 So, this is a fishbowl format. I'll do some introductions in a minute, but I will just kind of explain how that's going to go, and then I'll do some introductions. But one thing that we're trying to get here is participation from the crowd. And so, if you feel like moving up closer to us, you're welcome to do so. I'm not going to force anyone, but it would be nice to have people a bit closer. Okay, thank you for joining us. What we're talking about today is systems who have implemented OER programs. What was the, and particularly we have four really interesting systems who've done quite extensive work in OER programs. And the question posed to this group is what were the watershed moments or watershed decisions that transformed the process and or process, depending on where you're coming from, of that program. This is a participatory format here, and so the way it's going to work is I have some questions and we're going to do some introductions in a minute. And then as much as possible, I'm hoping this group can talk amongst themselves for a while, posing each other questions. And then we're going to request to open up to questions to all of you. There is a catch, however. If you want to ask a question, you are asked and invited to come up on stage and sit and join the fishbowl and that will knock someone off of the group here. If you feel terribly uncomfortable with that idea, we also have a roving mic that will be able to be brought to you to ask your question. But so be prepared, get yourself psyched up while we're doing this to think about how you want to ask your question and get psyched up to come up on stage with us. And we will be delighted to have you join us. OK, I want to frame as well as I mentioned the topic today is watershed moments, watershed decisions, these big critical things that happen when things go from idea to an explosion that you didn't expect or maybe did expect and hoped for. But what are these kinds of decisions and moments that we have that in system level OER projects that have made this happen? I do want to make also a comment. I know this is OE Global. Just a quick show of hands. Who here is not from North America? OK, a couple. So just very important to note that that the context in North America is very different than is is in Europe, Asia, other parts of the world and largely the at least the the instigation of OER projects in North America, largely around cost to students and the drivers are different elsewhere. So all our representatives up here are representatives from North American institution. So I think keep that in mind. But I'm hoping that some of the watershed is about the excitement of doing things that isn't just reducing costs for students. OK, so what's important here is I think that we all want to understand what are these things, these decisions that people made that created some kind of energy that was exciting and unexpected. And hopefully we can talk a little bit about that today. And I think also just to say maybe some watershed of things we did that were terrible decisions or really went wrong. And maybe we could avoid those or maybe some of you could avoid those if we've already made those mistakes up here. Each of the four esteemed esteemed esteemed panelists that we have here are representatives of institutions and systems who've implemented some of the most famous OER programs in the whole world and I will just quickly introduce everyone. So we have my name is Hugh, by the way. I should have done that right at the beginning. I'm the CEO at Pressbooks and Pressbooks has a good fortune. I guess all four of you use Pressbooks in different kinds of ways. But Pressbooks for those who don't know is a platform used by many OER publishing programs and we are very proud to be a key part of this community and also happy to be in person again. So our panelists here, I will go from left to right. Clint Laund, who is one of the first people from the world of education to send me an email and say, do you think that Pressbooks might work for an OER publishing program? And I said, yes. But Clint Laund is at BC Campus. Amanda's also at BC Campus. Exactly. Thank you, Amanda. And for those who don't know, BC Campus was probably certainly one of probably the first really big OER system level projects that really got this movement moving, at least from my perspective. Mary Gu is from Ontario's in the house, from Ecamp's Ontario. Ecamp's Ontario has done tons of awesome stuff. If you look at the Pressbooks directory, you're going to see lots of it is filled with all the great content coming of in Ontario. I think Ontario really had the advantage as well of building on a lot of the learnings from BC Campus and thinking about how to implement things there. We also have Boyang Che, who's from the, I always get this acronym wrong so I'm going to say the words as they're written down here, the Washington State Board of Technical and Community Colleges. And how many colleges are represented? 34. Yeah. A little bit newer in the system level implementation than Ecamp's Ontario and BC Campus, but no less amazing. And finally, Stephanie Green, who is from the Maricopa Community Colleges. And Stephanie, unlike the rest of the panelists, is a faculty member and so she's coming from a different perspective maybe than the system administers. Okay. That is the introduction, so thank you everyone. And I'm going to start with just the first question and I will just ask each of our panelists and try to do it relatively briefly, but just to introduce yourself, your system program and what the folks has been and maybe give us a hint of some things you might talk about, but just give us an overview of who you are, what you do and what your system is doing and maybe the scale of things and how it's been going. So handing over to Clint. Hi, is this work? Yep, good. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I know it's the first session right after lunch and it's also the last day and so I think hopefully the energy is not starting to wane a little bit so I really appreciate you coming to this session. My name is Clint Lalonde. I'm the director of open education for BC campus. I use the pronouns he, him, and I'm very happy to be back here on Treaty Six territory and Métis region for territory. Anybody who has followed my social media for the last couple of days knows that I spent a lot of time here when I was between the ages of 19 and 24 living in Edmonton and this is the first time I've been back here for 30 years so it's been very nice to kind of come back and revisit. One of the places that I like to consider my home. I don't live in Edmonton anymore. I now live in Laquungen territory, which is the traditional territories of the Songhees and Esquimall nations on Vancouver Island, colonially known as Victoria, British Columbia, which is where one of the offices of BC campus is and where we're located. BC campus is a sector-wide support for the British Columbia higher education system and for those of you who are not from Canada, British Columbia, the province just west of here, in Canada we have a higher education as a responsibility of the provinces so we have provincial organizations like eCampus, Campus Manitoba, BC campus to help support initiatives through the post-secondary systems in our relative provinces. So we have 25 public post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. We support those institutions mostly around teaching and learning practices and open education has been a key focus for us. For the past over 20 years we actually had some really visionary leaders around the time that MIT OpenCourseWare began that saw this model and wanted to bring it to British Columbia. And so around I think 2003, 2004 BC campus began a program called the Online Program Development Fund and the intent of that fund was inspired by MIT OpenCourseWare but it was also to try to prepare the system for this fairly new thing that was online learning and how do we develop courses for online learning and how can we share those courses amongst the institutions and so the Online Program Development Fund began with some of those goals in mind to build some system efficiencies. In 2012 we had one of our very first watershed, well not very first, but one of our major watershed moments which I will talk about when a minister of advanced education at the time was in a presentation about the 2012 UNESCO OER recommendation and was very inspired by that and came back to the province and said is there anybody in British Columbia who's doing open education and there happened to be an organization in British Columbia working in open education which was BC campus and that led to the launch of our open textbook program which began in 2012. So we have been doing this for a long time in open education. Our open textbook project has been huge, massive, we've in terms of student savings, I won't always talk about the student savings but it is significant. We have saved students around $40 million in textbook costs through an open textbook project. We fund various creation, collaboration projects around open education, the development of resources, the adaptation of resources. We do work in developing open policy for higher education as well. So my colleague Amanda Coolidge here was very instrumental in working on open tenure framework and we basically are an incubator for open initiatives within the province of British Columbia. I think I will leave it at that and pass it over to Mary. Clint, have you ever considered being less succinct and articulate? It's really truly challenging to be right after you. So let me just like gather myself. So my name is Mary Gu and I'm a librarian with Ecampus Ontario's Open Library. I've been with the library for about a year and a half so I definitely am new to the area, learning as I go, doing my best. So forgive me for any inaccuracies, it's absolutely my fault. But to talk a little bit about Ecampus Ontario, Ecampus Ontario is located in Ontario which is the province sort of on the east side. It looks kind of like a pork chop in my opinion. And it's a provincially funded non-profit and we work with 53 colleges, universities and Indigenous institutions to deliver services, supports, programs to them. And our goal and mission is really to lead and co-design, really important word here, co-design with our member institutions in order to help Ontario's post-secondary sector lead away in terms of creating student focus, student centered and innovative digital learning experiences. I don't think that's exactly the mission but it's most of the right words, so forgive me. But in terms of some of the major milestones with Ecampus, actually I don't think I can talk to that level. I'm going to talk about the Open Library, so forgive me here. We do so much that I find it hard to keep track of all the things that we do. So I'll talk a little about the Open Library. So we first launched in 2017 in part because of the amazing work of BC Campus who were open to collaborating with us. So actually the first set of our collections was a mere copy of BC Campus's amazing work because we wanted to bring that over to the Ontario context. And since then we've grown quite a lot. We've done things like major milestones including metadata project with York universities, of course launching press books that this is very shortly after launching as a library because to have Open Library requires us to provide support in terms of digital. The open publishing aspect, other major projects since then have included things like the creation and launch of H5P Studio which is I think one of the first of its kind when it was launched in 2020, early 2020. So good timing on the team's part at that time. And of course, same time as 2020, well announced in 2019 and then started executing 2020 is the virtual learning strategy which is a major investment by the government of Ontario into the post-secondary sector. And I believe Lindsay already mentioned in the keynote on the first day it's $70 million of investment over three years which is ultimately one of our biggest and of course our most recent watershed moments. Having that funding was incredible for the sector and it's been incredible to see what the sector has done with that money. I think the rest of the comments I'll be making throughout the panel will be reflecting about that because that's mostly what I've experienced in the time that I've been here and also because it can't begin to really articulate all the things that it's been made possible since then. So I'm done for now. Hi, I don't think it's on. Hi, my name is Boyoung. I'm a Palace Associate of Open Education working with Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. I work as state representatives for our Community and Technical Colleges Open Education initiatives. I always thought we'd been doing this for a long time but I realized why he recognized us as one of the newer members. It's been 10 years, only 10 years. And then we first studied about 10 years ago with this statewide project called OpenCourse Library which had a great aim to produce 81 OpenCourse packages and through that project there were a lot of lessons learned