 Welcome everyone. This is Una Daly from the Community College Consortium for OER, and we're so glad you could make it today to join us for our webinar on OER and zero textbook cost degree initiatives. For those of you who are members or have been participating with us for a long time, you'll know that this has been a topic near and dear to our hearts. We've been working on OER and zero textbook cost degrees since 2015, so working with institutions, faculty, and promoting the benefits of this along with finding solutions for some of the challenges, and so we have three experts who have been working on this at their institutions or within their systems from California, Minnesota, and New York, who are really going to share with you how they went about this and the successes and also the challenges that they've hit along the way to help their students be successful. So our agenda, I'm going to introduce our speakers, which I'm very excited to do in just a moment. We'll have a very quick overview of CCCOER, and then we'll get right into those presentations from our speakers, and we will then go into kind of a panel mode, and we will invite questions from you, the audience, and we really welcome those. And we also have some questions that I'm going to ask the panelists as well, and that will take care of us. So first up, it's my pleasure to introduce Laurie Beth Larson. She's an English faculty at Central Lakes College in Minnesota, and Laurie, do you want to say hello and a little something about what you do on a day-to-day basis? Sure. I teach English, I teach reading, and I teach the global studies class here, and now OER leads, so I get a couple credits to keep this going here on our campus. Wonderful. Well, we're so glad you could make it today, Laurie Beth. Thank you. And next up I'd like to introduce Tony DeFranco, who is the SUNY OER Services Campus Strategist at the State University of New York. And prior to that, Tony was faculty and instructional design at Tompkins Courtland Community College who is a longtime leader in OER, dating back to, I'm going to say 2011-12. So you've been in this business for a while, Tony. A long time, learned a lot of lessons along the way, made a lot of mistakes along the way, so hopefully we've corrected those over the years. Thanks, Tony. Yeah, I'm a campus strategist for SUNY OER Services. It's a shared service of the State University of New York System, and my primary role is to work with campuses in implementing and scaling OER across their campuses. We have specific areas that we focus on. Mine happens to be managing the degree programs as well as a few other things, but I'm happy to be in this role, and it's great working with the campuses. Great. Welcome, Tony. And last but not least is James Glapagross Clay, who is Dean at College of the Canyons, and I'm sorry at the moment, I should know this. James has been, James is really a co-founder of CCCOER, so has been with us for a long time, and you know, I've had the pleasure of working on a few projects in California related to ZTZ degrees. James? Yeah, thanks, Luna. Hey, everybody. Pleased to be here, been hanging around CCCOER for a while. Happy to be here and support all the work that people do with CCCOER, and now I've got the good fortune to support work across California community colleges. In my day job at College of the Canyons, I get to work with our online education team, our library team, and our learning center or tutoring center team, and yeah, happy to be here. Great. So we have, as you can see, we have an outstanding set of speakers to share with you today. So for those of you who might be new to CCCOER or to our webinars, we've been around for almost 12 years now, and I know there's another co-founder on the webinar today, which is Barbara Olowski, who was actually there at the very beginning when we were founded. And our mission hasn't changed a great deal, although the landscape has changed, but we still have the same goals. We're trying to help students be successful in their academic careers, and we do that through expanding awareness and access to high quality OER, and we know that the key to that is supporting faculty choice and development around these open resources. And I wanted to show you a quick map of our membership, and we are very pleased to have our members with us today, and many of you who participate who aren't currently members, and we welcome you if whenever that's appropriate. And our latest members that just came on this month is the Virtual College of Texas, and we're very pleased to have them, and I believe Judith Sebesta, their Executive Director is with us today, so welcome, Judith. And also Readley College in California, and that is represented by Amanda Tainter. I'm not sure if Amanda's on today, but she is quite the OER leader at her college, and we're very pleased to have Readley join us as well. So getting to our topic today, our three speakers of course are going to touch on many motivations behind the OER and Z2Z degree pathways, and you know, both from an institutional perspective and possibly a system perspective. I think many institutions get started around the cost barriers of textbooks for students, but looking at it from an equity perspective is also a very helpful way to look at how these Z degrees make it easier for students who may be low-income or underrepresented to be successful in these pathways. And many of our colleges around the country are involved in pathway programs, and the ZTZ and the OER degree programs align quite well with the pathway programs by eliminating potentially unnecessary coursework, which helps students to graduate more quickly. From an institutional perspective, these Z degrees can be an incentive to enroll students, because it significantly can reduce their cost of achieving a degree. And you know, one thing that isn't often mentioned up front, but it's a wonderful professional development experience for faculty and staff, and can lead to really improved pedagogy throughout the institution. So lots of potential benefits, and we're going to hear from some folks who are working right there in the field, and we'll give you some specific examples. So first up, I'm going to turn this over to Laurie Beth, and I'm going to stop sharing so that you can share from your computer. And let's get it on myself. Perfect, yeah. I see my mouth moving and can't hear. Hi everybody. I'm going to share this slideshow with you. So I am again from a very small college here in Minnesota. We have about 5,000 students, 5,500 students, so we're pretty little, but we do have, over the last few years, we have developed