Episode 52 Delmar Larsen
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Alan Levine: Hello and welcome to OEG Voices. This is our podcast that we produce at Open Education Global. Each episode brings you people, personalities, and ideas of open educators from around the world. And I get to be your host Alan Levine. And this week is really special because here and elsewhere, because we're in the first day of open Education Week and what I have done the last couple years is to find two sessions to record one of these podcasts where we not only record it but we offer spaces for other people to join in and listen. We have guests in the studio, which is exciting. 

But what's really special is that we're able to line up for this episode, someone I've been wanting to talk to for a long time, and we're really proud to have Delmar Larsen, the director of the LibreTexts Project, also who finds time to be a professor of chemistry at UC Davis. Some of this is in later recognition of the two OE Award for Excellence for open curation and open infrastructure that went to LibreTexts. I'm hogging the microphone here I wanna give chance to Delmar to say hello and tell us where are you sitting right now with that lighting that describing earlier in the podcast.

Delmar Larsen: First it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Alan. At least virtually here, that is. I am sitting in my office in the Chemistry Department in the University of California Davis in Davis, California. And I have lots of sun on at least one half of my face, but that's characteristic of being in a window in the Central Valley.

Alan Levine: Yeah. And I'd like to ask where'd you grow up? Where were you raised?

Delmar Larsen: Oh, that's a loaded question. And we might touch upon that a little bit. I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. I spent the first six years of my life in Anchorage, Alaska, and then I spent another five-ish years puttering around Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri a little bit. And then ultimately from about 12 years old until about 22 I was in Seattle, Washington.

Alan Levine: It's a lot of moving around. What kind of student were you? What did school mean to young Delmar?

Delmar Larsen: It depends upon how young you mean. So I actually was failing everything up until sixth grade with the exception of Science -- completely failing. I was in a special education, not that's failing but that was where they placed me for a period of time. 

And then I switched schools probably once to twice every year. So the first year that I started and ended in the same school was in Seventh Grade. And then the next year that I did that was 10th grade. And I just happened to go to one school that everything was aligned, right? And and. I was not failing anymore, and I really don't have a good reason to explain that.

And that happened around sixth grade. Mr. Hansen was his name. And I don't think that that teacher particularly liked me. It wasn't that it was, he didn't resonate with me. It was just something happened when I got there.

Alan Levine: That's fantastic. And first you went into chemistry, right?

Delmar Larsen: Yes. I've always wanted to be a chemist. The biggest issue I had was whether I wanted to be a physical chemist or a organic chemist, or a biochemist. And it became clear that I loved math and I loved physics. So I became a physical chemist. Actually, I became a biophysical chemist 

Alan Levine: For those who in the house who aren't real, understand the chemists what are the major sort of differences between physical and I already forgot the other ones. , bio

Delmar Larsen: organic

Alan Levine: Yeah, because everybody, I remember people like talking in fear of having to take Organic Chemistry.

Delmar Larsen: Yeah. Organic Chemistry is considered the gateway class. How would I describe it? Physical chemistry is, is a mixture of physics and chemistry. It, it doesn't involve synthesis so much or at all. It's more of physicists that are not afraid of chemicals, is a good way in order to describe that.

The rank and file chemists that do the synthesis, wet lab and things like that, they might not consider us to be terrible chemistry oriented. But if I go to the physics department the way I view things is very different from the way they view things. We're stuck in the middle between physics and chemistry.

Alan Levine: And let's play this out. Where did you go to university?

Delmar Larsen: My first two years I went to Edmonds Community College, which is a community college in ups, not upstate . It's north of Seattle. And then after that I transferred to the University of Washington. So I transferred in 93, graduated with my bachelor's degree with distinction in 95. And then I went to the University of Chicago where I was there for two years.

But my graduate advisor was by and large purchased by Berkeley. And so I had to move the lab from Chicago to Berkeley in my third year of graduate education. So then I completed the last three and a half years in Berkeley. Then after that, I got my PhD and I went to do a postoc in the Free University of Amsterdam for three and a half years.

That was largely cause I needed to recoup because the Berkeley experience was exceedingly destructive on my brain as it is for many people. And then after three and a half years in Amsterdam, I repatriated. Although I did it grudgingly cause Europe was great. Back to LA for a year, and that was really quite a shock.