about what to do and especially a lot of what not to do. And one of the biggest lessons that we got out of our very initial project like 10 years ago was that there has to be a matching professional development without the suite of faculty support that helps colleges to implement whatever that we've developed practically is going to mean nothing. So we worked really hard to build a suite of professional development that provides all levels of support including our OER 101 training that we have been providing for our system colleges since 2014 and I think accumulated total number of faculty members who went through the training is over I think four or five thousand and we actually stopped counting after that point. And then we've been actually opening our training to the grantees of TACC program and I don't know if anybody remembers. So our training was a flagship training for all TACC grantees from 800 community colleges of this country and then we invited them every month and we used to have 112 people in our training every month. So that was some time. And so after building those suite of professional development tools and repositories and all of those we realized that at some point that you know despite all of this incredible amount of resources that we provide and thousands of faculty members going through our training still OER seems to be remained as this random and elusive opportunity for our students. You have to be super lucky to accidentally sign up for the OER courses. So we thought we saw that as an equity issue which I'll talk about it later as to our conversation and we ended up having this OER and Locos labeling policies fully implemented integrated into our administrative system that currently benefits our students every quarter. And again I will share more details to our conversation today and that's one of our major focus from our system. And from there we realized the direction that we are heading is that whenever we make a move in our open ed we'll make sure that it's functioning within our infrastructure that has three major elements including research, policy and professional development. So whenever we make a decision on any of those items it should be within the, it should be cohesive with other elements. So if we are doing the professional development then it should be data driven. There has to be a policy step backs up and if there is any sort of obstacle we find and if it can be handled by policy change then we'll go for it. So nothing will be done because I felt like it one day. So it actually really helped gaining some credibility within the system. So I think there's now less filling in our agency, in our system that State Board will do something behind college's bag and drop it on their shoulder one day. So there is this sense of a collaborative community investment in open ed and I think I can confidently say that it's actually a norm in our systems. Nobody is surprised or shocked or like, you know, to go against the protest or something. Oh yeah, we get it. It's a good thing. Okay. And I'm Stephanie Green and I am faculty, as you mentioned, at Maricopa County Community Colleges. We're one of ten. We have ten colleges across the Metroplex and I'm fairly new to OER. I I didn't come as I didn't come into this from education, but I was only introduced about four years ago. So and then immediately press book pilot came out at our college and then we were granted funding and we were able to get press books going during the pandemic, which was really very fortunate for us because then we'd have something to communicate and share with our faculty and that was a really big deal. And so the good news is that I was one of the first ones to adopt a press book for my class or create one. And I get to use it and it was really just a handful of that started it, you know, and now we're over 400 books. So now we're like, what are we going to do next? So that's kind of like our one of our watershed moments that I'll speak about a little later. All right. So I think my job is to just inspire some questions. I do want to say for everyone out there, what's important here and that we've chosen these four panelists on purpose and they sound like superheroes because they all are superheroes. But the story is about often finding a way to get the support to make the these initiatives work. And so I'm I'm curious. So it is certain that 70 million dollars sure helps making an OER project easier to implement, maybe not easier, but scaling up. But, you know, one of the things that I'm interested in as as I sort of step aside here is just one of the things that that you feel helped get to the point where someone said yes to to to those requests, because everyone starts with nothing and somehow we have to get to that point where we've proved a certain amount. So anyway, I will step aside perhaps and let let someone else ask a question among this this group. But the first question is just what about that watershed? What was the watershed moment? And maybe maybe I'll start on on the far end there with Stephanie and then and then you can sort of pass that pass it on. Well, like like the others had shared, you know, we also offer, you know, initially, it was like, you know, our OER, I know, programming really began about a decade ago at Maricopa where we came out with Maricopa millions. And the goal was obviously to save money from expensive textbooks, which we did in a record amount of time. And so like like the others have shared, we've saved a lot of money. But also the other thing is program develop, you know, professional development for our faculty. So then offering those sessions to kind of draw them in like, oh, look what I did and then promoting it during like open ed week and things like that. So, you know, we offer them a little bit of monetary support to kind of draw them in. And then hopefully and we obviously once you do it, then you're going to stick with it and you're going to keep doing it and expanding on it, right? And then you kind of build that community of practice within those faculty members about, hey, what did you do? What did you do? And then the other important thing that I failed to mention while I go is that at each of our colleges, we also have like a go-to person and admin person who can help the faculty member that you know who it is on your campus that you can talk to, which is really beneficial. Oh, going to this. For us, our turning point was definitely the thing that I mentioned earlier. Our systems OER and local labeling policies. So, our state has established and implemented these two policies