 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series, or we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today, and the recording available for you to watch later at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where we have all of our recordings for you. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share, spread the word, your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not local here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to your state library, and we provide services to all types of libraries in the state, so you will find topics, show topics on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, historical societies, et cetera, et cetera. Really our only criteria is something that to do with libraries, something cool libraries are doing, things we think they could be doing, book reviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations for us on services and programs we offer here, but we also bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning with us today is Laura Hinman. Good morning, Laura. Morning. And she's a library director at our Midland University here at the Luther Library, the Midland University here in Fremont, Nebraska, and she's going to talk to us about OER, big topic in libraries, but this one specifically about doing it at her small liberal arts college university. And I'll mention too, this is something that has been, as I said, talked about a lot and so I'm very interested to hear what has gone on and how you've been dealing with it there at Midland, Laura. So I will hand it over to you to take it away and tell us all about it. Sure. So again, my name is Laura Hinman. I'm the library director at Midland University. I've been here for about almost three years. I started July of 2019. So today my presentation is the pros and cons of implementing OER at my university. We're a small private liberal arts university. Just really quick about me. I'm originally from South Dakota. I graduated from DSU with my BS in English for New Media and then I received my MLIS and grad certificate in archives and special collections from the University of Southern Miss in 2018. And I started in public libraries first, kind of jumping around in different branches there. And then that led me here to Midland in Fremont as the library director. So today I'm going to talk about the studies that I have found about students having to purchase expensive textbooks and what they have found to be difficult about it. And then the current textbook prices here at Midland and then some comparable OER possibilities for replacement for those Midland textbooks that are so expensive. And then some OER resources that I have found. And if you don't want to utilize OER resources, I've also found other affordable textbook options that are also available. And then some LibGuides on OER that I found a lot of my information from. And I did this presentation to my faculty last February because as a library director I hear a lot of, I guess, kind of complaints from the students about not being able to afford their textbooks and all the textbooks that they have to purchase. And so it's a really hot topic here, especially with us being a private university. We don't have the cheapest tuition, I guess. So adding on that extra payment for textbooks has been an issue. So this, I just wanted to kind of inform the faculty here that this is a possibility that you can adopt instead of having your students purchase those textbooks. I didn't get any, you know, horrible pushback, but I don't know how ready they are to move to something like this. But I just wanted to give them the tools to kind of start searching. Something that came, sometimes I know when I work in a university the students come to the library, whether they know they have it or not, looking to borrow the textbooks. And that's not usually a thing. Unfortunately. And I kind of mentioned that too later on in my presentation about what students are doing in place of purchasing textbooks. And that's a big one. Yeah. So the current difficulties right now with having to purchase expensive textbooks. This is what I have noticed here for how students cope with the cost of the textbooks. So a lot of students will purchase an older edition, which, you know, sometimes it has the similar information, sometimes obviously there's updated information. And so, you know, it's not going to work well with the class, you know, the page numbers obviously are going to be different, everything's going to be different. So that isn't always the best thing for the students to do. They'll delay purchasing the textbook, so they'll go to the class, you know, see if the instructor is going to use the textbook, or if they're just, you know, utilizing their lectures and PowerPoints. And so they'll delay purchasing it, they'll not purchase it at all. They'll share their textbook amongst their peers. They'll find a downloadable version, which that can be a problem because it might not again be the big book. They might be getting it from, you know, websites that probably aren't, you know, the legal websites or uploaded to the website legally. They'll utilize closed reserve. And if you don't know what closed reserve is, so we have a shelf here that has textbooks available to the students that either the professor provides for their class, or unfortunately, I'm sometimes having to purchase the textbooks out of my budget. And so the students think, oh, we have it on closed reserve, we can just use that. The problem with that though is they can only utilize the book for three hours at a time, and they can only have it in the library. So, you know, if you have to utilize it in the classroom, they can't. So that's not helpful to them. You know, if they go home for the