 All right, let's get started. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning, wherever you may be. My name is Regina Gong, and I am one of the members of the Open Ed Steering Committee, and I am co-chairing this fourth Open Ed 20 community meeting with Ethan Sienak. Ethan, would you like to say hi? Yes, hello, everybody. It's really nice to be on video. I know we've been doing a bunch of these in the webinar format because of the size of the meeting, but it is great to be here in person, in however that term means these days. And I'm really excited to be here with Regina to run this meeting. Yes, so yeah, so we would like to again welcome you. And as you can see here are our Open Ed Conference Steering Committee members. Most of us are here in this call. So just, you know, want you to know the names of our fellow Steering Committee members. Before we get started with our call, let's set up our mentee first. So we will be using mentee just like we've done in the past community calls to do some interactive questions. So it is really best to use a separate browser that you have been using, you know, apart from what you're using now in this call. You can either do option one, which is go to mentee.com and enter the code 3607-07-08, or you can go to check the direct link at the chat box. You can take a look at that and click directly on it, or you can use a QR code, whichever you like. Yeah, so now let's get started. Oh, wow, we have Rhode Island there. I wonder who's from there. So where are you joining from? Please let us know. Wow. Michigan, yay. Texas. Wow. There's a big contingent from Colorado and North Carolina, it seems, Georgia too. Yeah, so welcome everyone. So you all know, I mean, this is just for fun. You all know the five R's of OER, right? So if you were to choose the six R's, what would it be? I know, I just wanna relax. That's what I want. I'm sure a lot of you would want to do that. That's also the camp I went with. Yeah. I'm in the Rose Camp. Rose, yes. Wow, I like respect, yes. Yeah, so hopefully that six R will be the rock on. No one's feeling rowed, but it's okay. No one's feeling robots, I guess. Robots, yeah. Oh, I like the one that says re-imagine. Yes, we like that too. Yeah, that's a good one, Maya. Yeah, so maybe we should go to the next slide now. Yeah, so as always, we would like to keep you up to date with what we have been doing in terms of planning for our open-ed conference in November. So for now, I'll turn you over to Nicole Allen. Nicole. Wonderful, thank you so much, Regina. And I'm here representing the sort of organizing, organizations, OpenStock, Spark, University of System of Maryland, Corwin Center, and Colorado Department of Higher Ed OER Council. Wanted to share a couple of things on the organizing end with everybody. At our last meeting, we talked a little bit about the process of working with the hotel that we'd identified in Denver and wanted to let everybody know that we are gonna move ahead and officially move the entire conference online. We are still working out some of the details with the hotel. So haven't gotten the sort of official announcement out the door just yet, but hopefully early next week we'll have that out on Twitter and on email. And we can really move forward in earnest with planning a fully virtual conference, which is gonna be the first in open-ed history to be fully online. And I think offer some really, really exciting opportunities to build a conference that includes many more voices and reaches many more places. So also wanted to note that in moving the conference fully online, we are also extending the dates. And this is largely based on the great feedback that the community gave us on the last meeting. It was originally November 9th through 11th, Monday through Wednesday, and we've decided to extend to five days, November 9th through 13th, Monday through Friday. So that gives us five days to spread out the program. And while it's hard to sort of process that we won't be able to convene in person, like the reality is that a lot of our community hasn't been able to convene in person at this conference anyways, because of other barriers like funding and being able to travel across borders and things like that. So I think it's exciting to move forward with the online planning process. Also wanted to just give people a sense of what the timeline is gonna look like here on out. I think we've been sort of holding back on making major decisions first because this conference offers us the opportunity to truly build the conference from the ground up with community input baked in from the beginning. So we have left a lot of the decision-making until we're able to include more voices. And that is now fully underway and we are moving forward at full speed. The hope and please don't hold us to this, but letting you know that our hope right now is to be able to get the call for proposals out the week of July 27th and offer four weeks to submit proposals. We're looking at the later in August, opening up registration mid-September, issuing acceptances and the program outline. And then early October, the full program being published online and of course the conference in the second week of November. And also just wanted to quickly let you know that the program team, the volunteer team has been hard at work on the call for proposals draft where things currently stand and this could shift a little bit, but just wanted to be transparent and let everybody know where things are currently stands. We're looking at around 10 topics as opposed to tracks that are really drawn from the data that you all submitted at the last meeting on what you wanna