 Hello and welcome to our presentation facilitating and engaging regional open education conference online, OpenCon Cleveland. My name is Melanie Gagic and I will be joined by my fellow OpenCon Cleveland committee members Mandy Goodset, Ben Richards and Marsha Miles. Next slide please. I would like to begin by briefly reviewing OpenCon Cleveland. The regional conference began in 2018 as a face-to-face event at Cleveland State University. However, due to the pandemic, we shifted to a virtual format for the 2021 and 2022 conference. The virtual conference included asynchronous discussion opportunities for participants through the use of Slack and pre-recorded videos. We also offered live events such as Q&As and Keynotes. Ben will be going over this in more detail later in the presentation. As you can see from the chart on this slide, shifting to a virtual format did not disrupt attendance and in fact our attendance increased and nearly doubled in 2021 and 2022. Next slide. We believe that the essential component to the success was the diversity of our OpenCon committee. The group includes faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and administrators. This provides for opportunities for a variety of expertise, multiple points of view, and of course a reduced workload. Next slide. As you can see in the list of our current committee members, we have a group from our institution as well as from other universities and colleges with a variety of positions, again making us a very diverse group. So now I'd like to turn it over to Ben Richards. We got very lucky in 2020. The conference was held in late February and our university did not close due to COVID until mid-March and that gave us over a year to experience online conferences and online professional development as we were planning a virtual event for 2021. When we were thinking about what we liked and what we didn't like about other online conferences that we had all attended, some of the things we really wanted to make sure we included were facilitating real conversations between people, both attendees and presenters, giving attendees an opportunity to share their experiences and their expertise and really feel like they were contributing to the conference. And we also missed the, just sort of the fun and social and novel component of going to a conference and meeting people and just getting to socialize. So the model that we ended up adopting was, as Melanie said, some asynchronous content and discussion as well as some synchronous content and discussion. So both years we have had prerecorded lightning talks that are hosted on YouTube, sort of linked to from Slack, and that is where the asynchronous conversation happens. And then we do still have more live sort of spontaneous discussion and speakers that are offered over Zoom. If you haven't used Slack before, it's a message platform. It's targeted towards teams and it's built with sort of an enterprise solution, but it's built around channels and discussion threads. So as you can see, we had channels for each lightning talk and live event that would take place. And throughout either the days leading up to OpenCon 21 or the four days leading up to OpenCon 2022, conversation would take place about the lightning topics on Slack, and then we would still have live events offered. But because we weren't tied to just having in-person events, we also had social channels and networking channels where attendees were able to share ideas they had or ask questions, trying to gather feedback from other attendees. And the social channels were a way to really drive engagement with our conference kind of build a sense of community. And we offered small incentives to give incentives basically to participate in those channels. There are some, I wouldn't call them drawbacks, but limitations of any kind of online platform. We found that it was important to provide some sort of orientation materials to help people learn and get around Slack, especially if they hadn't used to before. Previously, the free tier of Slack which we used would archive up to 10,000 messages, which is a lot for a relatively small conference. We didn't meet anywhere near that cap. However, recently they've changed that to only archiving messages for 90 days. So the Slack sites are not a permanent resource anymore for attendees. We can't go back and view all of those conversations. There are various other tools like Slack, and some of them are open source. So if you had an IT person who could support that, it would be a cheap way to get some more flexibility and notably Discord, which does have a free tier, does not have the same message history limitations. So many of you may have noticed that lots of open education regional conferences, summits and events have cropped up that are fully online and available to everyone. So this raises the question, what makes these events regional anymore, if anything? It's wonderful to have access to all of this professional development and open education. But there's also value in building local communities around these topics, which can be a little difficult in a fully online event available to everyone in the world. So while we have definitely experienced benefits since moving our event online, we really wanted to retain some of that regional flair if we could with OpenCon Cleveland. So one way we did this was by specifically reaching out to folks in Ohio to invite them to participate as presenters in our event. We're so fortunate in Ohio to have the wonderful Anna Bendo coordinating open ed and affordability efforts at Ohio Link, which is our state, our state's academic library consortium. And so this past year, Ohio Link offered their first OER course redesign mini grant program to encourage faculty from across the state to adopt affordable and open materials. Anna and I worked together on this project, so it made perfect sense to invite faculty participants from this program to present a panel at OpenCon, and we actually reserved a spot for them from the beginning of our planning for this event. So it was such a treat to have faculty from Ohio featured in our event doing this important work. If you have state-level work happening around textbook affordability, consider specifically inviting them to participate in your regional event. Another thing we did this past year was specifically invite open education champions from other Ohio institutions to join our planning committee, and these folks brought wonderful perspectives about the planning process, and their help was invaluable. Because it's so easy to meet and plan virtually now, it was really not difficult at all to bring them on board and incorporate them into our planning. So if you're offering a similar open education regional event, consider how you can make the event meaningful for your region while also inviting attendees across the world to enjoy your wonderful content. I'll turn it over now to Marcia to talk about the accessibility of our event. Accessibility is an important aspect of a conference. Presenters were required to caption their recordings, and for this, we provided an extensive presenter guide, which we will share at the end of this presentation. The guide explains how to use YouTube to auto-generate the captions. As you probably know, those auto-generated captions are not perfect, so instructions on how to correct them were also included, and presenters were encouraged to do so. Additional support for presenters was also offered from the planning committee members. Next slide, please. For the live portions of the conference, we enabled live transcripts, which is a feature of Zoom. The feature has improved over the past few years, since we started using it. It's now called captions. Our conference was open to diverse participation by sharing invitations to attend and present across a wide geographic area. As mentioned before, we also had a variety of asynchronous and synchronous components, activities and presentations. Feedback indicated an appreciation for the online asynchronous events, even among local participants. Next slide, please. We're looking forward to your questions, but also feel free to reach out to any of the presenters later on, if you would like to do so. Next slide. And as promised, we've included some resources and links for you. Thank you.