Hi everybody, welcome to the webinar on Building OER Sustainability on your campus. We are really pleased today to have Dr. Lisa Young from the Maricopa Community College District, Scottsdale Community College, and James Glappa Grossklag from the College of the Canyons in California joining us today to tell us about their approaches to OER sustainability. For those of you who are used to hearing Una Daily's lovely voice, you'll notice that I'm not Una. I am Mary Lou Ford. I'm moderating today because Una is not able to be with us. I wanted to go over quickly the agenda. We're going to start with the introductions of the speakers, and if you would like to introduce yourself, please do so in the chat window. We're going to give a quick overview of CCCOER, talk about the College of the Canyons and their approaches to sustainability, talk about the Maricopa Community College District and their approaches. Then we're going to have a discussion, which we hope you will be quite active in participating, sending us your questions and engaging in the conversation. We'll give you a little bit more information about how you can stay up to date on what's happening and then close with any questions you might have. So I wanted to introduce first the presenters. As I mentioned before, we have Dr. Lisa Young. She's the faculty director for the Center for Teaching and Learning at Scottsdale Community College. And we have James Glappa Grossklag, who's the Dean of Educational Technology, Learning Resources and Distance Education for College of the Canyons in Southern California. So very quickly, for those of you who are not familiar with CCCOER, the mission of CCCOER is really to expand awareness and access to high quality open educational resources for community colleges. And in doing that, they support faculty choice and development and improve student success through using OER and implementing open education projects and resources. CCCOER reach is across the United States and Canada with about 250 colleges and districts represented on listservs and in its activities. Now, we're going to move into the theme of today's webinar, which is sustainability and the themes that you're going to hear coming out today are people when they're thinking about sustainability. They're thinking about faculty engagement, how students get involved, what's the level of institutional commitment and how do you increase that. And then, of course, the question on everyone's mind is funding. So I want to start off with James Glappa Grossklag from College of the Canyons, who's going to give us the first presentation. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Mary Lou. And I just wonder if we could advance the slides along. I may be... I'm not seeing that on my end. Oh. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm sorry about that, everybody. No worries. Una Daily makes it look so easy, doesn't she? She's putting together the slides, talking, chewing gum, and moderating the chat at the same time. So I don't envy her, but I admire her the way that she manages the webinars. Anyway, hi everybody. James Glappa Grossklag here from College of the Canyons. I want to share with you a little bit about what we're doing at College of the Canyons. The first image that you see here is used at College of the Canyons to promote our Open Education initiative on campus. And I hope that a couple of things strike you right away about it. First of all, it's student facing. The audience is students. So this is communicating to students what the benefit of OER can be to them. Secondly, I hope that the messages are succinct and direct. Their messages are saving money, accessing content immediately, and having customized content for your class. I think there are messages that you'll see or have heard in other venues when we talk about students saving money and accessing content and faculty control of content. Pardon me, Mary Lou. I've lost these slides. See that? Sorry about that. That's okay. But I will keep on going here. We have the audio skills. So the ability for faculty to customize the content is an important part of our messaging as well. It's something that you don't see about this message that I'm thrilled to share is that the image and the banner here of the slide was designed by one of our part-time staff members who was a student at College of the Canyons. So it reminds me and reminds our OER team at College of the Canyons, and I hope it reminds our colleagues at College of the Canyons that we have a strong student involvement in our initiative. And so what is our initiative about? Up to Mary Lou, if you could go to the next slide. That would be great. At College of the Canyons, in the spring 2017 semester, we had 40 courses, distinct courses, using OER in lieu of commercial textbooks. That adds up to over 200 sections, 200 individual class sections, using OER in lieu of commercial textbooks. And that's just around 12% of our total credit offerings during the spring semester. And that's doubled over the past year, which is just tremendous. We're also quickly closing in on completing two pathways through which students that students can complete using only OER in lieu of commercial textbooks. One pathway is a traditional transfer pathway, an associate degree in sociology, which would include the major courses, plus the general education courses. And then the second is a career technical education certificate of achievement in water systems technology here in hot Southern California. The water industry is very important to us. Overall, this year, this academic year, we believe our faculty members adopting OER will have saved our students over $3 million. So we think things are going great, really having a positive impact on the students. And if we can move on to the next slide, I want to share with you why I think we've gotten to this point. And before I walk through these key terms here, let me say that it's taken us quite a while to really get to this point. We've been talking about, some of us at college again, has been talking about OER for eight or nine years now. And only in the past couple of years have we seen incredible growth and incredible adoptions. We've had some organic adoptions over time and some early adopters over time. But I want to stress that there were many, many years in which I was not communicating a clear message. I was not successful in advocating for funding. I was not successful in carrying the message to our faculty in an appropriate way. So none of this happened overnight. So what contributes to, I think, is having reached a sustainable level at College of the Canyons. First of all, arising from that cat banner at the beginning, I think we've figured out a clear, concise message. Students can save money, students can access content immediately, and students can have access to content that's customized for them. So again, it's a student-facing message and it's a, can I hope, a quick, concise message. Also, we have in the past few years been very successful in advocating for funding. What's, I think, very helpful for us in the funding arena is that we have not been waiting for some magical pot of gold to appear from one funding source. Through our organization at College of the Canyons, there's a great belief in the power and sustainability of graded funding or woven funding. So tying together different strands of funding to really pursue and accomplish your goals. So we've combined external funding and internal funding to reach a situation in which we really have an embarrassment of riches. In terms of external funding, the State of California has invested in OER. We've been successful in being awarded some of those grant opportunities. Also, the college has been successful in applying for a federal Title V Hispanic Serving Institutions grant. A number of years ago, actually, I placed OER in that grant and we were awarded that grant. So we've woven or graded OER into other grant opportunities in California. Also, there's a big initiative, big statewide funding initiative around promoting student equity. It would make sense that OER would help to promote student equity. Also, across the United States, there are a lot of initiatives, statewide initiatives around what's known as a college promise or making the first two years of community college or first two years of higher education free to students. It would make sense, again, that textbook costs would be an essential component of making college free for students. So I would think that you'd all have good chances of success at including OER and those funding opportunities. With internal funding, certainly OER resonates with our foundation members and with local nonprofits and philanthropic organizations who want to help support our local residents in accessing education and completing their education. Also, in terms of providing hard copies of, let's say, open stacks texts to our faculty members or ensuring that homegrown open textbooks are available to students and to faculty. Our internal reprographics department and our library have committed just ongoing regular funding from their ongoing budgets to supporting our efforts. In addition, I'm extremely proud to say that our institution, our CEO, has seen that producing OER is a worthy worthwhile sabbatical project. So this year, our CEO awarded a second sabbatical to a faculty member to produce OER. All of that leads us to the next point of having staff to help with OER work. So many of those staff members are students or recent students, recent graduates, and we think we've found that's really been helpful in communicating with faculty. If faculty members who are interested in OER are talking to their former students or people who can very legitimately express the concerns of students, that helps us try to message home. That also allows us to develop a workflow so that it's not just me or one person, one advocate trying to do all the work, but we've been able to develop and distribute the workflow through different parts of the organization. All of that adds up to really a commitment on the part of the institution, whether it's funding or staffing or the workflow and everyone in the institution or many parts of the institution being involved. We also have great extremely strong commitment from our CEO, our board of trustees and executive leadership here, which really adds up to eliminating barriers, getting people out of the way if it's known that the executive