learn at the conference. So that includes things like social justice and COVID and sustainability and all sorts of different topics that cut across different stakeholder groups and countries and contexts. We're looking at presentation types, having the usual sort of 20 minute presentations, longer presentations for panels that bring together diverse voices and then interactive sessions and then time for workshops and also looking at asynchronous contributions and those being like short videos or posters and alternative format. And then we're also going to continue the practice of limiting the number of proposals each person can submit to ensure a diverse program. Right now, because there's lots of different types of formats, currently thinking about a three proposal per person limit with a maximum of one synchronous session as the lead, welcome thoughts in the chat or later on in the conversation on that piece. And now one more question we wanted to ask you all. And I welcome fellow steering committee members to weigh in in this conversation, but at our last community meeting, we asked you all the question of whether we should have an overarching conference theme this year and the feedback was generally positive on that. And then we asked you about some ideas for what that theme could be and the responses that we got were so varied. And we thought really hard about, how can we capture this idea of all of these different ideas with an overarching theme? And this is what we came up with. We've discussed a lot of different variants on this, whether to do reimagining open, reimagining education. We've also considered other R words, although none that were in the first question, but I saw people putting some great suggestions and yes, Maya did, you called it on reimagining. Reconceptualize reshaping open education was another one, re-envisioning open education. So lots of other re-words that better in there really welcome feedback on this if you wanna stick it in in Mentimeter here. And I think just a couple of points on this, if we do go with this word reimagining, we wanna recognize that reimagining does start as a mental process, but it needs to be an active process. Can't just be coming up with ideas or envisioning solutions that it needs to translate into concrete actions that actually change things. And I think in thinking about a theme that is inspiring and tries to capture all of the ideas, we really wanna put the emphasis on action coming out of this conference. So others on the steering committee, things to add, fill in there. I was just gonna say, I mean, I think, it sort of started from the very little literal process we were going through of reimagining the open education conference, right? As David stepped aside last year and sort of charged the community with figuring this out for themselves. And so I think this stems from sort of that idea, which is like, how are we reimagining this conference in itself, but also there is a need to think about this so much more broadly. There's so much more we can and need to factor in in terms of context when it comes to open education. How are we interacting with COVID? How are we acting with social justice and racial justice? And so I think this leaves the door open for us to think sort of on some practical levels, but also on some broader conceptual level of sudden. And that's why I'm really excited about it. All right, so seeing lots of great feedback in the chat really appreciate that. And unless any other steering committee members want to jump in, I'll hand it back to Regina. Thank you, Nicole. And thank you for your overwhelming response to our theme this year, reimagining. Really like that. Yeah, so let's talk about conference cost. And I think someone put that question in the chat earlier. Yeah, so our next slide, please. Yeah, so we asked this question, if you remember in our previous community meeting, obviously there's not going to be any in-person meeting anymore, so we asked what would be the amount that would be ideal for you as registration cost? And that was like the range that was, you know, that you told us. And so now we are given that we are going to have an online conference that will span five days. What do you consider would be an affordable fee? And what do you consider to be a reasonable fee? And also what would be the maximum that you could consider paying? So we put in the lower, which is a dollar and the high price, which is like 400, we don't intend to go over that $400 amount. Okay, so I see like right around 131, okay. Got lower, yes, 93, almost 94. Yeah, the input that you will put in right now will really inform our program committee and the steering committee as we think about what would be an online registration fee that would be more inclusive to all of us. Yeah, and I see that Maya is saying, sliding scale for students and unemployed, yes. For sure, we will have a special rate for students. Yeah, so I'm seeing right around 106 would be an affordable amount for registration. Yes, max around like 170, yes. And we are really looking to make this as affordable and as low-cost as possible so we can expand attendance. Yes, and keep it coming. And then of course, we ask you to before, the following features have been suggested in the past as important, but might increase the cost of registration. So how would you balance prioritizing this versus affordability of the conference? So how do we ensure that the following features that we as a community want for this online conference gets incorporated without really sacrificing affordability? So please let us know. And I saw a bunch of questions in the chat just around what is the