a Z degree. Now is this sharing the large screen? We can see your slides. Excellent. All right, so we have a number of courses, and our Z degree came about rather organically as Karen Picula started learning circles here. Some of you may have heard of her. She works now with the Minnesota State. So she ran learning circles, and we just continually added course by course in a variety of goal areas until we came up with enough courses offered every year in each of the goal areas so that students can graduate from Central Lakes with an associates degree without paying any money for a textbook. We have a few areas that are smaller, and not every single one is offered every semester, but enough so that within a year they're all offered. So here we have our registration page. I wanted to take a look at this because right there in the middle is our only indication that this course has a zero textbook cost, and this is how students can find out, but we also do have the option that students can find out from our website. Our website will has a like a PDF simply showing that that all these courses are available, which ones specifically are available for fall. Hopefully this process will become a little more efficient, but for now it's it works for us in a small college. We also do have Minnesota State a repository. We have a few books available on here. This is our own repository for OER materials that are being developed, and we're working on getting more up there. It's pretty limited at the moment for the starting. So we did a survey recently of our students as the first survey we've done, and of course it's similar to what other people are finding, of course, that lots of students are enrolled in courses with expensive textbooks. I was thinking a little bit about why our 20% of the students said they had not purchased a required textbook, which is a little lower than it seems the national average, but a large percentage of our population buy their textbooks with financial aid, huge percentage. So I think that when they get that money, then they are able to afford some kind of textbook, and it's not always a choice between textbook and rent. Of course we know it often is. So we also have a Minnesota wide initiative. We talked about this a little earlier on Northland Community College. We're going to create some degree programs, Z degree programs, and I do believe we asked most recently, I don't believe it's quite ready to go in the fall, but it's certainly in the works, and many of you probably know a lot more about this. Central Lakes College was not involved in this distance ed consortium to offer a Z degree, but this was the information I received most recently about other Z degree opportunities in the future. So our future goals, obviously, we need to let students know a little bit more about what options here are available. Of course, we continue to add. We continue, we added about five more classes using OER materials this semester. We'll be continuing to add some more in the summer and possibly again in the fall next year. We do have sustaining budget to continue this for at least another year and a half, and then we'll have to go from there. And we also have to target a few of the the goal areas where there's only a limited number of courses. All right, I'll stop this share. Alrighty. Thank you very much, Lori. And so as Lori's effort, as she has said, is primarily at her college right now, but there were three colleges in Minnesota that produced an online degree as part of Achieving the Dreams program. And I think, Tony, you're going to speak to that. And just thank you, Tony. And before you get started, Achieving the Dream, of course, did the OER degree program. We had invited the folks from Achieving the Dream to join us today, but they were unable to. They worked with 38 colleges throughout the United States. And three of those were from Minnesota. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. Tony, why don't you go right ahead? Okay, everyone can see my screen, I trust. Yes. Okay. So I'll talk about not just the OER degree programs in the State University of New York or SUNY as we're better known, but how they're being developed, expectations of the participating campuses, how we're supporting the campuses in the goals for developing these OER degree pathways. This is a snapshot of OER efforts at SUNY over the past couple of years of the 64 campuses, 59 have an OER initiative. There may be others that we don't know about yet. We're always pleasantly surprised when we find out about new campuses. But overall, we've covered quite a bit in the SUNY system. Over 155,000 students across the state are enrolled in at least one OER course. We estimate that students have saved over $16 million in costs for textbooks and access codes. We estimate that students, you know, and that the number of students is actually growing. We're quickly approaching 5,000 different course sections taught by over 1,000 faculty and some campuses have reported increases in success and retention rates, which is very promising. And we're looking forward to seeing more of that across the system as the numbers start to come in. So a consortium of five SUNY community colleges participated in the ATD OER degree initiative. The goal was for each college to develop at least one degree pathway. A couple of the campuses, Herkimer and Tompkins-Courtland, where I originally came from, ended up developing two programs at their campuses, which resulted in a total of seven programs. SUNY is funding some additional OER degree pathways. Three of the Achieving the Dream campuses are involved in the current OER degree pathway efforts, along with six other campuses that are new to OER degree pathways. We're pleased to have the first four-year school involved in development of an OER pathway at SUNY Oneyanta. They originally started their OER degree program as a Bachelor of Science in Applied Liberal Arts, but that has transitioned from a degree to an OER Gen Ed pathway. Both Oneyanta and SUNY system felt that this was probably a better approach for them, because it would have a broader impact on their students. We're also excited to have efforts underway for our first master's degree OER pathway. This is an MA in Learning and Emerging Technologies that's being developed at Empire State College. We've been very active at OER for quite some time. The College in Prison Program housed at Marcy Correctional Facility in New York, Marcy Correctional Facility near Utica, New York provides individuals who are incarcerated in education provided by Mohawk Valley Community College, who is also involved in