 All right, welcome again to all of our CCCOER members. This is Una Daley from the Community College Consortium for OER. And we have kind of a special treat here today with Delmar Larson joining us. So big thanks to Delmar Larson, who is the executive director of Libra Text. And I think many of you know that Libra Text was the recent only recipient of the Department of Education open textbook pilot. And so Delmar has a lot of great stuff to tell us about the work they're going to do with that. All right, everyone can hear me OK, right? Hopefully. Oh, and what I'd like to ask is if folks wouldn't mind just typing in the chat window a little information about where they're from. As I was mentioning earlier, we have folks from all over the country here. And I just saw some of the New York folks come in as well. So this is a great opportunity. I was going to say good afternoon for everybody, because I think at this point from the Pacific Coast to the East Coast, we're on afternoon time. But I just saw some folks come in from Hawaii. So good morning to the folks from Hawaii. And here's our agenda. Basically, we're just going to hear from Delmar today. But at the end, I'm going to just share with you a few of the events that are coming up in December. I think many of you know about these, but we have a webinar next week. And we have an all members mixer the week after. And wanted to talk a little bit about Open Ed Week as well. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to Delmar Larson, who is the professor of chemistry at the University of California, Davis. And also the Libre Text Executive Director. Delmar. Delas, well, Delmar. Can you hear me? We can. OK, can I do a screen share? Absolutely. Great. Now I need to figure out how to do this. I think this is the right one to do. OK, it's a pleasure to be here perverbally. And I'm very much enjoying the discussions that I've engaged in in the last couple of months since we received this award from the Department of Education, much to the displeasure of my graduate students who don't see me anymore and are threatening a coup from my laser laboratory. So let me begin by this. And that went to the wrong screen. So I'll do this. And that also went to the wrong screen. Yeah, we're seeing your website right now, I believe. Oh, it's not. Oh, how did it end? Actually, I don't know if it says the world's most popular online textbook. Yes, yes, you see that. Oh, it must have shared the actual browser window. Browser instead of the output. Do you see it moving right now? No, you don't. We see your slides now. You see my slides now? Yes. This is the problem with two screens. Let's see what happens if I do this. Do you see presentation mode for my slides? We do, yes. OK, we're rocking. So how do I begin here? So the LibreTechs project is a relatively mature project in the OER community. It's about 11, 12 years old. The first five years of our existence was primarily supported by volunteer work, by lots of faculty, and even more students. It was initially formed in the chemistry department here at UC Davis, and we call it the Ken Wiki, but it's expanded to a much bigger, more comprehensive scope in the last few years, and certainly in the next few years it will expand even more. We have social media that's typically available there that you can access us. But you can Google LibreText. And if you forget our name for some reason or other, just Google any topic in chemistry, and we'll be in the top level of that. So let me begin by actually emphasizing what the LibreTechs project, or more specifically, how it's used on the case there. So it's used in different mechanisms by different faculty and student for a variety of reasons. So it's hard to say exactly how everybody uses it, but there are these modalities out there. One is used as a curated repository of living content. In fact, it's the largest living content on the net today. And I use the term living quite specifically in the sense that it's a content that you can go in and edit it and upgrade it and curate it very conveniently. The opposite of living is dead. In that case, there would be something like a series of PDFs, which are particularly painful in order to try to edit. And then you have something sort of in the middle that are more zombie-like content, which have editing capabilities, but it's a little bit painful in order to be able to process that. And we can discuss those platforms on the case there. I should mention before I continue on, if people want to chime in in order to stop me on anything I say, please do so. Don't wait until the very end, because typically people forget, or at least I forget, what concerns I have when we're going on. And I like to keep things somewhat informal in my presentation, assuming that that is... So, Delmar, do you prefer a chat interruption and... Where's the chat button? There's the chat button somewhere on here. How do I look at it? Yeah, it's at the bottom near the share, or it should be. Pause, annotate, control. Well, let me put it this way. I'll monitor the chat window, so if anything comes up on the chat, we can do that. We can also turn on the microphone. Sometimes we get a little feedback, but if people want to, they can turn on their microphone then I think you're saying to ask them. Yeah, please, please, interject while I'm actually talking. It makes more sense in order to do this contextually than trying to remember what I said a half hour later. So the Libertex is used as a construction and dissemination platform. We have somewhere in the order of 70,000 pages across all 12 of our existing libraries, and we are planning on expanding that significantly thanks to the Department of Education grant. And it's also used as a usage tool. So it's a mechanism that, in part, is used in order to assess students' performance, identifying how students engage with activities or their homework, they can identify study habits, and our goal is to use that information in order to eventually develop a rubric in order to identify how students can better study online. That's a complicated question because there is no one way, I think, on how students can best study. It depends upon their skill set and we need people to identify these things in a more nuanced manner than what's many people presenting here. So I'm sort of preaching to the choir, but let me do this anyways. There are three primary textbook problems that I see out there with the current state of affairs here. One has to do with the rising cost of textbooks. I think everyone in this presentation is all on board with that, in addition to the detrimental effects associated with the cost of textbooks. But there are other problems that are a particular concern, especially for institutions where cost is not a primary issue for the students, more fluent student population that is. The second one is that textbooks can be limiting and not empowering, so we want our