 Welcome everybody to our webinar on OER adoption, student panels and campus-wide faculty development. This is from the community college consortium for OER and happy open education week to everybody. We have a real treat today. We don't have a lot of students. That's a really special treat for us and thanks to quill west who will be sharing for students with us today and what they have to say about OER. As we know that's a really important piece of this. We'll also of course have a second section of our webinar which will be on campus-wide faculty development at Northered Essex Community College which is also a very interesting story. We want to thank the California Community College system for providing us with the Blackboard Collaborate system and I hope that most of you are familiar with this. If you are not, you should see a participants list to your left of the screen, of the main screen and underneath that is a chat window where you can post questions as we go along during the webinar today. And we really invite your comments and questions as we go along. As I mentioned this week, all week long through tomorrow is open education week. It's a celebration, a worldwide celebration of open education throughout the world about what the potential benefits are for learners, institutions, the general public throughout the world. There's a number of online and local events from many countries. I just heard a statistic this morning. We've had people from 119 countries participate in open education week as of early this morning. So it really is a worldwide event and opportunity to promote and celebrate the work that we are doing. So I want to give you a brief overview of CCCOER, introduce my speakers of course which is key. And then we're going to go right into the presentations. So I'm going to start with Quill West who is the manager of the open education project at the Pierce Community College District in Washington. Quill, would you like to say a few words and perhaps introduce your panelists before we get started? Certainly. So actually I'm here with Roxanne Simon who is the president of the Associated Student Government at Pierce College Puyallup. And I'm really excited to actually let her do most of the talking today but we're going to talk about how students have interacted with our open education project. So I'm really excited to be here with you today. Okay. And our other speakers today are Susan Tashgian who is the instructional design coordinator and also adjunct faculty at Northern Essex Community College. And we also have Jodi Carson who is faculty and an instructional coach at Northern Essex. And I think they are not yet online. So I'm going to say their introductions for the second half of the webinar. All right. The Community College Consortium for OER. We've been going strong for about eight years now. Our mission remains the same. You know, promoting open education to improve teaching and learning. We're all about expanding access for high quality open educational materials at community colleges. We do this through our professional development online. You may have attended some of the professional development we offer at conferences throughout the year. And this is all about improving student success, providing access for students and helping them to complete in a timely fashion. We work with over 250 colleges and 21 states and provinces. And we're really excited to have the center part of the country and of North America starting to fill in. This is really an exciting move as folks across between the two oceans are really getting into open education. And we want to support all of you. So, you know, get on our email list so you can attend these webinars and invite your colleagues. And we want to make sure that you're open to all people, everyone. And, you know, contact us if you've got a great project at your college that you'd like to share. We'd like to help you do that so that you can get input from other folks and get some great exposure. All right. So, today is all about student voices in OER, the first half of our session. I'm going to turn this over to Quill and her student speaker. Hello, and thank you for having us today. Would you mind advancing the slides? I don't have permission to do that. So, first, I actually want to give Roxanna a chance to introduce herself and talk a little bit about her position and her experience as a student at Pierce College. Okay, wonderful. Hi, my name is Roxanna Simon. As you said, I am the current president of the Associated Students of Pierce College Puyallup. One project that we have here is working on, we're calling it hashtag textbook revolution. So, we're working on open educational resources and helping students to understand what the open educational resources are and how they can talk to their professors. To see where they are as far as using them or even lower cost textbook. So, I want to start by giving a little bit of a history because, and Roxanna correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe our student government groups are representatives of the students serve for a year at a time. So, this actually, the open education project at Pierce College is about, I don't know, two years old. So, it's two years old at this point, or at least I've been here two years. And actually, our work with students started in pretty strongly, actually the first year I started here. So, there was some work in 2013-14, but really strongly in 14-15. And it started actually, our college has two, our institution has two colleges. And the first student body work that I was students that I worked with were actually at our Fort Silicon campus. And those students started this project, and it's based on the work that the student perks were doing at that time with Ethan Snack. So, they stopped students as they were coming out of the bookstore and asked them how much they just spent on textbooks. And then asked them to say what they would spend that money on otherwise. And we've got some great pictures that came out of that social media campaign. Just in terms of raising awareness that textbook cost is of issue to students. They shared these images by faculty. These images lived in our spin-on to our campus learning management system, our college-wide learning management system for several months. And it started a survey that the students sponsored that was, we've used to talk about open education district-wide. For the most part, what we were trying to figure out is how often our students choose not to take classes because of textbook cost. It wasn't a significant number of responses to this survey, but it was an interesting piece of information that we found. The statistic is on our t-shirts. It's what, 56 percent? 