that require our colleges to label the courses that use OER and low-cost labels and the OER and the low-cost materials that are $50 or less. So, that policy, what it does is that that labels actually show up in our students class search page as course attributes. So, students can filter and they can make informed choices at the time of registration. So, those policies have been fully less elated and so now it's part of the state law and integrated into our system colleges, our 34 system colleges administrative system that allows us to have this bird-eye view about total number of class actions labeled and the total number of students enrolled in those classes. And we are actually in the process of connecting those data into our student achievement data, which will give us more holistic view about like true impact of those labels on student achievement and their career path. The thing about this policy is that because it actually show up as a course attributes in the students class search page, it became a visual, OER became a, became this visual option for our students. It brought the students back to the center of the conversation because usually before students were always at the receiving end of OER, like, you know, the everything is made and for faculty members and college administrators and students are just supposed to enjoy the benefit of it, but because it's so obvious, obviously there are students talk about it, they inquire about it, if they don't see it, they question why don't, why does it exist in our class search page for our campus? So now the students are the major and viral force of our systems OER move and it actually does open our eyes and made us really conscious about open pedagogy and this change of our mindset and practice that came from this, the OER and local sibling policies have truly been a turning point in the way we practice in our agency. And later maybe I can delve into more about how we got to that point of establishing the labels. I'm so interested to hear more from you, Bo Yan and Stephanie about the student work, so at Ecampus Ontario, I suppose because the faculty work consortium and our members are the institutions themselves, we are like a little bit removed from the students often in our work, though our team is quite interested when talking more and more about how we can get at the students and understand more of their needs as part of the convening work that we want to be doing. But with that framing, that does mean that a lot of the work we do and the impacts and the programs have had impacts has been at the educator faculty level. And the one that comes to mind, I mean, there's been so many moments in the history of the open library campus that could call out. But the thing that comes to mind that certainly really inspires our current team right now is probably the OER fellows programs that was in 2017. Hopefully that's right. Jenny might know, Jenny was one of the OER fellows and that work continues to inspire us because ultimately the open education is for people and through the OER fellows program, we engage a handful of educators in the sector to engage with open education, to do a project, to really get the experience of it through a facilitated experience with the campus. And I, and those folks, I think pretty much all of them continued in some way to engage with open education since many of them are now major champions of open education beyond Ontario's context. And that continues to inspire us, which has led to one of our recent programs, which is the OER Rangers, which is basically an expansion of that project, recognizing where we are now and the impact that those individuals have had once they had the opportunity, the time, the space, the funding and the structure to engage with open education. And I will just remind everybody, we're about to open up the fishbowl, so get your questions ready and be ready to join us up here. In British Columbia, I'd say there have been a number of watershed moments and some of those, I would say, there have been some that are externally driven by what has been happening in wider society or the wider open education community that have become watershed moments and there's more internal ones and by internal, I mean within our system in British Columbia. So, for example, an external one was 2012 with the UNESCO OER Declaration, the Paris Declaration, that one was significant because for whatever reason, the Minister of Advanced Education happened to hear somebody speaking very articulately about that and the importance of it and was inspired to come back and find somebody to do that kind of work within the system. And so, when we hear people like Cable talk about and the Sustainable Development Goals and UNESCO and these sort of guiding documents that are out there, I'd say those are key watershed moments that we can build our work on and to try to always push our work back to refer to that, especially if you have governments that have signed on to these agreements and have said that they are going to be meeting some of the requirements of these agreements. So, that in 2012 really kind of released our first batch of funding to do open education work which was 500, I think it was a half a million dollars to do the first open textbook project, which we had success with right away, so we were able to build on successes. We had adoptions. Another sort of watershed moment was a decision to reach out to other open projects that were happening at that time. This is 2012, so there were a few open textbook projects that were just sort of in the formative stages, open stacks at a voice university. We actually convened our very first open textbook summit which was a very small gathering of about a dozen people who were working in open education at that time and our agenda was like, how can we work together? How can we collaborate on this? These were the seeds of collaboration that really served us well for the early years of the project to be able to have people who were going through the same kind of growing pains that we were going through that were looking for solutions and we were looking for solutions. We had a little community that we were able to pull on. So in terms of a lesson learned, being at a conference like this and building connections and building those networks is very important to the long-term sustainability of the projects. And the last watershed moment that I wanna talk about, I think it was about 2015 and the watershed moment was the decision and it was probably Mary and Amanda who made this decision to involve students and to go out to