leadership thinks this is a really important initiative. And then finally, I'm very proud of the involvement of our students. I'm very proud of our students to begin with, but particularly happy that we've been able to include them. Last year our student government adopted an author that adopted a resolution calling on faculty to consider using OER because essentially they wrote we're dying. It's causing us to take on more student loans, causing us to choose between food and textbooks, causing us to not succeed in classes. Please consider OER. So that's been very helpful to us, I think. And also, in terms of student involvement, we simply know, we're able to know what the impact of textbook costs is on our students because we ask them. Thanks to our terrific institutional research department, we're able to distribute surveys and convene focus groups and recruit students to participate in panels during our summits and presentations on campus so that we know what students think and what students have to say about the impact of textbooks and the positive impact of OER. And so all of that adds up to, we think, a really sustainable structure at College of the Canyons to keep our OER initiative going, but it didn't happen overnight. And with that, I'll turn it over to Lisa. Hey, everybody. Good morning to those of you out west and to those of you back east. Good afternoon. I hope you're all having a wonderful Wednesday. And I'm very excited to be sharing the work that the Maricopa Millions Project has been doing. We are, if we can advance to the next slide, Mary Lou, please. The Maricopa Community Colleges are 10 separately accredited colleges, but we share common curriculum, course competencies, our courses articulate and transfer. So when we look at the Maricopa Millions Project, this was a district-wide project that really began in the spring of 2013 when our Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, who is our Chief Academic Officer for the district, asked, you know, what is this OER? I'm hearing about it outside of the district. I know we have faculty doing it. What is it? And what can we do with it? And that was really the genesis of the Maricopa Millions Project. And at that time, we reached out to those who were the pioneers of OER and had got lots of information and pulled together a proposal of what became the Maricopa Millions Project. And so if we can go on to the next slide, please. Our goal when we started was to save students $5 million in five years. And so starting the fall of 2013, we started looking at that. And with our project, we look at both no-cost and low-cost materials. And we can go on to the next slide really quickly there, please. And so with our terminology of no-cost and low-cost, one of the things that we found through Focus Groups early on was that students didn't really know what OER was and that they didn't, at that point, weren't really looking at open pedagogy and such. And so it really didn't make a big impact on them, whether we called it OER or what have you. But by labeling it no-cost and low-cost, being less than or equal to $40, we were able to provide a way that students could find those materials. And so with that, it can include a copywritten materials in regard to our no-cost, low-cost terminology. However, the Maricopa Millions project is really about supporting OER. And we've done that through OER grants. We've supported the development of 21 high-enrollment courses. And outside of the Maricopa Millions, math within our district, because they were early adopters, have really gone gangbusters with math OER. We leverage math AS, and they really have done a great deal of work in some departments, our entirely OER, within our district in regard to math. We've really focused on faculty awareness and professional growth. And student awareness, James, I have to tell you that we have reused and remixed your students' work with the OER Kidding Me campaign. And we used that during Open Ed Week to really start looking at raising awareness for our students. And so the great work that you all have done and that your student did is living on in Maricopa as well in regard to the concept. And we also did some other things in regard to student awareness, putting together a search option so that students could search our schedule, and through our OER enhancement fee, which was supported by our board for those tools that wrap around OER. And so we're able to put this OER enhancement fee on individual sections that are using those tools, things that have personalized learning associated with them, early alert systems, homework systems and such that wrap around those OER that are also open. And so to date, you can see that at the end of our fourth year, we're embarking on our fifth year, we've saved our students just over $9 million. And so we know that when we hit the fall semester, we'll have doubled our goal of $5 million in five years in just the beginning of our fifth year. What's really been, I think, most effective in regard to our sustainability is consistency and commitment. We've had consistent messaging, consistent events, consistent grants, our faculty awareness have all been very consistent from the first semester because we had a really sound strategic plan and proposal for implementing this. And the commitments from our faculty, from our district and college leadership, our IT departments and our OER steering team have really provided the ability for us to sustain this movement as well as the assistance provided through our centers for learning, whether it's our centers for teaching and learning, our district-focused Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction, our libraries, all of those organizations have really helped support it and helped bring life and integrate OER and the Maricopa Millions project into what they do. So as James had mentioned, it doesn't just live in one place. It's really spread throughout the organization and that really helps with the sustainability piece. Now, our project was $5 million in five years, so it was a five-year commitment. So what we're doing in this last year is really looking at how do we institutionalize everything that we've been doing so that this will live on beyond that five-year commitment? And so it's really exciting to be talking about this because we're really looking at moving this to, you know, really taking it. It's been a sustainable program, but really making sure that this is something that never leaves. And that's what we're doing in Maricopa. Great. Lease, this is James. Let me ask, can I post a couple of questions about some aspects that have long inspired me about what you're doing in Maricopa? And the first is your district-wide governance. It seems as though you've succeeded in getting all the right players involved, and it's somehow integrated into your regular governance structure there. Can you talk more about that? Absolutely. So we have our OER steering team, and that was really an essential piece of making this successful. And so with that, we put the steering team together with the support of the chief academic officer. And so they are our executive sponsor, and we meet with... The person has changed, but we meet with the person in that office regularly, sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly, based on schedules, but the tri-chairs of the Maricopa Millions project meet with them and make sure that they're aware of everything that we're doing. And we can find out about any initiatives and ways that we can combine our efforts. And so that's really a very strong piece that we have the leadership, but also what's very strong in that is the faculty involvement. So our OER steering team has our executive sponsor as our chief academic officer. We have a president who attends the meeting, one of our 10 college presidents attends the meetings, and is an active participant. We have a vice president of academic affairs, and we have a dean of instruction within the OER steering team. And their their roles are really to take it back to their peer, whatever's happening in the OER steering team, and take it back to their peers, so that all of the college's leadership is aware of what's going on with OER. But what's also really special about this group is that we went out and we want representation from each of the colleges. And so we have seeked out, but we don't want too big a committee. So our committee right now is about 17 people when it's full. It's about 20 to 22 people. We have a couple colleges missing, but we do want representation from each college. We want representation from various disciplines, from faculty on various disciplines. And then we also have representation from instructional designers, CTL directors, library faculty, and IT personnel. So that when we have questions or we have an opportunity come arise, we have the people in that room are all really able to help us come up with how can we take advantage of this opportunity? That's a reason. Or how do we make this great idea happen? Like with our our SIS search, that was something that the committee was able to really help us with. And the other piece that I think is really important regarding this is that we that representation and those different faculty aren't necessarily people who have drank the Kool-Aid. And that's really important too. We didn't want just people who were like, yes, oh, we are. We wanted some people who were like, well, I'm interested in this, but I don't know if this is right for me or my discipline or for the faculty at my college or in my department. And so we made sure that we have a representation that is really looking at representing all of our faculty. And then, of course, we do have someone from our faculty association, our FEC, who's like our equivalent, I guess, to a faculty union serving on that committee too. And that was something we had missed initially. And we made sure we had later as sometimes issues arose that we needed that they're involved in. Thanks, Liz. That's very helpful. I hope it's helpful for our audience. When the key piece that I'm extracting from that is that regardless of the individuals in particular offices, you have the offices represented or you have the roles represented. So there's a liaison and communication function occurring across offices. Is that accurate? That is very accurate. Yes. Okay. Thank you. And then you mentioned the SIS search feature or schedule search feature about