56 percent of Pierce College students chose to not purchase the book that they knew they needed because of the cost. And they knew that it would affect their grades. So it was a pretty useful tool for us to have that, and it raised awareness among the students. The student government that year statewide in Washington State made textbook cost and open education one of their lead issues, along with things like getting water bottles out of our, or getting plastic bottles of water out of our bookstores and things like that. So it was really important statewide as an issue and still is. But let's move on to 2015-16. And I'd have to say that I did not know how important, how much they were advocating for open education at Pierce College Puyallup. This is in the student center. So the students gather in that space on the lower floor. You can see below this line. I didn't know how important it was until I was here for a professional development session and I walked into that room and this giant sign is hanging there and I got all excited. And that's when I wanted to make contact with Roxanne. So can you talk a little bit about this sign and what is going on right now with open education? The purpose of the sign was to let more students know that do come into the dining commons that this is something that we were advocating for. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about this sign. Just having little signs around, most people ignore those. In the dining commons and with this big sign, it's nine feet long, or nine feet wide, I'm sorry, it's kind of hard to admit. So once we put that sign up, we just started getting a lot of questions. We also had a project where we passed out the t-shirts that had the statistics on them. So what's that picture here, because it's hard to catch a picture of it with your phone, is the windows outside of the student government office are covered. And they notice about what's going on, but they've written in window paint about open education. So you mentioned the t-shirts and this is the day of our rally. So talk a little bit about this experience. Originally, we thought to have our rally inside the dining commons, and then we realized that not a lot of students would come through there. So we chose to put the t-shirts on the cart and take them to students. So we went through all of the buildings. I think, I believe we have five. But we went through every building, explained to the students what we were doing, and passed out t-shirts. And one of the professors, I had talked to him beforehand and he said, we could walk through just so everybody saw. And then once we got to his room, he made a stop and passed out t-shirts and explained to the students what the rally was for, what the hashtag textbook revolution was. So for us, it was very successful. We passed out a thousand shirts. Every Tuesday we have wear red, and that's just to show support. We fought along the lines of here with the Seahawks on Friday, everybody wears blue, whether it's football season or not. If we do this with the t-shirts, we'll bring more awareness there. And this was the big launching of the textbook revolution hashtag. So a lot of, it doesn't get as much traffic on Twitter right now as it was getting for a while. But it's really neat to see the students getting active in social media talking about how important this is. And I believe they have a pretty strong Facebook. They have a really strong voice as well. So they're sharing their experiences with textbooks and they're sharing their experience with open education. So this was in October. Oh, you can see it was October 27th. I love their graphics. And then they have the best graphics people. Our students have amazing graphics people. This was our most recent event. It's called Raider Voices. I'm going to turn that into a more common conversation between students and faculty just as part of our institution-wide professional development activities. But this one was inspired by textbook cost. And actually, Roxanne, you were the start of this whole thing. So I'm going to let you talk about it. You're the one who came to me. So originally, we had thought about having a workshop just for professors and realized that it would be better if we had faculty and students together so that we could talk about pros and cons. We explained to everybody that this was not a debate. It was a discussion. So trying to find ways to save costs on books, whether they're using open educational resources or the reasons why they cannot use open educational resources. There's something that they're teaching and it requires the book that costs more than they explain that. We also had representatives from the bookstore there. So we got to have feedback from them as well. Understanding that it isn't necessarily the bookstore. It's Barnes & Noble, which is who sets the prices for the book. It was very successful for us. One of our faculty speakers is also my professor. And just about everything that we do in her class either involves open educational resources or lower cost textbooks. I think for her class, I spent $10 on two books. So that was awesome compared to other classes where I've spent $250 or more just for one book. So having to buy three of those per quarter got really costly. Somebody fell over. The other thing that we spent some energy on in that talk, it was really great to have students be able to explain how they use their educational resources in a room with faculty. And it's something that we replicated. We also replicated this event. So we did it at MQL and then the students in Fort Silicon also hosted an event, the exact same event. So we got to talk to two groups of faculty and we invited faculty leadership to come. So we had students and faculty in the same room and bookstore representatives. And I was there and administration kind of stuck their head in. So it was an opportunity