ATD. That program is being offered as a Business Administration AAS OER degree, and it's the first prison-based OER degree program in SUNY. At least one of the schools is offering their degree program completely online. Another will offer their degree 80% online with the full attention of moving that to completely online very soon. Others are offering a mix of online and face-to-face courses within their degree pathways. The OER degree pathway initiative is being led by SUNY OER Services, which is a shared service organization for which I work at SUNY for institutions looking to build, support, expand OER, and practices. And our main effort really is to help campuses lower the cost of education for their students and empower their faculty to use the materials that are most suited for their needs. Based on our experience with OER over the years, along with our partner collaborations and involvement with ATD, as I mentioned, we've learned a lot from that. We've compiled and developed a number of resources we feel are helpful in assisting campuses that are working on these OER degree programs. Let me back up, I think I might have skipped over one. Oh, there we are, course maps. One of the requirements for the campuses involved in the degree initiative is to provide their course maps and we feel that the course maps are helpful visuals for designing the courses. The course maps should include links to the OER being used, should align with the backward design process, which some of you may be familiar with, identifying outcomes, determining what's acceptable evidence and designing the activities. Campuses that create content are asked to apply a CCBY license and follow accessibility standards. This is a project management timeline that we've shared with the campuses. We've received a number of course maps in syllabi already and we expect a lot more of them will come to us in June as we approach the first target date. Some campuses will develop in three phases, some in two and some are very close. They may finish in the first phase depending on how far along they already were before funding is provided. All degree programs should be complete and delivered by fall of 2020. Degree program development coincides with asking campuses to submit their sustainability plans, which we are receiving the final plans now and we're in the final stages of reviewing those plans. As part of the effort, we'll recommend that campuses code their OER sections in their student information system so that students can easily locate their sections in the catalog. Again, this is just a recommendation, not a requirement. One of the requirements however of the campuses is that in order to receive funding, they must track and submit their OER sections into SUNY's institutional research information system, also known as Cirrus. The information organized and reported in Cirrus is used to determine potential impact and we use it at the system level for planning, academic and fiscal administration. It's like budgeting, legal obligations and reporting requirements imposed by New York State and federal agencies. Though not a requirement and not data we are asking for at the system level, we do encourage campuses to analyze their data around success and completion rates for their courses so that they can determine what kind of impact OER is having at the campus level and they can make decisions based on the outcomes of that data. The way that we're supporting campuses is a variety of ways. We hold monthly Zoom meetings with campuses to discuss and share their progress, their concerns and ideas we most recently met yesterday. We have instructional designers at the administration level who review courses and corresponding course maps. We work closely with one of the reviewers from the ATD OER degree initiative when we have questions or any guidance system level. SUNY has partnered with Lumen Learning. We're asking campuses to share their completed courses in Candela. Many of you are familiar with Candela. It's Lumen's flavor of press books. If developing in their learning management system, we are asking for those zip files and the plan is to convert all the courses into Candela and the courses that are considered exemplars will be featured on SUNY's Ready to Adopt catalog which can be found at oer.suny.edu and I'll be sharing that website again toward the end. Another way we provide support is through the SUNY Help Desk. They support the shared services and technologies around online learning for most of the campuses and the SUNY Help Desk in turn works very closely with the SUNY OER services team as well as the vendors and partners such as Lumen Learning. SUNY's goals for the OER degree initiative are aligned with some of the standard goals that we're all familiar with of OER which are to reduce costs and materials and improve student success and also to help other SUNY schools scale OER across their campuses. Offering these degree pathways coupled with the Ready to Adopt catalog we feel makes it a little bit easier and more appealing for some of these other campuses to accomplish this. We're also excited that by having a development underway for both baccalaureate and graduate level OER pathways that it will be a little more appealing for other four-year institutions to take the initiative to start looking at OER degree program adoption and or development. One of the tools we're working on is a heat map that identifies which campuses are doing OER across the system which courses they offer and who has the OER degree programs. The goal of this map is to provide a visual representation of all the OER across the system for both internal and external interests. For internal purposes it quickly allows us at the system level to see who's doing what. From an external perspective it allows campuses the ability to self-serve for a lot of the questions we see at OER services such as who in the system is using this resource or who can I ask about OER in a particular subject area. And we think that the visual data will be very beneficial it's being pulled from our database we're planning to provide access to campus leads to update their own data so they'll have the ability to toggle on and off certain fields such as whether or not to share their courses their faculty names and things like that. The tool has gone through an alpha testing phase to identify issues and problems we are now beta testing this and we hope to roll it out soon so that it's more publicly facing. And again the website where we have our ready to adopt catalog where hopefully this tool will ultimately reside is oer.suni.edu. Buna, I'm going to stop