Hello Berlin, it's nice to be here. I'd like to thank the Republica conference organizers

and the sponsors for making it possible for me to come to this amazing conference. It's my first time at Republica and I just think it's a mind-blowing, amazing event. So, I'm based in Sydney. I'm an Australian copyright policy lawyer that works for the Australian school sector and the Australian vocational education sector.

Part of my job, obviously, is dealing with copyright issues to do with education, which open education is an increasingly important part when we're trying to harness ICT as a means of actually delivering great educational outcomes.

I'm not going to talk about copyright today. I may mention it a bit slightly, so you don't have to run from the room screaming yet. But what I'm going to talk to you about today is about peer-to-peer university, which I'm one of the co-founders of, which was started back in 2009 with nine people seeing what we could do on the web trying to create an open online social learning experiment.

And to our surprise, by running nine pilot programs, we found that there was an incredible desire by people to harness any opportunity for education. And since then, we've probably run over 550 courses.

So, I'm going to just start with a really startling kind of projection. That's from Sir John Daniel, who is the president and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning. And if you look at this, it's nearly one third of the world's population is under 15.

Today, there are 158 million people enrolled in tertiary education. Projections suggest that participation will peak at 263 million in 2025. So, basically, to accommodate the extra 105 million students, we need to build four major universities every week for the next 15 years.

That is pretty startling. And there's just absolutely no way we can meet the current demand for high quality education by building brick and mortar. So, what we need to do is try and harness the power of the internet and people, because you need people, not just the internet,

to create online open communities and work out ways that we can get people to participate and get access to a great education and great learning. So, we have a little bit of a triangle here. We have a little bit of a problem, because the cost and access is huge. I'm one of the last, and I come from New Zealand originally, you can probably tell from my accent.

So, I'm one of the last generation that got a free university education in New Zealand. I know that many places like Germany still have a fabulous free tertiary education system in many countries around the world. New Zealand, Canada, the UK, America, Asia, you have to pay an awful lot of money to go to university.

And the usual way of doing it is through a student loan. So, this is a kind of problem. And also, people in developing countries and transitional economies, they're not going to have the same opportunities to go to Princeton or Harvard or the free university or Humboldt or London School of Economics.

So, it's very important to try and figure out ways that we can get a little bit more equity into education, because it's life changing for people. So, this is the other issue we have, and I'm a bit worried about this, because you're all sitting here at the moment, and you could be all like this in a minute if I keep going on like this.

But basically, even the traditional ways that we learn at university is really boring. And so, we need to think of ways of ensuring that education or learning becomes a great big adventure, rather than being something that you must do to get a certificate to get a job. And so, I'm going to show you another graph here, which basically shows us just how engaged we are in the traditional learning environment,

including you guys sitting here in the audience. So, this is a chart of a very small experiment that was done at MIT Media Lab. And the students were given wristbands as a proxy for engagement or activity. Now, if you look at the result, on the right hand side, you've got the yellow markers there,

which talks about the class activity, being in the lecture hall. And you can see different activities, levels where they spike, like the lab, doing your household chores, your homework has a lot of activity, social has a bit, sleep.

Now, the frightening thing about this chart is basically the lowest level of activity recorded using these proxies was when you were in the classroom in your lecture hall. Even sleep has a higher activity level than actually sitting in a class. You have a higher activity just watching television, and that drives me crazy.

So, it tells us something about the way we're doing education, and it may not be working. So, again, this is a really kind of telling thing to do. Now, I promised you, I'm going to mention a little bit about copyright today. So, copyright does impede access, remixing, sharing knowledge of culture.

And so, it's a really big obstacle in education, particularly open online education. The Internet's changed everything, has provided huge opportunities to give millions of people around the world access to education for no or very, very low costs, but we just simply can't copy

and communicate other people's material, even if it's freely available on the Internet. We have to obey the law, we have to either get permission from the copyright owner, or we have to rely on free use exceptions, and they differ from country to country to country. Some countries have more flexible educational use exceptions, like America with its fair use regime,

and Korea and Israel, and other countries have, I don't know, 45 different exceptions in their copyright legislation, which is suited for photocopier and video recorder. It just does not suit the new age of the flipped classroom, peer learning, or project learning.

It doesn't suit remixing and culture. And this is going to be a big, long fight to get legislation around the world and in trade treaties to try and get that balance right. So, what we have to do instead is harness the open movement, open source software,

open education resources, open access publishing, open science, open data, to use this sort of information and materials as a way of actually giving people a good education. So, as I said, the current model is pretty broken. So, where has peer-to-peer come into all of this?

Well, basically, what peer-to-peer is trying to do is that we want to give you more opportunities for lifelong learning, even if it's for professional development or you want to do it because you're curious. So, what we want to do is help make education more accessible, open, and creative.

So, we want to do basically four things. We want to build new and interesting ways to learn together. We want to use the web as a platform for learning. We don't want to build a new portal. We want to use the web as a platform. We want to use open source software and content as our material.