And then from there I went to Davis. So it bounced around, not just when I was younger, but also when I was older. But that's a standard academic life.

Alan Levine: And so what is the origin? How did you end up coming up with the idea or for creating LibreTexts, what was the spinoff for that?

Delmar Larsen: I became a professor in 2005, an assistant professor. And if you're applying for national Science Foundation grants, there's the actual research that you propose, and there's a component called Broader Impacts. And Broader Impacts are meant to be efforts that better the community which is in my opinion, a good thing to have with any project that involves lots of money that's any public funded project .

Those projects I found to be oftentimes falling into several categories. Teaching inner city school students teaching a new class running a workshop or sort of thing. And I wanted something somewhat original, so I was trying to think about what I wanted to do for a while. But I couldn't really come up with something original. It just doesn't turn on like a moment. But then I taught a class my second year. It was a physical chemistry class for life sciences. And so it was predominantly students that were looking for nursing or medical professions. And I took a first edition by a very famous physical chemist, this massive textbook author.

And the book was $200, which was pretty pricey back then. It's still pricey now, but it was, you hear more more issues now than then. And it was a first edition. Just off the press. And this guy had made books for decades. I learned from several of his books, it was even his physical chemistry book.

So when I looked over, I thought it was pretty reasonable, looked good, it turned out, they had lots of issues, lots and lots of issues. And so students were having problems. They were coming to me, I was selecting them. I was getting the the issues relating to that. And I felt, okay. The students were being abused.

They were asked pay a lot for their book. And the book was just not good. Not as good as it could be. And then I called up the editor and I said, okay you called them up and said your book has issues. And they said no, it doesn't. Yes, it does. I teach from it.

I'm a subject matter expert. No, it doesn't. And this happened for five minutes, bouncing back and forth and finally they said, oh we have some, we have a list of errata . Why didn't you lead with that? Why did you make me go through this game? And I got off the phone and the first thing I said is, I can do a better job.

Now that's hubris. And little did I know what that actually entailed, but then I started thinking, okay, how would I go about doing that? At the time, Wikipedia was just starting to crank up. It exists in different forms than that, but it really started to get in academia and they had the standard Wikipedia's bad, don't use it, and all the stuff that we may remember from that time.

But the one thing that I picked up on is I have loads and loads of students. My large general chemistry class is 500 students . So if I were to motivate just 20%, 10% of those students in order to start writing and contributing to it. And I used a wiki based approach, which is the ideal technology for large scale collaborative construction efforts to do exactly what I want to do.

I can do that. So we started to do that. So I did what's now referred to as open pedagogy. In fact, we've used 5000 to 10,000 students that have contributed to the LibreTexts Project over over the last 15 years. We are celebrating our 15th year birthday this year, or not this year, this week.

But we don't typically tell very many people about the open pedagogy approach of it. We have a lot of best practices that we're gonna try to tie together in order to be able to really scale that up because we learned a lot from that. But anyways the point is It was just emerging of several different things.

Someone irritated me. I was looking for the right time. I was motivated in order to be able to do it because I had I grew up poor and I had lots of issues associated with my growth that really made me want to be progressive and change the system, break the system, whatever you wanna call it.

And it just basically all worked. 

Alan Levine: So you started obviously with Chemistry. What prompted you to go beyond Chemistry?

Delmar Larsen: Interest. Not necessarily my interest, but lots of other people who were asking me about that. So the ChemWiki was the precursor, and that's what we started. And that existed for about three years. We set up a little server in the corner of my lab. I had I've always relied on talented students students that know a lot more about things than I did because I was trained in Chemistry.

I wasn't trained in being able to set up a web server. Or to do system administration or do that other stuff. So I relied on very talented students that were willing to volunteer for that. So I was in the corner of my lab and it was running fine. And then people started to ask what about physics?

So we expanded in our third or fourth year into the other departments that are part of the division that I was in which was the division of Physical Sciences. So we had Math, Statistics, Geology. Biology was a one-off that I added into it and I'm thinking I'm missing another wiki.

But that was it. So we had the Bio Wiki, Geo Wiki, Stat Wiki, Math Wiki. It started getting very Wiki oriented in the way that we were doing things . 