sharing here. Thank you so much Tony for sharing that. Kind of a big system approach to supporting the faculty and I know you mentioned that you've had funding to for I think three years now to really support the institutions Yeah we've been very fortunate in that the first year we received four million dollars in funding which was a major shot in the arm and we've received funding for subsequent years. We know eventually that you know that funding will will go away so we're at the point where we're trying to get campus to start thinking about sustainability efforts and we're trying to lay the groundwork so it makes it a little bit easier and a little more palatable for them. Great thank you. All right James please tell us about the California Community College Zero textbook cost degree program. Great thanks Buna. I'm just so so impressed with what's going on in Minnesota and New York it's hard to turn my attention back to California. I want to share first of all that I might be the one here talking about the California project but the California project has been supported by an incredible number of people throughout our state. First and foremost our really good friends at West Hills College LaMoure, Ron Oxford and Kelsey Smith who along with College of the Canyon service technical assistance providers also UNA Daily and CCC OER are absolutely essential partners on the entire project but the real work is happening at the colleges so I'm speaking really at the 10,000 foot level about incredibly detailed and difficult work that's going on at local colleges so I just want to acknowledge that right off the bat and let's see if I can get this slide driving. So in California we've got a pretty solid structure in place if we think about regulations and legal requirements. First of all we have ZTC or Z degree but we happen to call zero textbook cost degree. We have that codified in our statewide legal code around education so you can see that here on the screen defining as ZTC as a community college associate degree or and I've added the emphasis or career technical education certificates so it doesn't have to be a degree could also be a certificate earned entirely by completing courses that eliminate conventional textbook costs by using alternative instructional materials and methodologies including open educational resources so I'll hover there for a second. Many of you I'm sure have thought that means that we might use other materials we might switch to other instructional materials that are not OER not openly licensed and that is indeed true under the terms of the grant and the definition of of ZTC in our state law. So we do have some instances in which grantee colleges have chosen to use to integrate library databases they're paying for the library databases but it's zero cost to students. What I like about this definition is that the focus is not on may for better for worse something that we discussed in the OER community licenses rather it's on the impact on students it's about eliminating the cost for students so I appreciate that. Another point that this slide that I want to make with this slide is that logo that image in the middle of the slide the text open textbook with the dollar sign in the middle and a slash through it suggesting zero costs for textbooks. Separate from the ZTC program but very helpful our state legislature passed a law a few years ago that requires all state universities and community colleges to disclose in their schedules of classes any section so a class level a section level that has zero textbook cost so that's that's been happening at the same time that colleges are developing their ZTCs and that's been very helpful. Also one final point on the structure we have in place here in California thanks to our friend Barbara Olowski and Cable Green. Oh I'm going to say six or seven years ago they succeeded in persuading our state system office to implement a requirement that any materials created under a state grant a state community college system grant or contract has to carry a CC by license so so we have licensing the definition the disclosure to students all of that is really set in a structure here in California that that's a really positive place to start. Our ZTC degree initiative or our scope of our initiative is pretty broad although I'm pretty envious of New York right now. Our goal has been to support colleges in developing certificates and degrees. We currently have 28 colleges who have received their grant they're producing 34 certificates and degrees estimated to serve 23,000 students over three years. The estimate from our grantees and the colleges we're working with is that they will save students almost 43 million dollars over a three-year period which is an 858 percent return on investment from the original five million dollar investment that the state made and I'll talk more about that in one second. The grants and I'm sorry for the typo there the grants and in June of 2019 all of our colleges should have completed their work. We have the opportunity to continue technical assistance and I'll talk more about what that is in a few minutes. The support that West Hills College of the Moor College of the Canyons and CCC OER are offering we can continue that through December of this year. The materials here in our California projects are required to be housed in something called the Vision Resource Center which is a online it's a content management system called Cornerstone the product is called Cornerstone the California Community College branding its Vision Resource Center unfortunately that is authenticated so it's only available to people within the system alas however our friends at West Hills College of the Moor are working with our friends in the Cal State Chancellor's Office which runs the Cool or Ed and the Merlot sites to find a way to house the content also in those sites so that the content is available to everyone as as we want it to be of course I will clarify add a little bit of information about where the original funding came from here in California back in the fall of 2015 a OER hero long time long time friend to many of us Hal Plotkin was able to secure a meeting at the California Governor's Office to advocate for an investment a significant investment in creating z-degrees our friend Barbara was there and an amazing range of leaders through the OER world were there and we successfully advocated for an investment in in z-degree so that's where that's where our funding came from originally moving on and something else that was fortuitous for us is that a new state Chancellor's a system leader was put new new