textbooks to essentially be a scaffold in order to enable the curriculum that the department or the faculty member is enacting. But far too often it's used as a crutch, which essentially dictates the curriculum of the class. And that's not meant to necessarily be degrading to faculty because that would be self-deprecating, but far too often the faculty select a textbook and the textbook itself dictates the curriculum and I feel it's the responsibility of the faculty themselves to dictate the curriculum of the class and hone that curriculum to address the needs of the faculty, the needs of the department and the needs of the students, which no doubt varies from campus to campus. Textbook problem number three is that there's quite a lot of very interesting and very good research in the science of teaching and learning out there on how students learn effectively. But for that research to actually get into the classroom nowadays it needs to go through the textbook publishers because the textbooks are the de facto gatekeeper. In order to hinder a subtle research and put it into the classroom, I want to avoid or knock out the textbook as this gatekeeper and provide an opportunity for faculty in order to identify new paradigms, new approaches and be able to use them effectively and in their class case there. So these are the three paradigms that are three issues that I have a problem with in the current textbook infrastructure. So I say this quite often and I'll say it here, at least in the beginning, is that the textbook of the future is not the textbook of the past. So we need to stop thinking about the textbook of the past as a model in order to formulate the future. So we need to stop thinking I believe in building in the OER community individual textbooks and start thinking about building text libraries, interconnected networks of resources out there that demonstrates what we want our students to have when they graduate from the college. So we teach in classes, classes are vignettes, we teach subsections in a specific class and we then go to another class and there may or may not be any connection, oftentimes there's not and that is another entry that goes into the student's brain and then when the students are all said and done, we want them to be able to mix what they've done or what they've learned in these different vignettes into something that has a synergy that's far greater than the sum of the parts. My argument is why are we then giving them textbooks that facilitate these silos, give them a text library and a facilitated key or what I call a Libre Text in order to guide themselves through this library because that's what we want them to think about and then we want to give them the resources in order to go about doing that. So what are the Libre Text Libraries? The Libre Text Libraries currently consists of 12 libraries that are interconnected and this goes along with what I'm arguing about in terms of building a text library. We want to have these libraries which are field dependent because we can't get rid of individual fields obviously but we want to be able to build something that has this network, that content is being able to go from chemistry to biology and medicine to social sciences and even to humanities and you can make connections that way sometimes tenuous and sometimes not and that is a guiding principle behind what we do. What this means is that while I said that their project was born out of chemistry in the Ken Wiki, we are far more comprehensive. In fact, we take an approach that I call Ghibli in my team, the no gap left behind approach. So in other words, any field that has a need for OER which is basically every field and as far as I'm concerned, we are willing in order to address and integrate into our project. Chemistry is obviously something that I am that holds this very special part in my heart but it's just one of a range of libraries that we have available and we're gonna be expanding these libraries as part of the Department of Education grant to include the career ed library which has been formed and is available for access as of two or three weeks ago. Which library, sorry, I didn't catch that Delmar. Which library? So this, can you see my mouse? Does my mouse move on your screen? Okay, this used to be called the solar library. We're in the process of revamping that to the career ed library. It's basically CTE library. This is part of the requirements for the Department of Education grant. We're not fully done with the branding of it and the renaming of it but that's the point off of that and that's where a community college consortia members, consortium members will be quite principal in constructing it in addition to the Cal State University System, Jerry Hanley, who runs Merlot and other entities. Feels commons, yeah. Feels commons. I think the career technical ed library is very exciting. We're very excited about that. It's also the one thing that scares me the most because I have the least familiarity with that field being at our one institution. But fortunately, I have a lot of very talented people in our consortium in order to move that forward. And I should throw this out there. Any faculty member that has an interest in order to be part of our project or take use of our project or contribute to our project, we are open very strongly off of that. So let me mention something briefly about this Department of Education grant that we went through it caused a little bit of grief and not necessarily grief, let me phrase that. It was a very interesting situation in constructing and getting it because we were fortunate enough in order to receive the full call of close to $5 million on the case there. So we had three absolute priorities. This is in the call of the Department of Education and then one competitive priority, which is optional. One was improving collaborative dissemination through consortium arrangements. So that's why we have a consortium that currently has different levels of commitment ranging from full blown involvement. They're all involved at the institutional level that come in there, but we have other faculty in campuses that where they're only the department, for example, is involved and they're not a full blown consortium member as of yet. So the other one is addressing gaps and open textbook marketplace and bringing solutions to scale. We have several gap analysis sub team members focusing on addressing that and promoting degree completion. We have several aspects involved in pushing that forward. And the competitive preference priority, if I get to that aspect is essentially capitalizing on our homework infrastructure in order to develop a personalized learning system, sort of an AI in order to provide a personal tutor based off of how the students engage with our content and how they work with our online homework system on the system there. So the upshot of our proposal. So the LibreTechs