weekend, have to do homework, again, they don't have the textbook. So closed reserve also isn't a great thing to use for them. Another problem I hear is when admissions are doing their tours and they come into the library, a big thing I hear from the admission ambassadors is, oh, well, I never bought my textbooks because all of them are on closed reserve, so you don't have to buy any of your textbooks. And the problem with that is, you know, while we have these, we don't have textbooks for every class. So, you know, it kind of becomes a bummer to the students that start coming here and they're like, oh, I thought all my textbooks were up here and they're not. And then also the biggest one that bothers me is they'll try to utilize interlibrary loan. And what the students don't understand is an interlibrary loan is just like checking out a book from a library. You only get it for two to three weeks. And obviously for a student, they need it for the whole semester. And so it'll either be they won't return the book and I'm, you know, trying to hound them to bring it back. And they won't because they need it for the whole semester. And so I've tried to stop them from utilizing interlibrary loan. But if, you know, somebody gets to that request before me, it doesn't always work. But yeah, so these are the different ways that students try to cope with the cost of textbooks. This is from a 2018 student textbook survey that I found. And these are their key findings. This kind of correlates with my previous slide. Obviously with them not purchasing the textbooks, it negatively impacts their access, success and completion of courses. The biggest one that I hear that's frustrating to students is there'll be a textbook that's required, but then it never gets really utilized in the course. And then again, they're reducing cost by a variety of means. Like I mentioned the previous slide, I actually just had a student come to me yesterday that she donated a couple of her textbooks from last semester. That's she told me I could use it for close reserve. And she said that it was for a class that not it was required class people had to take, but it was a class that they didn't necessarily want to take. It was just a required one. And so they didn't want to purchase the textbook. And so the few people that did, they were just taking pictures of the pages and the chapters and sending them out to the rest of the students. So obviously again, this is happening right here at Midland. And this is just a table from that survey again, showing kind of a breakdown that this is the surveys from some university and colleges in Florida. But this is just kind of a breakdown of how many students are paying, you know, at in each interval of dollar amounts. And you can see, you know, almost 1600 students are paying between the 500 and $600 amount. And that again doesn't include the tuition that they also have to pay for. So it's a lot of money that obviously puts a lot of stress on the students. And this is the top five percentage answers reported by students when asked about the impact of textbook costs. So they're either not purchasing the required textbook, they take fewer courses, which means they have to purchase fewer textbooks. They don't register for a specific course because they know that course has a really expensive textbook, or they'll just earn a poor grade because they can't buy the textbook anyway, or they'll just drop the course altogether. And this is again from the previous slide, but kind of a breakdown comparing between 2016 and 2018. But those are the top reasons, you know, what happens when we have these expensive textbooks for students to be purchasing. And this is a link to that survey, if you wanted to take a look at more information on there when I share my slides, this is linked out to that survey. So you can look at that if you want. But I found it really interesting and provided a lot of information about this problem. And I'll mention here too, since you're mentioning that in the slides that yes, after when we have the recording up for today's show, we will have a link to Laura's slides and all of those embedded links and everything, you'll have access to everything. Yep. And this is also an article I found on a database about the efficacy of open textbook adoption. And it's basically saying that they're either withdrawing from the course or receiving a low grade because of the high textbook costs, but it showed based on the study that students would be less likely to withdraw if there was a free open textbook available for the class. So right now, what it looks like at Midland, I have a breakdown here of what a typical freshman textbook cost is from the Midland bookstore. For their first semester, they're usually taking their first math class, biology, speech, and English comp. And so the first column is purchasing the textbooks as new. And as you can see, it's right around the $400 to $475 range. And this again, isn't including our tuition is around $36,000. And that doesn't include room and board and the meal plan. So on top of all that, they're having to spend that $400 on textbooks. There are some used rental and ebook options, as you see in the other columns, but not all of them are available in those other options to save some money. So they're obviously spending a lot of money in there just their first semester as a college student. So that adding that added stress of being a new college student and now having to spend all this money on textbook is a huge, I guess, eye opener for those students. So this next slide, so comparable OER textbook options. So each class that I have from this slide, I found comparable OER textbooks on the websites that I'm going to show you in these slides coming up here. So first of all, what is