OER, low-cost options. In California, that piece of, let's say, sustainability is being implemented by legislation really. Beginning in January of 2018, by law, all of our state universities and community colleges will be required to place in their schedule of classes a unique identifier for sections that provide students with zero textbook cost options. And that's, again, by legislation. But you did this long ago. Could you talk about how you came to that realization that would help students and how you got it in place? Absolutely. So we did put together an SIS filter, and it was quite an ordeal because it encompassed a lot of programming and liaising with our IT department at our district level. But it was something that the OER Steering Team felt was really important. And it came about because we did focus groups with students. And we found that students were taking a great deal of time data mining their schedule because students within the district, even though we're 10 separately accredited colleges, as I mentioned, they have a common curriculum. So students can take English 101 at any of those 10 colleges, and it will work towards their degree. And we call those swirling students. So what we found was that the students were spending hours data mining the schedule, searching to see how much the materials cost before enrolling. And we thought, wow, if students could put that kind of energy into studying, imagine the impact. So we polled students and we asked them, what is low cost? And it came up with the value of $40. And so we thought they'd come in lower. But the polls showed that they felt that $40 was a reasonable amount of money to pay for their course materials. And we had this code that goes into our student information system that our schedulers put in. And now it's just part of the process. So when faculty do their book adoptions, they'll indicate whether it's under $40, if it is, then our schedulers code it. And that automatically allows in our search function within the schedule students to be able to search for those no cost or low cost less than $40 materials. And it puts a note in the course saying that these materials are either no cost or less than $40 and may contain open educational resources. And so initially what happened was that search function was very, very prominently placed on the search for the students. And that's when we first heard from our faculty association and got the idea to add someone from there because faculty had complained that it was too prominent. And why isn't it where students can pick different options for their classes as opposed to being the main thing. And so it did get moved into a more appropriate place for the students and they are able to search. And now what's really exciting also with the search function is that I've been working with the IT department. And again, that's part of that OER steering team and having the right people to be able to liaise with. We've made a developed a program that will then take that code and help me calculate the cost savings. So initially what would happen is we calculated our cost savings and I saw that as a question in the question box that 2013 we took the top 50 high enrollment courses and we then would search through the schedule at all 10 colleges for those courses that were using the no cost low cost filter and adding it all up and coming up with the cost savings. So it took about 40 hours to data mine and that information. Now it takes about 15 minutes because that program will automatically do it for all of the colleges collectively as well as individually and provide me with that information. And so we only use our top 50 high enrollment courses and we calculate $100 per textbook. That's kind of a national norm. There's a few institutions that use something different but for the most part colleges are using $100 to calculate that. And so we don't use every course that comes up as low cost, no cost. We are only using those top 50 high enrollment courses that from 2013 so that the longitudinal data is consistent. Yeah I'm glad you picked up on that question from Doreen and addressed it. And yeah the $100 certainly is the national norm. I am just grateful for the $100 as the norm because my degrees are in humanities and I can't do complicated math. But also I would say that one of the things to be aware of is that I am finding is that with external requirements such as legislative requirements or a variety of external funding for example through our braided approach to funding come different requirements for data, different metrics. So some of our funders are content with us identifying or using the national standard of $100 as the cost savings but others want actual cost savings so requiring us to go back to document the original retail cost of the textbooks and compare that to what it is now. So it can get complicated if you are successful in securing a variety of funding sources so just a word of caution there you sometimes you get more than you're barking for. Absolutely James and I'm glad that you shared that and I did want to ask you about having funding because as you may know the community college budget for the Maricopa community colleges has gone from $68 million to $0 dollars from our state and so we're in a situation where we don't have a lot of we don't even have the funding that we used to have forget about external funding to fund this. So can you tell me a little bit about some of the ways that you are getting these funds as well as some of the cautions perhaps as you've shared and some of the ways that you're really working to make that a priority? Sure boy there are a number of different levels. First of all in California the state of California we've been very fortunate that we that the OER movement has friends in high places let's say so through the efforts of T.J. Bliss at the Hewlett Foundation and Hal Plotkin with Creative Commons informally with the U.S. Department of Education and formally with a California community college the movement was able to advocate successfully in our state capital for the state for the governor and the legislature to invest specifically in open educational resources and more specifically in promoting uh ZTC uh degrees so that's uh that's certainly uh unique to to our setting in California but but what's not unique about that is that the advocacy was able to frame the case for OER as supporting larger interests of the governor and the legislature namely increasing not only access to higher education but the completion nationally I think most of us on the on the call here would know that nationally there's a move away from being only concerned about access to higher education and also concerned about completion so friends like John Hilton and David Wiley have documented that the throughput if you will the completion of students in OER classes is greater than that of students taking non OER classes or taking classes with commercial textbooks so it's been I think it's very helpful to understand what the larger priorities are within the funding circles whether that's private foundations or federal grants or state grants or the state legislature and attempting to frame your particular interest your particular passion in a way that aligns with or supports the the larger goals of the people who hold the first strings in addition if you think about federal grants at least under the previous administration federal grants under the Department of Education were in the Department of Labor were providing some additional points for projects that included open and the US Department of Education recently announced the adoption of I suppose it would be the acceptance of rulemaking that it calls for discretionary federal grants to be open the results of discretionary federal grants to be open the license so we'll hope that there will continue to be some preference for projects that explicitly call out the open nature of their of their outputs in addition I would say there's tremendous opportunity in the college promise movements all across the United States again I think anybody who follows follow the national discussions knows that simply removing the tuition costs is not going to really help the the national college promise movement achieve its goals so it's a great opportunity for all of us in the open movement to to get involved with sort of the the next big trend in open or in community college education in addition at the local level many many colleges have foundations many colleges have have ties to local local nonprofits or philanthropic organizations and you know it's it's I think it's an easy case to make locally that your community college is producing helping to produce if you will produce graduates who are going to be contributing to local economy and and become valuable employees and they're more likely to to to graduate and be available to work if if textbook costs are not an issue in addition I think that you know in the case of of Arizona where you don't have a state funding I would suggest that you have a competitive advantage if you were able to eliminate textbook costs you know college x costs this college y costs the same but college z costs the same minus the textbook cost so it's it's certainly a way to present yourself as as having a competitive advantage and that's something that resonates with being counting administrators like myself absolutely james and one of the other things that I found especially with trying to get funding is trying to weave oh we are into the grants that we're applying for as an institution as well as some of our internal grants outside of the maricopa millions and so we're always trying to leverage that as part of the product of the grants and I think that's something that you're doing also is that correct yeah absolutely thank you for phrasing it more succinctly than I did absolutely so yeah it's also a matter of being a part of the team at the college or being having your ear to the ground or perhaps through it through your district wide steering committee knowing what grants are on the radar and and making sure that uh as a a grants writing team and student services or institutional research or it gets underway that you're able to poke your head in the door and say hey don't forget about open include open in there absolutely and then I have another question for you james um so and then this is something that jim has just um noted too and this is a question that I have for