 Thank you for joining our program, Open Illinois, Advancing Statewide OER Efforts. I'm Nicole Swanson, Senior Coordinator of Library Services, Nat Reach at Carly, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois. Hello, and I'm Elizabeth Clarridge, Director of Coxswain Services at Carly. Hello, I'm Michelle Lee, the Senior Coordinator for Open Illinois, and the Program Director for the Illinois Scores, Grant. In this program, we will share our methods of building a statewide OER community and helping advance the OER efforts across our member libraries by providing centralized support. We hope the information we share will spark ideas on how you can grow your own OER efforts. Carly members include all Illinois public universities, all community colleges, and most private colleges and universities, including special and research libraries, like the Illinois State Library and Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Our members range in size from small institutions with a solo librarian to large research institutions. Carly is a member-driven organization and what kicked off our support of OER efforts in the state was in 2017 when our members crowdfunded a consortium membership in the Open Textbook Network, the predecessor of the Open Education Network. Our program's focus today is sharing how we are working to build expertise and cross-institutional collaborations through continuing education opportunities. Our Central Repository Open Illinois on OER Commons and our grant received from the U.S. Department of Education, Illinois Scores, support for the creation of open educational resources. As a consortium, we work centrally to nurture a statewide OER community and coordinate opportunities to build understanding and expertise among our members. These efforts are directly reflected in our continuing education programming. We are also a member of the Professional Development Alliance, or PDA, a group of 10 library consortia across the U.S. that offer free online professional development programming to our members. We do open our OER continuing at opportunities to this broader audience when appropriate, as well as benefit from the programs our PDA partners share. Our initial outreach efforts focused on educational opportunities for librarians, administrators, and faculty. Carly's Open Educational Resources Task Force helped develop our first website, an OER course understanding and promoting open educational resources, which draws heavily from the OER and train the trainer program, was developed to educate new OER practitioners and supporters. This was instituted virtually when COVID hit and has held over three weekly one and a half hour sessions. We limited the enrollment in this course to encourage community building among Carly members, and we offer it multiple times throughout the year. We also offer a recurring OER faculty workshop, which is open to members of Carly and the Professional Development Alliance. Carly member faculty who attend are invited to write reviews of OER in the Open Textbook Library afterwards. This opportunity is possible through our OER membership and it's a beneficial way that faculty can engage with OER. The evaluation they receive after writing a review helps our members identify faculty at their institutions who are interested in adapting or creating OER for their courses and on what timeline. We've created an open educational resources email list for our members to ask questions, share success stories and share upcoming OER programs and opportunities. Other ways we're building expertise across the consortia is through providing a limited number of scholarships per year for the members accepted into the OER certificate and OER librarianship program. Members who complete the OER certificate program are invited to participate as instructors in our OER course and faculty workshops, along with members of the Carly OER committee and Carly staff. Monthly OER committee members also lead topical OER office hours. They provide an opportunity for OER community to meet and talk about what's working well or not so well and gain ideas from each other for local efforts. Topics of open office hours last year included open washing, engaging faculty through a community of practice, funding for OER, faculty and student collaborations and OER and accessibility. In the last year we've shared several programs promoting the use of our OER commons hub open Illinois, which Elizabeth will be discussing soon. We've begun offering more advanced programs, including a wonderful two part open pedagogy series that will cross taught last March when introducing open pedagogy and exploring strategies for making open pedagogy work at your institution. The series was open to the professional development alliance and more broadly. Carly is currently coordinating continuing education opportunity to support our sub grant recipients for the Illinois scores grant. Our team of experts are offering programs relevant to the creation of OER, including instructional design, creative commons licensing, accessibility and 3D printing. While these programs are specifically for Carly members, the recordings are open to everyone. We are expanding our outreach this year to students. This includes developing a student survey on textbook affordability in our state, as well as the spring program including a student panel. As a library consortia, we have well established communication channels to reach Carly member librarians. But I just want to point out that we rely on our amazing members to share OER programs and opportunities with their campus faculty partners and students through their own local campus channels. We are also sharing knowledge about OER with state leaders. Carly's executive director and Craig serves on the Illinois college course materials affordability and equitable access task force, and we're exploring future outreach opportunities. These are 11 ways we are working to support a statewide OER community and coordinate opportunities to build understanding and expertise. Finally, we assess our continuing education