 All right, welcome everybody to our third OER degree adoption story. This is Una Daly from CCCOER and I want to introduce, although I'm not sure she needs any introduction, Linda Williams, professor of business administration at Tidewater Community College. Tidewater is the college that coined the term Z degree back in 2013 and they were the first ones to produce that full degree and since that time they continue to innovate and so we're very pleased to have Linda here today to tell us about their work. Thank you. I'm going to go on the assumption that everyone can still hear me just fine. So what I want to start with is a little bit of background for us as an institution in how all of this happened. Give you all a little bit of a snapshot of kind of where we are and then at the end, just talk a little bit about some of the things that we face as what I am referring to as a mature OER initiative because we began in 2013 in the fall. That was our very first offering of Z courses and our program was really developed in response in many ways to this graphic that we've all seen. We knew that as a multi-campus, very large community college, we're within the 15 top largest schools in the nation. We serve some very economically and socioeconomically disadvantaged students and we really believed that the cost of textbooks, this just crushing student debt, I mean our U.S. student debt is now almost as large as the entire GDP of Canada and we just saw our students really struggling to afford the textbooks as well as beginning to realize that the amount of student debt that they were taking on was really going to hobble them in future endeavors, whether that was buying a house, being able to be doing mobile and take opportunities elsewhere. We were really motivated by this kind of combination of student debt, textbook costs, and then the survey, they came out of Florida. They just gave us these really horrifying graphics about how many students don't register for class or take fewer classes or drop or withdraw as a direct result of textbook costs. Our motivation was pretty clear for us as an institution. Our challenge was that it hadn't been done before and to be honest with you in the summer of 2013, there was considerably less curated, vetted, and easily accessible openly licensed content than there is today. When we began, the 13-member faculty team who worked on this really were plowing some untilled land, so to speak, so they're always, I was trying to give credit to those 13 brave individuals who said, you know, let's give it a try. We have been very deliberate in our project in having an operational definition of what we consider to be OER. And so we have adopted and it's in our policy and it's in our practices this, what we refer to lovingly as the Hewlett definition, to make certain that we set a standard for what our faculty could and could not label as an open educational resource. And I think that that has been beneficial for us because it's allowed our faculty and now our OER librarians to really have a gauge by which to measure whether or not content comes into one of our courses or not. If the rule is pretty simple, if the content the faculty wants to use doesn't meet the five permissions, then it can't be used as a primary teaching source. In other words, we don't allow them to bring content in that we can't then freely put a just a simple CC by attribution license on. And we've done that to allow our courses to be easier to adopt and adapt not only by Tidewater faculty but faculty at other institutions who may want to use what we've built as a starting point for their own courses. We have a process or a model, so to speak, that we use in building the original Z degree, which was our AS in Business Administration and the three Z degrees that we are now finishing up. One is an Associate of Applied Science in Criminal Justice. The other is our Associate of Science in General Studies. And lastly is the Associate of Science in Social Science. So by fall of 2018, we will have our three largest transfer degree path completely converted to a Z degree. And then our AS that Applied, Associate of Applied Science. So just real briefly, we rely heavily on organizational commitment and that organizational commitment cuts across all college boundaries. It includes student services, advising our information systems, our LMS team, faculty, deans, college administration, all the way up to the president's level. So we have a commitment across the organization to support and encourage faculty adoption of these openly licensed materials. We have an OER librarian designated at each campus. We were able to do that by going back and reviewing position descriptions, some of which had not been rewritten in a long time. We found things like maintains the card catalog as some of their job responsibilities. So we worked with our Associate of Vice President for Libraries and the librarians themselves to come up with a more modern and engaging way for them to support faculty in their OER adoption. We have faculty champions. I'm one of them, but there are many. They have really stepped up and been willing to mentor and help other faculty. They go out and they present at their discipline conferences. They present nationally. They serve as an internal and external resource. We have a continuous improvement process for our courses. Z courses are