you you know we've we both you know have seen a lot of the data that david wireley and john helton and others have done in looking at the impact that using oer is having on student success and completion whether it's looking at them being able to take more courses and more credits because they have more funding available because they're not paying for textbooks as well as um we're seeing improvements in student success from a customized um from customized course materials um I'd be interested to know what kind of data collection efforts you all are doing um at at your institution um in regard to student data collection and um because that's something that we're really trying to get more into um in this current year and I'm sure our audience is curious too yeah so far thanks for that question lisa and and jim I so far um much of our data collection with students has focused on uh the impact is sort of implied negative impact of commercial textbook costs so we know through our um standard institutional student survey that when we ask when we ask students what's the greatest barrier to you achieving your in your educational goals uh the greatest number of responses come in that the greatest barrier is uh the cost of textbooks and supplies it's not work and family pressures it's not the cost of tuition but rather textbooks and textbooks and supplies so having that kind of data is helpful in advocating with uh our faculty and advocating with funders I think uh in addition we've asked students through specific surveys relevant to relating to textbook cost um asked our students how many of you due to the cost of textbooks are more likely to change your enrollment patterns or select a different class or um not purchase a textbook how many of you are worried that because you don't purchase the textbook it will impact your negatively impact your grades so really mirroring the data that we've seen and the questions that we've seen from the florida textbook survey and by robin donelson um and uh mirroring the data that we've seen from the student perns they came out in the study fixing a broken textbook market so we try to replicate that locally uh what we have on the positive outcome side from students so far uh is the students who are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of the oer that they've been using uh that not that percentage is 76 percent of students who are in classes using we are are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of what we are in their classes so we as we continue um with our initiative and continue to institutionalize the initiative absolutely a crucial piece will be making the connection to increased uh student success and student retention we haven't gotten there yet but that is definitely on our radar and I think that's that's something that we should all be doing I agree 100 and I know one of the things that we're doing at maricopa and is actually on my to-do list for this summer is that I'm going to be taking a look at the oer research hub and looking at um some of the studies that have been done specifically looking at student success student grades um persistence and such and student success metrics and looking at what that it would take to replicate some of those studies at the maricopa community colleges and so that's something that we're definitely going to be putting in place for the fall and getting that through IRB this summer so I'm really we've done a lot of the surveys um to to gather student satisfaction um and more of the qualitative data uh but we're really going to look at getting into um the quantitative data and so we're really looking forward to embarking on that um interestingly it's something that I propose to our steering team every year and I don't think we have a lot of people who are really into research and so finally I was like I'm just going to do it because I think it'll be fun so we're going to end I think it'll be really meaningful um and give us some really good data yeah and speaking of something we should all be doing uh Kayla parks asks a very good question uh whether we can speak to the ways in which accessibility or disability uh comes into play uh within efforts to support sustainable equitable and student-centered OER use that's a great question um we um require that the materials that are created through the maricopa millions grants um are accessible and um and that and we try to help the faculty with universal design as they're developing um but we don't and and I know that we've been partnering actually with you all James in um helping get some of our math videos um transcribed or closed captioned um but I think you're a lot further on in your efforts than we are so I think that you'd be able to share a lot yeah I think I think in in California community colleges we're just we're fortunate that we have a number of statewide uh state funded accessibility support services um I would observe that uh nationally many of the folks who are involved in OER come out of distance learning or come out of centers for teaching and learning uh and in in both of those realms my my observation is that that there's a great commitment to accessibility and that uh alt tags and styles and uh proper tagging of PDFs and captioning of videos that that's just part of the normal workflow and producing content for uh an online class or it's part of our universal design is part of the uh training menu that the center for teaching and learning offers I would hope um at least that's that's what we're that's what we're trying to try to to model here at College of the Canyons um so so Kyla I I I kind of put it you know turn the question back to say uh I don't know why uh producing content around that's openly licensed would be uh any different than producing any other content uh out of a college other than uh having an open license makes it much much easier and legal to uh add the alt tags and to add the captions and so on um so I I I don't mean to to to uh to you know to to not respond to your question but I think it's it's really a question that that um I hope is addressed anyways absolutely and I I think that if that's something that you are that you're struggling with or that that's something new for your institution um BC Open Campus has a great accessibility toolkit that is a fantastic resource for OER that can provide you with some guidance there yeah and and and part of it's also just making sure that the content that you're involved in producing or adopting at your institution is subject again subject to the regular uh vetting that we hope any content is subject to right as as Lisa suggested of course if it if it's new to your institution that that can be tricky and and Kelsey Smith asks whether we have a a specific staff member who's responsible for checking well at College of Canyons our our answers is kind of yes and no um the word flow of College of Canyons is that uh uh faculty members who are teaching online are required to uh complete a complete some training before they teach online that training includes uh accessibility uh we have a dedicated accessibility coordinator who works in our disability services office who provides training to faculty on uh making their content accessible and is available as a resource for students who want to receive a braille braille version of their textbooks for example uh so the let's say the standard regular existing uh processes of the institution would apply in addition the uh student workers or college assistants we have on our OER team are trained in accessibility uh so they can put all tags on content they can check that things are formatted using styles and if they're not they'll they'll format it with using styles and so on and so forth and um I might add we've had a couple questions about um and there was one that we we missed earlier James kind of about vetting OER and now we have this vetting accessibility and I think that um there's a number of ways to do that and with our Maricopa Millions project we have a peer review process at the end of the grant process so our grants um the faculty get um funded for three semesters that includes a semester for training assist and semester for development of their OER materials which um as I say development it's really using those five hours to make sure that um you know we're using remixing um what have you and creating any materials and of course making those OER and the third semester they pilot it after the pilot process they make revisions and then we have a peer review process and this peer review process is important for a couple of reasons one is it gives um feedback to the team developing the OER to so that they can get feedback on the OER materials um how it aligns with course competencies and such and and of course accessibility um but it also is an opportunity for us to get those materials into the hands of other faculty who may be willing and interested in adopting those materials and so the peer review process really um serves two options right now we're using the achieve rubric um but we're going to be making some um we're going to work on adapting that um because we've found that um faculty who are doing the reviews each faculty has a different reason for wanting to do the reviews and sometimes they're looking more at the content quality as opposed to the OER and so we're looking at doing something a little more comprehensive James do you do anything like that we don't we should well you know what I said that too quickly we don't and I'm not sure that we should I you know I see that popping up at different institutions and part of you know part of part of me thinks we should because we see other institutions doing it right and because because we hear from faculty all the time gosh peer review is so important or or they think peer review is important but on the other hand you know I'm not sure about the role of our OER team in getting too deep into the content we really uh in our OER team we really view ourselves as the facilitators and enablers and once the content once the faculty are satisfied with the content we really step back if they want if they want edits or they want to uh have our help making sure that hard copies are available for their students and so on and so forth we're we're happy to jump in there but the conversations that faculty have within their departments about the content really we like to leave up to the faculty if that makes sense absolutely I'm kind of torn in