 Hello everybody, my name is Chayton Jessal and today I'll be presenting a talk called student champion creating a $500,000 OER initiative. So before we get into everything, I'd like to go a little bit about who I am. I'm currently an undergraduate student at the University of Calgary. I'm here in Alberta, Canada. I know this is a global conference so I thought I'd situate myself somewhere in the world. I'm going into my fourth year of a neuroscience degree, which isn't exactly related to OER in any way, shape or form, but hey, I've still gotten to do so many cool things with the degree. And I am the faculty of science representative on the University of Calgary students union. This is important because this is kind of how I got into OER in the first place. So as an outline for today's talk, I guess, first I'll be going over why OER matters to me, how I got to learn about OER, the proposal and submission process for the project, the impact this project is going to have, and hey, what comes next. So setting the stage, after being elected as the faculty of science representative, I knew I wanted to make a really big difference on the SU. So I brainstormed a bunch of ways that I could potentially go about doing that. And, you know, what's the issue that always affects students the most tuition. The University of Calgary, it's increased 21% over the past three years, which is a bit absurd that's three years of 7% increase. So this is this is a very, very important issue for us right now. The only thing is that tuition isn't something that, you know, I as an individual can really advocate against it's mandated by the government that the SU is an organization does awesome work advocating for tuition to, you know, not go so high. But me as a person I want to take more of a pragmatic approach and I want to do something like tangible that I could actually get done to lower student costs. So I thought about what are other student costs and, you know, textbooks are definitely a big one. You know, if you've got five classes where you have a $200 textbooks, that's $1,000. It's a lot of money. So I got the thinking, what are some of the ways that I've seen textbooks kind of be eliminated in the past. And one of these came to mind. The University of Calgary, we run this textbook of vending machine program where you know there's a bunch of textbooks from like just about every class, you can rent out for a few hours. I thought, hey, you know, if we can support this program and help students that way. That's amazing. That's incredible. So, you know, with this textbook vending machine idea. I was very excited and I went to go talk to this wonderful lady in Christie, Christie is just absolutely sensational and you know she's somebody who works with the textbook vending machine program. And although she is very, very sensational, what she said about the idea, maybe not so much learn textbook vending machines probably not the best idea, only one person can use them at a time and you constantly need to be buying additions, and there's lots of keep costs. She probably could have left it with that negative don't do the textbook vending machine thing, but she really brought it back up for me and she told me and this is where it first got started. She told me about we are after this my own, you know, looking into it talking to professors, friends, etc. I learned that we are they're they're accessible to anybody at any time. They're open source freely updatable they're, you know, there's no upkeep beyond posting them to D2L or your school website, every single semester they're awesome. So we are was what I identified after these discussions as the way forward here. So then it came to OER advocacy. And the first night went to her name was Sam, she's the SUV P academic, a slight aside, Wednesday, October 18. I'm at 5pm, ask a student OER champion, or our panel that we're hosting, I don't have Sam hard there. I'll probably be there as well in case you have any more questions or anything like that. A little bit of ashamed plug. But what the Samar told me about was on top of just, you know, advocating and you know promoting it through social media. She told me about this program that the SU runs called Quality Money. This is just a quote directly from the website. Quality Money it's a partnership between the SU and the Calgary that has $1.65 million available for students to apply to for student led ideas that would benefit our greater campus community. At this point I had this awesome like baseline idea OERs. And I also knew, hey, I want to apply to Quality Money to promote this. I didn't really know that much of a specific idea. That's when it's the most important to consult with some experts. So I went to the Taylor Institute. This is the teaching center at the University of Calgary. They teach our teachers essential and met with this absolutely stellar human being named Heather. She's a wonderful, wonderful person. And there she told me about the pilot project that the Taylor Institute actually ran before in relation to OERs. What they did was fund 10 open education resources in the year 2017. Since then in 2021 it's been four years, and these projects have cumulatively saved over $1 million. I think that's $250,000 