is a community effort and that's a key point in order to emphasize here. Everyone who can contribute to it meaningfully is accepted with open arms on the case. They're all are welcome to join. It again is a construction dissemination platform with all that you would expect for those aspects. We're using existing technologies and we're developing new technologies in order to be able to push the overall goal of our project. One of our approaches or one of our flavors is to act as a OER aggregator of sorts where we will work on harvesting, which is the term that we use, which is basically integrating or burgifying if you are really big in Star Trek, the existing OER universe into our libraries. And there are reasons for doing that. The primary reason for doing that is it provides a consistent mechanism where all the content has a consistent style and format and it facilitates to the maximum capacity, the remixing aspect that is important in order to expand OER. And I'll show you an example of that with this OER remixer that we just went live yesterday. And I keep on harping on this or going back to it, but we'll work with any faculty or campus, the OER team in order to move forward. So oftentimes campuses that have OER projects that are just beginning don't have the resources in order to build an IT infrastructure in order to host their content or facilitate the construction of new content. I argue that there's no reason in order to do that because we'll do that for free. And in doing so, you then are able to capitalize on the community that we have established, which is growing quite significantly in order to move forward. So in other words, you don't need to worry about the support and the infrastructure and the pain of IT support of whatever platform you happen to use. We will do it for you. We have people all over America, consortium members at different tiers. And we have somewhere in the order of maybe, I think it's 250 million page views that we have collected over the last 11 years that is equivalent of a close to two thirds of or four quarters of a millennium of confirmed reading of our content. Our team consists of five sub teams that have a very specific foci. We have the development team, which I am also the leader of. We have the harvesting team that Kevin Flash at Sacramento City College is driving. And they're really pushing both integration of content but also gap analysis for both their campus and also to their district and outside of the district. Chuck Severance is running our technology team from the University of Michigan. Unfortunately, he's just downstairs right now in my lab. So we can continue our discussion right after this meeting. Dissemination team is Josh Halpern, which is relatively straightforward and involves outreach and a variety of other things. Marco Malanaro is running our assessment and analysis team. We have a range of faculty and student developers that interact with all the teams independently. And there's an upper level with me and outreach coordinator, project coordinator. And we have two advisory boards, one that's industrial and that's important in order to push the project forward along the CTE line in order to guide us how we're moving. We're hoping that we're able to capitalize on Jerry Hanley's infrastructure down in Cal State in order to be able to make that to the fullest capabilities. And we have an academic advisory board in order to concentrate on the other fields in the system. This right here is what the Libre text looked like a while ago, but what I want to do is somehow use a, is this a website? This is a website. Okay. So this is the front end of my website. Actually, I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to do this. Let me go over this quickly and then I'll go into my website here. So a lot of our efforts focused on integrating or building an online platform rather than offline, paper-based OER infrastructure that other people have focused on. This has certain benefits. One, it has ease of dissemination. So as soon as one member constructs content on the site then everyone in the world has access to that site. And that provides an opportunity in order to provide seamless integration over the multiple fields in each of the libraries and multiple subfields within the library. This, by using an online platform, the libraries are largely wiki-based infrastructure facilitates highly collaborative and highly distributive construction efforts, which is particularly important for the community-based construction efforts of the project. We do have a mechanism in order to provide PDF, which is just a very simple button at the upper right-hand corner. We do have an online homework system that is gonna be in the alpha phase next month. We have three-dimensional capabilities where you can provide, basically, I should emphasize here, that the things I'm talking about here are focusing around taking advantage of the fact that we have a computer behind the scenes and using it effectively. Again, the textbook of the future is very different from what I believe the textbook of the past is. And you can start to implement new technologies in order to be able to guide the learning experience. And part of that is interactive three-dimensional capabilities for chemistry, for biology in terms of proteins, but also for vector calculus in mathematics, which can be used for physics and engineering. We can introduce multimedia, including videos and simulations. We can embed FET simulations. We can embed Concord Consortium simulations and a wide range of other technologies as they come up. Our system is relatively simplified so we can embed these technologies quite quickly without any overhead complications, which is something that can be a complication or an issue in other platforms. And then once we embed it into one library, then all the users, including faculty and students, in across the whole, all 12 of our libraries can then take advantage of that. We have a numerical infrastructure, a calculation infrastructure. Jupiter notebooks is integrated, so we can have calculations, scientific calculations embedded into. We have Python. We have R. We have SageMath. We have Octave. We have 25 other languages that are connected to the Jupiter books. You can imagine that if you're taking a statistics class and you're learning statistics, you can then, as a student, directly interact with the data, do your analysis on the data right there on the fly and then get the results in the case there. And you can do that on your phone because all the calculations are done server-side on our system. We're quite excited about that. I mentioned this before as part of our goals in order to identify how students study best online. We can track student performance. We can then do assessment infrastructure off of that all with appropriate IRB approval if they're part of a test case or if they're just meant in order to provide