offerings with the Carly Open Educational Resources Committee, as well as regularly review feedback from program evaluations to ensure we're meeting the needs of our members. And next up is Elizabeth Clarence. Thank you, Nicole. I'll be sharing you information about our OER commons open Illinois hub. So once we developed programming to help our members with their local open initiatives, we turned to how to showcase the open educational resources that faculty within Illinois have created. Carly isn't in a position to host the resources. So we worked with OER commons to develop the open Illinois hub. Our vision is that the open Illinois hub becomes a resource for finding OER and the place for members to create or share their locally created open educational resources. By combining resources from many Carly member institutions into a seamless environment, faculty, staff, students, and the public are able to search across Illinois institutions and collections. We've customized our hub to include four main section about open Illinois, explore, collaborate and create and getting started. We selected OER commons for several reasons. OER commons defines itself as a digital public library and collaborative platform. The site launched in 2007 by XNE, an independent education nonprofit that provides infrastructure to identify high quality OER and provides space for collaboration. Carly is able to have a branded space on the site that is identifiable to our members. And by using the groups feature within OER commons, Carly can provide institutional branded space for our members. Groups can also be used for collaborative projects. And lastly, it is recently priced. Within the explore section of our hub, there are tabs for both curated collections and OER from Illinois. The curated collections are resources identified by members of the Carly OER committee and staff as OER that may be relevant for Carly members. The criteria for inclusion in the 19 subject areas include education level of the resource, its currency, and outside of the subject area, language acquisition and study. Most of the resources in the curated collections will be in English. The OER from Illinois tab is a space to locate OER developed in our state. The explore tabs look visually similar. An additional clue that you are in the OER from Illinois tab is found in the subject collection titles noted here with the red box, the added suffix dash OER from Illinois. The collaborate and create section of our hub is where Carly members may have an institutional presence or form a working group which Carly really considers those more project oriented. Carly allows members to use their institutional space as they wish. Members can highlight resources and share information about their local programs. They can submit locally created content as well as create OER using the OER Commons native open author tool. They can also curate quality resources that may be useful for their campus community and organize them into folders within their institutional space. We've had members go both routes. Some highlight their locally created resources while others have curated resources that are used by their faculty or may be useful to their community. Also within their institutional space, there's the ability to have threaded discussions within the group. And that helps to build community around OER and open educational practices. So next up is Michelle who will share information about Illinois scores, a project to create OER. Hello, so I'm going to be talking about why we applied for the open textbook pilot program. So we had a lot of members who were very interested in open education resources, especially members on our open OER committee through Carly. The problem is Carly didn't have funds for creating open educational resources, so that led us to look elsewhere. And Carly is always looking for ways to add value to our members when the fund for the improvement of post-secondary education through the US Department of Education came to our attention. We were encouraged by many of our members to pursue the opportunity, utilizing knowledgeable Carly staff and drawing from the expertise of our members, we were able to craft an outstanding grant application. Thanks to the Illinois Scores grant, which we received, its scores sends for the support for the creation of open educational resources. We are always able to offer sizable competitive sub awards to our members for the creation and adoption of open textbooks and ancillary materials. So we have four goals as part of the grant. The first goal was to eliminate textbook costs for high enrollment courses in the focus area in Carly member institutions. We are able to produce accessible Creative Commons licensed OER textbooks and associated learning objects for students and faculty. The second goal was to improve student learning outcomes by increasing the use of open source materials and by including personal learning experiences. The, you know, the idea that open educational resources create a space for open pedagogy. And with this we're able to collect and publish rich data about OER use for the purpose of advocacy analysis and planning. Our third goal was to develop local expertise about open educational resources and ancillary material creation, publishing, dissemination, adoption and use. And with this in this area we're able to engage Carly members institutions in the creation of open educational resources. The fourth, the fourth goal is to create a scalable OER model that can be replicated across multiple disciplines and institutions. And in this goal we're able to engage Carly member institutions to participation in various professional development activities. We were really interested in making this grant and a statewide collaboration and these are, this is a sample of some of the partners who worked with us on the grant, including the Illinois Board of Higher Education, the Illinois Community College Board, our lovely Carly's lovely OER committee and various other groups that you can see here. The eligibility for applying for the