for us to have a real conversation about what students are doing with their materials when they're asked to buy a textbook. What do they expect out of it? And what do they hope that the teacher does with it so that they're getting the most for their expense? And it was a great moment for me that having a student say out loud what I suspected, which is if as faculty we don't take the time to explain how we expect textbooks to be used in our classes, students don't necessarily know what to do with that tool as a learning resource. And so they find it actually to be an added cost for no reason. They don't understand the purpose of that book. So as faculty, it really serves us to stop and explain if we're going to have students purchase a textbook. Why? And then the other thing that was really useful coming out of it was to have faculty be able to explain. We invited, purposely we invited faculty who we had people on the panel who used open education resources pretty extensively. And then we invited people who have tried and haven't been able to convert their courses to open yet specifically so we could have those voices around why it doesn't necessarily work because we wanted students to understand what's going on coming out of this conversation. And we wanted faculty to be able to understand what all of the perspectives on the issue is. And we felt like that was really important particularly because we're hoping that this event can carry forward with things like diversity conversations because we want a healthy conversation to happen. But Raider was one of my favorite events this year and we just had it. It was in February. I took the dates off. It was just recently. It was in this quarter. So now our next thing is to talk about what's next. And particularly Pierce has an open education based, open educational resources based degree. So and it happens to be at kind of one of our smaller institutions. So it's at Pierce College at JBLM which is separate and serves a smaller body of students than we serve in to all of them at Fort Silicon. So our goal now is to increase our courses. And I said in a webinar yesterday our administration has set our vision to be 50% of the classes that Pierce College will use open educational resources in five years. So to reach that number we're partnering with the students to try to figure out which courses make the most sense and which degree pathways make the most sense to the students. So we'll be coming to them very soon to ask those questions as part of our next initiative to adopt open resources in a more wide space at our institution. So and Roxanne what do you think comes next? What would you like us to do next? What events are coming up? What things are we working on? I put it on the spot with that question. I would be on the head by spoke. As far as the open educational resources? Yeah. So I know that you're finishing your year in service in the fall and June. So what are you hoping that the next student group picks up? I know we have some things going on in spring but what do you hope gets picked up next with open education? I would like them to continue working with faculty, staff and admin because admin needs to be included too. And I know that our college has other, not really other because they all align with the open pathways. But I'm just hoping that students will take the time to get more involved, learn more and help. It's better to get out there and help than to sit there and complain. My idea. I love that. I love that it sponsors a voice of cooperation in the process. That's one of the best things about working with the students at Pierce College is that we've been able to turn this into a partnership much more than a place where the students are frustrated and don't see the institution doing anything on their behalf. So it's nice to be able to say this is something we are trying to make happen for you as a way of making education more affordable. Well, part of our admin has gone to conferences where they have the opportunity to learn more about the pathways and some of what we're doing here is being modeled for other colleges. I'm so proud of our campus and our college. So I think we've, Oana, do you want to take questions now or wait for the end? I think we'll go ahead and take questions now for Roxanne and Quill. This has been an amazing discussion. I really want to commend Roxanne for taking the time today and the last statement you just made, Roxanne, about how Pierce College can be a role model for other colleges to start these kind of dialogues between students and faculty and admin, I think is really amazing. So, yeah, very impressed with the work that you both are doing. Thank you. Yes, so we're going to go ahead and take questions for Roxanne and Quill. So you can type those in or if you have a microphone, you can grab the microphone. We'll do that for the next few minutes before we switch to our second section. Did we miss anything at any comments that we need to see any questions in the chat window? It's really far away. I've seen a lot of comments. So while there's been comments in here, just supportive comments of all the great work you're doing. Let's see, we do have a question here. Heather has asked a question about faculty feeling pressured in a negative way to meet the 50% OER in five years. So honestly, I'm sure that there are faculty who feel pressured in a negative way just from the whole conversation. And I'm going to kind of stick to something I've been saying for a long time that I learned from my colleague, Rachel Goon, who works in our library, but told me this when we both worked at Tacoma Community College. So you work with the fruit that falls from the tree easiest, which means the faculty who are volunteering right now, and you don't put pressure on the faculty who don't want to volunteer. So you say the vision and then you let them walk away thinking whatever they want to about the vision, but go about their regular business. And you work with the people who are eager to do the work, and then you just wait because eventually all the fruit has to ripen on the tree. It may take a few years, but eventually all the fruit ripens and falls from the tree. So from that perspective, yes, there are faculty who are very, very adamantly against open education resources, open