Alan Levine: And did you ever envision you'd be doing what you're doing now in terms of having a much bigger platform and all of its intricate parts?

Delmar Larsen: Part of the deal of being an R1 professor is that everything has to be proposed to be big, right? So whenever we make proposals, we always lay it on really thick with lots of icing and talk about where everything was gonna go. Now whether it goes that way, it rarely does but we always have grandiose plans off of that.

So I always had plans what I used to refer to taking over the world or "world domination" was the term I used. It turned out that I offended too many people to say that I wanted world domination. Textbooks is the right path for world domination. But nonetheless, some people didn't exactly like me talking like that, so I stopped that parlance.

But I always had the dream that it was getting big, but I never really understood that meant sucking the lifeblood out of me in order to maintain the project at the level that it is is going. It's beautiful to see where it's going but it's really quite a lot of work in order to do it.

Alan Levine: Yeah, and I've seen instances where I see online where, people have had work locked up in other platforms and you've made some really heroic efforts to be able to bring them into, to the LibreVerse. Is that part of the mission too?, I always think I love, every time I see it, it's Free The Textbook and it's that's a nice little flip on the free textbook approach.

That's the philosophy there, isn't it?

Delmar Larsen: Yeah, it's always been our philosophy. The mechanisms have changed a bit. So in, in the beginning it was all open pedagogy then it started to change into people who contributed stuff. So we'd find content on the internet. We would ask the author for permission to bring them into our site.

And then we'd bring 'em in. The idea was to try to grow in that way. Just by sheer chance. And like I said I really didn't know what I was doing when I was doing these things. 

But what I was doing was perfect for search engine optimization because what we were doing is we were creating a lot of content, because the students were creating it. And it was a lot of unique content and it was constantly being updated . And that right there was what started to make Google recognize us. And then that became this partnership that I had with Google in which we benefited greatly from search engine optimization, or at least from Google searches, that we didn't try to game the system in any way whatsoever.

It just happened naturally. But then we started to change in our mechanisms. So after a few years, like the first year or two it was students driven, okay. Then we started to go out and ask people in order to get permission, in order to do something. And at that time, Creative Commons was growing a lot and it became clear to us that We don't have to ask because technically when you put a Creative Commons entry on something, you're essentially putting a free sign that's sticking outside with caveats in order to use it properly.

But you're essentially giving pre, pre permission in order to bring it in. So we start bringing them in. The key point that we do here is that the effort of bringing it into our platform is actually a fairly time intensive process. Because we bring in content from PDFs or from websites, or from LaTex source, or from Pressbooks , and it's a wide variety of things.

We bring them in and then we have to go through and digest them and bring them into a proper standard. So that whole process we call "harvesting". Which is a term that some people also don't like, but nonetheless it provides a good description of the effort that's necessary in order to be able to go through this process and , put it into place.

As OER started to grow, we started to also continue the harvesting efforts in order to grab as much OER, subject to what the O is and OER and bring it into our platform and benefit from it. That provided a very powerful approach because it was centralized, so you went to one source in order to find it.

And that right there provided the best way in order to curate the content. So this is the big issue here is that we're not a platform with the end goal is to just publish something. We're not a publishing platform where you basically say, here it is, you publish it and we're done.

We're in academia. We recognize that's the start of the issue. That's not the end game and the we need to go through curation efforts. We need to constantly update. We need to constantly curate because there everything needs to be updated and what one person thinks is the right level for the quality of a book, it could be very different from a different person who has the same book. It's a constant active thing. And because we are subject matter experts, not in every subject matter of course, but we have lots of people on our team in order to do that, we're constantly updating and curating our content.

And that right there distinguishes us from other platforms that essentially that's not their game. Their game is, here it is, you use it, give us the money, and we're done. And it's actually the hard part is the curation effort. Posting it is actually not that hard in order to be able to go through the effort off of there.

And that's the time consuming effort that really I think is is our niche. And I feel very strongly as necessary for the communities that we're able to curate, we're able to move it forward. And more importantly, and I'm gonna get off the soapbox in a second here, is that when you have things decentralized, it makes it difficult in order to progressively move better.

For example, if you have 10 copies of the same book in 10 different campuses and 10 different instructors, and one instructor improves one And then how does the next, instructor, one of the other 10, how do they know that it's improved? If it's decentralized and there's no effective infrastructure in order to facilitate revision control or communication or propagation it's essentially you have not every step forward is truly a step forward for the progress.

