 Excellent. All right. Welcome, everyone, to our timely OER tutorials series. And this is the first one in the series and it's introduction to open educational resources. So this is great for folks who are new to OER or maybe just want to refresher. And I do want to say welcome and, you know, please share, if you would like, share your name and your college in the chat window. So that folks can see where everyone is from. Looks like we have a really nice turnout. So we've been having educational disruption in 2020. Started, you know, three, four months ago and we're still in that situation. And in talking with many of you and folks at other colleges, the need for open educational resources is greater than ever. Not only for students, but for faculty who are pivoting to online. These digital resources that are free for students to use online are very helpful. And so our series is meant to help folks who need more familiarity with that so that they can adopt those or they can, or if there are staff at colleges who are working with faculty, they can help them to select OER. And today is the overview. So we're going to go very quickly and cover definitions and so forth. Let me get right here to our learning objectives. So we hope that at the end of this 30 minutes, you will understand OER from a student equity lens. What are the benefits for faculty and institutions? And what rights does an open license provide for those who want to reuse the materials? And finally, how is OER, how can we measure that OER is high quality and what benefits do we know from the research? And so first off, I want you to tell me, if you would, to tell me where your OER initiative is. So kind of what stages is it at? And Liz, I'm going to ask you to put this in the chat window, but we're going to use a tool called menti.com. And you can enter the number 7241-00 and you can let us know what stage of development your OER initiative is at. Let's move that. Okay, great. Okay, so I know we've got some responses in here. Looking forward to some more. So we've got some folks who are fairly advanced. And once again, you can type in menti.com, m-e-n-t-i.com, and the number that I just mentioned to you, which is 7241-00. Some early successes. Just getting started. Well, perfect. I love this because I think this is an ideal tutorial for those who are just getting started. All right. Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you, everyone, for sharing that information. So quick facts about community college students. So I think I mentioned Amuna Daly, the director of the Community College Consortium for OER. I might have forgotten that. But our average student is 28 years old. The majority of them are working while enrolled full-time. And actually, we have more part-time students than full-time students, and they are more likely to be working while attending school. So we know that our students suffer a lot of barriers, not only time and money, but we have a very diverse student body. In fact, our student population is more diverse than not. And so there's other struggles associated with that. First-generation students are very high as well. And barriers to education. So I think many of you have probably seen the graph on the left-hand side, where we see that college textbooks have risen, and the cost of those have risen by over 200% in the last 20 years, higher than any other consumer price index except for hospital services. So this has priced many students out of the ability to purchase their textbooks. And statistics have shown that there's a disproportionate impact on low-income and students of color with textbooks and also with student debt. This is a big national study, well, out of Florida with, I believe, 28,000 students from their state colleges and state universities, saying that 64% of students don't buy textbooks at least some time because of costs. They're taking fewer courses, and many of them believe they've earned a poor grade if they've attempted to take that course without a textbook. And they've been dropping courses. So we know that this is affecting their ability to complete successfully and timely and in a timely manner. In addition, our students are facing more stressors outside of their academic life. And this particular study is from California, but it's been replicated around the country. It was done by the Hope Center at Temple University in Pennsylvania. And there were 57 community colleges that participated in this. In California, 40,000 students responded. 60% of students reported being housing insecure in the last year. 19% homeless in the last year, and food insecure in the last 30 days, 50%. Now, this was published in 2019 before the pandemic. So we know that need is even greater now. Some food pantries have had to close on campus that we're trying to assist students in these situations. So need is even greater. And so we are moving away from this frame where we blame students for their inability to be able to purchase those textbooks that they have had poor planning around their college career to an institutional responsibility where we see that instructional is important for all students who are registered and we need to make those available to them. And we need to make those materials relevant and good role models for all of our students and not just reflect a small segment of our students. So open educational resources, we've been kind of talking around it, the definition, and I think many of you've seen this before high quality teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain, or have been released pursuant to an intellectual property license permitting free use and repurposing. So this might be a course. I might be an open course. Some of you may use the canvas learning management system