budget, what is the cost of the conference? And the answer is that it's not set yet. And that's sort of our reason for asking this question. One could imagine we could run a conference totally using free Google Meet and Google Hangouts and we could keep the cost incredibly low, but also that would be probably not ideal and very challenging to navigate. So on the other end of the spectrum is we could purchase access to like an all-inclusive conferencing platform, which is one of the options on this slide. And so what we wanna do is gauge what's really important to the community and to community members. And then what we can do is go back from there to weigh what's important, what's necessary, what's a nice path. And then we can come back to the budget that is as low as possible to make the conference as accessible to as many people as possible. Yeah, thank you for that, Ethan. And it looks like, yes, there's an overwhelming support for discounts for students, adjuncts, and others with limited funding, yes. And yes, we will commit to that because it is important that we have participation from our students and also from faculty who, especially in community colleges, who are adjuncts. And also there's live close captioning, yes, for sure, for accessibility purposes, live stream of featured sessions. That is really good too. More live breakout sessions and what else is that? Full featured virtual conference platform, yes. The program committee is still investigating like what Ethan has mentioned earlier. We want this conference to be robust and engaging and as full packed as possible. So we are really investigating many of conference platforms out there, but we have not decided yet. But for sure, all of this will be informed by the decision that we're gonna make. Can't keep up with the chat, Ethan, you probably can. Take a look at it, yes. Well, and a lot of this stuff, I saw Rajiv's question and some other folks asking about like what the budget of the virtual conference platform would be. And there may be other folks from the steering committee that have an answer of what's being considered, but I think we wanted to check with the community to see if that was something that felt valuable. And it seems just from the results here like a pretty low score for social networking tools. So I would imagine that the result of that is we'll probably just use existing social media tools whereas like closed captioning, obviously incredibly important. And so maybe what we'll have to look at is like what's the cost if that's automated, right? Like some platforms will do that automatically for free, but it's computer generated. So given how important folks think it is like maybe what we need to consider is having human closed captioning or something. So this is just really helpful for guiding those decisions. And we're super grateful for all of the questions that you're asking for all of the input that you're giving here because this is how we're making our decisions. And so we may not have answers for all of these questions as you're writing them, but we will come back with answers based on the questions and the input that you've given us. Yes, for sure. Yeah, so I think you can move on to the next. Is that for our breakout? Yeah, so segue into the most exciting part of this community call. This is the first time we are doing a breakout session. So I'd like to turn over to Ethan to tell us more about how we are going to do this and what we are going to talk about during this breakout session. Ethan? Yes, awesome. Thanks Regina. So I would encourage everybody if you can and if you're comfortable to turn on your videos, we are going to do some small group breakout rooms. I'm just going to sort of give a quick explanation of what we're doing and then we'll break out into those so you can get a chance to meet some other folks from the community. So one thing that we've seen demonstrated really clearly on prior community calls is that we as a community value representation, diversity, inclusion, and making open as accessible to as many people as possible. However, we will never accomplish those things without some real intentionality around how we welcome people into the community and how we empower them. This is really something that's a shared responsibility between all of us. So we wanted to take some face-to-face time today to start building some community and also to take off this conversation. So we're going to be doing a breakout room to discuss the three questions you see on the screen right now. What makes you feel welcome at conferences? What are some things that have made feeling welcome difficult? And what are some ideas and suggestions you have to make OpenEd 20 in its online format this year welcoming and accessible to many people. So I'm going to ask the steering committee members to help facilitate this. So there'll be one steering committee member in each breakout room. We're going to go for 20 minutes and then do a quick report back afterwards. And don't worry about writing these questions down once you're in the small groups. We're going to send them around in the chat, but do take a quick sec to look at them now and start thinking about your own experience because we really want to lead it with this grounded in our own experiences, what works for you, what didn't and start from there. Before we jump in though, I just really want to quickly run through some general principles for having discussions. We want to get into the practice of establishing these norms upfront. We imagine there will be harder conversations. So just some really quick things if you tend to speak up a lot, make space for others. If you don't