student governments and to start working with them to help them, enable them to become advocates for this, to raise the profile that this was an issue and the students knew it was an issue but they didn't feel like they had a voice about the issue. So we provided some tools to help give them a voice within their own institutions to be able to advocate for this and say this is a real issue with our, we can't afford to pay for education and this is something that can help. Now there were some pieces of that that may be backfired once in a while as students pushed maybe a little too hard in the beginning with some faculty and that maybe caused some people to kind of pull back a little bit but eventually found the student advocates found their footing and found a great voice in how to do this and actually were instrumental in, it was students who met with the minister in 2018, 2019 and got BC campus and other $3 million to continue to do the work in the open education and that was students. So that's a watershed moment as well, the decision to actually involve students and have them be advocates for this work. Excellent, so we're gonna open up the seat at the side here. Is there any volunteer? Oh, there's Jenny. Excellent. Okay, so am I correct that Clint is now? Oh, I see. But then, sorry, I just, and then there'll be another person that comes and then the person after that, Clint goes off, is that right now? All right. And anybody who wants to come up and fill the other chair that is empty as well, come to come up. Please do. And if I could just request say your name and what institution you are from or where you're from, perhaps. Hi everyone, I'm Jenny Heyman. I am currently at Conestoga College. I'm a chair for online programs and I just wanna point out and I feel this is really important, there's such a strong correlation between open and folks in online and instructional design. Notice that in my career. What I wanted to talk about was and ask you about is personal and organizational preparedness and knowledge and how because I know I've experienced that. In 2013, I started a Canadian open education and wide world ed research nonprofit in Canada way before it's time, it totally failed. But what I learned from that personally and in the network connections that I made enabled all the rest of the good things that happened. And so I'm wondering because most good watershed moments are not so much luck as they are personal and organizational preparedness. So what about your personal or organizational preparedness helped you open that door for the moment? It's actually such a good point that she made because when the idea of OER and local labeling policies just first came about, there were a lot of concerns expressed especially from my agencies and college leadership and my answer was our system has been matured enough. We have mature soil to start this. You mentioned that the level of preparedness needed for this level of inform. I said the ground one, we have over by account 4,000 faculty members who went through initial trainings. We have over these many programs that I know for sure using the open educational resources. We have 80% of faculty colleges who are currently participating in any level of OER agenda. We have, it has been an official, the work agenda for our student association for the past two years. And so for based on those ground, based on those evidences that we declare that we have a mature enough soil to start something this provocative. Requiring our colleges to all together at the same time labeling the courses that use open educational resources under a page long policy guideline was not a joke. So to reach that point, I say we needed like eight years of preparation to get to that point. And if we actually have, if we studied that without going through any of those initial training, initial professional development and all of those initial argument and conflicted situation resolution point, I think we would have really failed miserably. So thank you for pointing that out. It was not a magic. Yes. Thanks. Okay, hi, I'm Dan Alasso. I teach history in the Minnesota state system which is a medium size system. I guess we're second to SUNY. We have seven universities and 30-ish community colleges. And it does seem that the community, to kind of build on your point, it does seem that community colleges are kind of an easier place to start because of less kind of institutional paranoia on the part of faculty. But my question, I guess, and my watershed is kind of a negative one, I suppose, because in, especially at the university level in my system, it's been very faculty led and faculty come and go. And so that is something that I'm wondering if you've, I mean, it seems like the panelists have all are kind of coming from a system perspective where the system has really kind of driven the change. I am like, I am trying to see this negative watershed kind of as an opportunity rather than just as a challenge but I'm still kind of working on figuring out how to make that next step and how to kind of get the system moving forward when we are cutting a lot of the faculty, including myself, who have been really kind of instrumental as volunteers and as people sort of driving the thing forward at the universities. As a faculty member, I'll take that one. At our schools, there's 10 of us, so like our initial funding, it came from the district office, right? So it was granted to us to get us going. And then the other thing is at each of our colleges, not all of the colleges have an OER committee. I'm actually co-chair of our OER committee. And I don't know, at our institutions, once the faculty get in, they don't necessarily go anywhere. They're pretty much like, that's it, we're done. So we have that long-term, people have been there forever. So that's helpful for us. But our admin at our individual colleges can also give us money like our VPAA gives us funding to help grow OER on our campus. And then we also work with the Center for Teaching and Learning, each college has a Center for Teaching and Learning and so they have OER support too. So we're kind of more collaborative, I guess, on our campuses having admin and CTA and then the library, the OER librarians together. So we're all just kind of, you know, volunteering basically on the committee right to help perpetuate it. Am I allowed to jump into the fishbowl? Yeah, just one observation that I've had. And again, I'm outside of the system. But one of the things that I've heard before and we've certainly seen evidence of this is that often a buying decision comes from one dogged