open educational resources, they are teaching and learning materials that can be used and reused freely at no cost and without copyright issues. So that first one for the math textbook. Here's a college algebra textbook that I found using one of the OER websites that I'm going to talk about. It's available online in the app that they have or they have a PDF option. And they're always updating the textbooks that are available. This one, the last update was June 22nd of 21. So this is an option for that first college algebra class and that biology class again available in different ways to read it. It's been updated in July. This one is that speech class. This one is on another website that I found. This one last update is 2019. And all of these with the titles underlined public speaking open textbook, that's the link out to the textbook if you wanted to look more into that. So all of these have those links there to look. And then the reading and writing course are English Comp class. So these are all available as OER options if the faculty wanted to take the time to adopt these textbooks into the course instead of having them purchase them. So next I have some slides showing what OER websites that I have found. And these are the sites that I presented to the faculty to show them around, show them what resources are out there. I mean nowadays there's a lot of resources available to our faculty to provide those free resources to our students. I was actually surprised at how many resources there were out there. And a big one that I, one of my favorites is open stacks. There's an option to sign into open stacks as either a student or an educator and each one has their, you know, positives, their resources available. If you sign in as a student, you get access to tutor assignments, highlighted study materials. If you sign in as an instructor, you get access locked instruction, instructor content and free resources integrated with your book. You can browse by subject. All the textbooks are available as a PDF in the app or online. And now they just implemented something called open stacks tutor. So for a small fee, you can pay for open stacks tutor to help you in each textbook that you're looking at for your class. And I think it's just $10. So it's not a huge fee for that. But there's that option in open stacks. And then again, open stacks as a student, you can highlight in the textbook. And you can revisit those highlighted portions under the my highlights tab there. There's reading and note taking guides for college success, study tips, note taking strategies. And then there's a time management guide to help students if, you know, as freshmen, they might not have a lot of experience juggling a bunch of, you know, extracurriculars and your classes as well. So there's some time management guides in there for the students to utilize. And then again, open stacks as an instructor. There's a Canvas course cartridge. I think they also have it for Blackboard and D2L. So if you use any of those LMSs in your university. So if you adopt a textbook, you can use the course cartridge. It has already built out, you know, assignments, syllabi. So you really don't have to start from scratch when you adopt an OER textbook from open stacks. There's a cartridge that you can integrate into your LMS. That's nice. I'm sure that's something professors or, you know, the faculty would think of is like, I have to redo everything just to switch to this new textbook. That's a lot. But there's built it. It's already kind of built in there. Yeah. Yeah. That's that was the one I mentioned at the end. That's one of the big cons that I heard was I have to start from completely from the beginning. And, you know, if you adopt a textbook from open stacks, technically, you don't have to because they have those cartridges built out for you. Obviously, you have to, you know, if you have a specific assignment or test that you want to build out, you'll have to create that. But it's really not from scratch. It really helps you build out that course. So I found that, I don't know, super helpful in my opinion. And then again, open stacks as an instructor, there's PowerPoint slides available for each book that you adopt. And there's also sample syllabi. So if you don't want to create your syllabi from scratch, there's help right there. And then they also started an open stacks hub. And this is really cool. So each textbook has a specific hub. And you can log into that hub and visit with other professors that have also adopted that textbook. And they will share some resources that they've created syllabi that they've created. You can talk one on one with those professors and, you know, ask them advice when they adopted the textbook. So that hub that they created, I think is really helpful for professors that are just starting out and not really knowing where to start. So I thought that was really cool that they started that. So here's the link out to open stacks. And I was just going to go in there and kind of show you around. Are you seeing the open stacks website? Yes. Yep. So I'm logged in right now. This is what it looks like. Again, for instructors, you've got that LMS integration. So those Canvas course cartridges, there's PowerPoint slides, test banks, answer guides. And then you can browse by subject. Again, I talked about that open stacks tutor. So we'll go into the subjects. So here's math. This is, again, where I found that college algebra textbook. And even if you're, I think they have stuff for high school too. So if you're needing stuff for high school, not just college, they have that information. So they have math, they have science, social sciences, humanities, business. There's a huge amount of information here that's available. And I believe they have, I