yeah, I would like to echo that. I mean, I think that was the first thing that, in a way, I've been doing a lot of work to start incorporating some excluded voices into my classes. And when I went to OER, that became very apparent that that couldn't so easily be done, right? That I would have to like, if it's not more than 200 years or 100 years old, you're gonna have trouble just finding a public domain. And so, yeah, and that's something I wasn't happy with. And yeah, I wanna echo, I found the translations from Elizabeth of Bohemia as well. I've got those notes in my reader, those letters. But in the bigger sense, I mean, just to a note of translations, I think one of the tricky things is also, I had this problem where I wanted to make sure I was giving my students a really good translation of the material as well. And the stuff in the public domain, some of it's still like, I think the Benjamin Jowell or whatever his name is does, the Socrates is pretty okay. But that was a real challenge for me to make sure I was giving them good translations. And what I started to realize though, I mean, maybe this isn't true at all levels, of course. But because I mostly only teach intro courses at a community college, and a lot of my students aren't philosophy majors, it's not a big deal to them. Like they're not gonna be reading them at the level where we need to make sure a particular word was translated in a very particular way. And so there's one of those places where I talk about excluded voices is I do talk a lot about the problems of translations and which translations we're using versus others and the way that that changes these things. On the other side, the place that I then decided to use materials that help is in the secondary sources. So I try what I do is we've got these primary sources, but I think for the most part online, I can find articles and discussion today about the problems with the traditional canon and so I try to link them out to that stuff and have that as a broader conversation. Still, ultimately it's oriented around those original texts, those primary texts that are in the Western canon. But then we can start to have a larger conversation. I definitely like to have a larger conversation about what we're teaching is just Western philosophy and what the differences between Western philosophy and other epistemologies and how we can think about knowledge and things like that. So mostly it has to be done through website linking sources to kind of find voices out there to kind of add to the conversation. So I think pretty successful. Again, it's not as good as maybe if I, what you might be able to find if you collected non-OER material, but I think for the most part, the conversation's there for the students to have. And the last thought that I was gonna have about that, about sources too, is one of the things I think is unique about philosophy and I don't know if other people have tried this. Now this isn't OER per se, but in philosophy I have found that most faculty are very willing and very kind and will let you use their essays in your class if you ask them for permission. So I just email faculty directly and say, hey, my students really need this voice and we would love to have your voice as a contemporary philosopher and can I use your essay? And they usually say, yeah, of course. A couple of people, because I tried to work in Ubuntu as a more African idea of ethics. And the guy was not just like, you can use my essay. He was like, here's all six of my essays. He's like, go for it. I want this idea to spread, I want you to use it. So he's like, of course, of course, right? Now I can't include those in a reader as a separate like publishable thing, but then in my classroom I can give those as handouts. So I think philosophy has that advantage where other fields don't. We can just really ask each other and nobody's really trying to make tons of money off of this stuff. We just wanna share our ideas and get it out there. So I've never had trouble with that. Yeah, that's a great point. I wanna echo a couple of things that I use in my courses is library resources. So the best way that I found is we have a nice, our libraries have a nice little module that you can plug into your shell that talks about how to use the search functions. So we can plug that in early on and then you can select a permalink. Usually there's a permanent link kind of, once you find a source, you can do that. Typically you don't wanna select the URL because that includes your whole search string and it's not a very stable link, but usually you can find that. So I definitely use contemporary articles to sort of flesh out, get different voices into the mix. But another thing, I mean, Edward mentioned the Stone as a, at least an online source, the New York Times website, but there's also Aeon Magazine, that's A-E-O-N and Nigel Warburton, who does Philosophy Bytes podcast is an independent philosopher now. He is an editor for Aeon Magazine. So they put some really good philosophical content on a lot of different topics, some contemporary stuff. And they have a lot of different voices as well. And they have an interesting model where an author can either choose to syndicate the essay or they can choose to openly license the essay. So a lot of the Aeon Magazine essays are actually openly licensed. Usually a lot of times they have a non-no derivatives clause, type of license, so they're not revizable, but they are definitely, you can download them and redistribute them. So that gives a little bit more flexibility. And then the final thing that I've started using last semester in my ethics class is the hypothesis web annotation plugin. If you're familiar with this tool, I can give you a link in the comment place. But the cool thing about hypothesis is like I can send my students out into the web and have them do readings on the web. And then they can use this web browser extension to highlight passages and write comments on the actual website. You only see them when you're logged in or you have activated that browser extension. But, and also I try to get my students to do that within our class groups. So you can create groups within hypothesis and then they can do these annotations. But anyways, it's a kind of a fun activity because