 Good morning or good afternoon depending on where you are located. Welcome to our second webinar of spring 2017 on marketing OER degrees to students. We are thrilled to have you join us here today. Today we are going to talk about some of the great speakers who are going to share their colleges. We have Lida Kaiser from community college, Mark Haskins from pierce college district at the JBLM. And we also have Preston Davis from northern Virginia community college and James Haskins. Let's get started. We are going to talk a little bit about CCC OER as we always do. Please use the chat window during the webinar. We will have some time for open Q&A at the end. But during the other time use the chat window which is on the left-hand side of the screen to see your name in the long list of participants there. We have a couple of special events we want to mention as well that are coming up in the next month. So first I'm going to just give a moment here to Lida and Mark just to give you a little flavor of what they do in their day job. Lida is the director of the office of transition programs. She is also the title 10 coordinator at Lord Fairfax community college. Lida would you like to say hello to folks and maybe mention some of the work that you've been doing on knowledge to work or some of the other opportunities that you have? Sure. I am an administrator in two areas of the office of transition programs. I'm also the director for the knowledge to work which is our competency-based program that uses OERs. I also help coordinate our portion of the consortium grant from achieving the dream for OER degree grants in Virginia. There are six colleges. We're just one of them that does that. So I do a lot of work directly with faculty to help them to look at competencies and to help them look at open education resources and help to encourage them to use those. And I also teach and when I teach I always use OERs. Wonderful Lida. So Lida has a lot of hats and we're really thrilled to have her here this morning. And secondly I'd like to introduce Mark and I'm going to talk a little bit about JBLM. Mark, tell us a little bit about yourself and the unique institution that you work at. Okay, great. Good morning and afternoon. I'm Mark from Pierce College at joint baseless McCord. I just joined Pierce College about two and a half years ago and when I joined I was a member of an extension site of Pierce College District and it represents about 10% of the college population and we're a contract program so we're not part of the state FTE and that gives us a little bit of flexibility because we have our own set of instructors and our own administration and when I first showed up my boss, the president of Pierce College Fort Stillcom, Denise Yocum, said I want to launch a completely open educational resource degree at Pierce College at joint baseless McCord because I know you guys can do it. She gave us a target date of launching by having the complete degree online by fall of 2016 but we were actually able to beat that by quite a large margin and we launched the complete OER degree in the fall of 2015 both online and face-to-face. Wonderful, Mark. Well thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that and we're going to get a very unique perspective I think from Mark because of the fact that they are a separate we run college at the joint base Lewis McCord Air Force Base so thank you for that. Sure. So I want to give our little commercial on what the community college consortium for OER is. We were founded 10 years ago this year and our mission really remains the same. We work with community colleges around the country and actually in North America to expand awareness and access to high quality open educational resources. Our webinars are part of the work that we do with faculty and other staff and administrators at colleges to help them find resources and hear about promising open educational practices and at the heart of our work is improving student success and completion. And I want to mention that we are in 21 states and provinces. Last month we welcomed Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, Lansing Community College in Michigan and Coastline College in California. And in February we are welcoming another community college in California, Ventura County Community College District, Ivy Tech in Indiana, Lakeland Community College in Ohio and Pierce College in Washington State. So welcome to all our new members. If you are curious and would like to see the rest of our members please go to our website and you can click under about us and see all of those folks. We make these webinars available to everyone but we do appreciate our members who help sustain our work. Now I want to mention open education week. It's coming up the end of March. It's an opportunity for you to create awareness on your campus around open education. And I know a lot of California colleges are in the process of doing this right now. I know a lot of colleges in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, Washington State, or Oregon. I'm sure the rest of you on here chime in. Maryland are trying to create awareness. This is an opportunity for you to provide either workshops on campus on your own or organize them around an event that's happening online. We have promotional material that you can download from the open education week website. We will advertise any kind of webinars or local events that you want to share with our members. And we have two webinars ourselves on March 28th and 29th. So please go to the open education week site and find out a way to use that at your college to promote open education. So now I want to get to the heart of our webinar today and that is marketing OER programs to students and in particular degree and certificate programs. So the big question is if you build it, will they come? And for many of these programs, we're really targeting the neediest students, the students that are working full time and trying to attend school at the same time and complete their degrees. They're often not on campus a lot. They may be taking some online classes. They may not be getting into all of the locations where your more traditional students are hanging out in different