my answer yeah and you know it's interesting because we have we often in our OER sharing team have these conversations and one of the things that we've been really working with is we share the Maricopa millions courses through our Maricopa millions website but we're going to be moving that to canvas commons and we had a lot of discussions about you know do we have to do a huge review and make sure that you know for the OER materials and you know we need to make sure that what they're sharing with everyone is legally able to and what if they have something copyrighted in their OER course that we didn't know about um but we really decided to take the approach um on that in regard basically through training and so in order for the faculty to do that we basically have them go through a training course that provides them with information on the canvas commons repository and on really what it means that they're moving their materials to that because we want to have all of the OER materials moved to that with special tagging and this allows us to really let them know this is what you're saying if you're putting it in canvas commons and tagging with the OER metadata and this is what it means legally and we think that's enough in that respect yeah it's it's a it's a tricky question I think you know the extent to which yeah you you provide the training let people do their thing particularly you know our faculty colleagues or how much do you want to get involved in in the content I'm not I'm not quite sure about that yeah it's a tricky one yeah and I'm looking I'm looking at the time Mary Lou do we want to do we have time for one more question or do you want to move on to the concluding remarks here yep no I think we have time for one more question and we've got about six minutes left so is there a final question someone would like to ask the panelists this or an observation another suggestion that we haven't haven't mentioned we certainly don't have all the answers we have a perhaps a couple of years more experience but we certainly don't have all the answers absolutely all right well maybe I can ask you one question for each of you could you talk about what was your biggest challenge in getting your project to be sustainable at your institution I can go for that one I think that our biggest challenge is that where we're trying to move forward with the z-degree or oer degree and we that's a huge huge undertaking and that by doing it I think it'll make it even more sustainable but it's been really challenging trying to match up the courses that are desired by students that are definitely um advantageous for them to have for like for example a transfer degree and then finding the faculty who are interested in teaching and and moving to oer um it's it's kind of logistically huge and so um we have four colleges that are working towards moving to that and that has been the biggest challenge everything else has come we've been really fortunate that it's been fairly easy and and has made become very sustainable but that oer degree has definitely been a challenge yeah I would say the biggest problem or mistake that that I've made is is staying in my box and and not um trying to integrate my interest in oer into the rest of the institution and and not uh really understanding what students and most faculty want um I I talked for years about learning objects and and the oer playlists and thinking that um we would uh uh be pulling together courses or course where the same way that people put together playlists on itudes and and while I was talking about that faculty and students were busy adopting and creating open textbooks so I I completely missed the uh the power of uh that that open textbooks would have and now that I've understood that I think we're we're making a lot more uh progress and having a lot more positive response from faculty and students great thanks very much uh for all of your comments and for um a really great conversation there with a lot of um wonderful questions from the audience so just in closing we wanted to let you know what is coming up and how you can stay involved um the upcoming conferences there be uh the open ed 2017 conference is happening in october in anaheim and cccar will be giving some presentations and of course a lot of you will be will be there if you haven't yet decided to come please check out that website and see all of the exciting and interesting presentations that they'll have because it's a wonderful professional development opportunity for you and your colleagues you can also look at the cccar.org website and go under the get involved tab to see uh how you can join the community email list you can see the webinars that will resume in the fall and you can see other uh other avenues for you to get involved with the greater cccar community so we welcome you to continue to be in touch with us uh over the next couple of months um we have already had time for questions so we just really wanted to thank you at this point for joining us today if you do have any further follow-up that you'd like to ask either of our presenters or una here are their email uh addresses that are on the screen right now we also will archive this presentation and have it available on the cccar.org our website in about two weeks and we also wanted just to bring to your attention quickly that this afternoon right after this is going to be another webinar uh which will take place on on the go-to-meeting platform i'll paste the link right there in the chat window if you'd like to join us it's on open policy and there will be several people from around the world who will talk about the benefits of open policy and helping get open educational resources integrated into uh the common way of doing things this is part of the year of open initiative which i hope you're all aware of 2017 is the year of open and we're trying to raise awareness increase collaboration and come out with some great partnerships uh among people working to see openness as part of our everyday world so thanks again to everybody we hope to see in the webinar series in the fall and please be in touch thank you very much to lisa and to uh and to james thanks everybody thanks everybody


Do you call a sheep covered in chocolate? A candy bar? What do you call a busy sheep? Cheer madness! Jack! Be nimble! Jack, jump over the candlestick! Jack, jump over the candlestick! Wanna be a chicken someday? Don't ignore me. This job isn't like scrapped up to be. Give the people what they came for. Do it together again. So sad. This is a golden rice wine. There's an ice cream somewhere around here.


A lot address that was a great speech What's your opinion why mr. Nakamoto haven't explained why? What Bitcoin is for exactly and why do you think he decided not to reveal his identity? well in Greek mythology there's a story of Prometheus and Prometheus had the audacity to steal fire from the gods and give it to man and As punishment for that he was tied to a rock Where an eagle would eat his liver every day and then overnight the liver would be regrown So he could be tortured all over again Satoshi Nakamoto stole money from the state Not stealing the money itself, but stealing the technology of money and giving it to men Directly and if we ever find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is the most likely Result will be that someone will either Metaphorically or quite literally tie him to a rock for an eagle to eat his liver out or her liver or their liver The day after Nakamoto is found We will discover from the media that this person is a criminal terrorist a Muslim a lesbian a vegan an Anarchist a punk punk rocker and Biologically related to Justin Bieber. I Just enumerated, you know ten of the most horrifying things I can think of Because that's what the media is going to do right Probably at the behest of governments. We got to realize that Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared just in time I think it's very wise to recognize that Satoshi Nakamoto is not a Deity or a prophet and that even though he she or they Created a vision for what Bitcoin could be Bitcoin is not theirs and their idea of what Bitcoin could be or is is not divine truth we are Bitcoin and Bitcoin will always be we Not a single person that's the whole point and therefore it doesn't even matter anymore what Satoshi Nakamoto thought Bitcoin is in fact Satoshi Nakamoto was mostly Arguably unsure about whether this would actually work. They were extremely hesitant to think that this would work So the bottom line is that Satoshi Nakamoto can't tell us what Bitcoin is because neither he she they nor we yet know what Bitcoin will be We are making history. We have to take responsibility for the fact that we are part of making history and Part of making history means that you have no idea what comes next because it's never come before and so you have to Make your choices carefully And with a long view into the future So the stewardship of Bitcoin has passed to all of us What do you think Bitcoin is? Thank you. Yeah, I would say I completely agreed that Bitcoin is a platform as a Lego Which gives you a creativity to create whatever you want. So in the in this point I completely agree with you like I completely agree with you in a lot of the points But in this one for sure So, yeah, it actually gives you the ability to build anything starting from the currency from the payment system and ending with with the projects which are now built with Ethereum when you You use the blockchain to create the tokens for the trees in the Canada and then when somebody is making a guitar From the trees you can follow the history of guitar in the blockchain. So why not? Yeah, that that that is also the great way to decrease the level of illegal Foresting. Yes, exactly. So so here's the other thing Here's the other thing that's really important to understand Bitcoin doesn't have to be one thing That's the whole point of a platform It can be that to you and it can be something completely different to me And it could be a different thing for every one of you In a system where you don't require permission to innovate to be creative where in order to launch an application on the network All you need is to create a new application and then find someone else who wants to interact with you using that application the user base of a legitimate application is to Okay for some applications one You don't need to focus group it or test it write a protocol definition Launch it on the network. It's like how many people do you need to run an application on the network to? At most and that's enough for that application to be meaningful to you. So Bitcoin is But Bitcoin is also whatever you want it to be It allows you to express the application of just two people and that's one of its magical capabilities because if you want to create a Financial application on our modern financial system. It has to be something that billions of people will use profitably for the banks Which really means that you can only have very few applications So I think it's it's important to think about it as something you own and and I own and we all own