it gets students engaged in reading materials that are out on the open web. And then they're also doing this active, engaged process of commenting on pieces of the article and then replying to each other's comments and stuff. And that gets them engaged in the reading. It's interesting, it's always interesting to see how students read an article. They either highlight the whole thing or sometimes they just completely misunderstand a little. Cause in philosophy a lot of times in an article you'll have a dialectic where somebody's presenting a position that's not theirs. And the students will misunderstand that that's not what the author believes. That's just, you know, but this is an opportunity, right? This is a teachable moment type thing. I love it, okay. It looks like there's a little bit happening in the chat, apparently hypothesis is coming up a lot. But there is actually a request for maybe suggestions about OER that include commentary. And I know you've been talking about some of them. And I, and both of you have talked about creating your own resources. But have you looked at any open resources that have been published with the Creative Commons license that you would recommend or that you've tried? Yeah, so a couple that I just have right off the top of my head that are really obvious ones. The ethics for A level is one that goes around a lot. It's not the primary sources, but it is these kind of short commentaries and breakdowns of the primary ethical systems and some of the questions and dilemmas. So that's a really great one to supplement with. The other one I definitely wanted to mention is the logic and critical thinking by Matthew. I have it over here. Matthew J. Vin Cleave, which is the, yeah. It's like the one to use as a base for critical thinking classes. And now I actually just spun off my own version of it because you can do that. And because I wanted to format it differently and reorganize the chapters. But that's another great one for kind of like, if you want to talk about logic rules and like arguments by analogy and causal, necessary and sufficient conditions, things like that. So those are two that come immediately, I think are at a pretty good quality. Cool. I don't have any to add to that. I know that I'm participating in a Rebus project that's maybe getting close to getting wrapped up maybe in the next year, which is a, it's actually a series of book of philosophy, intro to philosophy kind of books, but it's gonna be on a series of topics. Like they're gonna go look at logic and then metaphysics and philosophy of mind and epistemology and ethics and there's, it's a pretty extensive dive into each of those, like several, like eight chapters for each of the books in the series. I've written a couple of chapters for them and I think that's gonna be a really great resource when that's complete. And then I happen to know that another faculty member, Carl Aho in Texas is doing a grant project that's going to be trying to provide some of the contextualization stuff for public domain material, specifically so he's doing an anthology of public domain resources for an intro to philosophy course and then he's building the sort of introductory kind of contextualizing stuff to go with that. So hopefully that will be something that will be available in the next year, but other than that, I don't have anything right now that would be, that's, that you could take. Well, can I add to that of like perspective things yet to that end, I am trying to do that for my reader. So hopefully in a year or two, it'll also be my reader which is a similar, it's just organized by questions but it's focused on primary sources but there'll be kind of a page introduction of who the person is, what the argument is, the outline of the argument, the context of the argument, some questions, reading questions and just kind of have that kind of introduction to them. So hopefully yeah, in a year or two, I'm starting to get some sections written. Hi guys, this is Pete Maria. Can I ask a question? Great. Thanks. So I'm a humanities and philosophy professor at Saddleback College in Southern California. And I have a question about using OERs in the classroom. I often find like, for actually kind of the reason that you were talking about before that teachable moment, I like to use hard copies of materials in the classroom and I have qualms about having them use, cell phones or tablets because those can be a distraction. And I wonder how you, if you face those problems and how you handle using OERs but making them useful in the classroom so you can sort of do guided readings, you can have them working groups and a thing like that and yeah, anything along those lines. Thank you. So I'm old school, I actually just have them print it. Our printing department prints it and they sell it for costs. So they don't, so that according to, so our state defined zero textbook cost and that is where we don't have an additional cost for the actual like publishing, for the publisher or the author. But our bookstore, if we print a physical copy, can recoup its basic, you know, six bucks, seven bucks, whatever it is to print it. So that's what I do. I make a PDF, I put that PDF online but I tell the students, look, we're gonna use this in class. I highly recommend buying it. I don't make them. I mean, if they don't buy a copy I'd let them bring up a tablet or a phone but I surveyed my students and I think it was 87% said they bought at the library, I mean, the bookstore and use that as their primary source, right? That that was their preference was to buy a physical copy because I think they're with us too. They would rather in class have a physical thing that they can mark up and they can read and they can talk and so in the classroom, that's what I do. That's right. I provide a physical copy in the bookstore that's an option for students. So similarly, we work with a university press publisher that will, a university press that'll print a sort of a loose leaf, like spiral bound volume and put it in the, and sell it in the bookstore at cost. So I provide that every semester. I would say not a lot of my students purchase it. I don't require it. I've also kind of, I struggle with this because I know that some of the evidence about the empirical