locations on campus. So you have to be more discerning about how you reach out to those folks so that we can get those students involved in these programs and enroll that they can have the benefit of the reduced cost and also the enhanced quality of education. And so I'm going to turn this over to our first speaker to tell you about what they're doing at Lord Fairfax Community College to reach out to those students. Lighter? Okay, thank you very much, Bina. As I introduced myself, I am the director at the Office of Transition Program, but I spent several years as the marketing coordinator for the college. So this is something that I have experienced within other areas, not just in OER. And what we've been doing, I realize, is a little bit different maybe from what some other people are doing in their colleges, but I still think that you can maybe get some good information out of it. Here's just a little map of Virginia so that all of you geographically inclined people can get a vision of where I'm sitting at the moment. It's where that number nine is. We're a mid-sized public institution. We're part of a huge system of community colleges. In Virginia, there's 23 community colleges here. We have seven counties in what independent city. We're considered in the iPad's database, mostly rural and suburban. And then we have about 9,500 unduplicated credit students with more than 12,000 students in our various non-credit programs. We do have two campuses and two centers. One of our center is located in very lovely and very, very rural page, County Virginia. There is not public transportation throughout our service region. There is some transportation in the city of Winchester and small parts of Frederick County, Virginia, but that's about it. A big disclaimer. So I don't have the magic formula for how you're going to get students to jump all over your OER classes and programs. Everybody makes their own call. Everybody knows their own population. I mean, that's what it means to be a community college, right? You know your own population. We do have some unique components to our OER efforts, as I said before. First of all, let's start out that in Virginia, the chancellor of the Virginia Community College system raised concerns about three years ago saying textbooks cost too much money. And I want you guys to do something about this. And so the chancellor of the Virginia Community College system that involves an increase in the courses that use OERs and reduce cost resources into the chancellor that means $40 or less. So all of our presidents are evaluated on whether they're promoting this. That probably gives us a little bit of an edge when we have a president who's getting students to use OER programs that use OERs. We started out with OERs as an individual initiative with instructors who either didn't like the choices available to them or were themselves concerned about the cost of textbooks for their community college students. In 2014, we received a DOL tax grant to start our knowledge to work on a program that uses OER resources and is involved six of our degree in certificate programs, very much workplace related programs. We have a website called higher ed.org that's a repository for free or reduced cost learning resources that are tied to competencies in many areas. It focuses a lot on those six areas of information management. It serves as technology and information technology and health information management. But it also includes many, many other areas. I go to it to find things for U.S. history. You all know Kerry who has participated for you all for several years now and that's part of her job is she helps to locate, get access, curate all of the information. In July 2015, the VCCS announced that they had 16 institutions to be part of the Z23 project which is a Hewlett Foundation program to create what they call Z-Degrees, the entire degree program using OERs. You will hear from Preston about that in a little bit. I have included on the slide the link if you want to go and take a look at all of the resources. I will tell you that the work from that Hewlett Foundation program has benefited everybody. We have all sorts of resources that are available to us and it has really helped to propel the use of OERs. And then in 2016, we became part of six institutions to get and achieving the dream OER degree initiative grant that includes OER college, mountain empire, you will hear from Preston again and Tidewater community college. Why does all that matter? Like every other institution, we are marketing OER in a combination with a bunch of efforts and on several different levels. It's not the sole focus of our college's marketing effort and we only have so much to do in the next six years. What we have learned is that OER marketing involves education about OER plus marketing your courses and your programs. To us, this involves four groups, faculty and staff, current students, potential students, and then like every community college does, community people and the staff are very important because they have to be able to explain OER to students and answer questions that students might have. They have to know what it is, how to identify the courses that use it, and what that means for these students. We need to encourage faculty to join the effort and this type of marketing we found is best done through internal college channels. So talking about it in meetings, emails from the president and dean, recognition for people who are doing OER work, whatever that might look like, it could be a variety of things. We focused on the opportunity we've had through grant programs for stipends for travel to conferences because a lot of our faculty have almost no opportunity for travel. Professional development and that is something that is available to us through other VCCS schools as well, and then that ability to benefit students so that you have students that are prepared because they don't have to worry about whether or not they can afford the textbook. And the other piece of staff that's not up here is obvious and that's librarians and individuals whose job it is to help faculty identify these resources. It's very beneficial to us to have Curie on our staff to help faculty find