education in general. They can't see it working in their disciplines. And so that's fine. I will work with the faculty around them who think it's a good idea and eventually we'll get there. And maybe there's a 50% who don't reach the open OER mission, but that's okay because there will be another teacher who will. So that's the way we're kind of treating it right now. Great. And I love that metaphor. Eventually all the fruit will ripen. And there was a question here from Paige. And she asks, if we were to replicate something like this at our college, what advice would you give to us to get started? From the student's perspective, I'm going to look directly into that answer. What do you think would get students motivated to start thinking? Food. Food. I'm going to look directly into that answer. It isn't easy. But try to not get frustrated. I know with our team, we did a lot because when we first started, we weren't seeing with the red t-shirts. We weren't seeing other students wear them. We tried to be role models and making sure we had ours on every Tuesday. And just get out there and talk to the students. Talk to the faculty. It's scary, but it can be done. I would mirror that. And I would also say that in terms of... I mean, I didn't have to do a lot of convincing with the students because I think textbook cost is something that's really, really real to them. I think the difference is being able to message a solution that's not... And a lot of that work was done long before I got here. I think the students knew what open-ed resources were and they knew a lot about it. We had some leadership happening in that way already. So I don't credit myself with any of that. What I would say is it's about being able to share. What we're trying to do because we're not going to move the publishers. And it's not the college store's fault because they're not the ones who are saying that the base price of a textbook is $200. They don't set that base price. So it's very much about being able to say, here's positive influences or positive things we can do instead of letting that other conversation come up, which is a frustration. So you listen to the frustration and then you say, here's a positive thing we can be doing. It's a lot slower than, I don't know, telling students... And we have other things to deal with textbook cost. So Roxanne was just telling me before we started today that we have a digital textbook exchange that was done by one of the students here. That's going to be really cool. And that starts next... That starts on Tuesday. We're having our launch for the digital book board. We have a book board where students put... We have little cards that they fill out for books that they want to sell. And we thought if we can do a digital book board, we can reach all three campuses so that students have the opportunity to contact each other. Something else that we will talk about doing is having students in a class pool their money together to buy a book if there's no option. And that way they would share the book and they can copy pages. Yes, they can. I had to think about that. You're my friend. So just finding ways to get students to find alternatives to having to spend a lot of money. And the bookstore does know that we're looking at doing the digital book board and they're even telling students before you return your book here, check and see if you can't get more from the digital book board because we're limited on what we can give you back for a book. So I think that that kind of positive space where you're looking at affordability for now and for your very, very, very low cost for the future, I think that that's the balance that we're trying to strike. Because when students invest in open educational resources, they're investing for the students that are two or three years down the line. They're not investing for themselves right now. Because we can't make change as fast as they are. They're going to graduate before we can get 50% of our courses to be open. So what are alternatives? And building that conversation around two things at once. And you may feel like your message is getting diluted, but it's not. I promise. Great. We have one last question here, I think. We had lots of good comments which you guys can check on later. But Michelle asked, did student groups get involved right from the start or did you start OER first and then student groups got involved? So I think it's kind of an avalanche that happened all at one time. You never know what the thing is that strikes off the avalanche. Although I would say that probably it was the booming voice of Cable Green and Washington State to start an avalanche. So Washington made some early investments in open education with the Open Course Library Project and with some policies that support open education. And our state board has kept that going. So having those statewide voices that are already in place helps a lot. So I think it could happen kind of all at one time at Pierce College. I think students have been talking about textbook costs for years. I remember complaining about textbook costs and it's been a really long time since I was a student. So I think that it's always been an issue. And so it was just that there wasn't, you know, when I was a student I didn't know there was a solution that I could be advocating for. So being able to show up with a solution helped. I think it was kind of all and. And I do think that it's helpful to have students at the table when you're working as your steering committee or when you are talking about which degree pathways to follow. You always consider the students at the center of that, but to have their voices in the room or at least be able to talk to them and get their voices before you go into the room is a really effective tool for arguing for what we want most. So I think it's about making the invitation. Something else good that we've done here and that you do is recognizing those professors, faculty that do their best to use the open educational resources. We had to sign up for one of our professors and we just called him the professor of the week and explained why. So other faculty as they walked by and they saw his picture. I'm not irritated. Oh my God. Good. Then do something so that you can be up there. I'll take that. Yes. They call them pop stars now