And this is the issue that I have with many of the approaches in OER in general, is that we are doing lots of progress, lots of updating that's not really going into the central corpus that's moving things Centralizing is one way, not the only way, but is one way in order to be able to address it. And that's the way that we go about doing so.

But that's also a painful, more painful way in order to go about doing so. 

So the upshot of all that thing is that , I bit off far more than I can chew and fortunately we had lots of other people come on board in order to be able to help us move forward. With that, cause our development team is a great development team.

The curation team that's around the development team is great. We have somewhere between 50 to a hundred undergraduate students. They're actively helping to curate, update, whether it's accessibility, other issues across the board. And that's the nice thing about running this through the university and such, so I'll stop with there.

And another saying that it's a big bite that that we've started.

Alan Levine: Oh we might tell you to stay on the soapbox, but I just love hearing this. What you describe maybe to understand all the component, not all the components, but you describe it as the LibreVerse cause it's more than a textbook. What's all in the constellation of services or abilities that you add to this content?

Delmar Larsen: , in order to answer that question, it's important to know where we came from actually where we are, not where we came from. I'm a practitioner, right? Not only do I care about the platform in order to be able to create and distribute OER. I use OER. I haven't used a commercial textbook in 10 years.

So I'm constantly updating, constantly utilizing it, which means that I have a very practitioner oriented perspective around OER. Which is oftentimes not the perspective that you get when you talk to librarians, you talk to commercial companies and things like that. They have their own perspectives that are of value of course, but nonetheless, the practitioner's perspective is the perspective that we have when we go about that. So most of the people that we have on our team are academics in one form or another, and have a great interest and have used OER in the classroom that's out there. It was clear a long time ago that the nature of the textbook was evolving.

And 15 years ago, when I started paying attention to this as a faculty member, that the nature of the textbook is evolving. The publishers knew this. They started to expand the scope of their portfolio. So instead of saying, here's a physical book that they would go through, they started recognizing that the digital revolution that existed is changing the way that they were gonna be distributing content. And they also recognized that they needed to diversify into value added components around their textbook, where homework is one of the principle components behind that. But there are other components that they want to be able to bring in.

So oftentimes those companies would purchase other companies or they would actually start up new initiatives in order to be able to build that. And then when you actually go to the big three or the big four textbook companies and you ask what they actually provide, they come out with this portfolio of things . 

Here's ancillary materials, here's the homework system. Here is a question bank. Here's the textbook. Here are interfaces to clicker base systems and a handful of other things, and they start to add other value added components . Soon there's gonna be AI and there's gonna be other things that are gonna be connected to it. And if you want to compete with commercial publisher, which is essentially what textbook OER is involved in it, you need to be able to have that same portfolio out there.

The issue is, , that's a lot of effort in order to build a portfolio like that and a portfolio that's good. I should be clear that's able to handle the practitioner's needs. And so we knew that we wanted to build this for a long time to go beyond just a conventional textbook that's out there.

But like I said, I'm not a tech person, so it took me a while in order to be able to figure out what's the way in order to go about doing things. We went through multiple dead ends. Lots of technologies that didn't work. We try to partner with individuals that were only looking at making money off of students, and that's a big no-no for us.

Not that you don't need sustainability, but we don't want to view our students as a market in order to make a profit off of. And the same thing applies to faculty, to be honest. As far as I'm concerned. We just slowly grew it and started to play around with different technologies and started to identify what was going on.

But the game changer was really five years ago when we got this $5 million investment from the US Department of Education. . And that gave us a lot of freedom. And if you look at that proposal that we put together we had five thrusts and one thrust dealt with technology and it had the homework system.

They had this and they had that, and lots of things like that. And the Department of Education gave us a lot of freedom, especially after Covid really kicked up because that really scrambled a lot of people's plans and goals in order to be able to pursue what we were doing. And we started to expand and pursue things that I'm very pleased to present on and discuss . And just last week we announced another 4 million investment from the State of California in order to expand the homework system that we are building, partially with the US Department of Education money, and partially with the state of California at this ADAPT Homework system and really scale it up massively.