new system leader came in a couple of years ago with a very very clear vision and a very clear determination to realign many of the initiatives and many of the projects in the state around a singular vision focusing on student outcomes and accountability and he and the state system has enunciated those visions and goals and in a multitude of statements and I've listed many of them here on the screen which in my mind easily aligned with both OER and z-degrees so throughout our project we've encouraged our grantees to express the value of their local projects their z-degrees say in sociology or mathematics to express the value of that in a way that our state legislators that our state system will understand as supporting the overall goals for the system for example design with the student in mind well certainly when we think about instructional materials we're trying to design a degree program that thinks about the impact on the student another bullet is leading leading partnerships across systems we've had the good fortune to partner the california community colleges with the california state university system on a number of components of this project so again we we think and we hope that this has been well received by by the folks in our state system and in our state legislature and we hope that our our grantees have been able to express their local value in this in this way here's the next slide shows a very quick uh illegible i know from a distance a snapshot of where our grantees are where the colleges are that we that we participate that we support uh what i want to emphasize here is that they're all over the state we have large colleges small colleges rural colleges suburban colleges uh urban colleges so it's it's quite a diverse uh diverse collection like in new york so that was very impressive to see on the next slide i'll show you just as an example the diversity of focus areas on the one hand on the left hand side of the screen you see some of the focus areas in traditional transfer disciplines traditional liberal arts on the right hand side of the screen you see a sampling of our career education disciplines half of the projects that the colleges are undertaking are in the career education area so a precision agriculture respiratory care water systems technology you know really specialized content specialized areas i can speak about the water program which is is housed here at college of the canyons there simply is no quality content that our faculty know of in that field so our faculty undertook to create that content working very closely with professionals in the field so that the content the instructional materials reflect the current state of state of knowledge in the field and the content has been really designed alongside industry experts so it's it's been real a real bonus to have this funding not just to create oer but also to really increase the currency or ensure the currency of the content in the field a couple words about the technical assistance that west hills college the more college the canyons and ccc oer have been able to provide our our major activities have have revolved around building a community a practice via summits conferences workshops monthly webinars that unan lives facilitate with us we're trying to ensure access to all via training on accessibility we want to ensure that people respect the rights of creators through training on open licensing we have supported local implementations via onsite training going to colleges to work with people there we're documenting the impact via project evaluation we hope that we're helping colleges to sustain their local momentum through leadership training and maybe implicitly we've tried to highlight the student voice throughout all of our activities whether it's being sure to have a student panel at our events or writing up student success stories as part of our our documentation of the project we've really tried to to to do that ourselves speaking with technical assistance providers and tried to model that for for our grantees that really this is about the students we also have an increasing number of colleges here in cal california that are working with students to engage them in the workflow of creating oer and z degrees a side project that i'd love to mention is one that the barbara and the michaelson 20 million minds foundation have supported that we help help with your college of the canyons to develop a network of student oer advocates so look for us out on the conference circuit we're really proud of that project and we'll be talking a lot more about that and then moving on one of the final one of the final pieces of our support to our colleges is to help them to help the local implementers turn their focus towards sustainability what does it look like on campus to keep going certainly we've tried to provide tools and ideas and vocabulary to the the the grant managers the administrative folks but we also want to help colleges embed this kind of work around oer and z degrees into other conversations that are happening on campus so it becomes mainstream really and in one of the projects is entitled ztc equity champions and we have a couple here on the call with us today so that's great we we're encouraging them to are really asking them to be explicit about linking oer and z degrees to other large conversations on their campuses and in our system around reducing equity gaps and developing guided pathways and i know those are conversations happening across the united states so we want to make the point we want them to make the point that anytime somebody's having a conversation about reducing equity cap gaps z degrees have to be part of that or oer has to be part of that anytime an institution is talking about redesigning itself around pathways z degrees have to be part of that so a real concrete piece of that is a an online course that we've developed for those equity champions that explicitly makes those links look for that to be released to to the open later this summer so hopefully you can integrate that in your own campus uh and with that i'm going to uh think about my timing here and and turn it back to unha if you have any questions about this project feel free to contact me but i also want to acknowledge our part again our partners at west hills college and more ron oxford is the lead over there along with helsey smith so turn it back to you unha all right thanks james if you could just stop sharing there for a minute i think i will bring it back up let's see i'm going to stop share stop share there you go okay thank you so much um all righty so um i i want to engage our experts