things. A lot of our faculty who started in this work just did it on their own, but between having our own digital librarian as well as the VCCS information available that really has helped our faculty and staff. I will say the elephant in the room here and this is not to be negative about faculty, but promoting these things can cause problems with some faculty. Many are resistant to change. Many see it as a challenge to their academic freedom. Who are you to tell me I can't use the book I want? Sometimes they see it as a threat if they have their own publishing effort, do they work with textbook companies, and some are worried their classes will lose enrollment if all the students run and sign up for the OER classes. I just bring that up because you have to be aware of it if you can plan for responses to those issues. As you start marketing I think you are in a better place with it. For current students, first of all they have to know there is this option available to them. Now we have an indicator in our student information system that tells them that, and you have to sometimes teach students to look for it. They also need to understand that a lot of the OERs that are used can also be made available in a print format. In that interest of universal design, sometimes there are people who need that paper. We want to make sure that they know that that is a possibility too so they don't avoid the OER because there is somebody who needs that written piece of paper in a book. Then showing them the savings, having a cost calculator or something that shows them how much they won't be spending is helpful. For current students, you probably have a bunch of available resources. In our campus we have plasma screens that rotate information. We can send texts and emails. We have electronic signs and putting them on your website. All those are places to put that information. Yes, we know not everybody looks at them, but that's why you need to go across several platforms. I think around registration time if you include information on OER courses in your Twitter post, Facebook post, press releases are good. A lot of us, I think, will be doing that at the end of this month for Open Education Week. We are certainly planning to do that here. Basically, repeat the same information. For us, it is look for that SIS designation. That is also something that we have to explain for those traditional classes as well as our CBE. We just constantly tell students, hey, guess what? You're not going to have to buy a $300 textbook for this class. For potential students, OER is kind of similar to how all community colleges market themselves, which is, you know, we're the affordable way for you to get post secondary education. Once again, including cost calculators on the website can help to have orientation and advising information if your students are required to go through that that basically shows them how to identify these classes. But for potential students, you're looking at outward facing platforms. Advertising and press coverage are important. If you haven't part of your website that's targeted to parents or emailed or mailed information that's targeted to parents, include this. They're really going to care about it. I have a question on my next one. We have not done this, but if any of you all have specific programs that are all OER, if you have acceptance letters, it might be a good place to put this information. And that's something that I'm kind of trying to figure out how we can include that here at Lord Fairfax. And then having information sessions that are specific to pathways that include a lot of OERs or our total OER degree programs are important. And that's something that Linda Williams at Tidewater Community Colleges has managed very well and really increased the enrollment in OER classes by doing those sessions. Then finally, those community and stakeholders. Employers really love this OER stuff. So let's say you have an employer you work with and maybe they even have a contract rate for their employees to attend your college or something. But this is the kind of thing you share with them. And they'll be very excited that their employee can take a class or even get some sort of a certificate or a degree and have minimal cost for textbooks. Once again, you're using outward facing platforms, press advertising, whatever your traditional ways are. Digital media is good. But really, I really believe old fashioned word of mouth is just the best way to do this. You talk and tell everybody as much as you can. This is that old talk to the civic groups, things like that to provide that information so people know about it. Because if people know about it, they'll ask about it and look for it. And that's the key to getting them enrolled in these classes. What really works? Well, you know, see, I wish I knew that. But it just isn't a single answer. But like everything else with marketing, the key to this is educating everybody who's going to work with students and then educating the students themselves. Once again, Tidewater Community College has some great examples of what they've done. And we'll hear from the other folks that are on about some specific experiences they've had. But the success has been through that information being out there. So, when you're talking about marketing, what's your goal? Is your goal more students? Is your goal to get more of your courses listed and operating under an OER format? What are your desired outcomes? And that's what you want to market for. And it can look very different when you're marketing to try to get more faculty to participate. And when you're just trying to market to get more students in the door signing up for these classes. So this presentation was intended to just kind of be a starting point for what everybody is going to discuss today. And I'm happy to answer questions as we move forward. I'm happy to wait till everybody else has done theirs. And after we hear from everyone else's success and what's worked well for them. Thank you for your attention. And I left you with a picture of a hedgehog because, you know, it's Wednesday. And so we all need something to make us smile. Thank you so much, Lina. You really covered an enormous amount of