feedback to the faculty member that doesn't require IRB approval. We have several integrated annotation infrastructures. We have hypothesis integrated into our system. And we have notabene from MIT integrated into our system. And they both have the capabilities for faculty and student in order to annotate software. And it can be annotate pages and it can be used as a mechanism for students to provide a contextual help line. So they can come in and say, I have a problem with this page right here and the faculty or the instructor record can go to that and say, oh, and then address it right there. And you can actually then mark up the class. This is the front end of our site right now. Move this out of my way. Okay. So, and I just wanted to show you a bit of those more advanced features that can be used in any of our libraries. Of course, our interactive proteins are not quite so important for the humanities library, but they can be used there. So we can embed our videos. These are interactive protein with molecules right here. This right here is an interactive three-dimensional Moibus strip because that's what was selected, but there are a range of other approaches off of there. Jupiter gives you these codes. Like I said, this gives you the opportunity for students to directly type into the code, which is a skill set that we think is important for students today. And then they can run their code and this takes a moment. There we go. And then they can, this provides a visual or an animated infrastructure for the data that's given there based off of health and wealth of nations. I mentioned hypothesis infrastructure. We can print on demand. We can print up the full textbook right now that's in its beta phase because we can do it, but it clogs up the external browser, the external server that runs that. We can import into learning management systems currently via Common Cartridge, which we are gonna be importing a bit of courses into the Canvas Commons infrastructure in the upcoming month or so. We're working on OEI compliance, which is a California-based infrastructure for community colleges for accessibility. And that's also supported by the Department of Education. We have a component of accessibility in that grant. We have a deep learning management system integration via the SUGI infrastructure, which I might get to by the end of my talk, which is meant to be our own learning management system that can then interface to local learning management systems on other campuses via the LTI infrastructure, which I believe is learning technology infrastructure, but I'm sure, or interoperability protocols, I'm sure I'm wrong on that, but Chuck Severance, our tech team leader, is the one who wrote that protocol. So we're able to embed directly into learning management systems comprehensively via deep integration or topically via these Common Cartridge modules that I mentioned before as modules into learning management systems. We have a homework infrastructure that's in part based off of web work, which is a popular math, open-source math library system. The individual that actually built that system, Mike Gage is also on our team. And I mentioned already a significant amount of our effort is in importing open textbooks. We're just completing an integrator, a converter that will let us integrate EPUBs directly into our system that will make our integration effort about 10 times faster. So we'll be focusing on typesetting and making sure that we have the ability that we want into the system onto it. So... You had a question in the chat window, Delmar. True. Meredith Moore asked, can you embed into the Blackboard open LMS? Yes. The Common Cartridge or the tiny Common Cartridge infrastructure that's part of this thing here can embed into any learning management system. We've tested it only with Canvas right now, but we will be testing with the other learning management system. In other words, because we're satisfying the protocols, it should embed to the other learning management systems. And if it doesn't, we will fix it in order to make it work like that. We will test that out momentarily. Oh. Thank you. Any other questions or is that... That's the only question I've seen so far. Okay. This should be one-five. There we go. So the libraries, not these advanced features, but the core content of the LibreTechs that's stored in our libraries, and that's a Wiki-based infrastructure that was forked initially out of MediaWiki, the technology that runs Wikipedia, but has grown into something significantly more powerful and more flexible by MindTouch, which is a company down in San Diego, which is a really great company. And they are constantly updating their software, improving it, and when they improve their software, then we get to take advantage of those updates and improvements. So we're not a static-based system. There are a variety of different ways in which we bring content into our system. I mentioned harvesting, where we take existing OER content and we bring it in. But we've also used students quite extensively over the years. And we use students partially in course effort. For example, extra credit or forced requirements. We have students that work on effort of integrating existing content for faculty. So if a faculty member is willing to donate their notes, whether they're online or offline, then I hand it off to a student developer and they'll work on integrating it into the system, making sure it has the same format, the same standard. The equations are all math jacks, which gives us late-tech capabilities of editing it. Because again, we want to make it so faculty have the ability to edit anything that they want on the front page. And then we also facilitate the faculty construction of raw content, which is highly supported by our Department of Education grant. The key point here is to make our library as big as possible and it's the largest living library of OER content on the net today. And it's going to get about 10 times bigger very soon on the system here. So the idea is that we, does this actually move? We want to become something like the matrix where faculty can come in and construct their content as they need, in this case here instead of weapons of math destruction, it's weapons of education, where they're looking at various things and deciding what they want in order to move forward. So key to that is the construction of a Libre text, which is essentially a course area, which is what Canvas or other things would call off of it. And that has the textbook, but it also has other resources involved in it. And that's formulated by the faculty or the student that's customized for that individual class at that individual term, at the individual campus in the case there. And the larger the library is, the easier it is in order to facilitate the construction of a Libre text that's customized on the system there. We have actually two types of textbooks