 All right. Welcome, everybody, to our OER Open Education Week celebration. This is our fourth session in our tour to force of OER degree and adoption showcases. And this one is a little different than the previous three that we've heard about. This is from Maricopa Millions in Arizona, which I know many of you have heard about their wonderful work around OER and saving money for their students. And they've taken a little bit different path. They've gone more for OER adoption than a degree at this point. That might be something they'll pursue in the future, but they have significantly impacted student savings, improved teaching and learning. And Matthew Bloom, who is their OER faculty in residence, will tell you more about that. All right, Matthew. Okay. Well, thank you, everybody, for giving me this opportunity to share what we've been doing here. You know, Maricopa Millions, as Una said, a lot of people have heard about it. And, you know, we've been sharing, you know, our work for the last five years. And it was initially started as a way of trying to harness some of the energy that we had from both faculty and in administration at our district when it came to open education, you know, several years ago. We've had a lot of people who helped to develop, you know, a lot of improvements to MathAS and MyOpenMath and also some individual people who had done research studies and things like that. So all of this work that had been done and all this interest, it seemed like a great opportunity. So the project basically began as with the purpose, as Una said, of encouraging faculty to adopt OER. And there were a number of ways that we went about doing that. Before I get into all that, for those of you who aren't familiar with Maricopa, as Una said, we're in Arizona, it's in the Phoenix area. So it's the greater Phoenix area. It's a very large municipal area. We have 10 colleges that are all connected under the single Maricopa district and we serve about 200,000 students a year. And so the project had the opportunity because it's such a big system, the project really had the opportunity to have a great impact. And I think that we have had that. I have only really been involved in the project for the last three years. And as Una said, I just recently became Maricopa's first OER faculty in residence. And so I'll get to that in a moment. So I think where I wanted to kind of start here was just this general idea of kind of how the project works. And I apologize, my voice sounds a little hoarse. I've been recovering from a little bit of a cold. But so the idea was to incentivize faculty to develop, revise, remix and adopt OER by leveraging funds committed by the administration to call for proposals to create course content focusing on sections or courses that had the highest enrollments. So the ones that we wanted to try to fund were English 101 and 102, some of the 100 level math courses, Psychology 101. So these courses that really are the big kind of high enrollment courses for our district, we wanted to fund those first. And the idea was to try to engage faculty from multiple colleges and get them working collaboratively as well. Collaboration had a huge impact on it. This slide here shows just a few of the, in fact, I think these might be all of the disciplines that we have funded the courses or under which we funded courses. And all of the courses that we funded are ultimately going to be shared through Canvas Commons, which I'll get to in a minute. But so this is all, this will all be publicly available. In fact, a lot of them already, I think there's like 16 courses are already publicly available through Canvas Commons. Canvas is the learning management system that our district uses at nine of its 10 colleges. So the goal of Maricopa Millions was to fund these courses here and to promote faculty awareness of OER in other ways as well. And then a little bit later on in the project, we also started to transition even more to the student awareness aspect, just kind of piggybacking off of what we just heard in the last session. The students, you know, communicating the value of saving on textbook costs and the value of using OER is really important. And that's something that we're shifting to here. But going back, the idea was to remove the cost and access barriers associated with traditional textbooks and publisher subscription codes by supporting the faculty adoption of OER. And the explicit goal was financial primarily at the beginning. The goal was to save students $5 million over five years. And it has been pretty successful. I will tell you later how much total we have saved because it's a lot. So the point is that, you know, this is not something that was a top-down approach. The administration was extremely supportive. And there was a district-level committee involved in leading this. We've had a tri-chair model. So there are representatives from as many of the colleges as we can get. Usually we have mostly faculty, but there are also instructional designers, library faculty on the committee. There's also, you know, we have one or two vice presidents of academic affairs and also a couple of administrators. Like we have one of the college presidents and then another person who's like the dean of humanities at one of the colleges as well. So there is a wide representation on that committee. And I think that one of the things that I want to try to do in the future is see if we can't get some representation from some of the student groups on one of the colleges as well. But so one of the reasons why I'm stressing that is because it's not just that we're funding these courses here, but we are working together like everyone at every level of the