We're very excited about where that's gonna be going. And then I think what was may have been announced earlier today, but certainly will be discussed in a few days, is that we're working with the technical colleges in Wisconsin for expanding ADAPT for nursing with the new protocols that are changing for the the nursing assessment infrastructure.

Then we had new people that came in that knew a lot more about technology than I did. And just basically really improved what we were doing across the board. I'm very excited about what the LibreVerse is and where it's going. And it's recognizing that you need a holistic perspective in order to be able to address what the practitioner needs.

And again, we are lucky in that we are practitioners, so we short circuit that design step in terms of what a practitioner needs and what we do, because we already know what we need to do it. Plus I also get beta test it in my class, much to the displeasure of some of my students .

Alan Levine: It's refreshing to hear that, that this is coming from your practice. It's not coming from trying to do something, financially or just to generate a product. Can you tell us more about ADAPT that was the new grant is funding and excited to see that you're working with the Open RN people because I'm really impressed with the work that they do.

What does, what exactly does ADAPT do?

Delmar Larsen: So we knew that we needed to have a homework system to accompany our textbooks. Like I said, we knew that for a long time ago. We had proposed in the US Department of Education grant, this open textbook pilot grant, to build the homework system. And we proposed to base it off of made, which is a open source technology that originated the University of Rochester made by a man name of Mike Gage who put it together and has now expanded to lots of people.

And we started to pursue that and we started to look and identify that, that there were merits on a range of different technologies out there and limitations on each of the technologies. Fast forward a couple days not a couple days, a couple years. And then we we ran for an RFP that was released by the State of California for building a homework system that, or at least the way we interpreted it, build a system up or platform in order to address equity gaps in the state.

And we decide that we want to propose an infrastructure based around adaptive learning that had culturally responsive pedagogy integrated into it that was able to address the needs of the textbook . This was a $1 million grant. 

Typically you would need more money in order to be able to do this sort of thing but we were fortunate that we had significant start already done from the US Department of Education in order to push that forward. And I had some nice talent on my team. We built an infrastructure that we called ADAPT because it has, I would say simple adaptive learning capabilities.

It doesn't have a black box engine. It has a, what I refer to as a choose your own adventure story which is a decision tree approach that students get to take agency in order to guide their education, which I like a lot more than spoonfeeding from a black box. 

The intent is that instead of giving individual questions, students get a question. If they get wrong, they can go into a a remediation tree in order to help guide them in terms of understanding what's necessary, what are the skills that they need in order to be successful with that question, and then they can decide which of the branches they want to go down. It helps to build metacognition, it helps to build self-efficacy. It builds agency that I like students to be involved in their education instead of just being again, spoonfed. 

That has expanded a bit, but that's the basic essence behind what ADAPT was meant to do. The issue that we had was what technology do we want to do for the assessment infrastructure? Do we want to build our own technology behind it?

And our opinion was that was a silly idea. That there were already good technologies out there that we can capitalize on. So WebWork was one of them. IMathAS, which is the technology underlying MyOpenMath that David Lipman put together at Pierce College in in Washington State, is a beautiful alternative.

H5P had good capabilities. And then we wanted to pursue QTI. So question and test interoperability, which is the protocol used for learning management. And build our own technology above that. So the intent was to make it so that all these technologies can play underneath the ADAPT tent, and that instructors can come in and select what questions they want and not have to care about what the technology is that actually implements it.

If they want to build a question, they build a question in the technology that best suits what they want. And that could be H5P if you're less familiar with coding or if you're comfortable with coding in PHP or in perl you'll go to IMathAS or WebWork, respectively. And that's the basic essence of that.

But we've been expanding the scope in order to be able to be as powerful as we want it to be, integrate to learning management systems. We'll be releasing a phone app soon which is something I've been wanting for a long time because I want to be able to make it so it can use it for in-class clicker activities.

But it also gives the ability to capitalize on the phone's camera so we can actually take pictures and upload it directly to adapt off of that. The new influx of funds will be used in order to expand mostly in STEM although the non-STEM fields come along for the ride.

In chemistry we're gonna start building in new technologies for being able to create molecules and submit molecules. We have a virtual dissection technology that we're gonna be implementing for anatomy and biology related topics. 