and they have a section called canvas comments where there's a lot of open courses available, which other faculty can reuse those materials themselves. It might be images or videos that are that are out there that have an open license and you can bring those into your classroom and you can edit them if so desired. And finally, the most popular one of course is the open textbooks, which which can help replace traditional textbooks that you might be using in your classroom. And we'll talk a little more about that in just a moment. First off, I want to just give you a really raw example of contrast here between two chemistry textbooks. So the one on the left is a McGraw Hill chemistry textbook, very highly regarded intro to chemistry textbook. It's all rights reserved, which means it's a full copyright out of from a commercial publisher. It's $235 in in some campus bookstores. Probably many of them and a used one if you're lucky to be able to find that is $176. Now on the right hand side is an openly licensed textbook, it happens to be from the publisher open stacks, which we'll talk about a little bit more and I hope many of you have or but you will if you haven't. And this textbook is free online. It follows the same scope and sequence of introductory chemistry classes throughout the country. Students can also get a softbound version for $55 through an open stacks partner if they want a printed version. And some colleges have actually their bookstores have set up lower cost print options using their own reproduction of facilities. So this is a huge difference to a student budget. So how does that we are work. It means that there is access on the first day of class. So you as the instructor and your student don't have to wait around you don't have to say well I'll the first assignment won't be due to week two because I don't know when students are going to get their textbook. They will have a link. They can be provided with an online access on day one. As I mentioned free online low cost print options. So most of these open textbook publishers have some kind of a low cost print option. And we have colleges who've been able to provide additional support on campus as needed. So something that is quite doable. And finally faculty can adapt this for their specific students and course needs so it could be that they're adapting case studies other materials so that it really is representative of their community their students and the course learning outcomes. What faculty most often tell us is that the commercial textbooks cover more information than is required by their course. And they feel often that they've got to cover all of those chapters because the student has spent so much money on the textbook. But with an open textbook there's no more there's no more feeling guilty about that. And in fact if you so desire you could actually remove chapters or alternatively if you feel like an open textbook doesn't have isn't covering one topic the way that you would like to you can you can edit and or add additional material. And there's no requirement for you to change versions every few years you can download these materials from the repositories and upload them into your own servers on campus or your learning management system or other instructional material resources and change only when you when you need to and you can customize this to match course outcomes. And really keep information current and relevant because we know that often with commercial textbooks there's a delay because you don't have the option to make changes to it. So what makes all of this possible. So the infrastructure or technology behind it is called creative Commons licensing and Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that was set up almost 20 years ago to enable sharing and reuse of create creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. And what this really essentially means is materials can be licensed by the owner who holds the copyright in order to open up rights. And so that's sort of rights that normally if you had a commercial textbook that you were using in your classroom. If you had a student who couldn't afford one you couldn't make a copy of it and give it to them that would be that would be a copyright violation. But with a creative Commons license you're free to copy materials if needed if so desired. And it's really about freeing up the potential of the Internet. It also makes it possible for all of these search engines to search for openly licensed materials making it easier to find these materials that you might be hoping to use in your classroom. The difference between a full copyright and creative Commons is that the creative Commons license sits on top of copyright and gives rights back to users based on the owner's setup of the license. And we're not going to get into licenses today because that's actually the topic for next week's tutorial. And I will tell you that there's the five rights or the five Rs of OER and it's it's really helpful to remember these because these are a little bit more practical than than the license themselves and you'll see the licenses later we actually saw one with that textbook. But these are really the practices that you can now do with open licenses so you can retain that material as I mentioned you can download it. You download with that license that license is not revocable on that material so you can retain it you can reuse it in its current unaltered form in any way you choose for your for your classroom you can revise it. You can alter it to meet the needs of your classroom and you can remix it with other OER or you can add additional information of your own and we hope you will openly license that portion as well and then you can redistribute this so you can give it to