because our degree is called the pop. So as our offerings are growing, we're going to have more and more pop stars. And then we'll recognize them for that. We're still working out the pre-advertising graphics. But our faculty stars, it's about saying thank you. So thank you now. Which is something I have a long belief in. Thank you now for being so very much. Yes. Great. Well, thank you both so much for taking the time to share this really innovative kind of dialoguing between faculty and, sorry, between students and faculty and admin to promote open education and expand access for students. I think Will and Roxanne will be around for a little bit. So if you have additional questions, you can pop those into the chat window. And now we're going to move on to our second half of the webinar. And we have Jody Carson here, who is a faculty member and an instructional coach at Northern Essex Community College. And she is the instructional design center coordinator. And she's also adjunct faculty at Northern Essex Community College. And they have been running the textbook affordability committee there for the last two years and have saved working with faculty there to adopt OER. They have saved over $450,000 in the last two years. And they're going to tell you how. So Jody and Sue, are you guys on the map? Great. We can hear you. And you should be able to move the slides. But let me know if you need help with that. So hi, everyone. My name is Jody Carson. And as Eunice said, I am a faculty member in early childhood education at Northern Essex Community College, which is in cable maps. So it's 30 minutes more from Boston. And I'm Sue Tasham, coordinator of instructional technology here. And I also teach in the CIS department in the college. And we're really excited to be here as members of the TCC OER, which has been a great resource for us throughout the last couple of years. Wonderful. Thank you. Wonderful. And so your slides, progress your slides up here at the top right of the screen, you'll see like a link. OK. Thank you. We had a little internet connection problem earlier, so we weren't able to practice this. I think we're all set now, hopefully. OK. Super. All right. So as you mentioned, we're going to talk about our campus slide. We are a faculty development project, which started back in the fall of 2014. And we're continuing now. All right. So as, again, as I mentioned, to date, we saved about $450,000 in student textbook costs over the last two years. And that was an investment of about $25,000 in college funds. We'll talk a little bit more later on about where we got those funds. But we're very happy so far with our savings given the small investment. So the whole purpose of our project started when students were completing the cost of textbooks. They were meeting with our academic affairs vice president. And he was saying that at each event student's biggest concern was the cost of textbooks and the use. They felt like consistently they were taking classes where they were spending $200 to $300 on textbooks. And they weren't using them nearly enough. We heard that sometimes students felt like they could take a full course and never, you know, never even open a textbook as they paid $200 or $300 for, which is obviously a big concern. So we started off trying to find ways that they could pay students money and ensure that they had their materials. But what we found over the last couple of years is that there's a big shift from our initial plan of saving students money to really a change in the way faculty are teaching and the way students are learning here on campus. So actually when we were attending the open ed conference back in 2014 in D.C. we learned so many things. And we started thinking about sort of a tragic rate that we could use around campus to promote the project. And we went with the idea of adopt open, which I think is really interesting for us. We were thinking about adopting an open philosophy and adopting a pedagogy rather than the idea of adopting just open materials. And so that's sort of the way that we've been advertising it around campus. So we had been working with our vice president since the start of this project. And he had been to our recent meeting at another community college in the area where they had done a small project, which was about $5,000 on investments and course development. And he shared it with us and said, if you can get a set proposal, I would be happy to fund something for you. He'd be happy, not the right word, but he was willing to do so. So we did. We sent him a proposal within about 24 hours because there's money involved. We want to make sure that we have the opportunity to get it. And we were able to take that first $5,000 investment and save $50,000 in just the first semester by working with seven faculty on slide, of course. All right. So let's talk a little bit about the funding. We started right away just looking for ways to get money to pay faculty stipends. So we secured money, like Jodi said, from the academic affairs budget. We got a small amount of money for our second round from the tax grant. And then we applied for the next fund, which is our college's annual fund that supports student scholarships and other projects. So the criteria for our faculty pilot project was that there would be no cost to students to access the materials, that the textbooks that they were eliminating had to be at least $100 per course and times the number of fees and sections. So we put a call out to the faculty interested in transitioning to free and open access, and the instructor produced and or library materials in place of traditional textbooks currently required for their courses. And we got an overwhelming response from faculty. OK. So we started spreading the word around campus. And it's been an ongoing process. At the beginning, we attended college meetings, the all college assembly. We spoke at division meetings. We got on the president's general staff meetings. We got the student senate involved. Our students have had a couple of textbook rallies this year, which were very well attended. We speak at the new faculty orientation. And then we started presenting our work. We had a faculty panel a professional day. We spoke at the innovation conference and the TLSD, which is our statewide meeting last year. So we felt like getting out there and spreading the word was really helping, you know, get more faculty involved in the project and getting more people excited about it. It got to the point where if you or I spoke at a meeting, somebody assumed it was going to be about textbooks. And that's kind of what we wanted. We wanted people to know that this is something that we were really excited about and not seeing that we were happy to work with them on and really get others excited about it. Okay. So then the next, our next stage was really the application process. We asked faculty why they wanted to adopt OER. What was the current cost of the textbook? We are just finished our fourth round and we had over 60 applications from faculty received to date. The courses were chosen, like I said before, based on the greatest savings to students. 