And we want to support and encourage group work and community engagement. We don't want to focus on doing massive delivery of content. We actually want to do small, quality, engaged content. We want to do this all for a very, very low cost. We want to do it on a shoestring budget and we want to have fun doing it.

And we want to also share how we're doing it with everyone else so they can also do that if they want to with us or by themselves. That's what peer-to-peer wants to do. So, what are we? We are not a university, even though we call ourselves peer-to-peer university. We're a small, agile, grassroots, not-for-profit organization that exists virtually.

We are a university of the web that is built by the open community, but we're quite different from Coursera, Audacity, that are more sort of institutional basis.

We are doing learning outside institutional walls and we have three core values. The first core value is openness. All our courses are completely open. They're licensed under CC by share alike. You can do what you like with them. You can deliver them offline. You can tweak them. You can translate them. You can do anything you like as long as you comply with the CC by share license.

The second core value is community. We are an open community. All our courses are facilitated and designed and run by volunteers, hundreds of them. We all help each other out. So, we review your course. We help you design your course. We help you run your course. We review the badges that you want to give to learners, whether you're an expert or you're someone who's passionate.

So, this, without the community, we could not exist. And that's a really, really important part of it as well. What we also realize is we're not a place that you just come and take a course. It's a place that you can come to learn how to take a course or to make a course.

So, we now have developed since 2009 into a community of practitioners with the expertise for open to peer learning online. Oh, sorry, the third value. Almost forgot. Peer learning. That is also a core value as well. And what we mean by we are committed to it because we think feedback

improves learning both of the person giving the feedback and the person receiving the feedback. It's also closely associated with very good skills of communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, and empathy. Empathy is an incredibly important skill that we need to be developing and encouraging.

So, what we're trying to do is that's our third value. Sorry, I missed that third value. And we're called peer-to-peer university. How could I have missed it? So, what we're trying to do is develop a place that you can come and find the best open tools. You can get inspired by some examples of what we've done. We can give you a recipe to start your own project.

You can take a course on how to make a course. You can get help from a community of like-minded people who will help you going through that process. And basically, some of you here might actually be inspired enough to actually partner with us and introduce some stuff on the go. So, here's our different model.

It's all about kind of people working together, project-based learning, and having passion. It's about trying to create passionate learning. And amazingly, we seem to have got some secret sauce that gets people doing this. Oops. So, I'm going to talk about some of the cool stuff that we've been doing.

And then I'm going to talk about some of the cool stuff we're going to do to kind of inspire you into thinking what could be possible. Now, we appropriated the moniker or the idea of the school concept from the traditional education universities. And basically, we've got some great collaborators who have helped us create our vision of schools,

which is basically learning communities around particular topic areas. So, we've got the School of Open, which I'll talk about in a minute, with Creative Commons. We've got the School of Education that has a number of different partners like MIT Media Lab, MIT Courseware, Hewlett Foundation, and some great kind of inspirational teachers.

We had the School of Webcraft, which is our very, very, very first school that we did with Mozilla, which we started in 2010 and has just gone from strength to strength. And we have the School of Data that is something we're doing in partnership with the Open Knowledge Foundation. So, let's talk about some cool stuff that we've done.

Well, the mechanical MOOC. This is something we did in 2013. So, in 2013, we began thinking about what could we do, what are some things we could do to try and sort of hack the MOOC and somehow use technology to bring people to learn together in intimate communities.

So, we basically got content for MIT, courseware, some communities from Open Study, and some exercises from Code Academy. We joined them all together with a mailing list that coordinated student activity. And you can see our little robot up there. That's our headless MOOC. That's another way you could talk to it. Now, basically, the mechanical MOOC, or the robot, just acted like a mailing list.

It allowed organizers to loop into various components. So, as soon as we had enough signed up doing some of the activities, then emails would go out to remind them socially about doing the work. And so, that was actually a really interesting kind of thing.

Now, we've used that same concept of mechanical MOOC in other courses. And it basically now only costs about $200 to run a course like that. So, and again, we've got source code and documentation to show you how you can use a mechanical MOOC to do something different.

There's a little slide there showing the various things we can do. Now, we've also been doing another great course on open science, and this was aimed at young academics, you know, and young scientists of all ages to try and make them, you know, champion things using open science.

So, using, you know, again, bringing in a whole lot of people from the open science community, from various organizations to give panel discussions, which we recorded on Google Hangout. And again, the idea was, again, telling people how you could actually start doing open science. And I want to tell you about this at the School of Open.

And we've had, because we've had loads of, this initiative with Creative Commons, there's been loads of stuff done. ABC for Liberians in Colombia, Uruguay, in Spanish. We've got another copyright for academics and culture people in Romania. We have an open education camp in an island called Luxi of China,

which has helped deliver open education resources to a very remote community where they're called the lost generation because their parents are working in mainland China and they needed to actually get access to resources. So, the School of Open actually gives us a great example of a global reach of the Internet. How actually, we can do this by actually giving local communities power.

So, what happened in Kenya, we had two stories here. Two little stories is firstly to do with the School of Open in Kenya. We had a bunch of students who were kind of sick of having to carry water.