here um on a couple of points um and we're we're also looking for your questions there in the chat window so while we're waiting for that um let me just ask a question here and so you know i think these are very three very distinctive um oer z degree projects and very unique and they've had different starting points and stakeholders who were driving these programs and so i wanted to give um each of our speakers a chance to to delve into that particular piece what was that initial motivation who were the stakeholders who really brought this forward initially and and lori beth i i'd like to let you talk a little bit about the project there at central lakes i think you need to unmute yourself lori there we go karen picula was our initial champion and she ran learning circles for a few years and we had uh initiative grants from the state to begin this work and um it just kind of grew organically and as more and more people became involved in the uh usefulness i started because i felt like this is what i've always done i don't like teaching with textbooks and in esl and reading i felt like there weren't what i needed to connect with students so i you know i i ended up on one of karen picula's learning circles just to convert my courses actually get paid to convert my courses which is what i was always doing we were offered stipends and we just continued from there wonderful so it was very faculty driven because of course lori beth and karen our faculty yep completely from an organic perspective and i think not that um the other projects that um tony and james have shared weren't of course very faculty driven but they might not have started initially with faculty they it came up a little bit from a little bit different direction so um tony or james do you want to or lori beth did you have anything else you wanted to share there no okay tony or james do you want to talk a little bit more about that tony please go ahead sure i'll jump in um so we the initial motivation for this was our involvement with the achieving the dream oh we are degree initiative that was really what kind of spurred this on at the tony level we we saw um how much success we we were able to receive from that uh and anecdotally we know students like the oer they're asking their instructors for it for their courses that you know where it isn't most prevalent uh student governments have happily embraced it so we already had a fairly strong we are a degree foundation started so we felt we'd see more success and be able to build upon that success again resulting from the initial atv effort okay thank you tony and there was a question from rodney in the chat and he said did the system wide initiative start on a specific campus or were they always top down no they actually started really um at the campus level again the five uh community colleges within sumi were part of the initial atv consortium um it really started course by course and then focused on program by program and then you know started to scale into the consortium so that's really how it began great and and james you might have a different perspective on that well you know i would say that the you know the the real work is certainly done on the campus is by the faculty members and the staff uh there's no question about that you can't you can't convert a course you can't search for content you can't uh format for accessibility if you're sitting in you know in a dean's office or in a system level but so there's no doubt about about the grassroots or campus involvement faculty and staff involvement that's absolutely essential but in my mind also there's no doubt that let's say the top level i hate that you know think of that hierarchically but you know the the the executives the the leaders with whatever title somebody's got to get the money somebody's got to write the legislation somebody's got to be in the in the legislature somebody's got to gotta write the write the advocacy piece write the legislation so in california we've just had this amazing confluence of events uh in which at the grassroots level a lot of things were bubbling along you know there were a lot of institutions whether it's foothill the ands or college of the canyons or santa anna college or west hills the more where faculty and middle managers were were moving things along and excited about oer and then on the other hand david wiley how plotkin barbara lousky had the vision to say we're going to get into the governor's office and we're going to make a big ask right so so those kinds of things just came together really it's it's it's it's hard for me to to think about how one programs those things i can i see it always in retrospect you know three years ago i wasn't thinking about z degrees make perfect sense as guided pathways i never would have said that today it seems as obvious as oxygen and water to me how could you do a guided pathway if it were not a z degree it just seems like a disservice to our students but i don't have the ability to think of that ahead of time all right thanks james yeah those and thanks to all of our speakers on that unique perspective and michael had a question which i think maybe one or but all of you might want to address he asked about any pushback from any stakeholders um and he mentions you know faculty publishers or the bookstore um and i suspect that there was some pushback even though often it was a concerted effort um anyone like to speak to that i can speak just a little bit to that we have faculty of course who are i i concerned about uh intellectual property and uh so we we don't have a fully cooperative union support which is i don't know maybe necessary i don't know i'm kind of new at the whole big picture thing and our bookstore uh was beginning to lose money of course and so we've been working and plus it was quite complicated to get the still in process of getting the um the process of how to buy books for courses that are z degrees and what does that mean it's not traditional right well yeah thank you for that um i went on the note of pushback you mentioned publishers i'll tell you how now i see it i i didn't see it at the time but how um how decisively publishers have really given up the physical textbook market and and how decisively they're planning to move into what we know is going on with the access codes and inclusive access three years ago when three years and two years ago when the legislation was being considered to authorize the funding for our program here in california the only objections are really suggestions that the publishing lobbyists uh put into the conversation were a we should put into legislation a