23 projects have been funded so far, $1,000 stipend per course. And we have five new courses pending for fall of 2016. So this spring, we had over 35 sections of courses running without textbooks using OER. And some of the faculty have kind of thrown the hat behind without being paid. Some of the new faculty actually, I see a comment over in the chat box about new faculty orientation is being important. We would agree, we had several faculty who decided after hearing our presentation, that they were going to go ahead and not use textbooks in their courses to semester, just based on the number of savings. One of our human service faculty said it was criminal to not invest his time in this given how much he could be and he's committed to taking every one of his courses between this spring and the fall. So once faculty, once we choose the faculty, then we help them get started. We provide a half-day training which consists of people from CIT, instructional design, media specialist, instructional coaches, the library. And we used to have the bookstore and the training too, but not so much anymore. Then after the half-day training, we give them lots of information and they go off with it. And then they come back and work one-on-one with us to start building their courses and materials. We share the resources from CCC OER, share examples. We highlight faculty work and at the end of the semester, we recognize faculty with a luncheon that we invite the president, the vice president, the dean. As you can see there, we're presenting our vice president of academic affairs with a shirt from OpenStack. So we try to make it and the faculty present their courses. So these presentations have been really great. And you'll notice at the bottom, you know about the scheduling tool with the register. One thing that we're starting to see is that the word is out on these courses. Students are hearing that there's courses that have no textbook cost and they're looking for them when they're choosing their courses. So by noting in the course schedule which textbooks, our course is run without a textbook cost. We make sure to tell them that there's reading and electronic reading that's involved but that they won't have to pay for any of the materials. These courses are filling up more quickly than other courses on the schedule. So we talked a little bit about the first round actually already. And that goes back in the fall of 2014 when those first courses ran. And so this faculty has been instrumental in growing our program on campus. By having this faculty out there and saying, this is great. I love the materials. All my students have the materials in the first year of class. It's been really beneficial in order to get other faculty involved. They're hearing not just from Sue and I or from the textbook task force or from students but hearing colleagues saying, yes, this is a great thing. It will benefit your course. It will benefit your students. That was really helpful in getting other faculty involved. And by getting more faculty involved and more interest, it actually helped us to get more funding. Because when we were able to say, hey, we just $5,000. And say for students, $62,000. What do you think we can do next semester when we're saving up $52,000 again? Cost me another $50,000. It really helped us to be investment both in resources through college and funding and more faculty involvement. And these are some of our faculty. And we're going to share with you our faculty created a video for us that we presented at the open ed conference. And we just shared a link with it if you guys are interested in watching it. There's a little magic trick at the end. So you have to watch it right to the end. But the first faculty that we had, they have pretty much, I would say, all of them have done a second course. And some of those second courses are without being paid a stipend at all. So that's how much we, one of our faculty on the first day of class, he talked about the students were looking at the syllabus and saying, what textbooks do we need? And somebody in the class said, there is no textbook for this class. Didn't you read the syllabus? And the whole class started sharing. And he thought he had never heard cheers in a chemistry class before. And he liked that reaction from the students. So he's gone on to do another class. And it's in the process of developing a third class using some open ed courses. And he's gone. So the things that faculty say, when they're presenting, their course is at the end of the semester. And when we've been at meetings and we've asked them to share their ideas, we've heard a lot of different reasons that they continue using OER and that they're looking to do more courses. Class even for students is huge. We, of course, like all of you who are at community college, where our students have very different expenses and have very certain lives than some of the more traditional schools, especially here in New England. We have so many large private institutions. So our students do have a lot of concerns around the cost. And our faculty are very aware that that affects our students and affects their ability to learn. But it's not just about the cost. The materials that they've been able to find and enjoy, they enjoy using different types of materials to teach students through. So there's readings in their videos and all kinds of other materials. And we feel like that expands the opportunities for students as well as