evidence about taking notes with laptops although some of that has been disputed and then, but certainly the sort of distractibility feature definitely is a concern. But I've kind of just, I share some of that information with my students, but I let them make their own decisions. So I allow them to bring a laptops and tablet computers into the classroom and have them open. We do group work and sometimes I actually encourage people to have at least some kind of device because we might do work that requires them typing up stuff and doing projects, for instance, where they might develop a PowerPoint presentation. So they might need a computer. And then the only other thing I do is when I am, I sometimes do close readings of passages. For instance, when we're first getting into an author, we might read a few key passages together. And then I just put it up on the projector and magnify the size so everybody can read it. And then I'll highlight certain phrases and I'll, okay, so what is he saying here? What does that mean? We'll have a close reading together with it on the screen. I think that brings us actually very nicely. It was a great transition to our next kind of set of questions, which is really around how are the students interacting with the OER in your class? What are their responses been? Just anecdotally, or if you have anything like 87% want the print, that's a great piece of information to have. And Nathan, do you wanna go first? I'm gonna see if I can pull up some data. Oh, sure, okay. So in general, students are really happy not to have to purchase a textbook. So I don't have survey questions from my students on this, but the first day of class when you're going through the syllabus and you say to the students that all of the readings are available in PDFs or links in the Canvas shell, there is an audible sigh of relief and sometimes even clapping. So I think that's significant. That said, I have, I think, so in the most recent years, I've been teaching a bit online and I've been in the classroom sparingly. In the last couple of semesters though, I have had one student in each of the classes who I know has dropped out with in the first week or two because they didn't feel comfortable navigating the online materials. And now I, like I said, I provide materials, a hard copy in the bookstore, but when I'm teaching, I am almost only on the computer. I don't typically have a hard copy in front of me. It's very much based on, you know, you being able to navigate the materials on your own and some people just aren't comfortable doing that. I've had a couple of students drop. I know I'm almost sure for that reason. So it's mixed. I am definitely always thinking about what strategies I can use to get students to read more effectively. And I recently learned that hypothesis actually has a plug-in in Canvas so that they can do annotations inside the Canvas shell. And I haven't deployed that yet. I just learned about it. And I'm thinking that that might be a useful tool for students to, you know, even like mark up the textbook inside the Canvas shell. But I think there is, some people just aren't comfortable navigating through that. Some people are, but some people aren't. And I think it's a little mixed. Yeah. Yeah, so I found mostly for OERs, I agree, the students love it. I mean, they're very excited to hear that there's not gonna be another giant expensive textbook that they have to buy and that it's affordable. And so, yeah, I mean, so some of the data I took, we asked questions about, would they prefer, or how would they rate the quality of the textbook, the OERs? These were just on our philosophy classes, the ones I taught in the other OER classes we have. 63% said these were better than most textbooks they have in their other classes. 34% said they were the same and only 2% of students said these were worse than what they have in other classes. And what they mostly comment on, what they like about the OER is it gets to the point. It's not a whole bunch of chapters that they don't read, that has a whole bunch of extra stuff that the professor doesn't cover, that they have to be like, well, am I gonna need to know this? Am I not gonna need to know this? It's literally everything I say is echoed exactly in my readers because I've picked it. Sometimes I worry it's almost too repetitious because we're like, it's exactly what I wrote and then I say the same thing. But it works for students, they like that repetition. In terms of what was the other one, I asked if they prefer to pay for the published textbook, if they prefer to pay for a published textbook, 95% said no. What else do we ask them? We ask them if they would keep the textbook, after they finished the class and 65% said they would keep these textbooks. So I think the thing about with the OER is that students do wanna hold on to them, especially when they come to like core philosophy readings, those are things that down the road, they may wanna look back on or go back over or, and so that's another reason that I like offering a published printed thing that can kinda like hold on to a physical something they can take with them. I mean, of course they can keep a PDF but there's something about a physical book that they like keeping onto. So yeah, the student response has just been through the roof. It's most students, almost all students, find it useful, find it much more effective, much more to the point. To answer what changes might improve, we asked them what they would like to see added to the books. And the top response was outlines of arguments. That was the big thing. They would like to see it kinda like outlined, you know, kinda a standard form, like put out the argument so that we know when we go reading into it, we don't have to make sense of David Hume's Old English, right? Which I can't even make sense of all those betwixts that he puts in there. So, you know, like they just want something to help them structure it. They said that, right behind that is a list of key terms and definitions. You wanna see those. And then a biography of the author. Those are the three most popular kinda requests from the students, right? So what I like about that too is that they're not saying get rid of the primary sources. What they're saying is we like the