in student savings each year from these 10 projects. And that's just insane. So, thus, the idea for the open education resource fund was born. It's not a very creative name, but it tells you what it is. We wanted to fund the creation of open education resources. So now that we have this solid idea, it's time to write the grand proposal. And man, was it a slog. I took about a month, and I know a lot of people listen to this or academics. They probably do a lot of writing, but it was like 8000 words and to me that was inhumane, inhuman and also inhumane that one too. This is crazy. And in this process I do want to give a special thank you to Heather for reviewing and editing my proposal. You can see the title of this slide is felt wrong, which points out exactly why I need to somebody to edit my work. More, you know, more seriously, I guess, the grant proposal had three options in terms of we are funding option one was for $300,000 that would create 30 we are $400,000 for 40 and $500,000 for at least 50 being created, at least because some projects won't take the full amount that we offer there. So considerably quality money, the largest project that had ever been funded previously was close to this option to mark around $400,000. So we were being very, very ambitious with our ask but hey, good ideas are worth pursuing. So the submission deadline was November 26, and we would be told if we were successful in about late March. So submitting this project was a huge pressure off my chest, but it was also terrifying because it was no longer in my control. So a lot of mixed emotions but it was very gratifying process I'll say that. So in the meantime before we were told in March, um, you know, I didn't stop advocating for we are how could I learned how important this was, and I made so many friends, you know, in our various meetings and all that, and we really really work to do some amazing things, including, you know, creating an OER student librarian position to help professors find and adapt existing OERs at our school. Another great way to implement OERs. So come late March, the grant announcements, and we were successful and funded for $500,000. I was beyond excited and I was so gratified, knowing that you know I had an impactful idea. I worked with others to refine that. I put in the work to get it ready and won the largest grant ever awarded in quality money history. Not only is this meaningful because of the work it did, but it showed me the kind of things that I want to do for the rest of my life. It was just incredible and I can't even describe how it felt knowing that I made that much of a difference. So onto the impact that this project is going to have and it's set to have. No, this is very important. This is a very rough estimate, and I'm a very biased individual. So take this will be massive grain of salt I'm making a lot of assumptions here. So please, please. Starting in the year 2023 you can see on the top column here. The project is set to save 250 or set to, you know, save $250,000. This is just a value taken from the 2017 pilot project for each year, their project saved $250,000. The reason why it starts in 2023 is just because it will take a few years for the project to actually be ready. 20 year attention to this bottom here where you can see total savings. In this third column here, you'll see 70 or in 2024 this project will already be set to save $750,000. We want to grant a $500,000. So you're already getting more than your return on investment in 2024. And things get a little bit ludicrous in 10 years in 2031. So it's set to save over $10 million. And again, I know this project, please take this with a giant grain of salt. But, you know, just as a preliminary estimate that's kind of insane. So what's next. Well, unfortunately, I will likely never get to see the OER of an action. I graduate in 2022 and the first OER will be ready in 2023. I might not benefit, but I know that somebody out there will. And you can really see the impact that this project can have through the student testimony that you can take a look at as well. So, what about this year? Well, I still have some time left. I really want to work towards creating this holistic environment of support around OER here at the University of Calgary. What this involves is four things to me. Providing funds to help professors create OERs. That's done. Providing a means to adopt existing open education resources through that student librarian. That's also done. The third here is to work to create an OER award system at the university and faculty level. And this will incentivize OER use, something I'm working very, very hard on right now. Lastly, implementing a zero textbook cost signifier program, showing students that the classes that don't that have an OER to, you know, increase traffic to those OER classes, promoting kind of pushing professors even further. Hey, using OER, you'll get more students in your classes, things of that sort. And altogether, this really will push the University of Calgary in a forward direction in terms of adopting open education. And with that, thank you so, so much for attending my session. Please see my contact information below if you want to get touch and does anybody have any questions?