Building some more capabilities for math using GeoGebra and other things. So it's gonna be a real everything underneath the tent. But we're fortunate that we have the talent, we have the technology, and now we have the support in order to be able to do this thing . And it's free for every student and every faculty in the state of California.

Any faculty member can access the database in order to be able to take that. But as a sustainability model if they're outside the state of California, then we want it's $2 or $3 per month in order to be able to maintain it because it's a lot of servers and things in order to be able to maintain.

Alan Levine: So if people outside of California are interested, they can get into ADAPT then?

Delmar Larsen: Oh, definitely. And we let them run 'em for free. It's not that big of a deal, it's just that we do need to have some sustainability model in order to maintain the infrastructure that we put in place. Every, everybody needs a sustainability model .

Alan Levine: I was very intrigued when you shared last year or earlier, all the translations that, that you're doing especially for the Ukraine situation-, has that been advancing? Where do you see the translation capabilities going?

Delmar Larsen: Yeah, that's really cool stuff. I like it . I really like it. . I knew five years ago or at least I wanted five years ago in order to take what we've been doing in America and scale it up globally. What I mean, we, LibreTexts specifically. Now that being said, 50% of our traffic is outside of the US.

Mostly with countries that have English as the official language or the lingua franca. So typically former Commonwealth countries and such. India is the second largest country that we have in terms of traffic. But we obviously recognize that there are lots of students in the world that don't speak English and that English may not be the most productive mechanism for that.

So we set up a library dedicated specifically to another language about five years ago, four years ago the Español library. Now I don't speak Spanish or at least I poorly speak Spanish. So it's not entirely the best for me. But fortunately I had other people who were coming in. At the time we were doing human translations.

So we took the OpenStax chemistry book and we went through and we translated it. And we use students cause there's a good return on investment. I've always used students for this. And then we can go through secondary steps in order to update that. So we translated the OpenStax chemistry book into Spanish.

I think now that they also did the same thing but it was a slow process. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of money in order to be able to do this. And to scale this up to 500,000 pages that we currently have on our corpus would just be , unbelievably expensive.

And that's just for one language. But trying to scale it for multiple languages is just basically outrageous. However, last year, two AI-based machine translation algorithms have gotten pretty good. Are they perfect? No, they are not. But they are pretty good. And the argument that we had here is it better to have a hundred thousand pages in a new language that's 95% good versus 20 pages that are perfect in that language. 

And the answer by far is it's much better to have many more pages that are able to help that students can actually get through a little bit of the clunkiness in order to be able to advance that. We've been eyeing machine translation for a while. But the Ukraine situation provided us with an opportunity, although it was, obviously a very bad situation over there in order to couple with Amazon. So Amazon had a machine translation infrastructure and then coupled with MindTouch or NICE CXOne, the company that actually hosts our central libraries in order to be able to make a new library that was completely machine translated. And we did that in Ukrainian.

Again, Amazon was the one that comped it. CXOne was the one that hosted it. And then we generated and we had extra credits, and then we said we had extra credits. Let's just do Spanish while we wereat it. . So we did Spanish while we were there. And then we did 15 or 20 books in six other languages, Swahili, Chinese Hindi Arabic.

And the idea behind this well, , but it's not necessarily that this is the end product. It's not the end product. The point is that this is the beginning product because we're doing, we were operating on with wikis. Wikis are the best technology for large scale collaborative construction efforts.

So now we've built an infrastructure so that we have the starting point, and now instead of trying to convince a faculty member or subject matter expert in another country, that is comfortable, obviously with their own language in order to start and translate from scratch. They can then go into a page that already preexist and start to do the editing in order to be able to improve that .

And that is a much lower bar. So that means that we're able to take this approach and scale this up to actually get our corpus of content distributed broadly across the world. But this requires us to build an infrastructure in order to be able to to recruit faculty or students and other languages in order to update that.

We have started that. But we haven't really started to scale it up in part because our money sources are not dedicated toward those sort of things. The US Department of Education, the State of California, their constituencies are in the state, in, in the US. So we're looking for some sort of support in order to be able to to push that so we can actually really scale it up.

Otherwise, it's gonna be slowly moving forward. The first five years of our existence, we had no money at all. So we're comfortable in order to run projects that have no no significant Investment of funds in order to be able to do it because it just comes in naturally off of here. But we can scale things up massively if we have the right partners in order to be able to do that.