primary sources. We just want things that support us in being able to read them more clearly, right? And so I think they do enjoy engaging with the material that we give them. So that's kinda what we came out with. So recommendations for people, if you're thinking about getting into OER, like just do it. Like I think it's a decision to make and then you'll find that once you've already made the decision, you can start putting stuff together. And it might take, I think it took me two or three semesters before I really had a completely OER solution. Like I started collecting things and started working in articles and asking professors for if I could share their articles in my class. But yeah, definitely. It's actually, I think in philosophy, I talk to people in chemistry all the time about this stuff and math. And I think it's a lot easier for us in an interesting way. So it's like a circle stuff. It's interesting. It's like, it's easier for us on one hand, but on the other hand, I mean, we don't have an open stacks textbook, you know, which is that really high quality sort of publisher like sort of textbook. But I don't know if you've started trying to introduce any kind of open pedagogy components in your class, Ed, but I started this in the summer in an online course and then in the fall with an online face to face and we're doing it again this spring. And I'm going to admit that I was, I'm more ambitious about what I can actually get done, but I haven't actually been as successful getting, holding up my end of the bargain. The students have been great. And so I'll explain. I have a project, a personal project that's one of the graded assignments in the class comes towards the end of the class. And essentially the personal project just asks the students, is there something about the textbook or the class that you think could be improved? And then your project is gonna be to propose an improvement to the class. And then they submit the proposal to me, that's 40% of their total grade of this assignment. And I give them some feedback on that. And then they are supposed to actually do the improvement. And the idea is then I can take that and plug it into the class for the following semester. So I've had students do just those sorts of things. So I have a big glossary and study guide that students have created. One person created like a module at how to be successful in an online class. I had this wonderful thing that a student created which was like a Prezi on, like that went through the branches of metaethics. So looking at ethical theories as they map out in metaethics. So she had like, there's like relativism, objective, ethical views and all the different forks. It's kind of based on a lecture that I give but she had added other things. It was a really wonderful contribution. Some people have done little PowerPoint presentations of that like summarize a particular ethical theory or do a case study that applies it to a certain scenario. So anyway, I've been slow about incorporating those back into the course, doing the editing and polishing and getting them plugged into the shell in a way that is useful. But even students have been producing tons of stuff. So that's been kind of cool. Yeah, can I echo on that? I think that's great. I think that's fantastic. Like that's where I think I go next with my OER is like now that I have the core books down it's time to start getting the students involved. And you know that like I see this all the time where there's like, yeah, sure, a lot of the stuff the students produces isn't gonna make it into the book. But you know, there's that one and 40 student who does it better than you could, right? And you're like, wow, that's a great way to present this information and all the other students could use that. And that's what really got me sold on Open Pedagogy is this idea like, I haven't write all these essays and basically they throw them in the trash, right? Like they do nothing with this work. It doesn't add to anything. It's not asking them to, I mean, they're engaging with the material, but this is a way to have them engage with the material and contribute something to the classroom at the same time, which I think at the core of ethics, if we're teaching that, it's a really important thing. So I've been trying to work it into my ethics classes the most. I actually have the students pick their own grading system at the beginning, which is kind of always a fun experiment. Like they decide what percentages things will be and they've got to think about like, well, are papers gonna be useful to us? Are weekly journals gonna be useful to us? And it's just a way of getting them to think kind of meta about the whole process. And so yeah, anytime we can do that, I think that's really cool. So I'm really glad to hear that I'm not the only one starting to go down that road. I really, really love that we're kind of, I hate to cut this conversation short because I've learned quite a bit listening, but I promise we would take 45 minutes and we have. So I want to cut us there, which I love that we can end on the high point of students contributing to our courses. That's great. And I just want to remind everybody that there's ways to stay in loop with CCCOER and including visit our website. Most of our information is there, including we keep a great index of upcoming conferences. And we're doing one more webinar in our Open Education Week sequence and it happens to be with math faculty. So please join us tomorrow at noon to learn about teaching with math or teaching math with OER from some wonderful colleagues. And we do a whole spring webinar series. So join us on April 3rd, which I am very excited about this conversation. We're gonna be learning about OER and dual enrollment courses, which I think is a growing segment of student enrollment in all of our colleges. So I'm really excited to hear that conversation because it's where my college is going next. So thank you so much. And I want to thank our speakers again, Nathan and Edward, I learned so much about teaching with OER and teaching philosophy. I'm very excited to hear some and see some of the projects that you're creating with your students. Thank you. Thank you. It's fun. Take care. Okay. Unaid, did I forget anything? She's...