district basically from the top administration all the way down to individual faculty members who are, you know, their own, who are OER champions themselves. The idea was to use resources that are committed by supportive administration to help faculty adopt OER and do what they're passionate about when it comes to open education. And even if faculty didn't know anything about it, one of the things that was built into our grant structure was a training. So basically the way that the training worked is that, I mean, faculty adoption of OER remains the single most important focus because of the impact that that can have in our mind. Now, I mean, the student aspect is really important too. And having the process of a Z degree is something that we are kind of working on differently at different colleges. But the point is that this overall purpose is really to look specifically at how we can, we wanted to design a grant program to remember which faculty interested in transitioning to open resources would propose to develop their own course. And like I said, we were heavily weighing high enrollment courses and cross-college collaboration where we had three or more instructors from different colleges participating. They were funded with three overload hours each, and that was usually spread out over two semesters or three semesters depending on their development process. And there were really three steps to the grant. So the first phase of the grant, or I should say the first part of a participant's experience in the grant, was training. They were expected to complete some sort of training and articulate what resources they use. They were provided with a number of getting started links, including CCC OER's page, Creative Commons, OER Commons, BC Campus, OpenStacks, Lumen. Before I was actually participating myself in Maricopa Millions, I was still a Maricopa faculty and doing stuff with OER. I just wasn't on that committee until three years ago. But back in 2013, I got a grant, a separate grant. This is a separate system within our college district. But through the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction, I got a learning grant to develop an OER faculty workshop. And I've shared that with CCC OER before. And I shared that at the Open Education Conference in 2015, I believe. But that was also one of the kind of primary tools that faculty in our district were encouraged to complete. And since kind of a, it's a self-paced kind of automated, yeah, it's like a self-paced MOOC basically that initiates faculty into how to use OER. And that's available on Canvas Network as a free MOOC too. And so that was, that training aspect of it was in place because we wanted to make sure that the stuff that we were creating was obviously like legitimate in terms of its licensing. But also we wanted to make sure that they had access to all the resources that they might need. And so after the training section of it, the second part of the grant were the development of the course itself. And now developing the course could include, we were actually okay with someone just saying, all right, we're not going to use this economics textbook anymore, we're going to use the open stacks one, provided that they incorporated it into the LMS and into Canvas. And then sometimes what they would do is just kind of break it up so that it fit into separate modules or maybe develop some additional assessments or whatever things they needed. So it could be something like that. And there were other courses that were developed that were a lot more ground up development, I mean from scratch. And so that's something that we've kind of had some challenge with determining a better model for compensating faculty for the different kinds of work they're doing in terms of contributing to global open content. And that's something that I might talk about a little bit at the end when I discuss how we are changing our grant model. And I think maybe I skipped this part, but I might have said this, but over the last five years, Maricopa Moons has run its initial five year course. It was not intended to be a permanent thing. It was intended to be a five year goal, do this over five years, resources are committed for those five years. And this spring is the 10th semester of those five years. So as of spring 2018, Maricopa Moons has run its course and we've had great success, not just from this grant project here, but also because of some of the other things that we have been doing to encourage adoption. And one of those, like I mentioned earlier, is this idea of making sure that we're actually sharing everything back. We didn't just want to house it within Maricopa's canvas and pat ourselves on the back and say that we're, we look at us, we made OER and we share it with each other, but no one else. So fortunately, Canvas Commons was something we were able to, it was part of the Maricopa Moons project and a larger push within Maricopa to get Canvas Commons turned on. If you're not familiar with Canvas or Canvas Commons, basically what it is is a sharing mechanism. So, you know, any, basically anything in the Canvas LMS can be very easily shared to Canvas Commons, either within just the Maricopa instance of Canvas or in the public version of Canvas. And so what we've done is we've encouraged all the faculty who developed courses in the Maricopa Millions to share those, you know, after the final vetting, because the third stage in the process, which I think I skipped as well, the second stage is developing the course, and then the third stage in the grant is the actual piloting of the course and some finalization, tidying it up a little bit. And, you know, none of them are perfect, but they're