guess for my school, a big class that has the most expensive textbook is anatomy and physiology. And I've been trying to, oh, here it is right here, talk to an anatomy and physiology professor to try to implement this textbook instead because it's about a three to $400 textbook. So I've been trying to have him utilize this instead to kind of help out because it's normally the nursing majors that have to take that. He hasn't done it yet, but I'm hoping that he'll start soon. But yeah, if you click on one of those books, again, you got the table content. So you can look at it online on the app or PDF. You can either even order a print copy if you want to. And then again, it tells you when it was last updated right there. And then there's your instructor resources. So there's your LMS integration. If you want Canvas Blackboard or D2L, and you just download it right into there. Here's that hub, visit the hub that I talked about. So if you use this textbook, you can go to the hub and see what other resources are out there from the other instructors that have been using this. And there's those PowerPoint slides and sample syllabi that I mentioned. And then for the student resources, there's the note taking and time management guide that I mentioned as well. So personally, I really like OpenStacks. That's kind of one of my favorites. It has a lot of options available for you. Again, it's got that LMS integration, so you don't have to surf from scratch. So personally, I really like the OpenStacks the best for OER. But that's kind of what it looks like for that option. The next option that's out there is called the Open Textbook Library. Right now that has about 840 open textbooks available. That number changes all the time because they upload new textbooks all the time. Several are listed currently in development. These textbooks are all available as a PDF word or ebook format. And again, you can browse by subjects. So when we click on that, this is what it looks like. It's a little bit different from OpenStacks where this is basically just strictly textbooks instead of the extras that OpenStacks offers. But it shows you the new books that are available right now. And then you can browse by subject again just like OpenStacks. So we can look at this one, for example, learning in the digital age. It provides reviews if people liked the book or not. And then it gives you that copyright year again so you know how updated it is. And here you can get it as an online PDF. I guess I can show you what it looks like when you look at the online version. So it gives you the table of contents right away and then it has you scroll through the book. So that's Open Textbook Library. Again, it's just strictly textbooks. But it's just another resource to find more books available for you. And then the next one is OER Commons. And that one is a central hub for all things open source. This one has more than just textbooks. There's also articles available. There's many lessons. There's simulations. You can filter by a specific subject area. So education level, material type, media format. And there's also full university courses in there too. So you can utilize that as an example if you decide to adopt one of the textbooks. And you can look at the university courses that are available and kind of build your course out from what's available on OER Commons. And what I love about those simulations, so example, you're a nursing major and you're working on maybe the how blood pumps through the heart or something like that. And they actually have a simulation of how that works. And it's a video of showing how the blood flows and everything. So I love those simulations that are available on OER Commons. And this is what that looks like. You can again search what you're looking for. You can do it by subject area, education level. And these are the different common core math and different ways things are taught now. So you can look at that as well. Search mathematics for an example. So if you look over here on the left, we're looking at mathematics and you can break it down by the different subject areas. The education level material type. So if you want like a lab or a case study or something interactive, lesson plan, modules, that simulation, syllabi, textbook, there's just a huge amount of information here. So if you want to use different resources besides the textbooks to show students how to do something within that course or within that subject, all of this information is here for you. There's games. There's the full course here again that I mentioned that you can use as an example when you're building out your course. So there's a huge amount of information here on OER Commons. And then you can look at media type. So there's audio, interactive, video, ebook. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff here to utilize. And then this is what the textbook option looks like. And once you click on it, you just click on view resource. A lot of the information on OER Commons, they work with the other OER websites that I mentioned. So sometimes the textbook that they show here, they're pulling straight from Open Textbook Library. So I mentioned that in my previous slide. So they're working with the other OER and putting everything in one on one website. So that's kind of what OER Commons looks like. That was something that we did have a question. I was going to jump in and ask, I wasn't sure if you had other options to show, but could Professor Mix and Match from these different OER sites, like is the same textbook going to be on multiple sites with different resources, or is each site have just its textbooks? I guess is the question. So I'm thinking that each one has different options. I mean, if one math professor is utilizing different math textbooks, I