often speak up, try speaking up this time. It's sort of a make space, take space is the way that gets summarized. Listen to actively take time to repeat back and clarify language. I can't tell you the number of times I've been in discussions and debates where two people were actually saying very similar things, but just didn't agree on the specific terms and language that they use, but didn't realize it. And then finally, help make others look brilliant. So these are just some basic conversation norms. Lee just posted a link to a longer document with these and some other norms in practice. So you can take a look at that, but just keep these in mind as you're jumping into the small groups. Finally, when you're in there, you'll be able to submit your thoughts and ideas via Mentimeter. Nicole has added questions that you'll be able to move back and forth between at your own pace. So do take some time to submit your thoughts that way. We will go till 1.47 Eastern time and you'll get a notification when we're pulling you all back. So thanks and good luck in your breakout rooms. We're excited to hear what y'all come up with. All right, so we have nine groups of six to seven. There's an open ed steering committee slash staff member in each one of them. You know who you are. And I am going to open the rooms now and you all find yourselves there in a moment. Can I just say, oh, nice to see all these faces. I really miss people, my Lord. Yeah, I just, I switched to the gallery view as we were coming back in and I was just like, ah, this is amazing, look at all of these human beings. I know. And it's so nice to see. I know many of you and some of you I don't know and it's just so awesome. I know, I am just like looking like four corners of my screen. It's like, oh, Amanda. Well, I did promise that we would wrap on time. So I want to just run through the groups. I'm going to do your best to keep it to actually 30 seconds just so, because we have one or two other questions we want to get through before we wrap. But I think let's just hop into it. Let's start with group one. Do you have somebody who can report back for 30 seconds on kind of what you talked about? How do we know our group numbers? Yeah, I'm going to do this. So a cancels, a cancels group. Hey, so my group very kindly nominated me to be the speaker, which I'm not surprised about, but the TLDR of our conversation is that we found that the best parts about a conference were actually those parts of the conference that weren't scheduled. So like the coffees that you have, the social hangouts that you have, the awkward waiting in line to get your badge and waiting to get your t-shirt and stuff. And so we wanted to find ways to mimic that. And some of the concepts we came up with were that a session for new folks who are new to the community or just generally new to the OER world would be really helpful. Trying to do like a mentoring system for folks that are students or librarians, but not necessarily like putting them to the side, just allowing them to build a community with each other, trying to find ways to mimic that social time by scheduling it into the conference. Lots of positive feedback about like I think breakout rooms tend to work really well because you can have those conversations. And a great idea that came out of it was also how to create a guide on like how to have good conversations, specifically for videos. So like how are we making sure that everyone is speaking or that people aren't talking over each other? And then a really cool concept was creating a guide for like good chat behavior because sometimes like it's easy to just throw like messages in the chat, which work for some people, but sometimes that might distract the presenter. So just making that like part of the repertoire for sessions that you could probably at the beginning of your session, like say what your like concept is for chat behavior and video stuff. And that is our 30 second trial. Awesome, that sounds like a very productive group. And just folks, I see a couple of people saying like our group had very similar ideas. That's awesome. So a quick plus one or write it into Mentimeter but share out sort of anything new that you came up with or anything that particularly stood out. So next up, we're gonna go to Tiffany's group, group two. And I was also nominated again, also a shocker. And I'm sorry for being the only person about their video on, but or at least on the front screen anyway. So our group had a very similar conversation about having welcome sessions, social opportunities, things like that. But we talked about kind of working in the like games or things in between sessions or even during sessions, making sure that presenters know what features are available to them once we figure out what platform we're using so that they know how to create those sort of interactive options. Yes, Jeff Karaoke and then the other thing that was really important was being careful about language that alienates or language that kind of separates the the nose from the no knots, I guess, the insiders and the outsiders. And so, you know, like avoiding uncommon acronyms or even common acronyms that we think are common, but really aren't. So yeah, that's our spiel. Cool, thanks. We'll run a little bit behind. So keep it to 30 seconds, next few, next few report backs. So I'm gonna go, let's see, let's have Jasmine's group go next. We didn't clarify who was gonna speak. So I'll just go ahead and do it. So we eventually said the same stuff, open and mentors was a key theme from our group, especially for those who were maybe new to this community. A couple of like tangible, like not case