that faculty have access to in order to construct their Libre text. We have textbooks, which are self-contained textbooks that we have integrated into our system. These things, and they should be labeled books instead of maps. For example, the open stacks textbook would be a book, not a map, this is an older picture here. But we also have maps, text maps, and that's essentially saying, well, many faculty are hesitant about adopting OER for a variety of reasons. They like their book, for example, and if we could provide them an alternative to their existing commercial textbook, that would facilitate the adoption of OER. So what we'll work off of is constructing of a text map, which uses the infrastructure, the organization style, not the text, which would be illegal on the case there, but the pedagogy, which has already been shown by the Supreme Court, I don't think it's Supreme Court, but it's already been shown in court case to not be copyrightable, not be patentable, and use that as a, use that to construct a new textbook using the existing OER content. And then you fill in the gaps by using an expert member in order to polish it up on the system there. What that means is that you have access to the existing textbooks, but if you want to grab something, for example, none of these are a text map. These are all textbooks, but even though they say text map, again, I apologize for that. For example, in chemistry, if you want to use the trode textbook of general chemistry, it's a map on our system there. We don't integrate the whole textbook into it. Was there a question before I continue on? I just wanted to, maybe ask you to explain, because you had an NSF grant where you created, you started creating these text maps and text books, or, sorry, text maps. Yes. To help a faculty who were very, what's gonna say, embedded, they were very attached to their textbook that had been written by a commercial author and so forth, and it was published that way. And so what you did was you took those existing, the table of contents, et cetera, and you mapped it to OER, correct? Yeah, I mapped the OER content to the table of contents in the university. Yeah, the commercial textbook, yeah. People probably understood that. I think it's worth repeating that, though, because sometimes that can be helpful for faculty who are really having a hard time making the move to OER. This is one of the most successful things that I've envisioned in the project. And don't ask me about all the unsuccessful things that I envisioned, which were not so popular. But that's exactly right. For example, in this Brown and LeMay, which is one of the more expensive textbooks, if you go to this book here, or this page here, it follows the organization of the Brown and LeMay textbook. Now, which edition I'm not entirely sure. I should emphasize this is not the Brown and LeMay textbook, which would be illegal for us to do. But the pedagogy and the organization has already been shown legally to be allowed for us to follow the pedagogy on the case there. And ethical issues, if anyone has a concern about, the many of these textbooks follow other textbooks out there because they're legally allowed to do that. And I can give you the court case if you're interested in that. It's actually quite interesting. It was a chemistry textbook that did that in the early 80s. So when they, it means that a faculty member can just quickly adopt this and run with it. Because I get faculty that join a group, not necessarily because they have a great interest for OER or have control over it, is that the bookstore is unable to get them the books until the third week of the quarter. And they basically come in and they say, help. And I say, well, here it is. This is your textbook in order to be, or a text map based off your organization and the system there. But building those text maps are not easy. They take time and sometimes they take more time than we would like, but we're moving forward off of that. So let me show you how, let me show you the, let me show you the, let me get you one thing. So this is the chapter two on here. And any faculty member or any student, it can make a PDF automatically just by pressing this down here. Like I mentioned you before, it spits it out and you can print it up as you want. We can do aggregate batch jobs across the whole textbook. Obviously once it makes a PDF, it's not dynamic because it's a dead component, not a live component, but you can always refresh it and press it again and get the live component on case there on the system there. So let me go into the remixer. The OER remixer, we're very excited about. And this right here is, so like I mentioned to you, our goal is to take the OER universe of textbooks and bring them into our library, but make it so they all have the same format and I'm quite flexible in terms of that format that needs to be tweaked. I'm not dogmatic in terms of that, but we want to make a standard in order to make this work. And we do some tweaks in order to make it so when we change numbering around of the pages or the sections that they automatically renumber all the equations and the figures and things like that, it goes through a lot of grant work in order to take this effort in order to put it together here. So in order to facilitate that at the student level, because we don't want to do this for every single faculty member. Let me phrase that. Some faculty members want to have control over building their Libra text and don't necessarily want us to be involved in it. We're perfectly fine with that. So we built this OER remixer, which we're still in the lighter stages of the beta phase and it'll be live probably next week in order to facilitate this thing. So a faculty member can come in and say they want to, they select an area where their college is already designated. This is essentially, I've already had to talk to me in order to make their college in our system. Now I'm just gonna make the remixer test because that way I'm not missing with someone else's college area. And I'm making this thing. And I'm gonna say this is UC Davis. And this is just the format that I tend to use for naming. Chem 101 and I Like Cats is the title of the class. So of the textbook that I'm making here. So now we have this textbook and right now it comes with 15 off of it. And I just say, well, we start to build this after we've identified what resources we want in what order. So let's say that we have this map and we know that we have access to, let's say I'm making a general chemistry class that I like cats as a general chemistry class. So we have a range of different books and maps on the case there. And I want the first book to be, I'm gonna call it I Like Cats. Okay. And then all I need to do is say, okay, I really want, let's say open stacks content and I want measurements to be the first section of that. Where is that, where? I didn't do it down there, okay. And