 Well, welcome. Thank you. I'm really pleased to introduce you to the open skill project that we're doing funded by $3.5 million grant from the Department of Education to a consortium that is led by Arizona State University. But that includes as integral partners, the three largest community colleges in the country, Amidae College, Ivy Tech Community College, and Maricopa Community Colleges. And this is a team that's come together to try to really help transform the OER landscape, especially around workforce development and skills development. What we're doing in this project is developing OER tools that promote active learning that implicitly teach essential skills. We're now available now to use in any discipline in any LMS or to bundle with content packages that we're creating that can replace entire textbooks. What we're going to do in the next 20 minutes or so is giving you an overview of why open skill, why we're doing what we're doing, and then give you a look at the tools and the content packages, and then talk to you about co development and scale with our partners who are here, and then answer any questions that you might have. So let's talk about why open skill. So the Department of Education, it was very interested in expanding adoption of education resources that's the reason that we were funded and the reason for this whole program. And as we analyze the barriers to adoption, what is it that's keeping more faculty from using OER. We took a look at this, this well known survey, and found that that one of the major reasons one of the major barriers to adoption is a perception that OER is often high quality. And so we wanted to do is focus on improving the quality of OER offerings, provide a pathway to take conventional we are and make it higher quality in order to make it more appealing for more faculty to adopt. So our theory of change is pretty simple that by improving the quality of OER, we will expand the use of OER. So in doing so will meet the two goals that the Department of Education really has one is to save students money by having students use open education resources instead of expensive textbooks, and to improve student outcomes by having higher quality learning materials lead to, to higher quality student outcomes. And you're going to see in a few minutes how we're doing that exactly. The focus for this though, one of the things that we learned as we spoke to a career counselors workforce advisors and faculty at our community college partners is that there's already an abundance of OER materials that focus on content that focus on, on disciplinary content in particular, what's lacking is what the workforce really needs which is more learners more students graduating who are trained in what we're calling essential skills is the skills needed for personal academic and vocational success. That's what workforce development really needs, as much as if not more so than more content knowledge. And that's what it seemed to us as we looked at the landscape that the OER world really kind of lacked. And so the focus that we adopted as we asked ourselves how can we best improve the quality of OER. The focus that we adopted is to focus on developing tools that can enhance essential skills that can be paired with content in many different disciplines. And so that's what you're going to see now. Thank you Ariel. So now we'll take you into what are our resources, how you can actually use them and we'll try and do a short demonstration of some of these. So, in this project, we have developed what we're calling open skill tools. And each of these tools are designed, as you can see, to address specific essential skills taken from a framework from numerous different frameworks. And so we have four tools available, Chaudit, Review It, Planet and Tour. And we will go a bit deeper on the Chaudit tool. So I'll just quickly reference and discuss some of the others. The Review It tool provides the ability to build an assignment and allow students to review other students work. And so developing reading comprehension and critique and communication. The Planet tool is very versatile. Essentially can be anything from a note taking tool to a lab report, or a build your career path. So you can set different functionality, different levels of what you want students to be able to do from just filling out bullet points and tabs to building out a whole series of different tabs and kind of chunking up information. So the idea here is that students learn how to organize, visualize, and plan. The Tour of Tour is a bit different to the others and provides an immersive environment for students where they move through a panoramic image, which could be a into a cell, or it could be a some geological location, or even just a work environment to teach students how to interact in a social environment. So lots of flexibility instructors can build these and our team supports them integrated into their LMSs as we will see. So one of these tools is the Chaudit tool and I will play a short video here to demonstrate the functionality. Open Skills Chaudit creates an interactive environment where students design and refine charts to best communicate a message. By choosing the prompt and the data set, faculty create lessons contextualized to the students and the course. For instance, this assignment looks at not only the national data, but the data of the specific state the students are in. Once the assignment is created, the students receive the prompt and the data set along with the default graph. They'll adjust the parameters on the graph and then explain how their design addresses the prompt. In this case, by working with the graph, they'll find the disconnect between the national average and the pattern emerging in the state data and highlight it visually. Through this interactive design process, students will improve essential skills such as reasoning, numeracy, and communication. Open Skill tools can integrate seamlessly with your LMS, such as Canvas or Blackboard, and enable easy auto and manual grading that populates the LMS gradebook. Review It is an interactive tool where students anonymously review peer work with an easy to use interface and faculty designed rubrics. Review It is not just for written essays, but customizable for most assignments. It can even complement other Open Skill tool assignments. In this example, students are writing a case study analysis in a biodiversity topic. Faculty customize a rubric with topic categories to help students