studies, but examples of other conferences that did a really good job of establishing a welcome environment, OpenCon, specifically OpenCon 2016, there they addressed imposter syndrome, there are a lot of student presentations and projects. So that kind of evoked a more welcoming atmosphere. And then someone had also mentioned the World Cafe format from OE Global worked really, really well. So we can maybe do the same for this upcoming conference. And one, another thing that was mentioned was the fact that the sharing aspect in the open ed community is what really makes open ed conferences different from traditional academic conferences. So if we can try to keep, you know, along those lines for this year's conference, that will be wonderful. Awesome. Thank you, Jasmine. Lee's group. That's you, Jennifer. Hey, you don't have to do it, Lee. Plus one on everything that everybody's already said, we had a very similar discussion. A couple of other things that had been mentioned that I haven't heard yet were maybe having the small group meetings, being decided maybe by interest groups by, you know, community colleges or higher ed or K-12 or maybe even geographically, so you can work with other people who are in your region that you might go to smaller conferences with that you could network with easier. One of the other people in the group mentioned maybe in some instances, it's easier, I think in person than online stripping affiliations from people because people might see where you're from or what your job title is and place an importance on that that shouldn't be there. But other than that, it's pretty much plus one on what everybody else said. Awesome. Thank you, Jennifer. Emily's group. Okay, so a few emphases where the importance of having breaks, only having a few sessions back to back and then letting people move around and the importance of having good tech support and tech practice for presenters to minimize those technological challenges. Awesome. And a record speed report back. Thank you. Thank you, Emily. Regina's group. Maya will start off first. Thanks. Plus one on what everyone's been saying, some of the things that we specifically talked about were the kind of importance of first contact. So the kind of registration table experience and having those kinds of personal conversations. Also, we were talking about how sometimes in, especially in an online format when there's a chat function, especially with Zoom, we can't reply to individual comments. So sometimes comments just kind of get lost with the speed of how many people might be responding. So if there's a way that somebody can kind of just acknowledge comments or have somehow the importance of acknowledgement. And then plus one on welcome session for noobs as a newbie myself, I would love that. Yeah. And to add to one of our members said welcome session. Yeah. For the first time attendee and also online conference body. So yeah, that would be very useful. And just as a reminder folks, we do have a open question on this in Mentimeter. So please do write these things. We're recording this. We will definitely download all of this stuff because I'm just mind blowing at all of these awesome ideas. So I'm going to go to Haley's team. We're at 59, so do your best. Hey record time. Okay. Well, we had tons of great ideas that I'll put in Mentimeter, but some of the ones that haven't necessarily been touched on were just ensuring that we have a really thoughtful and robust code of conduct to make people feel welcome. Ease of experience in the first impression of conference technology and how important that is for folks to carry, whether or not they felt welcomed by the technology. And I think the rest we all touched on in some capacity, the biggest one also, I think it is just being aware of kind of like rockstar culture and doing what we can to ensure that everybody's on a level playing field. Awesome. Last few groups, Mo, you're up next. Your group? Yeah, I would just say plus one to all of those things. I think one of the things that we identified was just like more marginalized voices or like more voices that we don't really get to hear from as often in the sessions and also like building in mechanisms for people to be able to share their opinions. So like if we could make it so that sessions aren't necessarily like, okay, we're in conference mode now, don't unmute your mic, the chat is locked, like giving people, making it feel a little bit more open to conversation. Yeah. Cool. Oh, and also moderated drop-in rooms after sessions was another suggestion. Awesome. Yeah, I love that one. Jillian was gonna report back for our group, but I think she had to hop off. So I'll just say, I think, you know, we echoed a lot of the similar things. Had someone mentioned the idea of pop-up sessions, which I think OpenCon did a couple of years ago where like you could schedule yours out a day in advance to try to make presenting a little bit more accessible to a wider group of people. So some extemporaneous presenting options was one of the ideas our group came up with. We are two minutes over time, so I'm gonna throw it back to Regina to bring us home and wrap us up. I wish we had more time, right? So, but this is a Friday and it's two o'clock, it's sunny outside, I'm sure you would wanna enjoy the day. So thank you, thank you, thank you. We are going to send the link to the recording of this session and I hope to see you again next time. When is our next call again, Nicole? It's gonna be on August 21st. August 21st. So thank you to all of you for your engagement, for your inputs and I'll see you all again next month. So take care, happy weekend. Bye. Thanks, all.