requirement that the content uh comply with the copyright with copyright right law b we should insist on bookstores being part of the conversation at the local campus and c we should insist on material being accessible it's a no-brainer all of those sure you know but now i see that their heart really wasn't in objecting to it because they've been planning something else all along which we're starting to see today right thank you james um for that and um tony any any thoughts on pushback um either within or or outside your system yeah i mean well with regard to james i agree with what he says we haven't really seen much pushback at this level and at this juncture um you know back in the early days of oer and i think probably many people really are probably very familiar with this there was pushback from faculty what is this oer thing it's not good quality you know all of those arguments we don't want our you know colleagues courses to be listed as oer in the in the sis or in the catalog we don't think it's fair all of that stuff changed at some of the campuses in particular the one where i originally came from where the culture just shifted a lot so i think oer has found its place on campuses it's it's part of you know what we do now um the bookstores by and large have been excellent to work with in particular in my case again coming from the campus perspective we had we were all at school and the bookstore manager there was great to work with initially the publishers weren't happy when we made the switch and some faculty have had some interesting stories about that but i don't think we're seeing too much of that and as james has mentioned they've shifted their business model for the better great all right super um and so i i realized that um these these are pretty rich discussions we're having and so i'm going to skip over that question on repositories because i think you all addressed some of that upfront and i want to ask you this question it's it's it's more general question and each of you may have a unique way of approaching this but what do you think is the most important benefit of the oer z degree degrees for your students um you know so far we have some anecdotal evidence i don't think that there's any we don't have long term outcomes data at this point on the z degrees because they've just been deployed fairly recently um but can you what what is your thought about the most important benefit for students um perhaps beyond cost and maybe cost is a piece of it and and why um you know why is this so important and what have students said can you can you share some of their thoughts and um how they're uh how they're addressing the z tz degrees i'm happy to start um our friend amanda taintor from reedley college conducted a survey of reedley college students a couple of years ago asking about the impact of textbook cost and included the option for open ended responses and one of the responses really really sticks with me uh a student said the system sucks the system is rigged the rich get richer and stay rich the poor get poorer and stay poor poor can't go to college can't get educated and so on and that you know it tears up my heart i think it tears up all of us as as educators but it made me realize that and i've heard this elsewhere and seen anecdotal evidence of this elsewhere that student many students view some of us as part of the dang system that is part of the rich staying rich and the poor staying poor and that's not what i why i signed up to be an educator you know i i so so taking away that feeling that students have of getting nickled and dime paying a fee this paying a fee for that and constantly constantly thinking about money removing that worry removing that cynicism to a little extent i hope will be the primary benefit helping our students to believe that education is indeed a social good as well as you know a good for them personally thank you james um tony or lori yeah i'll jump in briefly i agree with what james said he made some great points um you know just from campus anecdotes i think one of the greatest benefits to students again it's tied to cost saving but um the ability for them to take more courses to graduate sooner um you know it makes it possible but the other thing is not having to deal with uh systems that are locked down and the the technological challenges and nightmares that go along with that having access to the information day one or possibly even you know in many cases within soon a week before the courses begin and they're able to keep that information and you know not pay for it or or buy an inexpensive version of the textbook so i think there are a lot of different benefits to students and obviously the benefits to faculty as well and as i digress a little bit faculty um you know from the pedagogical perspective they have a lot more freedom over the curriculum and and they're able to shape that content in their uh in their lesson plans based on their specific needs and i think it engages the students more wonderful and i have certainly heard that as well from students um that the there are professors who are teaching with oer seem to be more engaged they understand the material better and um lori i want to give you a chance to i think i think also um all of all of the courses i teach are uh use open ed resources and i actually authored the book for the reading class because i didn't feel it was bridging a gap very well between what students know and what they need to know um in global studies we were in you know very small rural minnesota and to create materials that are not necessarily for a junior and a four-year college in the middle of an urban area i can connect the uh objectives of a global study class to what the students are doing in addition we're also moving into more open pedagogy and asking students to write units for all of these classes so i think we're we have enough um open ed resources courses so we're actually moving in that direction which is pretty exciting on a little small campus yeah thank you for that lori it's wonderful to get that faculty perspective and i just want to touch back on what james had said about taking that worry away from students and we did a few impact stories of students this last year who were involved in z tz degrees and one of them had gone part time for many years and she said the reason she went part time was because she couldn't afford the textbooks and that required her to go part time and when she heard about the z degrees this was just so exciting for her and she's now going to graduate this spring because she was able to come back full time um after some stopouts