grant. We strongly encourage our members, but did not require multi institutional collaboration because we are really interested in impacting the largest number of students in Illinois. Each work group that applied for a grant had to include one librarian, one subject specialist, one instructional designer, one 3D printing coordinator, one accessibility coordinator, one copyright coordinator, a proofreader and an industry sector representative. And these work groups were replicated within Carly. We had our own team of experts in these areas. We did not require that the people on the work group, the applicant work group be experts. We are fully committed to creating this expertise across the state through training that Carly is offering to our members. So, one of the things that we're able to do is to ensure the development of knowledge and skills necessary to build a vibrant OER community for our members. So, with that, we are able to receive Illinois Scores grant, which, and through the grant, we were, we are able to create competitive sub awards in the focus area of the human condition care development and lifespan. We're able to, that was on our first round, we're able to expand that now. And each round we are aiming to award a minimum of eight OER peer reviewed, ancillary material, textbooks and ancillary materials. And we're one of the several 50 grantees who initially received partial funding and then later was made whole. So it's forced us to be flexible with what we're offered, we're able to offer, and how we're approaching this project. The next grant, please, next slide please. I wanted to show this slide as an example of how we are able to achieve geographical statewide representation. This slide very much mirrors the slide we posted earlier that shows all of the Carly members. We are able to award in the first round nine sub grants, which equaled 13 institutions, two of the sub grant awardees were collaborative efforts. We're able to do this in addition to geographical representation. We also have representation across the board as among our community colleges, private institutions and research institutions. We're in the process of looking for round number, getting applications for round number two, and we'll see where we go from there. So as an example, the next slide shows the sum of the subject areas for our first round. We have chemistry, nursing and health psychology physical therapy and public administration. And you can see here that two of the groups are actually collaborative efforts, which we're really excited about. Next slide please. And so what we hope that our work on the OER grant is not just a model of how to work on a large grant like this, but it's actually a model for how to work at promoting open educational resources. Right. So one of the first activities you need to do is get out the word about the grant or get out the word about your program. So you can do this with interviews, email campaigns, create workshops, right? Our workshops walked potential applicants through the application process, but more importantly, after the application, after the awardees, the awards were announced, we created workshops that were that would help them create the open educational services such as instructional design, 3D printing, which was a requirement of our grant, accessibility, creative commons, and copyright. And we're constantly reworking those to make them something that our constituents need. We also foster collaboration, right? We created a Slack channel. We created meet, greet, and collaborate events, which were speed dating for people who are interested in collaborating on the project. We also hold weekly office hours. And those office hours where our staff is available for answering questions, offering guidance, giving suggestions. So before, anything that someone needs to talk about related to OER and the Illinois Scores grant, we're there for, we're there for you. The fifth thing we do is support for applicants prior to the award and after the award, right? So before everyone with the awards were noted, we met with all of the applicants, talked about their application, ways they could improve it. And then we've been meeting with them regularly to talk about their progress. So we're constantly communicating with them. Next slide, please. And so what have we learned? And what we've learned is that, you know, there are some practicalities of creating an OER program and running a grant. And one of those things is that you need to regularly offer educational programs about OER. Those programs need to be supported and maintained, constantly updated. Then we also learned that there's a changing paradigm for educational materials is intensive. It's not a one-stop fix it and it's done, and they constantly have to be maintained. The idea of looking to the future as part of the present, right? So you're constantly thinking about what can we do to help? What can we do to improve things? Logistics of what we've learned. Communication is key. That is something that has to be constantly maintained. Team-based implementation is very helpful in these times. Everyone is overworked. So figuring out ways that we can work together to ease everybody's burden, but still make really wonderful open educational resources that benefit students. Moving forward, continue to apply what we've learned to future efforts, right? Working to create a state-based legislative initiative. This is our next goal. Finally, the last slide. We'd like to thank you very much for joining us. And we'd like you to think about not just, oh, you know, we, sorry, we came up with this project, this presentation, as a way to encourage people to think creatively about their initiatives, their OER programs. We don't have to start big. It doesn't have to be large. But the model that we've created here at Carly I think is a really useful model and has a lot of components that can be adapted for a variety of programs. And we hope that you've learned something today and that you might be able to utilize this in your own programs. Thank you very much.