then it makes a section down here and then I want this one to be here. And then I want, I especially feel that I should be grabbing something from Chemprime instead. And I want to grab this one right here. And you know, Colm's law or so. And it automatically sets this thing up. Oh, and I've moved it outside. So, and then the next chapter is I really like cats. And I do the same thing. Off of this, or I can grab this whole chapter and now this whole chapter comes in here and let's say I want everything that comes off of that. And they start building it and they start getting into, did I tell you I like cats? By the way, I don't like cats. And it automatically sets up. So you could facilitate this rapid remixing of the OER universe, at least the OER universe that's in our library, which is gonna be very expansive very soon. Already is significantly bigger than any other chemistry resources out there. And we've constructed these things and you can do whatever you want, like deleting them, changing them around and such. And I'm going to just delete these things. We're still have a few more things off of that. And let's say that I really like this textbook as constructed, which is kind of crude right now. And I publish it. And lo and behold, it takes a moment in order to cycle through each of the pages in order to copy it into my area, which is the remixer text area. And that's how we can remix content. This is currently set up in order to handle the content in the chemistry library or any of the other libraries that we have. Anyone can play with it. You guys can play with it right now. You just can't publish a Libre text because you probably don't have an account on our library because we want to preserve fidelity on the system. I give an account to any faculty member or any OER developer or curriculum developer that wants to be able to do that. Fine, it actually does that. We click this open. And this is the textbook that's created. And lo and behold, we have a chapter here that has all these sections up of various content that's out there. We had a question from Amy as well. She said, is there sentence level editing? Yes, that's what I'm gonna be showing you right now. So this right here is topical level editing, which is meant in order to handle what percentage that is able to handle an individual faculty's needs depends upon how close the content that we have fits that person's needs. So some people it's 100%, okay? And then they don't want to edit it, okay? So before answering that question, I need to discuss that there are two types of content on our system. There's source content and there's transcluded content. Transcluded content, if you are familiar with Linux, is like a symbolic link. It basically means that the content is really not on this page. So any page that we have, we have the ability to edit the page if you have an editing account. So when you edit the page, you normally see content to edit. But in this page, it doesn't see anything. It just has one line that says page path to reuse. Basically it says that the content is really somewhere else and it's just stored here. Now why do we do that? Well, we have a guiding principle that we want to limit the amount of forks that are necessary, that are there so that when we upgrade our core material in the resources that everyone can take advantage of that in their overall aspects. Now, there are people that then don't want to necessarily use our core material. They wanna fork it, remix it on the case of it, which is perfectly fine. That's the whole power of our system there. But the point is that when you start remixing it, you can't have it coupled to the same content that it originally came from because they're forked. They just don't work off of it. So if you want to edit content in the way I had it set up there, you have to go to the original content. And then when you edit that, you then have a full editing capability that has a gooey interface in order to be able to set things up on the case there. If you particularly like editing HTML, which no one should, you can look at the HTML backend on the system there. But it has a front end that is a gooey interface. I'm gonna get rid of that because that's old that people can come in, they can edit equations right here via RLA tech, which unfortunately, they'd have to learn in order to edit equations. They can embed a video. They can do things like I don't like this paragraph and delete that and save it. I'm not gonna save it. Actually, I will save it. So now I've interfered with this core material, the chemprime, okay. But the key point is that because this is a wiki, it saves all revisions. So it can go back and I can revert to a previous revision. Since I find the revert button, there it is. And then it goes back. So this is important in order to make sure that people don't consider our platform as sort of fragile. I argue that people should get in there and feel comfortable getting gritty and dirty. I prefer them to do it in their sandbox rather than going out and learning it on the core material, but they have the ability in order to do that. We think this is gonna be great. We're gonna expand this again to all the libraries. So if you're in the chemistry, you can then go in and pull in physics or geology or such into this content and do the same remixing and editing. I should mention here that while this brings over content into the, where are we? Into the Libre text. If we want to fork it, we just need to bring the content. I didn't go here. So this right here is transcluded, like I mentioned to you. It's copied from the core material, but if you want to, you can just basically go to the core material and paste it into here. Like let's say this one's still kind of pulling up revisions and such. Sometimes that can take a while because the size of our database. This one here is core material and you have the ability to copy and paste. Just copied and pasted like you would. And lo and behold, it's now formally forked. So anytime I edit here, it does not affect the content master material in the bookshelves. And that gives you your customer. We're gonna make a little button that you just press L convert from transcluded to copy so you don't need to do that sort of grunt work that I just talked about. Again, the point is to make it convenient for faculty and course developers in order to manage things without having to really deal with the grunt work unless they have to deal with the grunt work, like fork it, not fork it, but editing and customizing the content in the system. You don't want to have to make them deal with the grunt work. I totally get that. So this has been great, Delmar. It's about quarter of and I thought maybe we should open this up to questions on a more formal basis if you're okay because you've kind of gone down into some very low level stuff, which is important to know and the GUI drag and drop interface looks great. If