And we're already starting to talk about that in terms of Africa with the French and the Portuguese countries in Africa and start to really being able to move this forward. I will mention that as soon as we did that update for the Espanol library, our traffic increased fourfold basically over that month .

So there was a need for that. And we have a great excitement in order to be able to scale it up.

Alan Levine: Not quite the server in the one room now. 

Delmar Larsen: Oh, it's definitely not the server in the one room. So everything's in the cloud with Amazon or Digital Ocean and such.

Alan Levine: This is exciting. I would ask questions for a long time. I really, I wanna thank you for being here. We have like guests in the studio. I don't know if anybody wants to ask a question of Delmar if you do just let us know through chat or unmute. We wanted to make this interactive.

I I was kinda thinking the way you talked about your interaction with the first publisher. What do you hear from publishers? 

Delmar Larsen: They do not talk to me.

Alan Levine: They don't talk to you?

Delmar Larsen: I had a Cengage rep come, come by seven years ago, the last time he came to my office. And he wanted to give me the pitch and I asked him, does he know who he's talking to? So I sat him down, explained it. He left, and I never heard back from him again.

So publishers don't talk to me anymore.

Alan Levine: I think let's see Shira Segel, who's here from MIT she wants to ask, and you can ask the question too if you want, Shira.

Shira Segal: This is really rich. Thank you so much, Delmar. I'm so excited about all of these projects. Would you mind just telling us a little bit more about your collaborations with graduate students and their role and importance in the work that you're doing?

Delmar Larsen: I use a lot of undergraduate.s And for multiple reasons. One is that they give a great return on investment. It's also great pedagogy, so it helps to satisfy my educational mission. But the last thing is it provides me an opportunity to fire them if they don't do their work.

Graduate students have a lot more protections. So my experience with graduate students have been lukewarm in various ways because in terms of looking at the final outcome from that. So the way that I've used graduate students in the past, and I think I've had seven or eight graduate student quarters since I started is that they had to be able to fill a certain niche that I wasn't able to address myself. So something that was better than what an undergraduate student can do. But that I wasn't able to address in one way or the other. So most recently I had two graduating graduate students, so students that were right on the edge of getting their PhD.

Actually, lemme rephrase that one student for two quarters, that was right around the edge of getting his PhD, who was an organic chemist. So like I mentioned before, I'm a physical chemist, so organic chemistry is not my forte. And we were building an organic chemistry book that was based off of McMurry.

This was before the McMurry book became OER which is still not released. But once we get it, we'll start to release it within our portfolio, so we'll have a different flavor of McMurry's book what we call a text map that follows the organization of McMurry's book. But we needed questions to add into ADAPT.

So I used that student in order to create questions. So you create about 500 to a thousand plus questions, I think that was put into ADAPT that we still haven't released. Although individuals who are on ADAPT can come in and take a look at that, if you have an instructor account, it's not public.

Most of the questions are in depth. I've used graduate students. One I was actually particularly interested in last I think it was last Fall that had training in tutoring for standardized tests. And maybe the need for this is changing a little bit because standardized tests are coming out of or more passe, but the interest that I had was was more of a diversity issue that one could make serious arguments, and they were made out there that students that are from marginalized backgrounds, don't do as well on standardized tests as students that come from non marginalized backgrounds.

And there are multiple reasons for that. , I wanted to see if we could take our infrastructure and make it so that we can provide some education for students that are from marginalized backgrounds. So basically create a course for how to do well in the SAT or the ACT or the GRE or whatever else that would be freely available to predominantly marginalized students, but, be available to everybody that would be then supplemented with ADAPT and goes through the infrastructure cause it basically follows exactly in line. 

I still have a great interest in doing that. But we didn't continue it for a variety of reasons that's out there. But a graduate student who had the experience of tutoring in students for those things was the one that actually was put in those together.

And I still very much believe in that topic. I think that might be one mechanism in order to try to address inequalities associated with standardizations. Just standardized exams have started to fall out of of things. I could be wrong. I don't know. if SATs are still being used around there. 

Those are two examples of how I use graduate students. Typically graduate students that come in with some specific expertise that I don't have access to are the best graduate students in order to be able to use. Otherwise undergraduate students provide a much greater return on investment and provides me the opportunity that if they if they fail to work I can [avoid] the financial hemorrhaging that's associated with that. 