give precise, effective feedback. Then students submit their assignments and critique their peers' work using the customized rubric and topic-linked comments. Review It emphasizes the importance of feedback by having peers not only assess the submitted work, but also the quality of the feedback. Through this process, students will improve essential skills like reading comprehension, critique, and communication. Open Skill tools integrate seamlessly into LMSs such as Canvas or Blackboard, which enables easy auto and manual grading back to the LMS gradebook. And if faculty want to repeat the process for a second draft, faculty can easily create another cycle of review linked to the same assignment. Tourist is a browser-based tool for creating 360-degree interactive experiences to share stories that convey a sense of place. Open Skill tools can integrate seamlessly to LMSs such as Canvas or Blackboard for faculty to create customized assignments that fit to their course. In the LMS, faculty create a default virtual tour. Then students will add or edit 360-degree images and populate those spaces with text, photos, videos, and more. Throughout the design process, students use their creativity to paint a multi-sensory experience, bringing the tour to life. Their digital storytelling will convey a sense of place about a location that is connected to the course content. Students will improve essential skills such as technical proficiency, creativity, innovation, and cultural awareness. Once the student has finished their virtual tour, they can publish and share the link for the faculty to view. Planet is a customizable, digital-tabbed notebook that helps students break large projects into actionable steps. Faculty customize the planner for their course-specific project or goal, as well as choose the student's editing level. In this example, at the beginning of the semester, faculty created most of the layout to guide the students. But towards the end of the course, the students would design their own layout. Students receive the planner and fill out the faculty-designed portions and, if allowed to edit, refine the planner to their needs. Planet puts an emphasis on the ownership of the process. By visualizing the path to their goals and organizing actionable steps, students will improve essential skills such as visualization, organization, and responsibility. In the end, they'll complete their project and have their planet assignment as a record of their journey. Since OpenSkill tools integrate seamlessly with LMSs such as Canvas or Blackboard, faculty can enable auto and manual grading, which will populate to the LMS Greatbook. In addition to the OpenSkill tools, we have also provided five content packages. These are targeting high-enrollment courses that were chosen by the three different community college partners. These are English Composition 1 and 2, introductory chemistry, and biology, interpersonal communication, and student success. These content packages are essentially OER from many different providers that are being curated by our faculty. We've gone through iterative rounds of review by our faculty and they represent content with some formative assessment. And we can bundle this all together with the content packages and the tools to generate multiple assignments. You can even string one assignment into another assignment. And we can provide this to different institutions as a service so we can help with the learning design. We can help the integration and we can provide technical support and even some level of professional development. So to make this real, we're going to now move into a demonstration of our tool and this content package. So I'm going to do this from inside a Canvas course here. So in order to build a tool, it's quite simple. I'm now in the instructor view and if I was an instructor wanting to build an assignment, I would add an assignment. So I'd create a new assignment and I can call it the OpenEd demo and I can add this assignment. And then when I click on it and edit it, I will have the ability to set it as an external tool and then choose, for this demonstration, the Charted tool. So it's as simple as that when you're building your assignment. And for this demonstration, it will load the interface that only an instructor sees. And they can add the title of the assignment, the prompt for the students, they can duplicate an existing assignment if they have created a previous assignment. But for this here, we can add the burned acreage data. So this is a data source that we have, which contains the year average and so the year, the California acreage burnt and the average of the whole nation. So it's a simple data source that we can use. And so you can turn on the auto grading, you can then give students additional prompts, you know, why did you choose this chart. Give students to explain a deeper level, what why they chose this visualization, what they were hoping to surface in this visualization. And then you simply take the data source and paste it into the tool. You can click on the preview to make sure that it is imported correctly. And then you will just create the assignment. And that is it. So now we have an integrated assignment that I will then save, we can assign whatever grade we wish. Save that as an instructor, you can load this assignment. And then it will allow you to review students grade individually assign a grade. And then submit the student experience is similar in that the student will load the assignment work through the data. You can review the prompt. Choose a chart and visualization that they would like here a scatter plot. I can edit the chart and customize it by adding trend lines for example, and then submit a prompt and save my assignment or submit. Finally, we have the content packages, which are available to supplement the assignments and the tools. And then here is an example of our biology content package so this is a full textbook replacement. An example here some formative assessment and some content I believe open stacks content is here and this provides some formative assessment some hints. And I did I get this section. Alright, so now I'd love to hand it over to our community college partners. Each of them have an interesting story to tell and some experiences working with over 60 faculty in this project. I think the collaboration is unique. And so I could start then with Lisa young and then we'll, we'll, we'll hand it over to Lady Emma, and then to Mark to finish off. Well, this