Hello and welcome to the news clip. Today we are in Bangladesh in the sidelines of Asian Assembly for people's movement and organizations in Dhaka. We have Mr. Rasheed Khan Menon who is the Minister of Social Delivery and also the President of Workers' Party of Bangladesh. Thank you Mr. Menon. Mr. Menon, the first question itself which is out of curiosity. Your name as Menon which is mostly used in southern parts of Bangladesh. What is the context of this? The context is that my father was very fond of Mr. Menon in those days of independence struggle against the British. So when I was born, my father gave me this as a nickname. But nobody called me by my own name. When I came to the college, one of the great artists of Bangladesh, he just joined the mass head of our work magazine in which he gave me his name as Arkan Menon. And after that I used to write my name within Dhaka Menon otherwise nobody would have known me by that. Even during my university election days, there were two Rasheeds. So I had to distinguish as Menon. So sorry, the people would have hoped me proper. So at one time this Dhaka Menon had just gone away. I knew him as Menon. I did not know him as Menon. That's how it has stuck to my name. So now I think I can call you Menon than Rasheed. So Mr. Menon, you have literally lived through three eras. One is British India. You were born in 1943. And then Pakistan and now Bangladesh. You have seen a lot of struggles. You have been part of a lot of struggles. Now you are part of the workers party of Bangladesh. You spoke in the Asian assembly in the inaugural address that capitalism and neoliberalism are the threat for this world today. And we need to unite. Can you elaborate just a little? Well, I said there, though it was not a very long speech, but even then there is one thing that now the world is being ruled by only a set of people. The whole, the wealth of the world is now procedurally in the hands of, as I said in that paper, that eight men controls about 50% of the wealth of the world. So eight men controls about 300 crore people in his life. And not only that, it is the corporations and others who are determining the decisions making process of every country. Even in Bangladesh where the capital is not developing that way, the international companies are definitely herder to play in this country also. So after the fall of Soviet Union, or the disbanding of the Soviet Union, and the setback of socialism, now the capitalism has a free hand in the world. And what happened is that now to that, the free back change of capitalism has entrained the society, conservatism, and selfishness and other things that has become the goal of the day. Unfortunately, in our nation, we are the young people, we used to look for the good of the country, good of the people, wealth of everyone, similar people. Now I find the young people that they are confined to themselves, they desire that immediately they take a job, they will have a flat and a car, and they will live their life like that. So this is the effect in our country also. And not only that, the process of the privatisation process has increased much more. The difference between rich and poor has increased. In our country also, the genetic efficient measures this income gap. They say that it is increasing, not only in the case of the rich and poor, but also in the case of the poorer people also. And that is more good, greater than the poorer people. And in this way, the people are being deprived, and not only economically, now they are being deprived of their rights also. They are exercising that all the governments have become authoritarian, even in the government of Kasim, they have become authoritarian. You can see everywhere in the world. You said about the increasing gap, which we see in South Asia, the richer are becoming rich, the poorer are becoming poorer and poorer. Also, what is threatening the South Asian region, including Bangladesh and India, is the rising religious fundamentalist. In Bangladesh itself, recently we have witnessed attacks on activists, bloggers. How do you think that as your party... Unfortunately, what happened is that the liberation of Bangladesh was called the basis of a non-communal democratic rise. And immediately after the liberation of Bangladesh, the constitution included that secularism and democratic rise around socialism also in our four principles of our constitution. But three years, three and a half years after that liberation, the father of the nation was assassinated by the military. And when they came in, they just threw away this principle of secularism and everything from the constitution. Not only that, they even implanted those people who were the collaborators of the Pakistani army. So they were brought back to this country, they were given the citizenship, they were given the post of militia. At the same time, in the world also, something has happened is that the Middle Eastern photographer had a very good position in our country. Many of our people are now working in Saudi Arabia, the Middle East. So that influence is also coming to Bangladesh.  And so they supported these forces who were against Bangladesh, who fought against our people, who killed our people, who raped our people. They were brought back and financed by this country. You know, the Islamic Bank, the first Islamic Bank, now it is the biggest bank in Bangladesh, was established mainly with the help of the Saudis. Their professor was there, his name is Khatib, his name was Khatib. He was the pioneer of the, in the establishment of the bank. And all the people of Yamaat-e-Islami and others were brought in, became their director and other things. So in the economic factor, in the economic sector, they just got their entertainment in the economic sector also. And the 21 years of the military rule and the other rule, what happened is that with respect to our country.  Now a sort of, in Bangladesh a change is coming, unfortunately. The change is that in the mindset of the people, now religion is getting deeper and deeper. And that religion is not the religion that we practice in our country. Because in our country, the Sufi is mainly the liberal kind of Islam in our country, it was followed by our people. Our forefathers used to do that. Now the extreme ideas has come in. And now we are being influenced by our young people and other people. What happened, you see, in this Islami U.S. you are seeing that is what is happening today. Today it is closed. About millions of people were there. And there also, the division is very sharp. The extremists and the liberal ones. The division is very sharp. This has made a ground for the rise of the Islamism and the military people. And after that, the Polition of BNP, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat Islamists, helped these forces to grow in Bangladesh. And they have gained this Islamism ability in our country. Now with the rise of IS in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Syria, so they have already influenced our young people. And you know now the internet is the best thing to influence people. So by the way, it has influenced. In Bangladesh there is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. In India we see there is the rise of religious Hindu fundamentalism. And in Myanmar there is the rise of Buddhist fundamentalism. And in this context, a lot of attacks against the Rohingya populations have happened in Myanmar. And most of these Rohingyas who are stateless people have come to Bangladesh. And Bangladesh is one of the few countries which has opened doors for these refugees and provided humanity in it. When a lot of other countries in southern and south-east Asia are no stateless. Recently, Bangladesh government has signed an agreement with Myanmar authorities about safe preparation of these refugees back to Myanmar. But there are also reports that post-agreement of the Rohingya villages were also burnt in Myanmar. So how do you see that there can be a safe reparation of these refugees back to Myanmar? Is there any monitoring process? Well, the more that Bangladesh has opened up its borders for the Myanmar people, now the total number has come down to about 1 billion. And just the people who just came in recently, about 600,000, obtained 70,000 are taken away. And in the last three months, about 30,000 are back there. So you know what problem Bangladesh is now facing. So Bangladesh has no other option but to go for a recension with the people though there is a world support, European support and other supports are coming. But Myanmar is a neighbor because we have to leave with the neighbor. So we thought that, we felt that these issues should be sorted out bilaterally first and then the others should come in. Now, after that, because we have a negative in 1992 about the Rohingyas, who had reported in Myanmar once in 1992 about 30,000 of them, but they stopped there. So we do not believe that Myanmar is going to respect the agreement, but we have to go through that process. Number one, because two things are very important here. You know, the China and India, both of them, they are not taking any side. They are trying to remain neutral about it. Now, the China is saying that it is an internal affair of Myanmar should be tested like that. And India is just keeping mum all the time. So it has been very difficult for Bangladesh to maneuver in that way. So we have to go for an agreement with them for a preparation. But in the preparation, we propose and they have been saying that in the preparation process the UN is said to be involved. So UN is said to be there to... Overset everything and say bye. Thank you, Mr. Menon, for speaking to Newslet. Thank you for watching Newslet. Please log into the website www.newslet.com.