helps to meet with different learning styles. Some of our criminal justice faculty have spent a lot of time talking about the current days of course materials. When a new case comes up, they can change out their course materials in an instant and be bad at the discussion for their class. They're saying laws will change and the textbook can't keep up. So the current case of materials are really important. Access on the first day of class, of course, is critical. We have many students who register late. We might not register twice before classes. And it takes them three or four weeks to get money for a financial aid voucher to get books. So this day, every student has access on that first day of class. And then both richer content and student engagement was tied very closely together. We found many times students enjoy it more. I'm teaching an intro level section of an early childhood course in the fall with my students. And it was the first time I'd eliminated a textbook in that course. And our students were seeing throughout the semester. I really love the materials. I love the fact that there's a reason to have a video or there's a mix of different things to read and different points of view and authors to hear from. But the best part was when they said, I actually read the materials for this course. And I thought, yes, finally. That's exactly what we're looking for. And then, of course, the full section. Sue actually is teaching an intro session course on our winter intro session this year. And there was two sections running. And Sue filled up first. And she was going to request to be added into her course, even though it was full, while I was still rooming the other open section. And the students were saying, well, there's a textbook constant. That will really help me be able to succeed in the course. So that was the other course. The other course uses a textbook that was cost $185. So I can see why. And so these are just some of the things that we've observed. Really, a mindset change for the faculty. They have a deeper reflection on the content and the course design. A lot of the faculty have really redesigned their courses. We had one faculty member write her own textbook for human health and nutrition. And she's created a lot of materials, interactive quizzes. She's voiced over her PowerPoints and created her own quizzes and created a lot of her own materials. And greater alignment with the learning outcomes of the course. We use the QM rubric here. We use Quality Matters as a guide to design the courses. Greater collaboration among faculty. We have now quite a few of our psychology courses. They're using open stacks, but they're also collaborating together. The psych faculty. We have a lot of adjuncts here. Psych and sociology. So they've been working together to eliminate their textbooks. And we're going to talk about student engagement. Well, yeah. You talked a little bit about it. A little bit about student engagement already. But we have definitely found that students are really excited. After hearing a lot about these courses, the student senate contacted us and asked if we would collaborate with them on some textbook rallies to get students in the room of faculty talking about engagement with textbooks. Again, not just about cost, but about how we use textbooks in our classrooms. And they were saying how they really enjoyed some of the different styles on different methods that were being used in these classrooms. So this last slide kind of speaks for itself. This is our cost savings, as you can see. We have grown from $56,000 in one semester to over $450,000. And this is just in a matter of two years. So over 2,000 students have benefited from the cost savings. So these numbers are impressive. And we are really excited going forward. So we are going to talk for just a minute about what's up coming for us because we have a few things going on. But before we do that, we thought we'd share our top 10 motivation tips. Usually we need to deliver these David Letterman style one at a time. But today we'll just have to share back and forth. So these are things if you're thinking about getting faculty involved or if you want to start your own open education program, these are the best motivation tips that we can offer you. The first one, number 10, talk a lot about textbooks. Number nine, advertise the savings often, especially when there's administrators around. Share your work. Sign your faculty champion. Involve students. Make friends and collaborate. Start small. Call it a pilot. Ask for money. And talk a lot about textbooks. I think we could have put that one in the list a few more times. And it's delicious. So it's been a great benefit to us. So for our next steps, we'll talk quickly about those before we take some questions if there are any. Jodi and I wrote a grant proposal for funding from the tax grant. And it's a grant for statewide OER initiative to kind of build on the success of Northern Essex program and collaborate with the 15 community colleges in Massachusetts and scale the use of OER. So we are just one step away from getting the funding. It was presented at the chief academic offices meeting last week and they voted unanimously to fund it. And it's just Friday it will go to the president's council. So we should hear after that. So we're really excited to start working in a statewide consortium. And I'm sure most of you have heard about the achieving the dream proposal that is out there. The request for proposals for OER pathways. And we are definitely looking to work with that grant as well. Which of the programs we want to work with because we have a few possibilities here and potential collaborations around our other state consortium. Working with some of the other community colleges. So that's all right now. We just hope to keep growing the program to keep the excitement happening here while we're trying to work with others across the state and really expand program resources. And like everyone else, we're really hoping to come up with some sort of system where we can put everything in one spot and everybody can access it because it seems to be the one thing. And we still haven't quite figured out. All right. I think that's all we wanted to share. We're ready for questions if you have them. Great. Thank you so much, Sue