reviewed at the end of every four semesters that they're taught. And really, we're just trying to capture the good things that are happening in those courses and getting them folded back into the master template that we share out with faculty. So this is something that goes on at the faculty level every semester, but is a much more structured process every four semesters. We have a very large advisory committee that meets four times a year, that has representatives from all affected areas of the college. And we talk about things like promoting the programs to students, engaging additional faculty, mapping out new degree paths, managing grant awards. Right now we're a member of the ATD OER degree grant. We participated with the Gates Next Generation Courseware. We participated in a VCCS QLIT grant. So that advisory committee really helps us inform how best to use those funds. And then finally, we believe it's very important to engage with the OER community. Hence my presence here today and, you know, the faculty that we encourage to attend things like Open Ed and OLC, their peer group meetings, NISOD, and a variety of other national and regional events to help them to engage, not only to share with what we've done, but to see what other people are doing, maybe with something that we did, but they now do it better than we do it. So I think that engagement with the OER community is critical to our success. So just here at the end of this portion of the presentation, I just want to share what we did well and what we didn't do well, I mean, what the smartest strategies we had. And one of them was to stand firm on this use of truly openly licensed resources. It's in our policy, our faculty understand it, and we just have to support them until they can, you know, get to that, reach that level of content. We very much take the approach of invite and support. We never force OER adoption creation of a Z-Course on a faculty. Instead, we tend to invite them to come take a look, give it a try, and then provide them as much support as possible. The other thing that we've done very well is we have this kind of stealthy instructional design piece built in that when a Z-Course is created, it's stripped down to its learning objectives. And the faculty developer then crafts module level objectives and assessments. And once they understand what their module level objectives are, how they tie back to the course level objectives, and how they're going to assess student learning at that point, they begin to gather the content. So we really think of it as kind of a backwards course design. What we learned was when all possible, seek to reuse or recreating new. I'm famous for saying that build is actually a four letter word. We really discourage our faculty members from building from the ground up. We prefer the adopt and adapt model. And we also realize that we needed to optimize the ease of adoption for faculty. So now they have the ability to view a completed open course that they can then revise and revise it, refine it and customize it. And we also felt like it was important for us to be able to present that course within the LMS. We're a Blackboard school. But trying to get them to work with another LMS or another platform that complicated their lives instead where we choose those content delivery methods that allow faculty to deploy the openly licensed content inside of the LMS. And I wish we had done some of those things sooner, but we learned the lesson quickly enough. And so when I say backward design, this is just a graphic that says, you know, let's begin with our outcomes. Let's determine, you know, what acceptable evidence of learning in terms of assessments that we're looking for. And then plan the learning experience and instruction, i.e. the content at the end. And I believe that that's one of the reasons that we have seen a fair amount of difference in our success rates in our Z courses relative to some of their non-Z counterparts. So briefly, just some results. What we determined was we had taken 25% of the cost away from our students' cost of attending. So if a student comes and takes and completes a two-year transfer degree or two-year associate of science degree, we're able to save them in theory based on an estimate of about $1,200 per term, which is the college board's amount. We shave about a quarter of the total cost from their degree. So a little bit about scale. So to give you an idea of how quickly this scaled from fall 13, and this slide goes through fall 17, we started with about 360 students college-wide enrolled in Z courses. And I think that when we hit our peak in spring of 17, we were at about 2,900 students in that one semester enrolled in Z courses. So we've really, it's scaled up quickly. And one of the reasons is because we've been able to engage our faculty to expand the number of sections of Z courses offered. We started with 16. In fall of 16, we offered 98 sections. And now we've kind of leveled out, we've had a decline in enrollment college-wide, not just in Z courses. And so we're now offering anywhere from 80 to 90 sections college-wide. And those are a combination of online face-to-face and hybrid courses. We do see a big difference in retention at drop rate. In all of our sections, we are retaining at the drop date about 96% of our students. We retain somewhere between 97 and 98% of our students in