instructor or university professor, whatever it is. And I think that, so I don't, I think probably these people are much better about thinking about how to get faculty engaged. But when that pressure comes from the faculty that often can lead to lots of exciting things happen. So how you organize it, I don't know. But I think it's important that a lot of times administrations are responding to pressure to do projects from faculty. So. To kind of jump in on this a little bit with your question, Dan. I don't know if this will be quite fit for your context, but one of the sort of the aspect of session instructors or faculty has been on our mind in terms of our program design. A lot of our more recent programs has been, the baseline requirement is that you are involved with one of our member institutions. We don't care if you're part-time. We don't care which one you're affiliated with. Choose one to let us know. As a way of like equity engaging on the fact that many marginalized folks are sessional. Many people who are early or first gen academics are sessional. And so that was something that was on our mind in terms of how do we distribute the funding that we currently have to support the work. And also we ultimately see it as human capacity building one way or another. The more folks who have that opportunity to have to engage with open education and OERs is positive. They may end up leaving the system or going to another system, but that's another person who's now had experience and hopefully a positive one. And as we see like OER is very global. People collaborate across boundaries, borders, et cetera. So I don't know if you're at your institution that is maybe one of the requirements that can be a challenge or barrier for other for sessional or part-time faculty to continue to engage or to get started in engaging. Because I have heard that in some cases like this is not recognized as scholarly work or this is not or granting opportunities are not available if you're not full-time and that can be a barrier. So that's something that we think about and we know this is a reality and we would definitely advocate for that to be removed if you are employed in an institution that you should have full access to as much as the opportunities to get involved with different kind of work as possible there. Oh yeah. So I was just gonna, oh, there we go, okay. I was just gonna add that I was looking at the Minnesota State sort of core commitments and core values and strategic framework. And one thing that I would recommend is that if you were to reach out to like even a dean or just one administrator that you know has some sort of interest within open at all, I would align it directly with the core commitments and core values of Minnesota State. In particular, you've got a ton of language in there about ensuring access to extraordinary education for all Minnesotans. So if you're able to make that alignment and then show where open fits in with a strategic framework, a lot of times that can lead to policy decision changes within Minnesota State so that you're not doing the work off the side of your desk anymore, that policy could be enacted to be a part of your desk or perhaps some sort of innovation fund that they distributed in Minnesota could have a requirement that that innovation that's done needs to have a CC license on it. But I would just encourage you to try to find that one administrator who can sort of start to help move that up. I came up to the fish bowl to kind of ask maybe a similar question kind of inspired by Dan. Sorry, Marilyn. It's the movement from grass roots. Like a lot of people begin doing this grass roots I'm a volunteer, I'm getting involved. And then you're talking about the minister has done this or we wrote state legislation from the outside. A lot of times that just looks like magic. Like magic just happened, right? Like do you have lobbying efforts? How did you make state legislation happen? Do you have outreach? How did you go from a grass roots program to implementing provincial wide policies or programs? It clearly wasn't magic. It's hard work and there's effort to maintain but it feels kind of daunting for people who haven't done it before, maybe haven't seen it before. Do you have anything to share about those experiences and things you've learned or things your organization does to maintain those relations and make things that were grass roots institutionalized? That's a transition, right? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I can talk a little bit about this. I mean, I didn't mention in the introduction that we are funded by the ministry of post-secondary education and skills and trades training or sorry, future skills. The ministry has recently changed names. So we actually have a direct pipeline to the ministry for special projects. I mean, this came out as a special project. So we do meet with the ministry on a regular occasion because we were born out of a ministry initiative 23 years ago and we've always been able to maintain those relationships with the ministry. So that has been very useful for us and we've been able to continue to advocate directly with people within our ministry office and gain funding and to be able to launch some initiatives. Now, one thing that we try to do is make sure that any initiatives that we do put on the table align with the ministry goals and making sure, just like you want to find those documents within your institutions that talk about openness and access and stuff. We try to do the same thing with ministry documents. So anytime something comes out from the ministry, read through the digital learning strategy and where is open mentioned in this and trying to find ways that we can pitch our projects to the ministry that way to be able to support the institutions locally. I can actually add the example from the Washington state out to stills question. So about like how the grassroots move eventually became a state legislation and state policy. So in our system in 2017, as I mentioned earlier, there was this, we ran this actually 2015 a statewide research that assessed the faculty members' needs and the use of open educational resources and that was pretty comprehensive, quantitative and qualitative research. And one of the discovery that we had from that research was that as I mentioned earlier that there is no equity in terms of students benefiting from the open educational resources. That's really, they have to be super lucky to accidentally sign up for the courses. So some students actually enjoyed OER through fourth quarter after quarter and some