mean, if they're utilizing different books for different classes, they could Mix and Match. But they're going to provide different resources on each website. But OER Commons, that's kind of pooling all of the resources from all of those OER websites into one website. That would be a good place to start if you wanted to see what was available everywhere, but then decide which one is the best that you want to go with. Right. And then also, like I said, it's not just textbooks. It's also those, you know, courses, full courses. There's simulations, labs for like biology or chemistry or whatever. So there's a bunch of options on OER Commons. And then there's also at Rutgers University, they have a community repository. So this is free access to scholarly open access. So a lot of it is scholarly articles, electronic theses and dissertations. There's historical and cultural resources and digitized archives and supplementary resources. So this is kind of a cool place. Like if your professor wants to utilize journal articles and you don't have, you know, access to that specific article or database or whatever, you can go on to Rutgers and look at what they have in their community repository and utilize it from there. I mean, it's basically just like looking at a database. I really love this idea. You know, they put their scholarly work things that are even published from there and they make it open to the public. So I love that. But it's basically like searching in a database here. You search right in the search box of what you're looking for. But this is also available if you're not just looking for textbooks and you're looking for scholarly articles or supplementary resources. This is a good place to go. And this is other OER websites that I found. So there's open course library. And that includes textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings and assessments. There's 81 college courses on there. 42 have been completed so far. And it also provides faculty with a high quality affordable option that will cost students no more than $30 for textbooks. So it will might provide textbooks that you have to purchase on there, but they're super cheap options. There's MIT open courseware. So it's a web based publication of almost all of MIT course content. So if you're trying to build out a course, there's a lot of course full course content options straight from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There's also Merlot that has over 35,000 open course materials. And then there's the Milny Open textbooks. And that's from the SUNY faculty and staff peer reviewed open textbooks that are authored by the SUNY faculty and staff there. And I don't have to go into these links if you want to look at them from my presentation you can. But it's basically like all those other websites, there's a search box there you can search by subject or course that you're looking at. And it provides you all of the resources right there. There we go. So if you aren't able to adopt OER, but you still want to provide affordable textbook options for your students, there's other options out there rather than purchasing those expensive textbooks. And one of them is from Cengage, it's called Cengage Unlimited. The perk to this, well what has to be done for this is all of your professors have to agree to adopt their textbook from Cengage for this to really help the students. So if they adopt all their textbooks from Cengage, then they can pay for Cengage Unlimited e-textbooks for $70 for four months. They can get all of their textbooks, both e-textbooks and hard copy rentals. So they only pay that one flat price for the four months for the semester and they'll get all their textbooks. And it also includes college success tips, career success tips, study tools. So there's one option there. And then there's the other Cengage Unlimited plan, which is a little bit more expensive, it's about $120 for four months. But this also includes the mind tap. So if I think that's math and biology, I think it's the online portion of the class. So it not only includes textbooks, but also that online with the access codes, it includes that as well. And then you have the options on both of those if you want the four months, the one year or the two year options. And then the price fluctuates based on what you choose. But even though it does cost to use this, it's significantly cheaper than buying individual textbooks for a hundred bucks a piece or something. Now they're just paying one flat fee for all of their textbooks as long as your professors are all using Cengage. And this kind of gives you a breakdown between Cengage Unlimited and the extras, the online portion of Cengage Unlimited. It tells you based on the checkmarks what each of them includes. And you can show more benefits to give you more information. And then that's where you can change your plan. And then you can buy that way. I believe like on my slide, you can do a trial run with it to see if it, you know, something that you want to utilize. But again, if you're not able to do OER, this is going to be a great extra resource instead. If you want to use it that way. The next one is called ProLego. This is an online textbook subscription service. And this one is $18. If you decide to pay monthly, it's $18 a month. If you decide to pay yearly, then it drops down to $12 a month. So $144 will be billed annually. And on this website, it's an option for a 14 day free trial. And this is unlimited access to the textbooks you need. It has built-in study tools. You can read it anywhere on your iPad or computer smartphone. And this is kind of what ProLego looks like. And again, with this one, again, all of your professors or, you know, at least most of your professors to make it, you know, make sense, they