has been a really exciting project to work on and as Ariel mentioned, we are three of the largest community colleges in the nation. And so just to put that into scale, at the Maricopa community colleges we have 10 separately accredited colleges with 120,000 students. We have 1400 full time faculty and about 4300 adjunct faculty. And so when you look at how do we get faculty involved in a project like this. It's not necessarily easy. And so one of the things that we were able to do with the Maricopa community colleges is we leverage faculty as champions to reach out into the different disciplines and get faculty to work on the projects as subject matter experts as reviewers as content package developers. And so we were able to actively engage them. And for our institution, that was really a way that we were able to recruit faculty to work on the project. I think that one of the richest parts of this is that our course. I think that one of the most rich parts of working on this grant was our faculty who were working on the course content packages, got to work with faculty from all three institutions, and leverage their best minds. And so all of their experience to develop these content packages and a lot went into that in that we had to map our competencies and see where there were areas that were alike. And so that we could develop these content packages that could be used at all three of the colleges. And so I think that was really a rich opportunity for our faculty. Lisa. All right, we'll hand it over to Emma at Miami Dade College. I'd like to say that one of the best things about our collaboration and our partnership was the fact that amongst our, our team are in the consortium. We decided that in order to be successful and to do all the different course content packages that we would do each of us. One of the five of us specifically Lisa being one of them myself as well and Mel and Dr O'Connor from Ivy Tech, we would be the leads the subject coaches to cheer on our faculty help them to meet together in order to stay focused and meet the timelines that was initiated in our consortium. So we meet periodically we assess the needs of each of the course content packages constantly, and because the needs are always evolving and as subject coaches, we would meet periodically with each other virtually. And so we had some experts as they say, another tool that definitely helped us with slack, we got to slack each other back and forth when we had different ideas, and that really helped with the communication between the entire team and helping to pull all this together. So it really was, this is not just a collaboration in name only but it actually was a living breathing collaboration and we have our baby open skill was birth from this entire experience. And I think one of the, one of the things that was very impactful for this project whether the ability to get faculty along with us the whole journey. And they were able to see iterations of these tools. And so they could provide early feedback when we were still in a beta phase, and we had the capacity to then make improvements. Not over engineer the product and get those out into the hands of the faculty to test, and then for the first time this fall, now in pilot, hoping to scale up really big in the spring semester and next year. So I think that has been extremely useful and allowed us to effectively and efficiently use the grant funds. So handed over to our final college partner, Mark at Ivy Tech Community College, thank you. So, one of the biggest strengths about this project is that we have such a solid framework that even though each of the campuses and each of the institutions have gone through many changes. Some of them revolving around staff that have been involved with the project, we've still been successful, we're still continuing the course. I mean here at Ivy Tech alone we've had for even possibly more staffing changes that were associated with the project but we're still continuing our progress we're still getting faculty involved. We're still looking at ways of using these tools and the thing that excites me being a former faculty member myself is looking at the tools. And they're so, you know, platform agnostic, and are focused on these essential skills that could be incorporated any sort of curriculum. I taught computer networking in the past and to me I'm thinking about, oh I could use tour to work on a server, you know, stack, you know where I could show students how to operate within the server room, or, you know, perhaps I even use it in geography course where there could be some ruins or some unique architecture and having the students go through that so I think the thing that I'm just so excited about is that we've got a great team working at each of these different institutions but also we've got a commitment to using quality tools to form quality OER that is faculty driven and student focused. Thanks Mark. Yeah, and none of this content is static it never it never is it will always be you know improving and so as we scale, we hope to continuously bring back feedback from faculty, improve the content packages support more improvements in the tools, and they are really an open source framework so any developer can actually come and build upon these tools, and take them into directions that we never imagined and build a completely new tool. So that will be one of the contributions that we're making out of this project that I think is really exciting once we start generating a community around, you know, new assignments and creative ways to use these tools and we start to surface them and, and have them move out in the new year. So, with that a few closing remarks, and just to bring up our final message here of what we're doing again OER tools to promote active learning and implicitly teach essential skills so available now. We can work with anyone that is interested in using these we can give you access you can try them out. We can support the bundling of these tools with content packages to develop a textbook replacement with your institution. So that comes with some learning design support and technical support. It's all part of the grant funds or was and allows us to do that. So, if you are interested, thank you, and please get in touch. The website is open skill hub dot org, and you can email me directly at David dot shanstein at in spark dot education. And we thank all the speakers today. Hope to be in contact with you soon and get this OER out into the world.