students actually never, what they would never hear about it. They, you know, it's like something they never heard about before. So that was definitely an equity issue. So we, what we did was we actually just drafted the statewide policy at the state board building that require our colleges to label the courses that use OER and law cost labeling policies. And of course we couldn't just enforce the policy that we just wrote up. We ran two rounds of statewide surveys inviting all faculty members and college administrators to provide their input on the policy guideline at a really granular level, including the names of the label, definition, criteria, what's qualified, what's not qualified. All the sample cases, we put it on there and then gave them a chance towards Smith. So that, so after going through that two rounds of the research activities and each time we actually send out the outcome of the research report back to the system making sure that we are capturing your voices. And then- How long did that take for you to do this? About a half year, six months. And then through that collaboration we were able to establish the A-page policy guidelines for OER label. And we invited three colleges to run a pilot. So that was a key. I'm so glad that we did that. So after three colleges running the pilot for about three, for about two quarters we got very consistent feedback from all three. They said that boy, we need another label. In addition to OER label that would mark the courses that use other affordable course materials that do not necessarily fit into the definition of OER such as really inexpensive commercial textbooks. They do exist. So we got to work and but we soon faced another challenge this time to set the threshold for the law cost. I mean, how low is low enough for you? Is it 40, 50, 60 and couldn't get the consensus on system or the consensus on that number. So we turned to the students and our Washington Community and Technical Ecology Student Association, our mighty Student Association. They are known as WACSA. They rose up to take up the action and they collaborated with our agency and took up the charge and they distributed, they were in charge of distribution and promotion of the survey and managed to gather first about 5,000 responses. They were on the campus all over the places holding an iPad and a piece of candy urging their fellow students to fill out the survey and through that effort in the month of October and November, they managed to gather about 5,000 responses and from that, and then that was so moving, actually really moving and a lot of our system college offices were so moved and many of them voluntarily connect with their own colleges student governance office and rallied to promote the same survey and like a library or a learning office, bookstore, student services office, they call and say, what can we do to help and manage to increase that number to 10,050. So from that survey with student responses of 10,050, we were able to set the threshold and with that threshold, we ran another round of state-wide surveys, inviting faculty members and college administrators again to do their worst missing on the policy guideline, this time for the law cost label. So after they were able to edit everything on the policy guideline except the threshold because it's set by the students. So we managed to legislate that at the end and the legislation process was that our students rallied, they, I wish I could just show you the picture of our students gathered in the Congress building, they voluntarily called upon their senators and representatives from their district and asked for the legislative luncheon and breakfast and legislatures love that during that time of the year. And so they would, and then they would come to the hearing and testify and every part of the loving effort they can give, they did. So at the end, we had this policy guidelines, policy guidelines, legislated, coded, and the full support by the students and that was our journey like from the initiation of the idea one day. Oh yeah, I think I can write a policy guideline and then from that moment to actual legislation, it actually took five years. So that's the one thing that I wanted, a message that I wanted to share with you, not like, oh look at the amazing thing we did, but this message is more about be patient. It's a step-by-step process, keep it data-driven because it gives your policy a legitimacy and authority that it needs. And then also the data-driven process is such an effective communication and promotional tool. So later, all system would feel like that it has been the system by the investment. We have an accountability, it's we are responsible for the success of it. So that's a one thing that I wanted to leave with this. Thank you. I have a curiosity here. Go ahead. Huyang, since you mentioned that the students led the charge in terms of getting the threshold, is there, do you plan ever to update and redo a survey as economic conditions change? Yeah, we have been actually, thank you for bringing that up. We have been having active conversation about that, like with current changes in our economy, it's inevitable. Actually it was under consideration from the beginning, like five years ago when we were initiating it, we had a plan to revisit the number and then to see if there is a need for increased that amount and we'll probably get to the work and probably we'll start another roundup. Oh. Yeah. Actually, the statewide survey, so thank you for bringing that up. Marilyn. So hi, Marilyn Billings, I'm inserting myself into the fishbowl. Formerly from UMass Amherst and now working on the Rotel project with the state of Massachusetts. So my understanding of your question, Dan, was I'm gonna back up a little bit further that you're feeling like it's faculty led your institution and how to move forward from there? Cause I could back up a little bit on that. I have, I mean, I have talked to the associate vice chancellor. I've been on all kinds of system office committees and councils and things. The issue that we're having is that, for example, I was, I got a grant to explore a Z degree at the university level to sort of extend the work of the 10 community colleges that have already implemented associate's degrees. And so I, and I was planning on going, you know, on going in for the implementation grant next year because I had lined up four departments that I, you know, including history with my courses that I thought, you know, were ready to have a zero textbook cost path through them. And then, you know, my campus, and not to make it about