have to adopt their textbooks from this website. But the nice thing about ProLego too is if you don't like it, you can change or cancel your plan at any time without any fees, cancellation fees or anything like that. So what I found with the cons when I presented to the faculty on this presentation, again, I didn't directly, I didn't get any bad feedback. I just heard it from others. One of the things I heard is, I think they thought that I was asked to create this presentation from, I don't know, maybe the higher ups or something. Because one of the responses I got is, are they expecting us to do this now that she gave us this presentation? The only reason I gave this presentation is because I knew this was out there. I knew it was a problem with the students, and so I just wanted to give the tools to our faculty. So nobody told me to do this presentation. I just wanted to provide it. The biggest one was building a Canvas course from scratch, like I mentioned earlier. We have professors here that have been here for years, and so they're utilizing basically the same assignments, tests, and quizzes. They might change a little bit, but not very much. They've been using the same textbook for years. So they never had to change anything. It's not much work on their end to have to change anything. And so having to find a book, read it, build the whole course content, that's one of the big cons. If they use open stacks, there is that cartridge there for them, so they don't have to do it from scratch, but they would have to be open to doing that. And then for the second bullet, the hesitant on the validity of the books. So our nursing faculty, I guess it would be a big example for this one. Obviously they're going to be wanting that evidence-based textbooks because that's what their coursework relies heavily on, obviously. And so they're concerned, I don't know if it's because it's freely available and it's free. They're worried about the validity of the textbooks. But the biggest thing that I hear from the students is on the positive side, their textbooks are built into their tuition. So they automatically get their textbooks at the beginning of every semester because there's a faculty member that are buying these textbooks for the students. So they're all set up to go for each semester. And it's nice for the nursing faculty because then they don't have students who don't have the textbook or who are waiting on a textbook. The downside to doing that is they're purchasing all new textbooks. So there's no room for possible saving money because they're not looking at rentals or used books. It's all brand new purchased books. And then they're also having them buy the e-book and the textbook. So that's like double purchasing. Not one or the other, but both. Right, both. Yep. So I hear a lot of complaints about the amount of money that's being spent on those books. And a lot of, like I showed, there's an anatomy and physiology book on there, on the OpenStacks website. So the resources are out there. It's just, again, the faculty have to go in and see what books match the best for their course. Another thing about Midland is, Midland is very adjunct heavy. So we have about, I don't know if it's like 36 full-time faculty and the rest are adjunct. So we have over twice as many adjuncts here. And so what I've seen a lot is when adjuncts choose their textbooks, they've never had to choose a textbook before because they have either come in just graduated as a student or they've been out of teaching for a while and they're just coming back for a part-time job. And so they might not know how to choose a correct textbook to use. And so a lot of times I'm seeing that the textbook that they're choosing for the students is either only available to be sold on Amazon by third-party sellers. And usually with those third-party sellers, they're jacking up the price. So if it's like a $60 book and it's not available anywhere except from that third-party seller, they're jacking it up to like $300 for the book. So I see a lot of that. Or they're just finding textbooks that are just more expensive than they need to be. There's more cheaper options out there. So they're not being mindful of what the students are already spending their money on in other courses plus tuition and everything. And then with adjuncts, they come and go. So we get new adjuncts every semester and some of them either stay several semesters or they leave. And so it's hard for me to give them this information when they come and go all the time. So they just might not know that these resources are out there. And then again, a big one is not knowing where or how to start with this information. And that's again, what I kind of tried to do with this presentation to the faculty to kind of help them. And so far, you did the legwork for them. So far, I did have, we have a couple of professors that are already utilizing OER before I even did the presentation. I mean, that's great that they're doing that. Unfortunately, it's classes that even if they adopted a textbook, it wouldn't be an expensive textbook anyway. I was hopefully more directing it at, you know, the health sciences that have really expensive textbooks. But I'm really glad that they're utilizing that and that the students see that this is available. Because even if that, even if there are other textbooks aren't on there, at least they know that there's some supplemental resources out there, like those simulation labs that I showed you and different resources that are there. If they're not understanding the content, then they have that to go to. And I have had a couple of professors come to me asking for my help finding OER for their classes. So I've had a couple of professors adopt OER since I've done this presentation. I'm hoping