your students you can give it to other faculty there's no restriction on that. So some really powerful rights are given through openly licensed educational resources. Now you might be wondering well you know I you know I've heard that some of the stuff's you know not that great. And so we do and it's really important as a faculty member to be using effective instructional materials in your classroom. So I wanted to share with you some research findings about the effectiveness of OER and so there's been these both of these reports have been published in the last two years. They're meta-analysis so they look at a number of studies done around the use of OER comparing the use of OER in courses to the use of commercial or traditional textbooks. And they have found in over 22 studies with 100 I'm sorry 22 studies with over 100,000 students that open courses where open textbooks are used the students have equivalent learning outcomes as those courses using commercial textbooks. And with no differences based on instructor the same assessment or student prior knowledge so looking at looking at keeping it as equivalent as possible over those comparisons. And the more recent study that was done in 2019 with which was a meta-analysis of 11 studies over 78,000 students found that courses with open textbooks have a lower withdrawal rate than courses with commercial textbooks. And I think this this makes a fair amount of sense given that some of our research from students surveys have said that students are dropping classes because they find that they can't afford the textbook. And when they get into a fair amount of a way into the course and they're not doing well and they're unlikely to be able to buy the textbook, then they draw they withdraw from the class. So some some encouraging research. This this research was was particularly striking I think from an equity perspective. And this was out of the University of Georgia 21,000 students. And it was comparing once again students in courses with traditional textbooks to students in courses that were using OER. And all students had a had a positive change in grade overall. But you can see that students on financial aid had a had a greater so the Pell eligible students had a 12.3% increase in their grade when enrolled in classes with OER. And you can also see that other underserved students here the study use non white was 13% higher and a part time students attending University of Georgia were doing 28% higher than those part time students enrolled in courses with traditional textbooks. And really some encouraging results for helping with the equity situation. Now you may be wondering well you know this is pretty costly. We have in many cases, we have faculty stipends to help faculty move to OER. And maybe other costs associated with it. And so what what is what is the, you know, what is the return on investment for your institution. Now, these particular studies that I'm quoting here was done by achieving the dream. They, they are their Community College Success Student Success Network, which works with colleges all over the country and they recently completed an OER degree program. And this was where they worked with colleges that were putting together entire pathways where the courses were converted to use OER. And they found that students who are enrolled in OER courses were more likely to earn to sign up for additional credits than students who were not not only in the current semester, but also in subsequent semesters. So very positive outcome for student completion instructors reported that they they changed the way that they were teaching and they were their materials were far more relevant in current. So other exciting news and then they did a research study with a smaller number of their institutions that were participating in this program and did a real deep dive on bookstore and and different institutional costs. This is really the first of its kind and I highly recommend that you go to this the link on this slide if you want more details. But they estimated that there would be a modest 3% institutional return on investment after the initial course development period and as enrollment increases. So, we're really starting to see some benefits not only from the student and faculty perspective but also from the institution. And I think I probably have a lot of faculty online today. So I wanted to mention what the faculty from that same study recommended. And they recommended that the institution really needs to make this a strategic objective and get high level administrative support. Otherwise, it's less likely to be successful faculty need to know that they're going to be supported in this work. It's not something quick converting to OER is changing it's changing culture and it's changing the way things are delivered. And so professional development support is key for faculty to get to get to find these resources and to improve their course quality and to collaborate with other faculty. Cultural barriers and so sharing materials may not be part of your culture at your college. And that is something that needs to be supported and fostered because open education is about working together to maximize impact and collaborate. And finally, students need to be on board with this and so looking how you can get students not only aware of OER so that they can select courses that help them to succeed and complete on a timely basis but also getting students to become advocates for open education. And we have many impact stories about that on our website about students who've been able to help advocate for open resources successfully at their colleges. So I wanted to just mention the top level. These are just a couple of the of the major repositories because I think it's important