me, but then my campus, you know, had this huge budget issue and we're, you know, we're cutting 27 tenured and tenure track faculty. And so, you know, and see, exactly, right. Yeah, that's that, yeah. And so the issue is not so much that we don't, you know, that I don't know where the system-wide institutional support is, is that, you know, the things that were, the things that depended on faculty to make them happen, the bottom can, you know, drop out kind of at a moment's notice. And, you know, and I don't think that we can correct that in my situation right now, but how do we sort of future proof these efforts against that type of thing? Because I think that what's happening at my university is, you know, sort of symptomatic of the crisis in higher ed. And is probably gonna, you know, hopefully not at yours, but is happening all over the place. Yeah, it is happening all over the place. So a couple of things that I just wanted to mention was, one of the things when I was at university in Massachusetts Amherst was I was fortunate that the librarians are considered part of the faculty group, faculty senate governance. And so we worked really closely, the faculty and the librarians, to pull together legislation that was approved by the full faculty to support open education and, you know, listed a lot of the details that I won't go into right now, that the administration is then required to implement. And so then that leads to some additional supporting structure happening within the Center for Teaching and Learning, some other groups on the faculty support side, and including the librarians that kind of keep these things moving forward. And then, so because it was one campus and we went to the system level and then I was able to, Vanessa Northeast OER Summit meeting to bring in the head of our Department of Higher Education and her colleague, Bob Ackward, whom some of you may know, and Nicole Allen was just a riot and put sparkles on all of the people who were the program committee. And I just thought, oh, we'll sparkle the head of the Massachusetts State Legislature, not the legislature, the Department of Education, and got them really integral in all of this so that they then went forward to the whole statewide Department of Education so that we were able to put a trial group together at the state level to support these kind of initiatives and it's still growing, right? So just from starting with the faculty, I think it was a Gen Ed council that I worked with, General Education, sorry. And I don't know if that's helpful in supporting some of that infrastructure that's needed there. If I can, I just want, I kind of want to interject just one quick thing and Kathy, I won't take your time. I'm really interested. First of all, Hugh, I'm so deeply grateful for the work you do at Press Books that allows us to publish ourselves deeply grateful. So I'm thinking there's kind of a book in this because a lot of these shared stories are organizational, but we don't know all the pathways so it's like holes in the fences. How do you get into organizations and governments and spread these ideas? There's a lot of really great strategies that I hear and it would be really great idea possibly to capture those strategies for being able to take advantage of the watershed moment. I don't know anybody. Anyway. I've got some ideas. Okay, so Minnesota State University System. So I'll just present it with Heather Blicker, the HRL Affordability and OER Roadshow to your librarians. So my quit and they are on it and they know what's going on. So I guess my question would be, have you found yourself to your librarians? And y'all spoke to that, how important they were in the process and so that I'm ending with a question mark. Have you found your way to your librarian? Okay, so that's the book. And I think the whole. Well, and in terms of developing like the resilient kind of systems that can resist that kind of change where like one leg gets cut off and it falls down. I think, I'm a big fan of distributed networks and within institutions what we have done is it was originally faculty that we were reaching out to but we have now set up librarians groups and we have pockets of support within librarians at institutions. We have an instructional design community and educational technology community and all of these different communities and all of these different pathways within the institutions. We're trying to embed open with those groups so that it does create this sort of distributed network to build in the kind of resiliency that's unfortunate. One last question, we're at time. So last question here. I want to say thank you to all of you as well as BC campus about professional development. My name is Manisha. I work with a very small First Nations College just one hour south of Edmonton, Muscogee's Cultural College. So the professional training which you do like BC campus, I love you. We keep it, you know, we need to learn about the recent one about spirituality like care in open pedagogy. They're really very much valued. Number two, for small organizations like us, we do not have this infrastructure or any funding to give to any of us. I think what's the value? What's the purpose of creating OERs because we don't have relevant meaningful indigenous content? That's what my social work and other teachers say. Number two, open, just don't use, I don't use the word open or a lot of jargon. In my college, we just do it. Just do it, meaning two examples I want to give you in one second. So one, we used Norway's open digital library because it is now our strategic plan to produce indigenous children's books. Our strategic plan, 1.5.2 says publish indigenous children's books without any budget for publishing. So we used Norway's digital library. We didn't have to pay any graphic designer, partnered with our linguistic class of students. They have fluent Cree speakers. So in Cree syllabics, we created a lot of books. So it really helps to hear the audio and the books too. So it's relevant content, local faces in the books. Number two, this COVID has been great for open education movement. Zoom is so easy. So we converted all our student presentations into open resources. So we have a collection of 300 videos which our students created. That's why I'm saying just do it. Don't get into too much jargon about Creative Commons licensing or what open means, just do it. Thank you. Okay, thank you. That's a great ending. Thank you all. Thank you to the wonderful panelists and those brave enough to come up here and those brave enough to ask questions. Thank you everyone.