We're here with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. Andy, great to see you again. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on. You know, when we first had phones that had apps, and you could do all kinds of things by tapping on the phone, that was revolutionary. But then when you experience a voice app, it makes tapping on your phone so circa 2010. M&A is a lot of activity going on. Do you have any dry powder left for M&A? We sure do, and we've already made some acquisitions, both in the Dell EMC level and at the VMware level. And of course, Dell Technologies Capital, we're now having a bit of a coming out party explaining what we're doing with the portfolio and the new investments and, you know, lots of new investments in machine learning, deep learning, security and cloud and all the kind of next generation business models that are important to us. So for us, when we talk about being a data company, we can't do it from just even being a chip. We have to be a solutions partner with cloud service providers, enterprise, IoT edge solutions. We try to be there. Customer things that we talked about, you know, touched briefly on like the IoT stuff.  I mean, we have customers who are building, you know, implantables and, you know, other devices around our IT technology, building new things. Really, it's like, you know, we're going to make you live longer. We're going to improve your quality of life, right? And we're going to extend that into the next generation. Funny how many companies say, well, we're complying with GDPR because we encrypt the data. Well, if you're not legally allowed to have that data, that's not going to help you at all. And unfortunately, I think that's a lot of companies think that as long as we're looking at the security side of the house, we're good. And they're missing the whole vote on GDPR. For me, the Intel is not a chipset company. The Intel is really the provider of computing power. It's really the things that we're helping to do this, that we are driving new policies. Companies are seeing results, agencies, and we are making the world a better place. And I would say that that's humbling and amazing, and we're just getting going. Obviously, every layer in this overall cake needs more features, more capabilities, and so on. Foundationally, it's about web-skill engineering and consumer-grade design. And if you're doing these two things, getting more workloads, getting more geographies, getting more platforms, getting more features, all those things are basically a rite of passage. You need to continue to do them all the time. Really great, Ted talked this one up by Zane Uptefecchi where she talks about the most brilliant data scientists, the most brilliant minds of our day are working on ad tech platforms that are now being created to essentially do what Kenyatta Cheese calls advertising terrorism, which is that all of this data is being collected so that advertisers have this information about us that could be used to create the future forms of surveillance. There's always a vulnerability, and it will be exploited. And all that metadata that's unscrubbed, I'm not worried about them selling metadata that's scrubbed. I'm worried about the nation-state or the sophisticated actor that already has a remote access trojan on the network and is exfiltrating in real time. That's the guy that I'm worried about. It needs to solve, but it's not just on us. We're building this ecosystem around us that can help you do that.  It's the back end. But now it's moving to the front of the shop, so I hear a ton of excitement, a ton of optimism. Every element, every piece of code, you know, what we saw is that this year developers will write 111 billion lines of code. You think about that. That we know about. That we know about, there's probably more. And all of that, you're right. These are broken up into pieces that are inherently networked, right? They have data. It's all about data and information that they're sharing to give interesting experiences. Become a domain expert in whatever domain you're proposing and what field you're going to enter. And then surround yourself with people, whatever job they're doing, engineering, marketing, sales, F&A, who are better than you at what they do. And to the extent that I've succeeded, this is why I've succeeded. Now this might be easier for me than for others, but I try to surround myself with people who are better than me, and to the extent that I've been successful, that's why.


We are about to reach a ministry milestone, as you can see. And the reason that this matters is because more people now will hear the gospel of Jesus Christ preached in the power of the Holy Spirit. Every number represents a life transformed. Every subscription is a life being impacted with the gospel of Jesus Christ and with the teachings of God's word and with the power of the Holy Spirit. We're seeing more people now saved, healed, delivered, and empowered. That's why this is so important. Welcome to this very special stream. Of course, I'm joined by my brother and co-host, Mr. Steven Moctezuma. Steve, say hello to our wonderful community here. Hello spirit family, Steven Moctezuma here. What an exciting moment this really truly is. It is incredible. And we thank each and every one of you guys. I see the numbers on the screen. It really is incredible. So we're very excited about what's about to happen here.  This is a movement of the Holy Spirit that we've been given to steward. And so we're very excited about that. Tim, why don't you go ahead and just bring in the lower third there with the number count, please? And as you can see, where probably I wanna say, maybe 20 minutes out, 15, 20 minutes out, but watch those numbers for fluctuations. There are people who are very passionate about being the one millionth subscriber. You don't know how many people told me I'm gonna wait until it's 999,999. And then I'll be the millionth subscriber. And then some people even unsubscribe wanting to be the millionth subscriber. So it's kind of like a game that they're playing here. So you'll see those numbers fluctuate as they often do. So as we watch those numbers climb, I wanna share with you a little bit about the journey thus far. And by the way, if this is your first time viewing content from our channel, we release teachings on the Holy Spirit, prayer, and spiritual warfare. Those are the three primary topics that I cover. And of course, we preach the gospel of salvation to the lost, but as far as our assignment to the church, what we take to the church is ministry in the area of the Holy Spirit, prayer, and spiritual warfare. And of course, we also livestream our events that we do around the world. And at these services, the power of the Holy Spirit moves tremendously. The glory of God is heavy on these meetings. People are saved, healed, delivered, and believers are empowered by the Holy Spirit to go and do ministry themselves. And so we also livestreamed the power of the Holy Spirit in action. So if you love the Holy Spirit, you wanna hear more about prayer and spiritual warfare, you