more will come. I don't know if it will. But I know the several students that I've talked to, they would really like for this to happen here. Just because there's so much more money that they're spending on other things. Maybe it's something that starts small, at least a few are doing it and the word will get out. And maybe student demand, once they learn about it in one class, they may bring it to the other more expensive ones and say something to the professors. But hopefully, you do this. This would be great if you could do this. Right, yeah, exactly. And I send out a bi-weekly newsletter about what's going on in the library, if there's any changes and stuff. And I usually end all of my emails with, if you need help finding textbooks or wanting to try open educational resources, let me know and I can help you. So I'm always putting that plug in their ear. I'm just hoping and waiting that more people utilize it. Again, all of these are linked. These are some of the live guides that I used as examples when I was making my presentation this time and the last time. I built it out much more from the last presentation because there's just even more information out there. And I feel like OER is becoming so prominent now that, I mean, no offense to the professors, but really there's no excuse not to use it because there's just so much resources out there right now. It's not so new that nobody knows how to do it. Yeah, it's been proven and more other people have done the hard work of making it feasible. Right. And there's so many, I think it's on a couple of these OER live guides that there's universities out there that a lot of the courses or a lot of the faculty are completely switching to OER. Like they're more OER than not for classes, which is really exciting and hoping we get there someday. But these are just examples. If you want to look at them, if maybe there's some information that I missed and you want to see what they're doing, I linked them out to the schools that I looked at. And then this is an open educational resource guidebook. It's linked on there. This just gives more information about it, more resources that are available. And so I got a lot of information on this guidebook as well. It's not super long. It's easy to read. So if you wanted to utilize that, it's linked right on that slide. And I think that's all I have. Is there any questions for me? Or yeah, does anybody have any questions? Go ahead and any more questions, type into the question section of your GoToWebinar interface. If you want to know more about any of the different OER services that Laura mentioned, you can ask about that. Or how is anybody using this kind of thing in your university or college? If you have any tips for anyone else who might be wanting to jump in here and needs, I think this presentation would be great for anyone to use who is trying to do the same thing you are doing, Laura. I know this is a problem and a need in our college, at our university, but I need the backup. I need the research. How do I convince my faculty to do this? And I think all the resources here and what you've gone through so far is going to be great for other people to do. The survey and questions you had at the beginning were from like 2018, 19, correct? We do have a question. How long ago did you do the presentation to the faculty to try and convince them of this? I don't remember if that was... Yeah, the first time I did this presentation was February, last February. 2021? Yes. Okay. It was right, yes. Yeah, last February. It was right before I went on maternity leave. That's hard to remember. So yes, last February I did this presentation. It's been about a year that they've... Yeah, okay. Yep. This is... I do want to again redo this presentation. I'm currently working on creating a survey to send out to the students. I have to have IRB approval to do it. So I have a process to go through before I can actually send out the survey. But I want to hear from the students of what they're doing to get their textbooks. Because I showed the survey findings on this presentation, but I want to do my own survey here because I have a big inkling that a lot of them are going to say that they're using Close Reserve and they're making copies or taking pictures of the book from Close Reserve or they're utilizing their peers. I'm guessing that's going to be the two biggest answers I'm going to get. And I think that showing that might... I mean, I don't know if it will, but hopefully that'll give them a little bit more push because I know that... I've heard from faculty that it's frustrating when they don't have the book in class. They didn't do the reading because they don't have the book or whatever it is. And I mean, here's your answer. Here's where you can easily fix that. I mean, that's a question too. I mean, do these faculty just assume all the students are getting the books? Do they even know that this... I mean, what's happened in classes? Yeah, why? I mean, you just said they get frustrated. Why didn't you do the reading? I can't afford to buy the book that you want us to. Yeah, I think they... What are you doing as a faculty to fix that problem? You just... Yeah. I think they know it's a problem. They're relying too much on Close Reserve, which I get. But that's not what Close Reserve is there for. It's for the students. If their textbook is still in the mail and it hasn't come to them yet, that's technically all the textbooks that are up there should be taken down after like two weeks. Because by that point, all the students should have their textbooks. That's the supposed plan, yeah. Right. But they're just... That's what it was supposed to be when Close Reserve was first implemented. And that was before I came here. But they're relying... I think they're