The same issue also happens with post-docs and things like that. So if your post-docs are very clearly delineated for a specific topic, then it actually works quite well.

It's just the protections are very intentionally by what protections are meant for, make it difficult in order to be able to address them. And in the issue that I can't do conveniently with undergraduate students. 

Alan Levine: What are your interests outside of work and teaching, what keeps you busy?

Delmar Larsen: Actually only, it's only LibreTexts , 

Alan Levine: Come on. I know you, you have a dog... 

Delmar Larsen: I have one dumb dog and two apathetic cats. Yeah. 

Alan Levine: I saw that on your Twitter bio. .

Delmar Larsen: She's a she's just dumb dog . that, that's just a joke in the house. actually my wife tells call her that.

I don't think I have much of a life right now. Pandemic really destroyed, all that, and it's taking a while in order to get forward. Right now most of most of what I dream is dreaming of LibreTexts much of the displeasure of my family.

And except for my dog, who doesn't really seem to care too much. 

Alan Levine: Maybe the dog is not so dumb, but we'll stop that. 

Delmar Larsen: Yeah. 

Alan Levine: Marcela, do you wanna ask .... I want to highlight just a couple of things. I wanted to give a shout to Jennifer for the wonderful submissions that she shared with us. We have 23 submissions from LibreTexts. And she did a wonderful job.

Marcela Morales: So it's it's quite a bundle. So we're super excited that we are able to highlight those in Open Education Week and share with the community during this week, particularly since this year is the 15th year anniversary and we are so excited about that. And I just wanted to say congratulations. I've been a big fan of LibreTexts for a really long time, and it's just amazing to see how long it has come, how far it has come now.

. So happy anniversary. And the question is in also as Shira was saying, what's next for Lex? What is the one thing that you would like to see in the next 15 years for LibreTexts to have the one thing that you would say? Yeah. Hopefully in the next 15 years, that's something we are gonna be able to offer. 

Delmar Larsen: The dream we had. So one of the reasons that I was because of affordable education. And that was largely K-12 education, also obviously included post-secondary at College up in I think in order have a systemic effect on the need to address things in the K-12 space.. I'm not very comfortable in the K-12 space. and there's lots of really beautiful efforts in terms of OER and K-12, but K-12 OER is encumbered by lots of politics and lots of issues that I'm still relatively new.

I very much would like to scale ADAPT in order to handle [ garbled] at the and for campuses that don't have the money in order to be able to purchase the books or update the books or to capitalize on the technology that we have that's out there, whether they're marginalized or not marginalized, great interest in order to be able to pursue that.

My issue is I need to learn more about that. And I need to to get some support in order to be able to pursue that And we're already starting to look at that via several partners that we've established that we're hoping will actually cultivate into something that'll be significant by many parts of the LibreVerse especially this what we call Project Solo, which is a standalone learning management system.... in H5P and a few other that my team has been putting together. so that's where I'd like to be able to go. 

Then I'll go back to what I people don't like me saying as world domination. So there's still a lot of global need for OER out there. There's a lot of OER in English, but there's less in many of the other languages, and there's a need in order to be able to address that. Not entirely clear from. Direction where I'm gonna be able to get the support in order able to do that cause it's gonna be more foundation I think from from that's out there. And since we don't we don't gouge for access to the LibreVerse and things like that we're gonna rely on the sustainability model in order to do a significant bulk. 

Those are my dreams. Yeah. 

Alan Levine: And again, I wanna thank you Delmar, also Shira, and Allison. And I forgot my colleague, Marcella and Jennifer, in on this conversation. 

So I wanna thank you for that's, I'm talking to you as the audience who's listening to this when I edit, for listening to this episode of OEG Voices, the podcasts that we produce here at Open Education Global. so each episode I pick different musical intro track from the Free Music Archive.

Because of Delmar's interest in chemistry, I found one called "it's Okay, We Have Chemistry" by an artist named Dr. Wylie and it's licensed under Creative Commons Non-commercial Share-Alike 

And you'll find this episode at our site, and you can follow up and engage in conversations with Delmar in OEG Connect, where I have seen him before and elsewhere on the internet. And again, we just appreciate you so much for spending the time with us Delmar.