wanna see the power of God in action, and you're looking for a ministry that's Jesus-centered, Bible-based, and spirit-filled, then this is the channel you've come to the right place. And we like to say this is the Holy Spirit's channel because he's given it to us to steward. It's his, it's not ours. This platform belongs to him. This platform belongs to the gospel. Now, this ministry actually began in 2007 on YouTube. And 2007 was not necessarily a take-off year. I like many others who begin an online ministry or on online content. I began with this very small, but important assignment. And all of us have to recognize that God begins the work. God is the one who not only begins the work, but he also rejoices to see it in its beginning stages. Don't despise the day of small beginnings. So 2007, we launched the channel. And I remember those days, we would have viewership some months that would skyrocket all the way to 100. And of course, compared to what we're seeing now, I'm being a little bit, I'm jesting just a little bit there, but you get the idea, not that there's anything wrong with that number. That's what we were faithful to for years. And so you can't look at obedience and you can't look at the reason you obey in the metrics that man measures that. We have our motivation and that is simply because we wanna obey God and we wanna see soul saved.  Steve, as you look back maybe even to 2007, what runs through your mind as we sit here saying what the Holy Spirit has built so far? So I remember the very beginning of the ministry and I could tell right away that Diga, I mean, my goodness, his mind and the way that he articulates things and the way he speaks, I knew, I knew that he was being led by the Lord and I had the privilege and the honor to join the ministry very from the very beginning, very start, I rolled wires if you guys didn't know before I ever started seeing with the ministry. You worked on camera and you were the wire coiler. That's right. And yeah, it was just an incredible time, very new to be online at the time in 07. And I just remember thinking, man, this is gonna be really cool. This is a different way to reach so many people with the gospel and what a privilege it was. And yeah, I just remember being so excited to wrap those wires up and film on camera just like these guys behind the camera. So it really was an incredible time. So we saw the Lord do it, 2007 we begin. And let me just be honest with you, from 2007 all the way to 2016, like if I had the chart, I would pull it up and I would show you basically the lifetime of the ministry from 2007 when we started, all the way to 2016, I'm talking barely any traction. So little traction that when you look at the chart of the growth of the channel in terms of the lifetime statistics, you don't even see anything register on the graph from 2007 to 2016. So I wanna emphasize this again. If you're doing something for the Lord and you wonder, when am I gonna start seeing fruitfulness? You have to remember why we obey. We obey because we love him. We obey because we wanna see souls saved. We obey because that's the assignment God gave to us. But it's also important to remember that obedience itself is success. Obedience itself is success. If we measure success simply by the metrics of man, well, and sometimes things with large metrics aren't of God and sometimes things with little metrics, they are of God. So the question in regards to ministry success and ministry fruitfulness and ministry growth, the question you have to ask yourself is simply this, am I obeying what God is telling me to do? And that's really it. It's simple faith and obedience, trust in action. And as you put that trust in action, now that obedience itself, that is success. So never mind the metrics. Now we rejoice in numbers because we want to see more people saved. Somebody asked me, David, do numbers matter to you? I said, yes, absolutely, numbers matter to me. And in fact, there's a whole book of numbers in the Bible. But numbers matter because numbers represent people. So this isn't about clout. This isn't about any one man or ministry. This isn't about, you know, celebrating numbers for the number's sake. I mean, I'm sure the team appreciates seeing all of their hard work culminate into something like this. And of course, we acknowledge that to some degree, but it's important to remember that numbers only matter because numbers are live trends transformed. And even if it was just one, one person hearing the gospel, one person receiving their healing or deliverance or being empowered, one person turning to Jesus. All of heaven rejoices in that. We rejoice with heaven when even one sinner repents. So remember that we measure our success. We measure our standard of fruitfulness by whether or not we're obeying God. Well, think about what God told Isaiah. He said, go and tell the people who will not listen. In other words, I'm gonna send you to people who aren't gonna hear a word that you have to say, but he was successful because he fulfilled the assignment that God had given to him. So while we celebrate these numbers because they represent people, let's keep a healthy balance in remembering that numbers alone do not dictate success. It's whether or not you've obeyed God. So 2007, we begin on YouTube. 2007, 2008, 2009, all the way up to 2016, very little traction.  I'm glad they have that there. Look at, okay, this is exactly what I was talking about. And by the way, guys, the staff is doing an amazing job. We thought, by the way, we thought we were gonna hit a million subs on Wednesday, but then things started picking up rapidly because of some recent teachings I've been doing on Spiritual Warfare. Like the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Just a huge influx of people saying they're being set free, their minds are being transformed. It's a beautiful thing to watch when the truth of the word begins to impact lives. And so recently, people have been really responding more specifically last week. People really responded well to some of the teachings we released. And so we're seeing sort of a boost from that. So the growth rate itself is growing. But look here, September 4th, 2007, so when I began the YouTube channel, and look here, you don't even see 2007 on the chart because nothing registered. And look how little, and by the way, I was putting out videos, so it's not like I wasn't doing anything. Look at how very little traction we gained. You can see just a little after 2014, right before 2015, you see a tiny bump. Well, that's when we started to see some movement on the channel. And if you look at 2016, you'll see this even larger, it looks about double that size, but still a very tiny bump. You'll see that there was this tiny influx. And that right there, 2016, was Sid Roth's It's Supernatural when I went on the program and it went somewhat viral online. And so we saw a little bit of boost from that and we stewarded well the growth that came in. Look at longevity depends upon stewardship. How well you steward the word, how well do you steward what God has given to you? And I