We're back. We're live. This is Think Tech here on Think Tech Hawaii.com. I'm Jay Fidel and it's Wednesday and Wednesday has a lot of energy for us. This show is Energy in America and we have Jeff Kissell on the line by Skype from New York. He's a senior fellow at E-Pring, which is an energy think tank out of Washington, D.C. Welcome to the show, Jeff. Thanks, Jay. It's a pleasure to be here this evening and it's nice to talk to you from across 6,000 miles of open ocean and continent. Wonderful technology and technology is really what we're talking about tonight. We're going to call this discussion lifelong to renewables in Hawaii and that means the intersection of regulation and technology, I suppose. And you've been writing a paper and doing a lot of thinking about that as a senior fellow at E-Pring and I wonder what your conclusions are. Well, it's a little bit deep and I want to lay a little bit of foundation if you'll excuse me for a moment. Hawaii over the last half century has really undergone a lot of changes. Our agriculture industry has changed. It's essentially gone. Our fashion industry has moved offshore to the Orient and other places. We've had a lot of concentration of effort on cheap immediate gratification in terms of our economic economy. And that is a great result. Jeff, can we stop for a minute? Can we stop for a minute and call you back? We have a degrading line, Jeff.  Aloha, Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at three in the afternoon. Do not tune in in the morning. My topic is energy efficiency. It sounds dry as heck, but it's not. We're paying five billion dollars a year for imported oil. My job is to shave that, shave that, shave that down in homes and buildings while delivering better comfort, better light, better air conditioning, better everything. So if you're interested in your future, you'd better tune in to me three o'clock every other Monday Code Green Aloha and thank you very much. Okay. Okay, we're back. We're live with Jeff Kissel. He's the former CEO of Hawaii Gas, and he's a senior fellow at E-prink, which is an energy think tank out of Washington, D.C. He joins us by Skype from New York. He run Energy in America. We're talking about lifeline to renewables in Hawaii because Jeff has been working on that issue for E-prink. So tell us the background of your research then. Hawaii has had a lot of experience with infrastructure coming and going, you know, in the 17th century, we had a self-sufficient economy. Later on, as agriculture blossomed and in the full extent, the economy developed, it was independent from the continental U.S., from Asia, and from many other places. Now, because we've lost our agriculture industry, we've lost a lot of the things that made us independent. We are dependent on food and the spare parts that the world economy delivers to us, and we're about to dismantle a very important piece of energy infrastructure in Hawaii that we need to pay attention to. It's the renewable energy. Well, I thought we were doing very well on renewable energy. I thought we had some great things going on. But all kinds of renewable energy activity has declined by more than 50% in the last two years, and it's because it was a diversified small business industry. And now, because of the sudden and uncalled-for abolition of net metering and the other things that allowed homeowners to install renewable energy systems in their homes, small businesses to install renewable energy systems in their businesses, and developers to put it in place in their new developments, essentially renewables have come to a standstill and started to regress. If we don't do something about that, within a year or two, there will be no renewable energy left, a new renewable energy industry left in Hawaii. And of course, the consequences of that are very severe. It puts us back on the dependency on foreign oil, and it's a real tragedy if we let this continue. And it's going to be as big a tragedy as it was when we lost sugarcane, pineapple, and the other major industries that supported the Hawaii economy, so that we are now dependent almost entirely on tourism and government largesse. Yeah, interesting that you see energy as an industry that measures up to those standards. But I guess the reality is we had and still do some have, we still have some solar installers. We have a huge solar installer industry and every so often we read now about those companies going out of business and in any event, the number of installations dropping precipitously. But my question is, didn't the regulators and the utility have at least what they thought was a good reason to get off net energy metering and to move on into, what do you want to call it, the new net energy metering now, which is what self supply, that's supposed to replace it.  The issue is not that at all. The issue is the most convenient and expedient solution to a short-term political problem, not the investment that it takes to develop a sustaining, sustainable, renewable energy industry. The evidence is very, very clear. Thousands of companies, hundreds of people and lots and lots of unnecessary economic dislocation is going on because people took the easiest way out. It's going to put us back on a track to dependency on oil. And that is going to be the worst of all possible outcomes for us. Well, let me drill down a little bit on that. You can still have solar installed. I think we're talking primarily about solar and rooftop here. You can still have solar installed, but you don't have the same benefit of being able to sell it back to the utility under net energy metering. But if I don't care about selling it back, and frankly, if I had solar, I wouldn't care that much, then you can still have it. You can buy it. It's just that the spreadsheet is different. You don't do as well financially. You don't retire your investment as quickly under the arrangements that have succeeded net energy metering. But you'll have to explain to me why this change from net energy metering to self-supply. And now they have time of use. They have a big pilot project over time of use, which I think in the end is probably going to roll out around the state within the next couple, three years. Why do those things lead to the demise of renewables in Hawaii? Time of use is nothing more than a hidden tax. It's a way to get people to pay more for less. It increases our dependence on fossil fuels. That is the wrong strategy. The fact of the matter is, and it is inescapable, it is sure as the sun rising if I can draw the analogy. We are losing solar companies daily. We are losing solar jobs daily. And not to make this personal with you because I respect you, and I think you're a great journalist doing a wonderful service for this economy. However, people do not live on spreadsheets. They live on budgets. They need to pay $8 a gallon for milk at the grocery store in Hawaii when they could buy it for $4 in the continental U.S. And the reason in part is because the ultra-high energy costs of Hawaii make it necessary to pass those costs along in every product we buy and everything we do, not just the cost to pay our electric bill every single day. And so if we can say to people, oh, don't worry about it, spend $60,000 and put your solar panels on the roof. And when you don't need the power, it'll charge your batteries.  Then in fact, what you've done is cut the heart out of an industry. You know that businesses make 90% of their profit seasonally at the peak times. They're staying business all the time so that they can be there when it's time to make money. Retail makes it a Christmas time. There are other industries that the hotel industry make it during the winter. There are other industries that make it in other seasons. Well, the renewable energy industry makes it when the sun shines. And if you're telling me that I can't share my power with my neighbor when the sun shines, you're destroying the incentive that I have to spend the money, make the investment and become an independent business person. Yeah, well, you know that. And join the benefits of serving my community with renewable energy. Well, where do you place that against the solar farms that are coming online? You know, Hawaiian Electric is out there having RFPs and, you know, contracts and projects to build large-scale solar farms where that would, it's provided by a contractor, but ultimately it serves the utility to have the solar farm. And I think what's coming down the pike, if it's not already here, a large-scale battery configurations again on the utility side of the line, why can't those things, you know, save our pipeline of renewables? In the Energy Policy Research Foundation that I work for, we deal in facts, not fantasy. The solar industry was installing more than one megawatt of power a month on small businesses, on homeowners, in apartments, everywhere. You're talking about solar farms that may be five or ten megawatts. That's less than a year's supply of what was happening on the rooftop. Forget everything else.  And they cut it off without understanding the economic consequences. Today, there is less than a 30-day supply of energy in the state of Hawaii with a shutdown of the coal plant and the sugar plantation on Maui. Maui is in a crisis and doesn't even know it. The hold is filling with water, the ship is sinking, and just because everything looks great on the deck, nobody is paying attention to what is about to happen. You get one big storm on Maui and heaven help you. You have big troubles. So what will happen here? Let's assume that energy metering results in a reduction of the number of installers, the number of installations of solar on rooftop, and it makes it less attractive for owners to, you know, install solar on rooftop. How will that work? So now there are fewer installers, fewer installations, but the installations that exist will continue to exist. And to the extent the utility does something at its side, you know, that'll ameliorate the problem. But can't, show me that this is going to evolve into a disaster. The facts are very, very clear. 25, 35 years ago, we had a six month supply of oil in the Hawaiian Islands, coal, and food. Today we have a 30 day supply or less. We have 10% of the spare parts we once had. So we are dependent on an airplane lifeline to keep us going day by day. What on earth would we want to do that same damage to an industry that's done nothing but contribute positively to the economic value in Hawaii? I'm dealing in facts. I'm not dealing in speculation. I'm not telling you we should be, you know, we should all drive electric cars or we should all do one thing or another. And in fact what's happening is that the regulators well intentioned and the industry well intentioned have utterly undermined our governor's courageous plan to move Hawaii to a fundamentally renewable energy base in its economy. And because they cut the heart out of it unnecessarily and untimely. Now I'm not suggesting we should have net metering forever. I'm not suggesting any single solution is the right solution. What I am suggesting is that the right solution is to move in a very measured way toward a renewable energy economy. And anytime you see a big dislocation like the number of people in the renewable energy falling by 50, 60, 70% you need to step back and say what have we done wrong because clearly we've done something wrong. So from the point of view of the regulators and the point of view of the utilities, you know what do you recommend at this point? What can they, should they do to go back to sort of a moderate growth instead of this kind of trauma? I think the most important thing that they can do today is to take a step back from the precipice, restore net metering, encourage renewables and if necessary, which it is, invest public money in upgrading the grid so it can take the variability that solar energy will put on it and let that industry grow. The evidence is just abundantly clear. 