relying on that way too heavily, which then also kind of frustrates me because there are some professors each semester that are asking me to purchase the books. And I have not a very big budget. It's a small library. I don't have very much. And so they're looking to me to purchase those books for them. And so, yeah, it's just frustration all around. And so that's why I tried to do this presentation to kind of fix that. But I'm going to... You'll probably didn't know what could possibly... What other options there might be. Yeah. Right. And I'm hoping after I get the survey done, I get all the data from that, I'm going to redo this presentation to maybe those that weren't here for it or need a refresher or something. And they can see that, obviously, this is a problem. And you'll have to have a information from your own students telling them, this is how they're struggling. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it doesn't look like anybody has any other questions that they've been typing in just now at the end. So that's fine. You all know where to find Laura, if you do want to talk to her more about this and what she's doing and how she's been able to work it out. Oh, just some comments. Fantastic presentation and a couple of thank yous. I think other people are going to definitely be using this at their universities, too. And if they have, if you guys have questions, obviously, you can email me as well. So, yeah. Great. And good luck, Laura. My fingers are crossed for you. I know I was a struggling student myself, too. Undergrading. And it's not... Figure out. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. All right. All right. Thanks. So thank you. Thank you, Laura, for this great info. Thank you, everyone, for attending. I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen now to wrap up and show you where we'll have our archive and everything. Here's this show page. Here we go. Our Encompass Live page. These are upcoming shows here. But at the underneath there is a link to archived Encompass Live shows. And most recent ones are at the top of the list. So this is last week's here. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show will get an email from me, probably by the end of the day tomorrow at the latest, letting you know that the recording is ready. It has to process through GoToWebinar and YouTube and everything. And it'll be posted here. And as I said, there'll be a link to the recording on our YouTube channel and a link to Laura's slides. Laura, you send me the sharing link whenever you get a chance. And we'll add that link in there. So you'll all have that information. If you're looking for other shows, if you want to search our archives, we do a search feature here. You can search the entire show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want to. That is because this is our full show archives. Going back to when Encompass Live premiered. I'm not going to scroll all the way down because there's just too many here. That is in January 2009. So we've got 11, 12 years worth of shows here. So just do pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything you watch in our archives. Some of the information will stand the test of time and still be good. Some will become outdated. Services and products may have changed drastically since the original presentation. Some might not exist anymore. You never know. So just pay attention to when something was originally broadcast if you do go ahead and watch our archives recordings. We do have a Facebook page. I have linked here for Encompass Live. We do promote about our shows. Here's a reminder to log in to today's show. So if you do like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. Do we announce when our last recording went up? And you can know what's going on. We also put it on Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag and comp live. That's our little hashtag for the show. So you can keep up on what we're doing there. So that is for today's show. I'll help you join us next week when we were talking about WordPress. The last Wednesday of every month is a pretty sweet tech day. Amanda Sweet, our technology innovation librarian comes in the show and does something tech related. So if you're the techie person in your library, this is definitely the show to be watching. Keep high on. We do tech things during other times of the month, but definitely every last Wednesday of the month will be her. And WordPress just did an update. She told me to their interface and she's gotten lots of calls and emails with questions about it. So she has for her topic next Wednesday WordPress layout templates using Elementor. So definitely sign up for that. And any of our other upcoming shows you see we have here in March and April dates getting filled in. Keep an eye on the schedule here as I get more of the other dates that haven't been scheduled to finalize. And so sign up and so join for any of our other future upcoming shows. Hope you'll see you on those. Also a reminder, something else we do online. Big Talk from Small Libraries is next Friday, February 25th. This is our annual online conference. All online, all day long, free, small libraries doing presentations. Everyone who is a presenter on Big Talk from Small Libraries is from a library with a population served or an FTE of 10,000 or less. Laura has been on there before actually, previously. Our schedule is up. Registration is open. We have presentations from public, academic, and school libraries. So a little something for everybody. So if you are interested, everyone can sign up for it. That is next Friday, February 25th. So sign up for Big Talk. Sign up for any of our upcoming Encompass live shows. So hopefully we'll see you on a future episode. Bye-bye. Thank you.