see that we're just about 25 people away from our million subscribers. So watch the numbers fluctuate here, guys. Everyone wants to be that million, so I guess we'll see who it is. But Tim, if you can, bring that chart back up just for a second. I wanna show them something because there are people watching who maybe they're being encouraged to continue in the calling that God gave them. Look, what happened if, what would have happened had I quit in 2012 or 2014? That's almost seven years of doing it with really no response. And then if you look, 2018, 2020, we of course know what happened there. And 2020 was another big year for online ministries for obvious reasons. But if you'll notice, we didn't even see most of our growth until the last 24 months. So believe it or not, most of the growth that we have seen occurred in the past 24 months. Thank you, Tim, for that chart. And I think that's important to recognize because in that, see there, you guys go fighting for that millionth spot. So in that month, the 24th month, or the past 24 months, we saw the most growth. And what's interesting is I thank God that most of the growth came in the past 24 months. Because it was from 2007 all the way to 2020 that God was processing things in me. God was working things in me to help develop character that could sustain the fruitfulness of the ministry that God would bring. So we of course honor God. This is his doing. This is his ministry. It's for his glory to reach his people. And it's so that Jesus can reap the reward of his suffering. We wanna see people say he'll deliver and empowered unto God's glory for the purpose of his kingdom. But you know, don't be discouraged if you're not seeing fast immediate results. The difference between a star and a shooting star is that a shooting star gets attention, but it fades out quickly. But a star is faithful. A star remains fixed in the sky. And so this isn't about, of course, and I wanna make sure I'm careful with that analogy. This is not about glorifying man or looking at an individual and oh saying, oh, they're shining. It's just a simple analogy to help you understand longevity. Quick growth is dangerous. And so be very thankful if the Lord is processing you and celebrate where you are. So we have just about 24 to go. And if you're watching and you haven't subscribed yet or if you're watching and you're unsubscribed waiting to be the million subscriber, we're gonna ask everyone to go ahead and subscribe right now. Thank you to our viewers. Thank you to our supporters. Thank you to our partners, our wonderful spirit family. This is the movement that God has given to us. Listen, this is not just about one man or ministry. This is a holy spirit movement. No one can stop it. The truth and the power will go forward. God has favored this ministry. God has favored our movement. And we're now seeing the fruit of that. And I'm telling you this, this is only the beginning. This is just the springboard for what God is going to begin doing through his ministry in the next few years. So Steve, anything else you wanna say to our partners, the spirit family as we wait to cross over this milestone? I just wanna say, thank you guys so much. It really is an honor and a privilege to be a part of this ministry and to be a part of it since the beginning. Just going through all the years in my mind right now of all the times that I sang over and over again or tried to perfect what the Lord has given me. You would do several takes for one song just to get it right. Yep, I would do several takes and those late nights that we worked. And I just remember thinking, Lord, this is for you and you alone. And yeah, now we're here and it really is surreal. It really truly is surreal. I'm looking at these numbers. It's incredible. It really is incredible. So again, this matters because this represents lives that are being transformed. Think about the fact that the Holy Spirit touched your life through his ministry. He's the one creating the meals. I'm just the one serving them. I am your servant serving you the ministry that God wants to give to you.  And think about that because it multiplies even more on other social media platforms that aren't even being counted here. This is just a single platform. And so we're thankful to the Lord. We're thankful to the precious Holy Spirit. And I wanna encourage you again, you're watching this and God gave you an assignment. There's something you're doing for his glory. Number one, do not measure your success by the metrics of man. Rather, measure your success by whether or not you've obeyed God. That is the key. And if God gave you the assignment, God will give you the ability to fulfill that assignment. And we do rejoice in numbers because these are lives transformed. But when all is said and done, one plants, one waters, only God is the one who can bring forth the harvest. Okay guys, 13 more.  Like right when we're at 999,995 or something because people are gonna wanna be that millionth. There he goes. Pardon? We're going, we're going up. Let's see it. So 992, 993. Let's see if it doesn't fluctuate. Hopefully we just go straight through. Oh, let's see what's happening here. Okay, 995. All right, here we go guys. Five, five more. Five more subs to a million. Come on. Four more subs to a million. Three more subs to a million. Two. One, here we go. People have gone. Wow, come on. We've reached a ministry milestone. One million YouTube subscribers and I can hear them cheering in the control room. They're all waving their phones and celebrating one million YouTube subscribers. That's just incredible. We honor again the precious Holy Spirit. We honor what God is doing through this ministry. It's his ministry, it's not ours. This is his work, not ours. This is his movement, it's not ours. We're just stewards, but we celebrate. Every life transformed. Every life transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, remember, this is only the beginning. Father, I pray that you would continue to use your platform. Lord, as we stay grounded on your word, trusting you. As we continue to declare your truth and only what your truth is as revealed in your word. As we continue to surrender to the precious Holy Spirit, as we continue to honor and glorify our wonderful Jesus. Father, we ask that you would continue to use this ministry to see people saved, healed, delivered and empowered. And we promise we will give you all the glory. In the mighty name of Jesus, we pray. I want you to say it because you believe it. Say, amen. Amen. Steve, anything you wanna say before we dismiss this special stream? Love you all, thank you so much.  Love you. Well, we truly do love you, our wonderful supporters, our spirit family. This is our movement that God gave to us, to steward. It's not just me and Steve and the ministry team. This is all of us. God is using all of us. So let's be thankful for this movement and let's continue to press forward and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ all around the world in the power of the Holy Spirit. And remember until next time, nothing is impossible with God.