certainly helpful tools and other faculty have already been using them and remixing them. And so they were encouraged to share them and the search tag that you can use if you have access to Canvas. And you can, even if you don't have Canvas as your LMS, you can get a free Canvas account at, I think it's Instructure is the name of the company. And so it's a free Canvas free for teachers account. And what you can do is just search MMOER and it'll bring up all the courses that we've funded there. And so we just, you know, we felt like that sharing was important not just so that we could encourage faculty within our district to use the material, but so that we were actually having the kind of global impact that we want. Saving students money while that is the kind of really appealing to administration, really appealing to certain stakeholders, obviously it is important to save money and especially if you're a college student at a community college and, you know, it's like, do I spend $400 on textbooks this semester or do I pay my first month's rent? So yes, that's valuable, but there is this, as we, you know, it's kind of preaching to the choir here, but there's this whole other aspect of open education that has to do with this philosophy of contributing to the commons and that's something that is definitely part of our philosophy as well. So along those lines, I think that I just wanted to stress that as Maricopa Millions has developed, it has focused on saving students money and developing mechanisms for calculating that, but at the same time, thinking of his mission and more recently as we're beginning to evolve, this project is now becoming institutionalized. I'm not sure if I really like that, the use of that term for it, but that's how I've heard it described, but in the creation of this position that I've got for the first time, it's a faculty and residence position, so I remain English faculty at Scottsdale Community College, but for the next two to three years, I will be on full reassign time coordinating the district's open education initiatives and that just as a demonstration of the value that Maricopa sees in this project, that they're gonna assign that resource, you know, to this thing and one of my goals is to try to really stress this idea and this I got from the Open Education Conference in 2017, which was one of the keynotes was Katherine Casserly, who's the former CEO of Creative Commons and program officer for the William & Ford Hewlett Foundation. She listed the values of open education as freedom, transparency, equity, access, inclusion and collaboration and I think that obviously equity, access, cost savings fits into those things but there's so much more that we can be doing so that's part of what we'll be doing as we shift. But the ongoing goals that we have had specifically had to do with student awareness, faculty awareness and improving upon the catalog of materials that we offer and so when it comes to, so I've already kind of described the grant process and how much we've funded in terms of the grants but I wanted to also say a few words about some of the other things that we have done as well in order to promote faculty awareness across the district, so adoption and adaptation of materials. We host OER events, dialogue days, we usually, we get people to come in from across the country. We've had Preston Davis speak, David Wiley just last Friday, we had Rajiv Jangiani from BC Campus so it was, and Quantlin Polytechnic Institute and it was just an amazing day. So we offered these opportunities for faculty to get that kind of OER recharge and again the funding for that is, it's collaborative funding coming from this administrative support and then we also leverage other support services from the district and college level as well because there are so many people who are interested in OER. It's kind of like the discussions that I have, it almost doesn't, in some ways it doesn't really matter your politics because like everyone has a reason to like OER and so everybody can see the value in it and you can have a lot of people helping you out. We've also been utilizing our CTLs and college libraries. Like I said, we've had librarians on our steering committee and librarians as we all know are some of the greatest OER champions out there and so we want to make sure that we're always including them in the conversations and we also invested some money in promotional items and we've been promoting our website which is maricopa.maricopa.edu forward slash OER and at this moment we're trying to, the whole district just changed their website so we're looking for some additions to be made to it at present but it is still a resource for the public in general but also specifically students to kind of see what kind of work has been done with Maricopa Million so we've been using the website, we've been using these events, we've been doing promotional materials like with pens and stuff like that to try to get people to really participate. Now what I think is actually probably one of the most important things that Maricopa Million was get built into our class search, this low cost or no cost filter for textbooks if you see down here. So what it is is that students can search for courses but then when they click more options they can actually filter out all the ones that are not using low cost materials. Now this is not necessarily just OER, it could be somebody whose class is just a bunch of links to the New York Times or something like that but it is something that we put in place, it helps us also to calculate a cost savings estimate because what we can do is we can basically run a report of all the sections that have this code