you can give me one minute to do two slides and then I'll end, that would be great. Absolutely. Okay, so how do we construct textbooks? There's complicated manner that looks like this, which involves basically tapping into all the infrastructure, which I don't want to go into. Simplified manner looks like this, which is when we want to adopt a textbook or build a textbook, a Libre text that is for an individual class, the biggest problem the faculty member has is essentially identifying what they want. Because many times faculty members are not used to having complete freedom in order to control their curriculum on the case there. So once the faculty member identifies what they want, then they ask a question, does something exist in the libraries or the bookshelves today? If something already exists that is essentially identical to what they want, we copy and paste it and it's ready to go, okay? But most of the time they want to customize it in some way or the other. So what we do is we copy it, paste it and then the faculty or the students that are part of the faculty team or so starts editing it in order to satisfy what they want and then they go. This is all within their sandbox or their campus-based system. But what happens if we don't have anything on our site that resembles what they want, which is oftentimes the case, but it's getting better and better, then we ask the question, does something exist outside of our libraries, our platform that is already available? If yes, then we work on integrating it into our system using our harvesting team, largely based off of undergraduate support because they are undergraduate students because they have a very good return on investment for that. Well, we ask permission in order to integrate into our system. We do, we harvest it, if not, then we're stuck at this low level, which is constructing things from scratch. And that's where the cooperativity or the community constructed effort is critical in order to be able to move things forward. And we have a variety of projects in this level right now that involves supporting students and faculty and multiple campuses in order to do that. And many other projects also have similar infrastructures in order to move forward off of that thing. Okay, with that, I can end without giving you more details and section. Can you answer any questions? Yeah, Delmar, because I think, you know, this has been a great overview. I'm gonna guess that some of our members out here would like to know about how they would engage. Let's say, what's the process for our college to engage in being part of the Libra text group? And then later, what's the process for just an individual faculty to get on the platform? Or do you engage directly? Do you want to engage with the college first? And then all the faculty then obviously would have an opportunity. Yes and yes. So right now, our team is sufficiently developed in order to facilitate, and we do this quite often, at the individual faculty level, which is important. And again, the philosophy is that when we build something for one faculty member at one campus, it is no doubt gonna be useful to another faculty member at another campus, in the case there. And in some cases, we even assign an undergraduate student developer in order to a faculty member in order to aid in the construction of content. At the institutional level, you're basically talking about what happens when they want to be a consortium member. And to be a consortium member, it's still less defined about what's required in order to be a consortium member and that's intentional, because all I want to do is to see some buy-in from the campus in OER, Libre Text Effort. And that can range from a variety of different things. So obviously the faculty member, the institution can provide some support for us in order to move forward, and support can be used effectively, financial it is. But that's not the way that I would prefer campuses in order to do that. I'd like campuses in order to invest their resources into their own faculty and teams in order to construct and adopt and customize content. Via, for example, the stipends, course releases or things like that, in order to basically demonstrate they have skin in the game in order to move forward. Okay, so it looks like in-kind kind of support is also an option for consortium members. So how would they contact you or the team? Is there, I know that last time we talked, you were looking at adding some additional interfaces besides the main info at LibreText.org? Contacting me directly at info. I mean, info goes to several different people. So if you contact me, then we can direct it. Most of the time it requires some level of discussion in order to find out exactly what people want because these things are so variable across different campuses with different goals and different resources and such. I've had a community college contact me and basically said that they wanted to drive out all textbooks by the president of the community college, they want to drive out all textbooks on their campus and hang a gone fishing sign outside the bookstore, which I thought was cute. I hope they've talked to the faculty. I did not ask them about that, but nonetheless, if contacting us directly is the best way of doing it. So we're not so inundated with requests that things fall off to the wayside. We are willing to work with anybody. In fact, you can argue we're paid now by the Department of Education to work with everybody in order to make this work. So we can get an account on LibreText to actually get an account to start creating your own textbooks of sort. We would go through info. Yeah, just send me an email directly there or directly to my UC Davis account, both of them will work. Eventually that's going to be a delegated to another team member in order to handle those things. But for now talking to me directly, and then we can have a more detailed discussion about what the goals are of the individual faculty or OER team in order to move forward. And if the OER team is interested in having more control over that section, we can give them administrative capabilities so they can actually make accounts themselves in the case there. We just have to try to maintain some control over it in order to ensure fidelity in our content. We had an issue a few years ago with people storing Bollywood films on our site when it was open. Interesting. So for your content developers that content is peer reviewed within specific fields or disciplines. Yeah, so we have curators for our libraries. Okay. But obviously no one curator is able to curate a whole library with all its subfields and such. So we rely on the internal peer review but we also rely on external peer review. So we don't have a review infrastructure like what Open Textbook Network has for example, although we're intending on coupling from our low in order to be able to do that. And reviews