ground about how to do the outreach. And we did have a few questions in the chat window. I'll just repeat those to you if that's okay. This one is from James in California. He asked, you mentioned teaching students to look for the OER indicator in the schedule. What are some ways that you do that? There are two ways. First of all, our course catalog. You can go in and you look at a class. And it has a little thing about the textbook for that class. You click on it. And it will either take you to the bookstore telling you what you're looking for. And it will either take you to the bookstore telling you what the book is and how much it is. Or it takes you to a page that says this class uses a digital resource. Or this class uses a resource that is both digital and in print. Or it tells you that. Now, that means that the faculty has to make it clear. And the people in the administrative assistant in my dean's office have to make sure that that link is right. And I always go in and check it to make sure it's right. So there's that way. The second way is, and I think there's a slide that I saw that's going to be coming up that somebody had that actually shows what the little SIS notations are. And it just says that this is a free or reduced cost course. And tied where they have it, the course number actually has a Z attached to it. That's their thing. We don't have that at Lord Fairfax. So people have done this several different ways. But quite frankly, I think that I really like having that link that's attached in the course listings where you click on the text. Because even if not all your classes are OER, you'll have a better idea how much you're going to spend that particular semester. Thank you, Leda. Regina from Michigan asked if you can share the wording for OER that you use in your SIS. And if that's something easy, you could put a link in for us. Otherwise, we have some examples coming up later as well. And Regina had one other question. Or she had a couple of other questions. I'm going to let you answer the first question if that works for you. And she also asked about how many courses are using OER at LFCC. I was just trying to figure that out because in truth, I learned just this semester about four more that we didn't even know about. We had an English professor who made all of it. And this is a guy who's won the Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence and the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia Award for Teaching Excellence. And he just did this on his own. And he's been teaching a long time. So I just found out he's got four classes. So I would say that right now, we have about, I wouldn't say it's 28 classes that are. And we have our six degree programs and certifications for which all classes are available OER. But they're just now making sure that all of them are in there. And we're working on two more for the part of our new grant. So it's kind of like, there's constantly more. Every semester, we're getting about eight more classes. But 28 are what we're offered spring semester. And as you mentioned, Liza, you also have the six degree programs, which through the knowledge to work, which are all OER as well. Right. Yeah. So, you know, I know there's some additional questions that have turned up in the chat window, but I kind of want to move on right now since we have a couple of other speakers. And we will come back to those questions at the end. And also, Liza, or anyone else who's on our webinar today, feel free to address some of the questions regarding how you deal with that at your college. So thanks so much to Liza for that overview of all the work they do. And now I want to turn it over to Pierce College, to Mark Haskins, who's the executive director there, to tell us about the Pierce Open Pathway project and how they've done outreach to students to fill those programs and make sure that they're really reaching out to the students that can benefit most. Mark? Thank you, Anna. Yes. First, let me say that from a marketing strategy point of view, we experienced a lot of the same issues that Liza raised. And I think, you know, most of what we experienced agrees 100% with what she's saying. This is the uniqueness of our program where our faculty are actually paid per student. We were able to leverage the concern about losing students to OER classes to our advantage. And it was a great motivator for those faculty who weren't on board yet to go OER because they didn't want to lose students and therefore reduce their paychecks. And I think that's something that you can use to your advantage potentially. But it speaks to the point of the internal education issue first. And I'm a classic example. So I don't have a marketing background, but I would say my advantage towards being part of this was the fact that I didn't come from a higher education background. And so I knew that there was going to be a barrier to starting to talk about open educational resources or OER with our target population, which was primarily service members and their families. But that wouldn't mean anything to them. And I wanted to avoid edu speak because it wasn't going to resonate with our population where OER is an acronym for something completely different in the military. So my couple slides are more example-based. Again, from a strategic planning perspective, I think LIDA raised all the major points. But here's kind of the journey that we went on. I instantly was educated that OER is good. And we have three primary reasons for that. Of course, savings is the one that gets the attention of our students primarily. But it's also the better learning, the flexible pedagogy, and it's more relevant to our information-driven age. But a third point for us that we were able to market to our students was that these classes, especially the online versions of these OER classes, were going to be guaranteed to be on the schedule. They were not going to be canceled, and so students could depend on that, could have the stability to plan their pathways, especially when this population is often deployed to the field and has to take a quarter off and that type of thing. But the bottom line is the marketing is not easy. What we decided to do at Pierce is rather