associated with them and based on that we have a fairly conservative way of estimating cost savings if we basically say that there are 20 students in a class, in fact most of our classes have more than 20 students in them but so 20 students a class and we did a little bit of research and polling and the original team settled upon $100 as an average textbook price for a given course and I know textbook prices can range wildly so it's really difficult to tell but our calculation is 20 students per section times $100 per student times the number of sections and then that's how we estimate that savings and it's helpful for this, this is helpful for students and for us and it was honestly one of the best tools that we have but we've been focusing a lot more on student awareness like I already mentioned we've been kind of developed we've got this image here spread throughout the campuses all different colleges and a lot of buildings and these little table tents that just kind of sit out there in the lobby and stuff like that and we've also been holding student awareness events where we've borrowed the hashtag textbook broke this is an event at Paradise Valley Community College this is a great opportunity because you get to kind of interact with students it's a really unique way of interacting with students and this was an event at Scott's but you know it's true though that there are all kinds of things that you can do with the money and it's not just a matter of oh I save money you know it actually is permitting some students to it can significantly improve their lives during the semester and so that's obviously very important so all this stuff together basically has brought us up to like I said the end of Maricopa Millions in its current form it's not ending we are not stopping at any point it's just evolving and this is our final estimate we set out to save five million dollars over five years and it looks like about eleven and a half million dollars is the final calculation there and I can only stress that this cost savings is really much more than just the courses we funded or even the work that we did with the awareness because a lot of this has to do with how that work maybe but also all these other little pockets of OER practice just popping up without us even knowing it are happening across our district and we have a lot of faculty in this district and we are constantly discovering something new that somebody is doing whether it's the results of a sabbatical or if it's just somebody made a bunch of videos and we didn't even know about it and all of a sudden we discovered that's something that's happened so it's not just the grant project that created this but it is nonetheless I think something that we are really proud of sharing so that said and I was going to put this up here too this isn't the most flattering graph here because you can see that there's a little bit of a dip there in 2017 I don't know if that's a general I don't know if that's a general like enrollment issue or what but we're going to try to be focusing we're going to try to focus more on how to you know maintain that savings per semester and maybe even improve it as we move forward and so what we're going to be doing is rather than funding complete courses anymore we're really going to focus more on improving the content that we have and so because a lot of times faculty aren't really interested in adopting a complete course you know maybe somebody as if they're teaching it for the first time or if it's like a last minute thing but most faculty are more interested in having like a buffet you know so that they can kind of pick and choose the things that they want so what we want to do is make the most appealing spread possible and focus on improving accessibility and cooperating culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies maximizing 5R permissions renewable assignments that kind of thing and that's that's going to be the future of Maricopa Millions from here on out and I believe that is it all right thank you Matthew that in fact was a tour de force in itself and one question that you answered partially was in the chat window and I'm not sure if it went out into the general chat window was Canvas Commons do you want to speak just you have one minute left so maybe just a really critical of how people can get access to Canvas Commons yeah so what you can do is is if you go to I think it's Canvas Canvas free for teachers so you can get a free Canvas account and it's it's I don't know which one I'm kind of just randomly doing this here but yeah Canvas is is there's like the Maricopa Canvas which you won't have access to unless you're you know a student or faculty or staff but if you're just a public person then you can get a free Canvas account and after you enroll you get your free Canvas account then you'll have access to Canvas Commons which is the search mechanism that's used and Canvas Commons looks something like this this is the Maricopa version of Canvas but you'll see that provided our network works here so yeah so Canvas Commons whether you're accessing this through the public Canvas or through whatever is your institution uses it I imagine that you would still have access to it as well under the search if you just do MMOER okay come on I guess I'm not typing fast enough there you go MMOER you'll see all of the different courses that that Maricopa has uploaded for sharing alright thanks thanks so much Matthew we're going to close the recording off now but I'm going to ask Matthew to put his email in the chat window for anyone who'd like to follow up later so thanks again Matthew for a wonderful presentation and thank you to our audience for joining us