so it really um talking to students has really been an eye opener about how this takes a lot of stress out of their lives and makes it possible for them to move quicker as tony mentioned can i say one other thing wanna please do on top of the benefits not not a benefit for students necessarily but maybe just a personal benefit of working on a statewide project and i'm curious if tony and lori bethav found this as well i have i've met and been able to be inspired by so many leaders in our california community colleges whom i didn't know before you know you just think oh my gosh there you know there's so many incredible people out there working on this project who started to form this network you know and it's just it's just uh just stunning for me and gratifying for me to to to see the the strength and passion leadership at at so many of our colleges so that's been really really gratifying yeah we've seen the same thing and and one of the primary focuses of suny oer services is creating these communities of practice and they've really taken on a life of their own and and it is exciting and reassuring and pleasing to see that you know faculty are so engaged and they're passionate about this and they're very staunch supporters of it so we've seen that as well great i'm going to move to our our last question and um keeping an eye on the chat here as well but so what are your plans for growing and sustaining uh your oer z tz degrees and i know this is this is a long a long answer question but um in the short term um and you know you can give us our your longer term vision later if need be but um where do you see this going next and lory death how about if i start with you sure ana on our little campus we um are hoping to apply for a um well our very short term is a campus budget right so we've we're with our campuses now investing money into our efforts and so in the fall and spring next year our community of practice with open uh oer open pedagogy will be funded by the campus but we hope to do a multi-campus initiative in the following year so hopefully that'll be a state initiative those that's just our little our um efforts at sustainability right now okay i don't know about further than that all right well that's that's it's good that you're focusing on next year that's wonderful all right um james or tony who would like to go next well i i think we've got maybe three three different levels here uh in california first of all i think sort of short term uh we've encouraged the colleges to connect oer and ztc to other things that are happening at their campus so the a lot of a lot of initiatives and funding around reducing equity gaps a lot of initiative and funding around creating guided pathways so we're encouraging and we hope giving tools to our grantees to make that case internally that here at this college we should be part of the guided pathways plan that's sort of short term medium term our statewide faculty senate here in california community colleges were successful in receiving funding from the state legislature to uh support adoption uh and and creation in some in some courses of oer content and in particular to work on homework systems openly licensed homework systems first in math and then another stem field so that's a that's a wonderfully faculty driven project i think in the medium term uh and they've got funding for a number of years and the medium term that's going to help drive awareness and and bring more uh resources to the ecosystem and then long term uh the collective we are working on uh refunding the ztc project so hopefully uh in a in a year or two uh we will continue what we've already started here but we'll be doing it uh perhaps uh with a foundation of more content and greater awareness thanks to our colleagues at the statewide academic senate toni would you like to address that question sure uh i think you know the great work that's going on in california and minnesota and so many other states new york um you know just in in suny we talked about the 15 plus oer degree programs we have now we hope that this current body of work uh and the ready to adopt catalog will will spur on other senior campuses to to look at uh adopting and creating their own oer degree pathways we're not entirely shifting the focus away from degree programs we think it's very important and we want to continue to support those and we'll continue to support those um but we're also funding some creation projects in order to plug some of those gaps where there's a lack of needed courses and there's a lot of collaborative effort going on right now and that's one of the things we're working on bringing cohorts of campuses together to talk about some of these things and we talk about some of the things that are most important to them that may be the creation of more degree programs it could be collaborating on individual courses so um so we're looking at that but we're taking some different approaches and focusing our efforts in some other areas as well okay thank you very much tony and you know we're just coming up on the hour um i just have a few more slides um and if you have questions uh out there please just type them in the chat window and we'll hit those in just a moment um i just wanted to let you know if you're not currently on our community email list and would like to join the link is right there um it's on our our website and if you go to cccoer.org and go to the community email link you can join our conversation and our ongoing um yeah conversation we and we advertise all our webinars and all of our archives are sent out on this list as well um we have one last spring webinar um in um june on june 5th on regional models for oer adoption and this is really uh exciting um area that's developing and we will have the midwestern higher ed uh compact joining us and also folks from the pennsylvania affordability uh textbook program joining us for that webinar so we hope to see you on june 5th and we want to thank you once again for joining us today and um if i haven't seen any other questions at this point um but um if you have any in the next few minutes just go ahead and type those in the chat window i think uh lori beth james and tony will be here for a few more minutes and i want to thank them profusely for their for their time and expertise uh this afternoon um just really a wealth of information on um oer and ztz degrees the motivation the impact and um some of the challenges all right thanks everyone thank you bye guys great job tony and lori beth and thank you unan liz absolutely yeah thanks all of you as well likewise all right have a great afternoon you too