Hey guys, welcome back. I want to do a really quick review about my mystery beard oil the first beard oil I've ever used and This one I got for Christmas from my mother-in-law and I'm like no idea. I have no idea who made it. Like this. There's nothing on the glass. Yeah It's really nice. It's really nice. Maybe we could crowdsort this. Let's show everybody on YouTube Okay, YouTube, please please work out how this ends up on Reddit somehow someday Who made this who product we have no idea, right? So no, it's a beard oil I've actually kind of avoided beard oils and I and here's why me to me too. Here's why the reason the reason why is because I Felt like I don't want to put oil in my beard. I felt like it was like let's take some vegetable oil and dump it in my beard, right?  Yeah, we've been trained to think this is my favorite product Honestly, 100% favorite product. It smells amazing Yeah, oh that it's nice. It's dark. It's woodsy. It's very manly. It lasts all day Easiest ever to him to apply just like boom boom in and my beard Incredible absolutely incredible mystery bottle basically I became a rich rich man when I put it in I People I got hired at three different jobs They all and I didn't do anything at the jobs. I just show up and they're like look at that beard I don't it's just because it was and again, we have no idea who made it And so the likelihood of you finding that same success I would give it like a mystery bottle or love potion number nine like yes oil Love potion number nine. Let's let's let's tell the good people Beardsmen out there why beard oils are so great and while all these products are great. Okay, let's imagine. This is your hair Okay, this is your hair actually wait. Yeah, this is your beard hair. Okay? Just just just let it happen. Okay.  You're gonna get ketchup and like stuff all over that beard hair, okay? And it's gonna cling to it like this. It's gonna look all nasty. Okay, when you use a product like Beard oil or any of these conditions. What happens is this?  Well, it's protected and what that does is it helps your beard hair weather You know whether literally whether if you're out in the cold it does cleaning your beard since I started using I don't know if you've noticed that right absolutely if you cleaning your beard after a meal Like say you get some milk or heaven forbid butter in there like eat lobster or something, right?   Okay with beard oils and what I didn't know that was right up Wow, I just save it for later Anyways, I had the opportunity recently to try just to just a sample at this point now This is a new company that's up and coming. I really like what they're doing. It's the beard supply co Company, excuse me. Yeah, but anyways. Yeah, beard supply company. Yeah, and I think that they're big I'm not sure where they're based. I think it's like text something like that So shout out to you guys. Thanks for the sample now. This one is their winter number one blend now this smell wise It was a little strong for me. I think it smells really good now This one has it's it's strong, but it has No, it's again up to personal preference. This one has smells of tobacco coffee And it has like a little peppermint flavor on top. I think I like the peppermint. I can I can I can base oils Simon Disa and I can't pronounce these got some weird oils, but it's tobacco coffee cedarwood pine I'll do peppermint peppermint vanilla and ginger. Okay again, so if you have a ginger beard put that in But anyways the way it makes your beard feel great. This was a great Beard oil. I really enjoyed it. I'm actually gonna be looking into getting more pro I want to try out some of the other ones. I do cuz cuz it's it honestly I didn't think that the oil was bad It just it was just the smell that was overpowering and if what I like is they kind of looks like they're on a trend They're making different beard oils for different times of season or different yeah, which is cool That and that's good. I can respect what the what you guys are doing So anyways, thanks to the sample this this is can be found from beard supply cow and again We've got the mystery beard oil. Please tell us what you think it is If you see the question mark link question mark link below that means we have no idea where it comes from Help us find out where it comes from. But anyways, it's great. Um beard oils awesome really check them out I would recommend them. I'm actually gonna start. That's that's my next purchase. I've done these I'm gonna go into beard oils. Yeah, so as always guys save the beard