After they did their gym classes, they had no plumbing in this little African school in Kenya. And so, by doing the courses through the School of Open to learn about web development and open content, they managed to kind of find on Twitter, and using other things, access to a real-life plumber in the Netherlands who then taught them how to make their own plumbing system

so they actually could solve the problem of actually not having to carry water anymore after they did their gym classes. That is an amazing story. The second one happened in Singapore. We had a high school student who began finding MIT courseware on the Internet and YouTube videos. And he thought, wow, wouldn't this be a great opportunity for us to sort of like perhaps harness these activities

and develop some open education courses in English to help because in Singapore they all speak French. So, he worked with his English club at school and then developed a whole English program on this sort of stuff as well. So, again, amazing things happen. We've got the School of Data. That's also happening with the Open Knowledge Foundation.

I'll just share that. The School of Education, you can look at this all online. But let's look at some of the stuff that's about to happen. So, May the 16th, this course is actually due to start. And this is the course called Play With Your Music. So, this is a new edition of the course. It's offered in collaboration.

We do most of our major big courses with collaborators with the New York Steinhardt School and with Peter Gabriel, the recording artist, including one of his percussionists and the sound recordist that was involved in one of his records.

So, yes. So, what he's doing in this is he's giving us two of his tracks. Sledgehammer is one track he's giving us and the other one is In Your Eyes. And basically, anyone with any musical ability can come and do this course. And you'll learn to mix your own songs

using the latest tools in the web. You'll also have some access to experts who are on songwriting and audio effects techniques. And you'll also be able to share this on SoundCloud. So, this is an amazing collaboration

between the New York Steinhardt School and PDP University. And so, that is something I encourage you to have a look at online now. Play With Your Own Music. It's with Peter Gabriel. It starts on May the 16th and sign-ups are right now. The next thing I'll talk to you about is the School of Internet of Things. This is another new school which is probably going to launch sometime in 2010.

So, the Internet of Things is a new landscape where our daily objects and environments are connected to the Internet. So, we think this offers some really interesting opportunities to discover our world in a different way. So, we're going to start developing some courses that's going to introduce you to the new technology of Internet of Things.

And we're going to give you specific tools to analyze, design, and make your own Internet of Things projects. So, it's not just about making it. A huge part of this course is actually getting you to work with others to design your own items, but get others to analyze it before you actually then decide to make it.

So, that's another exciting project as well. And of course, we're rebooting our School of Webcraft 2.0. This is very exciting. So, this is going to be delegated to helping those who know to code to teach it to other people. When we started the School of Webcraft, we were teaching people to code.

Now, we're going to the next level, which is teaching people to teach others how to code. And this is our School of Webcraft 2.0. And I think this is going to be great. And this is launching on May the 12th. You're going to have 30 to 40 mentors helping people learn how to teach web development, weekly hangouts, Twitter.

You know, learners are going to be encouraged to make weekly makes, which are going to be used for teaching kits for others. And again, this is all done by volunteers. So, I'll just stop there and just invite everyone in the audience. We really want, you know, to invite anyone to come and have a –

to play and learn and experiment with us. It's free. It's open. It's inclusive. It's a sandpit. You're welcome to come and experiment your learning or develop your own project. And then you're welcome to take your project away and go and do another platform. Or you're also welcome to stay and keep experimenting with us.

Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much. And now we have a few minutes for questions. Are there any questions? Yeah. Oh, the cameraman. The cameraman? Yeah.

So, the cameraman is filming the cameraman. Great. Hello. Sorry. I have to keep the camera on you. I recently heard a debate about learning on internet and universities and I understand the trends that you're describing.

One of the things that I didn't quite get and I couldn't, unfortunately, listen to you all the time. So, I'm not sure maybe you said something about it. I wonder in universities when you have seminar groups, as the cutbacks in education or as more universities have been created and understaffed,

the classes have gotten bigger. And one of the big complaints is that there isn't enough one-to-one interaction with the students. Do you have any ideas how you could apply a better way of interacting on an individual level with your students? Or do you think there's a big danger

that the trend of online universities is going to create another tier of university levels where you have the elites and then there'll be a second elite in stone universities and then the online will become something for the poor, basically?

That's a big question. Look, universities, they are struggling at the moment and I think they're struggling in the sense that do you actually get value from having a traditional university education? Now, obviously you do if you're doing things like law or medicine or architecture or something that's professional there.

But I think the problem we've got is the cutbacks of universities, funding, you might sort of find that some aren't going to survive in the next 20 years. You might see a reduction of universities and that may not be good for us either.

So we try and work alongside universities. We don't see ourselves as competitors. We also are trying to do things in a cheap way that universities aren't so rich may be able to adapt and play with us in the same area. But look, there is a danger of universities becoming too elitist and only for the few and so maybe we do need to start exploring things like peer-to-peer university

or things like the university where people can get access to different professional development. I mean it's a really dangerous time I think for education. Any more questions perhaps?

No, I don't think so. So thank you very much. Thank you Berlin.