10 years ago when we were internet metering and we were building out our solar grid, both of those refineries were about to shut down and go away. Guess what? Both of those refineries have new owners, new capital and they're invigorating themselves because Hawaii is going to continue its addiction to oil in a big way that you wouldn't get that cap. Look, I'm not talking about whether it's right or wrong. It may be the right thing for Hawaii. It may be that oil prices are going to decline to the point where it's the best solution for Hawaii. Certainly Hawaii doesn't have to worry about air pollution or anything else. Obviously it's got to worry a little bit about sea level rise. But the fact of the matter is you've got a healthy oil industry and dying. Well, let me ask this. I hope our connection is good. Energy industry, isn't that the reverse of what this... Going back to a solution on this, so you think we ought to go back to net energy metering. Would you modify net energy metering now if you resumed it or created another kind of net... How would it differ? Would it differ at all? Would you improve it in some way from the way it was before? We were right. It was working. It wasn't broken. What we need to do is not stop the installation of renewable energy devices. We need to invest in the grid, give the electric company a proper return so that we can handle more renewable energy on that grid. That's the solution. It's not difficult to see. One of the points about net energy metering before was that the utility was paying retail to buy power back from the owners of rooftop solar. That was really too high because the utility had its expenses. It really wasn't good business to pay retail back, especially it wasn't clear that they were going to be able to use all what they had to buy. So would you change that? Would you change the rate at which the utility buys power back from the people under this program, this reconstituted net energy metering program? I am advocating a step back to the point where we were successful and then sorting out the real problems. You've identified one. The utility needs a return on their investment. No one should deny that. You can't tax the shareholders of a private company to support the public policy. Give them the proper return, but you've got to have an industry that can install the renewable energy devices so that we can put that renewable energy online and then figure out how to properly allocate its cost. Don't stop the installation. I'm just being a gadfly here, Jeff, but suppose I said why don't we increase the installation? Why don't we do tons of solar but do it on the utility side where we can best control it and where you don't have the argument that it's inequitable with the disparity of income and property ownership. That way everybody enjoys it in the same way, in the same degree. Why don't we take those installers and those installer companies and give them work, lots of work installing solar farms, you know, scaled up solar farms for the utility or for utility contractor? Why don't we do that? The utility does not control the real estate. The homeowners control the real estate. It's the rooftop and they don't need to have permits and public hearings and all kinds of issues resolved to get their solar installed on their rooftops. They need to be able to call a local installation company and arrange for the installation. The utility simply can't do it. We don't have the economy that allows that. We don't have the regulatory environment that allows that. Well, let me change the facts on you then for a minute. Let's have in my model, you know, my hypothetical I'm asking you, we're going to have a better regulatory environment. We're going to have an environment that really wants to move down the track on solar and renewables and we're going to stop taking, you know, years to approve, you know, permitting and RFP arrangements. We're going to do it much faster. Would you change your answer? It took me six months to get a building permit to remodel my bathroom.  Yeah, okay. I got your meaning. So what about the tax credits? Would you change the tax credits in this return to net energy metering? Would you do anything to incentivize one way or the other? I think that's got to be on the table for consideration. The people at the public utilities commission, the people who run the utility and the people in the solar industry should be called upon as responsible participants in this community to come up with the solutions that will work long term. Our governor has got staff that is capable of coordinating this and it ought to be done. Well, I think one point, you know, inherent in what you're saying is if we want to move down the pike, we have to move quickly and we can't be deterred by, you know, whatever regulatory changes or impediments exist, we have to move, we have to move more quickly. And my view is anything and everything we can do to move more quickly, we should do it. And for the life of me, I don't understand why it takes so long to do anything, including the, you know, the 19 months on next era, that was too long. But let me ask you about the mainland, you know. This is called, this show is Energy in America. And so while, of course, you have plenty of experience looking at it from the point of view of a Hawaii, a Hawaii file, Hawaii resident, former CEO of an energy company here. What about the mainland? What is happening on the mainland? What is happening in terms of net energy metering? What is happening in terms of rooftop solar and, you know, scaled up solar farms and batteries and all that? What are the trends you see happening there? I'll answer that question, but I want to address one issue that you raised earlier in your commentary. We are about to lose the last sugar plantation in Hawaii. Once you lose the last of anything, it is very difficult to bring it back. I want to say the mainland is building out its renewable energy infrastructure. Hawaii is shrinking its renewable energy infrastructure. The mainland is, is reducing its energy demand overall for electricity in different regions by one half of 1% to 4% a year. That is falling demand. Falling demand, and it is replacing coal and other forms of conventional energy supply with renewable energy. It's even actually reducing hydroelectric energy, which, although it's clean, has other environmental consequences. And so we are replacing the equivalent and, you know, anybody can look at these statistics stuff and that's the business I'm in is to show the numbers. We are replacing energy consumption on the continental US and Alaska by the equivalent of 200,000 barrels a year. That means in 10 years, 2 million barrels a year of energy demand that were, were previously fossil fuel natural gas base will be gone. That is a really, really important statistic because the demand is falling and the supply is being replaced by renewables. Hawaii is actually changing that trend for the worse. We're going back to the past, not forward to the future. That's a wake-up call for Hawaii, isn't it? Because the longest time we were ahead of the curve, weren't we? We were the model, we were the postage child for renewables and especially for rooftop solar. And now you're saying that we're falling behind and other places are moving faster than we are. You know, one thing I would say that people here don't follow this, they don't know this, they don't realize that, you know, our speed of moving toward renewables is, seems to be slowing and we're not keeping up with the speed at which people are moving toward renewables on the mainland, am I right? You're right because we have this big installed base. So the fact that it isn't expanding is not noticeable now. It will be when that base ages and the only thing to replace it is the oil and then oil changes from a relatively inexpensive fuel as it is today to a much more expensive fuel as likely to be in the future. And we get, we get hit with kind of the compound impact of high local energy prices with high jet fuel and we end up where we were in 2006, seven, eight, nine, where we have high energy prices, high flight prices to Hawaii and a tourism industry that essentially collapses overnight. Well, that's pretty, that's pretty threatening. I'd like to talk with you further about that. But let me ask this, I mean, you mentioned it's, it's, we should look at the facts, we should look at the stats. You're writing about this. If I wanted to read, you know, you're writing your report, where would I find it? If it's not out, when is it coming out? We, well, we are writing all the time on our website, which is epric.gov, E-P-R-I-C, sorry, epric.org, O-R-G, E-P-R-I-C dot O-R-G. And you can see the statistics on a nationwide basis. We are doing a series of articles on the overall impact of renewable price economics and the choices that we want to make in terms of miles per gallon in our vehicles, renewable components to our electricity, and the other essential items that every citizen should know to make good judgments. So you will find us writing about that all the time. And you'll, you'll also have an idea of what the, the energy balance in the United States and the world is likely to be. And when we can expect changes in fossil fuel prices, what's renewable energy prices? Thank you, Jeff Kissel. It's been great to talk to you. I want to do it some more. We'll look at the website, epric.org, and we'll come back to you. We want to continue this discussion. It's important for policymakers to know about this. Thank you, Jay. It's a pleasure being with you tonight.


We're fortunate here in BC to have around 3,300 foster families providing love and support to almost 5,900 children and youth in our communities across our province. And you know that may seem like more than enough but I tell you there's never enough. We're always looking for people and individuals that can open up their hearts in their home. This event is phenomenal. It is so important to acknowledge foster parents because one of the things I say so often is that foster parents are the best advocates in the world for kids. They are the world's worst advocates for themselves. So these events mean so very much. My foster parents and my peers, they believed in me when even I didn't believe in myself. And I can probably say quite truthfully that I wouldn't have been here today if it wasn't for their support. So to those of you who face the storm, I express my gratitude. And on behalf of all youth in and from government care, I thank you. We thank you for taking the risk and facing the storm. So on behalf of the BC government, I really want to give my heartfelt thanks to all of the foster parents for opening your hearts in your home. It's an incredible gift you give and something that all of us really, really appreciate and I want to thank you.