than, especially when it came to print ads and that type of thing, try and explain OER. We took a different approach, and that was to come up with something catchy, something that would pique their curiosity, and that's where POP came from, the Pierce Open Pathways. We were going to use POP, and hopefully people would be interested in what this stood for, what this was all about. And so some of the ideas that we discussed at the program outside of the marketing channels were promotions like Got POP, What the POP. We wanted something flashy and now and with it. But unfortunately, I'm going to explain as many of the pitfalls probably more than great ideas for you all, but perhaps you can avoid some of the stumbles that we had. We didn't come to a consensus, and so when it went to our marketing and communications section, no fault of their own, but it's a very brand conscious and very brand strict institution. So the next slide shows what they came up with, which is Pierce Open Pathways. So not necessarily particularly novel with regard to a catchy slogan, but it was through the word of mouth and through the education of staff that Lida already pointed out. That to us was the key. Our registration personnel and our advisors, we threw our own internal staff meetings and information sessions, and we created a frequently asked questions type of thing. And so our team fully understood POP, and then they could talk about it to the students they were registering and advising. And the issue of identifying on the schedule was already brought up. Unfortunately, with the format, the slide got a little bit distorted, but that red arrow should be over the column that says POP. So we trained our students to look for POP. If they wanted those open classes, they would look for POP in the schedule, and they could easily find those courses. And anecdotally, students gravitated toward that. We have many stories where they had an unexpected fee that we had to pass on to them for the online, for the Canvas learning management system. And we told them that they didn't have to pay for a textbook. It was a large source of relief for them. Now just be advised, when we go to our new schedule, the bookstore controls some of that, and the new symbol for an OER course is an exclamation point, like a warning. I would like to negotiate with them to change that to something like a happy face, but of course the bookstore, for them, that's probably not the best thing for their bottom line, and it's an open educational resource course. In any case, we started with Pierce Open Pathways, and we proceeded from there. Now, to our benefit, the open educational movement really kind of took off on the other campuses as a whole, and so in some ways perhaps we weren't giving our students enough credit. But they were understanding OERs better than we thought they were, to the point where they were lobbying our state legislature to have actual laws with regard to use of open educational resources within the community and technical colleges of Washington State. Next slide. So here are just some of the examples that we did in print and electronic ads. We started with including Pierce Open Pathways, your pop in the ads so you see in the upper left-hand corner. That's a stock photo. Pierce generally prefers to use our own student images, and so that's what we, once we launched this, got it on the streets with the stock photo, then we started to go more with our own students. So there's one of our students down directly below. This was from our, we would print this on our quarterly information brochure that has our course schedule and that type of thing, our term schedule. And so on the back cover it's saved by the expensive textbooks. Obviously the key is the savings, but it's just really not that, not so easy to communicate that succinctly, especially for print ads. So we went away from pop and to the headline type of approach of your degree, no books. And so you see a couple of different versions of that featuring some of our students. And that pop or the OER, the textbook free associate of arts degree became one of our three main talking points to advertise Pierce College at Joint Base Lewis McCord, the others being the most classes on the base, and of course the military friendly aspect of our program. So now we're at the point of contemplating what we're going to do next in terms of marketing. We're working on our tabletop banners and that type of thing for our outreach events. And again, it's not so easy to come up with a succinct headlining to grab their attention. So you can kind of see on the right hand side the evolution of some of the bullets that we've been considering. You know, the top one is the first iteration and I didn't like that at all because to me it varies the lead. The savings is way down in the tech or way further in the line and I want them to know upfront that they're going to save. And so it evolved a little bit to using an icon at least and then the third is where we're at now where the savings is emphasized. It's back to the your degree, no textbooks. And then what does that kind of mean to the student? You're going to save up to $2,200 on your entire degree cap. And then on the left hand side, we're at the point now that we've been doing this long enough. We set ourselves a goal of saving students $1 million in a three year period. We're more than halfway there. We're definitely going to make that goal. But now that's something that we can also use in print ads is some sort of thermometer or odometer image to show this accumulating total of savings. And we're hoping that that will be very attention grabbing for our potential students. I think that's all my slides. Yes. Any questions for me? I love what the boss too. I may have to try and re-engage on that. Well, thank you so much, Mark, for giving us that view of what you've done at Pierce College JBLM. And I think it's very unique in that you do have a somewhat different student population, but I think the principles do remain the same. I don't think I saw any other questions specifically in here. So, Mark, I think what we'll do is Mark will still be here and will be available for questions at the end. And I think we're just going to move on to our next couple of speakers who are going to share very briefly some of the great work they're doing. And next up I have James Guapa Grossle from College of the Canyons. He's the Dean of Educational Technology Learning Resources and Distance Learning there. And James at his college and with his faculty and staff has been working on OER for nearly a decade now. And they're getting involved in C degrees. They have been for a couple of years in James. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Can you go on to the next slide? Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Yeah, boys, saying that we've been working on this for a decade or more or nearly a decade makes me feel a lot of pressure. We should probably have accomplished a lot more. But we continue to be inspired by our colleagues in Virginia and Washington. I want to talk about just three or four points here that are going on in California and at College of the Canyons. First of all, in California we're fortunate that the state legislature and our state system office has really been devoting more attention and more resources to OER. Last year legislation was passed that will require, beginning in January 2018, will require community colleges and our state universities to identify in their schedules of classes all sections that are using OER. So as we've seen in Virginia and Washington, we're really looking forward to that coming into widespread practice here in California. We have to explain to faculty sometimes that this doesn't mean that you're required to use OER, but rather that you're required to inform your students when you are. So we think that will generate a lot of interest and attention on the part of institutions, enrollment management perspective, as well as faculty perspective. And we hope that we will see a lot of student outreach and marketing around that or arising from that. At College of the Canyons we've been fortunate to engage our students with multiple channels of communication that range from including students in our team, in our OER team, which has been really a real boon to us. It helps us to keep a fresh eye on how to communicate to students. So one of our really bright employees in our OER team here has authored articles and press releases for student publications, and that's been terrific. She's developed banners and images that inform students about free textbooks. And it's really helpful for us, or for me at least, to have the student perspective on things. And the student eye on how to design the marketing information, as well as getting the student government involved has been really helpful for us in terms of advocating within the institution. So while we're here, we are very pleased that our student government passed a resolution calling for students to be able to use OER. It's really a very powerful statement in which they refer to the increasing debt load that they experienced, the failure of publishers to respond to student needs, and their concern about the impact of textbooks on their academic level. So we're very pleased that our student government passed a resolution calling for faculty to consider the use of OER. So that resolution has been helpful for us in convincing others in the institution, primarily faculty, to consider OER. We have not done a very good job in leveraging that resolution to encourage students to pay attention to OER sections, but we look forward to doing that in a more concentrated way or coordinated way. This summer, when we will be launching our OER indicator in our class schedule prior to the state requirement in January 2018. And finally, I don't have it written up here, but I do want to call attention to the utility of having student data or data about students' concerns and student performance related to OER. It's very helpful for us, I think, to be able to speak to students about student performance. We're able to speak to faculty about local student concerns. So we've all seen, all of us here on the call, have seen national data about the cost of textbooks and their impact on student success. But we have that similar data from our own students. So we can tell our faculty that our students here, the percentage of our students who identify textbook costs as the major, as the number one barrier to their educational goals is 75%. And so on and so forth. So that's very helpful, I think, to have our own students reflected in the data that we use. And then also, we will be closing that loop or continuing that framing by gathering data and documenting student success and retention rates and completion rates through the OER courses. So that we'll have, again, the ability to talk about the efficacy of OER at our own institution with our own students. Otherwise, again, congratulations to our colleagues in Washington and Virginia and thanks for their continued inspiration. That's it. Thank you so much, James, for sharing the work that you're doing there. And I'm going to move this on. I think we had a quick question for you in the chat window about someone would like to find out if you have any student design publications around OER. And I'll let you answer that in the chat window, James. Sure. Thanks. And so James just had an OER summit day at his college back in late January where he invited folks from around the state of California. And he had over 140 attendees come from different colleges, primarily in Southern California, but I think some Northern California as well. So a lot happening in California, too. Now, I'd like to turn this over to Preston Davis, who's the director of instruction at the Extended Learning Institute. And of course, many of our earlier speakers have referred back to Preston because he is really one of the pioneers at NOVA along with Tidewater who started doing the OER based degrees back in 2013. And so they have a lot of data and really a lot of knowledge and strategies to share with us about what works and doesn't work at their college. Preston? Great. Thank you very much. So I just wanted to briefly mention about how we are trying to really increase awareness about the OER degree programs that we have at NOVA We sort of went about, you know, visioning, creating a degree pathway, starting with our online