and Jodi. Amazing what you guys have done in just two years. I think the statewide effort is really, really exciting to have Massachusetts really work together at the community colleges to work together on this. There was a couple of questions that came in when you were talking. One was you mentioned that, I believe you mentioned, that students can see in the schedule what courses use OER or low cost. And we had a question about how you're doing that. So the way that we do that is we met with the registrar's office and we sent them a list at the start of each semester or start of registration period for each semester. That contains a list of the courses. And they code it in Vienna as a note on a particular section. So when students are going through, they can see that different sections of courses have a code and they don't all necessarily mean that they're open. It could be about being part of a learning community or having a service learning component. When they're going through the scheduling tool, when they look at particular sections, they can use their mouth over the code and it will tell them, you know, this is a course that has no text across. Students will be expected to complete reading electronically. We do want to make sure that they know when they register that they have to read electronically because that can be a challenge for some students as well. Okay. So great. Great. Thank you for that. There was another question about the same time about stipends. And I think the question you had mentioned, $1,000 stipends I think earlier. And the question was, is that for folks who create their own materials? Do you have a variation for people who say go to open stacks and use a textbook there and some of the ancillaries? Or is it just one stipend? When we first started, we just used a flat $1,000 stipend. We started before we actually really even got involved with PCC OER and we really didn't know a lot about what we were doing. We just knew we wanted to make some changes. So we started off with this proposal and went with $1,000. And after the first round of faculty presentations, we had a discussion with our VP about the variations of work that went into it. You know we had people that adopted an open book and that was pretty much all they had to change other than some of the in-class activities. And then we had other people that pretty much developed their own textbooks. At that point, we had a discussion about who would have to make the decision, about how to pay people and how much to pay them and all of that. And we decided at that point it was just something that we didn't want to get into. So we kept it at a flat $1,000 regardless of people's work at this time. We do anticipate that change in with a statewide proposal. We do not see that we'll continue with that model going to be like. Okay. Thank you for that. There's a few more that came in. Let's see. Oh, boy. Quite a few more. How did you capture the cost savings statistics? What measurement assessment tools did you use? So we used the actual cost of the books that the students would have paid. And we just really kept track of it by the number of students enrolled in the course times the cost of the textbook. So we've just been like manually keeping, you know, a total of the cost savings. Right. Most of our students would have said, you know, we have extremely high percentage of our students that are on financial aid here at the college. And in order to use their financial aid to buy textbooks, they do have to order them through the bookstore. So we used bear cost. Used when available. Otherwise, the new cost. Okay. Thank you. And we had a question from about how are you working with librarians to help faculty adopt OER? So as part of our textbook task force, we actually do have one full-time librarian that's been around the college for a while. And she works with us pretty closely. She's helped us develop our LibGuide. And then we've had a couple of new librarians that have come on board that have been an active part of the task force as well. And I know, you know, across the states that the libraries are much more involved than they are here. So, you know, we'll definitely try to, you know, have, like, a librarian as a point person, as well as, you know, someone from instructional design or instructional technology. Our faculty, a lot of times will work more closely with the librarians in terms of when they're finding resources, particularly those that aren't just, you know, adopting existing open textbooks that have to put together more of their resources. And at times they'll use, we do a lot of part of the project, faculty to assign materials through our library that are freely available to the students, even if it means that the college has a cost for those because they're already part of our college-wide budget. And it's not a direct cost for students. Right, right. And I think our final question about the repository. Yes, please. So, you know, we do not have a repository. And I'm laughing because that's one of the things that we had a meeting with several of our colleagues across Massachusetts before we really got into this potential funding source. We had an online meeting, and that was one of the things we discussed was one of the first things that we want to do is come up with some sort of repository or find an existing one that we all will consistently use to put the materials in. As far as sharing, you know, we've worked with people through the CCCOER when they needed resources and, you know, kind of shared out that way or connected faculty without their faculty at this point. But we do hope to have a much better answer to that question next open-ed week. Well, wonderful. I think at this point we're going to let Jody and Sue go and thank them very much for this very helpful overview of how they built their program over the last two years. So a big hand to all our presenters today, Roxanne and Quill and Jody and Sue. And I hope that our participants today enjoyed this and that you're enjoying open-ed week. There's still a day and a half left. So get out there and see if there's other things of interest to you. Most of these sessions are being recorded, so you can catch up on them at another time as well. So thanks, everyone, and have a great day. All right, thanks, Luna.