to understand the licensing as it applies. The ones I'm going to talk to you about are all a fully openly licensed materials and they also have faculty peer reviews. So you can read what faculty other faculty at higher ed institutions in the US have said about these textbooks. So first up is open stacks. So open stacks has been running since 2012 they're at Rice University. So there are not nonprofit project out of Rice University. They just to give you an example they have they are now used in over 50% of colleges and universities in the US. And they have saved 9 million students over $830 million and that statistics a little old now it's probably dates to last year. And we know that there's been a huge uptake this spring. They have 37 comprehensive textbooks that are paired with ancillary materials for instructors so many of these have slides and test banks associated with them. So and open and open stacks also partners with some commercial providers for low cost online homework systems. And they really span the gamut in terms of your general ed courses so if you haven't been to the open stacks site. I really encourage you to go there we'll talk more about some of these next week. But this is this is a really excellent place to go if you teach in any of these topics the subject areas here that you can see on this slide. The open textbook and I'm sorry I forgot to mention everything on this particular site. The open stacks is peer reviewed it's peer reviewed during the development because this is actually a repository. Where they actually developed the open textbooks themselves and they use a creative commons license they use the most or I should say the least restrictive creative commons license which allows you to edit and reuse in any way you choose. So the next one I'm going to mention is the open textbook library and this has over 700 open textbooks. Some have been published through the open textbook library. Many are referring to textbooks that were developed elsewhere. But there are peer reviews up there and in order for the textbook to be uploaded into the open textbook library it has to meet a certain level of requirement and you can you can go to the open textbook library to see what that is. And they also have a wider set of subject areas than open stacks open stacks is very focused on those intro courses open textbook library is a little bit wider more a wider set of disciplines. So but both excellent places to go to find those materials. And when you're working with other faculty who may be new to OER you can explain to them that there's peer reviews up there when you click on one of the one of the open textbooks. It'll tell you if there's peer reviews and you can then read those and over 60% now of the materials have been peer reviewed at the open textbook library which is very exciting. Some of you may not know that the Department of Education actually passed an open license requirement in 2017 so all competitive grant programs all applicable I should say competitive grant programs as a fiscal year 2018 are required to release their grant deliverables under a creative under an openly licensed open license and they really hope that this enhances the dissemination of these valuable educational resources that are funded by the public and should be available to the public. And so it not only their money then not only benefits those institutions that receive the grants but but those who aren't recipients of the department department funds can also participate and skills Commons is a great example of that skills Commons is a workforce development OER site. It was developed under the tact grant which was a combination of the Department of Labor and Department of Education. And these are all openly licensed resources that were developed at community colleges in partnership with subject matter experts and workforce industry experts to support retraining in just a wide variety of workforce areas and those are all openly licensed as well. So at this point, I just wanted to mention that many colleges end up looking for funding opportunities and alignment with other initiatives on campus and and in fact it's even more critical because many of our state budgets are in the process if not already being decreased, slashed might be another word. So there's some, there's some excellent ways for you to align your OER adoption with these other students success initiatives because the goals around OER adoption and say student equity are are the same. And so the more that we can work together within these other strategic initiatives, the better this can be in terms of supporting students guided pathways is another one. As you look at OER in ZTZ or zero textbook cost degree pathways. There's a very close alignment with guided pathways, which is, which is all about equity for our students and I wanted to mention two other areas which is the Perkins five workforce program so that was Perkins five was passed in 2018 and that is the funding for not only higher ed or I should say community college but also high school career education and it specifically calls out for the use of open educational resources that's written into the law. So there's an area that you could use to support your work and also our dual enrollment. High school programs. There's another place where we are can really solve that textbook problem about who pays for the high school students textbook who's taking that course. Finally, we've had some colleges who've been able to use their cares dollars for the pivot to online and digital because these digital openly licensed resources are a great fit for faculty who are looking for new resources as they're moving online. And I think that's it for our tutorial today. So Liz, you can turn off the recorder.