courses, and then really growing that to include courses that are taught hybrid and on campus at all of our six campuses at NOVA. And as we've grown our program and really gotten faculty to embrace this and really turn into a more grassroots type faculty-led endeavor at this point, trying to keep in mind that we talk about OER and open pedagogy among faculty and administrators, but students don't really know what those terms mean. And so we really have to try to keep things simple and let students know that when they see some of these things, the reality is that it will allow them to take a course without having to purchase textbooks. And we know that there are a lot of benefits to sharing and to open material, but the bottom line for students is that cost-saving mechanism, particularly for community college students, because that does give them the opportunity to have access to the material from day one, because they're not having to choose whether or not they can afford to purchase it. And also, it really takes stress away from those folks in determining how they're going to allocate their funds. And we've seen in some cases that it allows students to put that money towards taking additional course credits and hopefully completing their degrees in a more expedited manner. And so we've had some challenges with making it really simple for our students to find information. So first and foremost, we published a list of what those courses were. And we started by putting a note, as you can see on the screen, in our online schedule of classes. If students would search for courses, we would denote in that course. And we refer to those courses as digital open, because we wanted to make sure that students understood that they were going to be accessing free digital and open content in these courses so that there was this expectation of having to access material in a digital format, that no textbook purchase was required. And we also made sure that in partnership with our bookstore that they indicated when students were searching for course sections that were OER for our institution that it stated specifically that there was no textbook required for that course so that students didn't have confusion with having to order textbooks for other courses. And we're finally at the point now where we're able to work on updating our SIS system, which will allow students to actually search for courses based on an indicator that specifies that a course is OER or low cost materials less than $40, which is really inspired by what Maricopa in Arizona has done in making sure that they were able to differentiate and promote to students the courses that would allow them to either complete a course without having to purchase textbooks or those that required low cost materials to be able to complete their courses. So that's sort of where we are at this point. We're always looking for more innovative ways to share this information with students in a way that they will understand what the implications are for them in their learning. So thank you. Thanks so much, Preston, for sharing that work that you've been doing. You may need to turn off your speaker. And I'm excited to hear that you're going to add search as well to the capability in your course registration. And we, at this point, I think we want to open this up to other folks. And I might suggest, it looks like we lost Lisa. Lisa Young was here earlier. Lisa, I think you've had to take off. But Lisa is from Maricopa Community College. I'm not sure if anyone else here is from Maricopa. But as Preston mentioned, Maricopa has had this for several years in their course registration system, not only having the designation but actually allowing students to search for, I think their designation is low cost or free textbooks. But it refers to OER or textbooks that are less than $40. And so a really powerful way, a powerful tool to give students to find these classes. And let's open it up now to others who might have questions or comments. We have the capability of six simultaneous speakers. So you can raise your hand and grab the microphone or you can simply grab the microphone by clicking on the top button. We're typing in the chat window for us. While we're waiting for some questions or I wanted to mention that I regretfully forgot to mention that Santa Fe College in Florida joined us in January. We actually had over eight colleges that joined us in the last two months. And we're just thrilled to have Santa Fe Community College as a member of CCCOER. They joined Broward College in Florida as a member and also the Florida Virtual Campus as a system-wide member of CCCOER. Debbie Blair is here from Santa Fe College who is their representative, their leader of OER there. And also she's an instructional designer and adjunct faculty there. And she is preparing some materials for Open Education Week to share some of the early work they're doing. They've been working on OER for a relatively short period of time. Thank you, Angela. Angela in the chat window mentioned that she's from Maricopa and that the SIS system there uses the terms low cost or no cost. Once again, a reminder that we will have a webinar both on March 28th and March 29th about OER adoption. And then on the Wednesday the 29th will be OER degrees. We have Lansing Community College, Open Oregon participating with us on the 28th. And then we'll have Austin Community College in Austin, Texas and Montgomery Community College in Maryland sharing their OER degree work on the 29th. So we look forward to having you at those sessions. And I just wanted to mention that we are maintaining a list of conferences related to Open Education on our website. You can go under Get Involved and look at those conferences. And I want to thank Kiri Dolly who's one of our advisory board VPs. And she helps us coordinate the website and she's been maintaining those. I think for those of you who are in the Open Education movement here, you may know that Open Ed was just announced. I think it was late last week that Open Ed will be in October this year in Anaheim, California. We also have the Year of Open, which our parent organization is running this year. It's our big anniversary, the 10-year anniversary of the Cape Town