can be useful as a mechanism for peer review but one of my primary problems with peer review is that they oftentimes don't have an expiration date and when you're dealing with content that's dynamic, those peer reviews start to go out of date and then they become detrimental to the evaluation of the content. They're perfectly fine in the old fashioned way where you represented textbooks based off of editions and you know the addition and that's about it. Second, because our content has lots of eyeballs on it, like I said, approximately one year of confirmed reading happens per day on our site, it provides a mechanism for, this is gross review where students and faculty who look at the content can then email us directly or provide feedback, which is available at the bottom of the page if they have an account, not even an editing account, a non-editing account provides that and then they can provide feedback that comes back to us and says, this is wrong, I don't agree with this, this is confusing and then we hand that off to the author of the content or we fix it ourselves if we're unable to do it directly or hand it off to the curators in order to be able to do that. Okay, thank you. We've had a couple of other questions. One is, are you integrating materials from OER Commons as well? Yeah, like I said, when I say the term OER universe, I truly mean everything that's OER, we're gonna be bringing into our system. So we have the list of resources in OER Commons and Open Textbook Network and we are slowed down for that because we're trying to build our student developers. We're scaling up to about 100 student developers that we expect when we go through this effort and we want the technology so we can just integrate EPUBs directly, which will save us a lot of effort. We had another question as well about, are there any online tutorials to assist faculty or others I assume who are navigating and editing in the platform? That's a great question and the question is maybe. We have some things that are in play but we're gonna be building some YouTube videos in order to really guide that and we do have a best practices document which is able to give a basic principles of how things go but there'll be more out there very soon. I'm trying to find one of my team members that has a good voice because I really hate listening to my voice on computers because I think it's awful. So I think it needs to be a nice Morgan Freeman-based voice in order to present the tutorials online. Well, yeah, a good voice is always helpful for things like that. So I guess if somebody was interested in moving from an existing platform to LibraText, have you thought about that? Because I mean, there's folks who are using OER hubs, there's folks that are using, let's say the Lumen Learning Platform. If they wanted to move to LibraText, have you thought about what the transition kind of picture would look like? The unfortunate thing is that every platform has its own issues and styles off of it. So many of the times it requires a brute force. So if a faculty member is willing to switch platforms and we have had about a dozen or so of those faculty, we typically have to do it on an individual basis in order to evaluate what's necessary to bring it over. Some things are easy and some things are hard. So for example, if it's relatively simple HTML and for interface and content, which both of those platforms are, we have the ability in order to just hand it off to one of my student developers and then they just copy it over in order to make it work. Part of our harvesting the universe entails at least integrating Lumen's public library and I don't know about their more private or customized content. We've had people come over from open stacks when they used to have a platform for customization and people from CK12, which I'm more familiar with. I haven't had anyone come over from Chem Hub that I know of, but I would have to go check around to see if someone has done that. Okay, thank you. It's just about on the hour. So are there other questions? People can turn on their microphones as well now if you'd like to jump in and ask Delmar any questions. I think we've gotten some great information here and Delmar, can we share these slides with folks as well? Yes, most of them are internal, so don't, but some of them are probably not Creative Commons licensed, so don't slab a Creative Commons license on it, please. Oh, okay. Like this one, for example. Unless you want me to cut up all the stuff that is not, it doesn't fall into it. Yeah, we'd be happy probably to remove a few things. Okay, well, give me a day and I'll get back to you with a cut-up version of it. Okay, that's super, thank you. All right. So we're still open here for other questions for Delmar and a big thank you to Delmar for coming to join us today and I'm sure that there'll be a lot of interest as this rolls out in more detail. And just very briefly, I'm mentioning that next week, we have, I'm sorry, yes it is next week, the impact of OER adoption on cost outcomes and stakeholder perceptions. This is with a couple of the Open Education Group Fellows, Regina Gong, I think many of you know, she's on my executive council from Lansing Community College and David Rose and they're talking about the research they've been doing at their institutions. Our new member mixer is December 12th. This is targeted at everyone and we hope that you can join us for this, especially new members because we're gonna give you a chance to introduce yourself. The topic is gonna be the coming of change agent and also submitting your OER questions for 2019, we'll have a panel of experts who will be answering those. So do join us if you can that day. Open Ed Weeks coming up, I think many of you saw this, the site launched, I think it was the week before Thanksgiving. So this is an exciting opportunity to bring Open Ed awareness to your campus. There'll be a lot of special events during that week as well. And we love when you share the projects with us so that we can display those worldwide. So Delmar, I don't know if you're still here, but Annie Fox from Front Range Colorado said that your voice is fine for training, just FYI. We released our new member toolkit last week and we hope that this is helpful for those of you who are new to the Community College Consortium for OER or if you have new faculty, new instructional designers, librarians who are coming in and wanna know how to participate in the community. And we're very open to feedback on that. And that's all I had. So once again, I want a big thank you to Delmar for joining us today. And if we'll publish the recording and the slides when those are available. I think you can contact Delmar directly or you can ask me questions if you wanna do any further follow up. So thank you. Thank you. All right, we'll have a great rest of your day everyone and we'll see you all soon. Thank you, Luna. You're welcome.