our Z courses. So there's about a 2% differential in this drop rate. In terms of withdrawal, we see about a 3% reduction in student withdrawals in our Z courses. One of the reasons we believe is that since students have access to content on day one, they don't get behind. And we all know that once a student gets behind, although they may would like and want to get caught up, it's just highly unlikely that they will. And so when that withdrawal date comes along, they're in a position where withdrawal really makes the most sense for them because they're not going to successfully complete the course. We have seen in these are just three sections, three semesters, anywhere from a 4% to a 5% difference in student success, where we define student success as finishing the course with a grade of C or better. In fact, we've just finished a pilot, a two-year pilot, and the data that we have looked at now coming out of it is that the Z courses that these students are taking negate the disadvantage, academic disadvantage that a Pell eligible student has. So not only are we seeing them succeed at a higher rate, but we believe that the Z courses can actually eliminate the disparity between the academic achievement of a Pell eligible and a non Pell eligible student. We continue to survey our students. They consistently say 98% of them say the Z course in terms of quality was the same or better than the same course with a traditional textbook. And so we continue to march forward and engage faculty, engage our students, engage the community to build on what we've done well and to identify those places where we still have room for improvement. So I believe that gets me to the end of my, I have 10 minutes left. I was right on time. And this is my contact information, so please feel free to email me if you have a question. Thank you so much, Linda, for sharing that with us today. And of course, the experience that you have developed at Tidewater is really invaluable for those who are newer on the journey. So thanks so much. We are open for questions at this point. I don't see any in the chat window. So we can leave it open for a minute or two. And then if we don't get any more questions, thanks to Linda for leaving her contact information here for us. And you can contact her afterwards. I have a question. Linda, this is Nathan from Houston Community College. I was wondering, how are you doing? I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your student recruitment strategies and sort of how many students do you think are kind of taking a full slate or at least most of their courses in the Z degree? So we do not run these as cohorts. In other words, they're open enrollment. They appear on the schedule along with all the other courses. And so we don't restrict who, you know, who enrolls in them. In other words, they don't have to be a business admin student because we have English and history and art and all of that. So one of the things that we've done is we have incorporated the Z course descriptions and what they quote unquote look like in terms of no textbook required, all digital delivery content in the informational flyers that our student services and enrollment services and the information center give out. So we actually had the college revamp those and publish those to include Z courses. So the same way it says, hey, you can complete your degree online or do you want hybrid or do you want face to face? And if textbook costs are an issue, we have a solution for that. And I think that that's been helpful. I think that getting our advisors and our counselors really engaged with recommending students to take these courses helps. We also clearly delineate them in our schedule. All of the Z courses actually have a Z in the course section number. And so when a student clicks on that through our self enrollment, they see a set of standardized notes that says this course does not require the purchase of a textbook. All course materials are delivered digitally by the LMS and the internet. And then we give them that caveat that says, therefore, consistent and reliable access to the internet is required for the duration of the semester. So I think that that getting our information system, our information center people, our advisors and our counselors really well versed in this has helped a great deal. To be honest with you, word of mouth among these students has been really impactful for us. But I also think it's because it's supported by documentation, the flyers, the leaflets, the registration cards, all of that. The Z degree and Z courses appears on all of that material. Our communications and media people have done a great job of that. They tweet about it, they put it on our Facebook page, they make sure that we've got a link right off the home page to the Z degree. So I think that all of those small pieces have come together. We have only ever had one Z section canceled due to lack of enrollment since we started in fall of 2013. Great. Well, thank you, Linda. That is so helpful because Nathan at Houston Community College is not the only one who's struggling with this. So thank you so much for sharing that with us today. We are going to have to stop the recording now so that we can make our switch to the next person. So thank you, Linda, for all that wonderful information and thanks to all of you who are participating with us online.