Declaration for Open Education. And each month we're taking a different theme at that website around Open. This February was Open Source, January was Open Education. August is going to be Community Colleges and Open Education. But stay tuned for that. And it looks like we have another question. I think we have any other questions? Cynthia, Cynthia, it's helping me to gather questions. One final thing I think is Regina asked earlier about how are you working with bookstores? I'm going to ask any of my speakers here. Would you like to share how you're working with bookstores on providing OER solutions or information around OER to students? Yeah, this is James. I'll be happy to talk about our bookstore. Thank you. So again, James caused the canyons. Our bookstore is a private third-party vendor, Barnes & Noble. They're excellent partners. I think they're excellent partners for many reasons. Beginning with the fact that we have approached them as partners. They're important to the campus. They're important to the community. We've approached them and said we're not trying to put you out of business. We wanted to find a way to keep you in the game. It's helpful for all of us if you're healthy. So certainly when we're utilizing open stacks, that's a no-brainer. They can order the print copies of the open stacks and students can retail the open stacks books there, and that's fine. In addition, when we have faculty using open textbooks, we have helped them to compile. So putting together multiple different sources to create a web version. We work with our in-house repro graphics or print shop to print a text version. Maybe re-hold, punch it, maybe put it in a plastic bag depending on how big it is and how important it is to have it in a certain order. And we'll take that over to the bookstore. The bookstore will inventory it, put it on their shelves, mark it up to cover their costs, and then we let students know that print copies are available in the bookstore for a cost. That's a way of keeping the bookstore in the game in our mind. It's not the case with all college stores, but many college stores are seeing a shift in their revenue from textbooks to rentals or from textbooks to merchandise. So finding a way to continue to encourage student foot traffic to come into the store is helpful for the store. Mostly it comes down to, I think, a spirit of partnership and collaboration. They're very helpful. Thanks so much, James, for sharing that and for that successful relationship with your college bookstore. We always want to emphasize that to work with your college bookstore and try to find solutions, many of them have tried various programs. OER might be new to them. Some of them started with rentals quite a few years ago. As we're moving to OER, we want to bring them along with us. Would anyone else like to share? Lida, Mark, or Preston? This is Preston. No, I just want to slide back. Go ahead, Preston. No, please. Go ahead, Lida. Well, I was going to say that our experience is kind of the same as James's. If they're a third party vendor, they do, the college gets income from the bookstore. Not a lot, but some. And so it's important for us to make sure that their employees understand that when there's an OER that's being used and there isn't a print copy available, that they tell the student that as opposed to trying to sell the student a textbook that they might be using in another section of the same course. That's the only issue we've had. And I one time actually had to walk with the student to the bookstore and say, so I'm the professor and somebody sold the student this book and this isn't the right book. And it was very nice about it. And they were very nice back. And it was more important at that point for me to help the student get their money back. And the bookstore wants to be student friendly. And so they try to cooperate and help. And we all work together on that. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Lida. Preston. Yes, I was just going to say briefly that our bookstore, they are very willing to make sure that the course materials that are required or not required for a particular course are very clearly stated. So that there is not any confusion among students for courses that require textbook and those that do not. And so we're able to provide that. And they keep a list of that as well so we can compare to make sure that we all are kind of understanding what courses at the college are requiring textbooks and which ones are not. And so I think that there's an understanding that the curriculum really is separate from sort of the facilities and the revenue portion of bookstore operations. And kind of understanding that those things are separate. I think it really helps us to try to focus on ways that we can work together and make sure that our bookstore is able to provide services and function. But our students are also able to save money when and where possible. Thank you, Preston. I think that Quill was also supporting that in the chat window. Quill, do you want to speak to that or do you want me to summarize your comments? Go ahead and summarize, you know, if you want to. Oh. You're already online. Why don't you go ahead and say what you just repeat what you had in your comments there? I was just making a point that most of the bookstores see themselves, or at least the bookstore people I've worked with, see themselves as a student service more than a profit center. And so they really just want to be able to help students. So they prefer to have the information, even if it's information that doesn't make them money. Well, I've heard that quite a bit as well, Quill. So thank you for sharing that. We want to make sure that they have the information so that they can give that to students. We are a few minutes after the hour, so we are going to have to conclude now. But I want to thank all of our excellent speakers, Leida, Mark, James, and Preston. And thank all of you who came this morning, wonderful questions and participation. This webinar, and all our webinars are archived and slides are shared. And they're usually posted within 48 hours. And so we look forward to seeing you in March, later in March. Take care, everyone, and have a great afternoon.