 Great. Okay, so glad to see everyone here. Can you hear me okay? I see Tina was asking if the sound was on. I wasn't talking, but maybe we're good. Okay. Great to see all the folks logging in and saying hello in the chat. Please tell us where you're from. This is a webinar with the OE Global, the CCC OER Community College Consortium for OER. We do these webinars on a monthly basis during the school year. I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of who we are. Many of you of course know us well, but it's always helpful to kind of get a refresh. We're going to introduce our panel for the day and we're going to, and they'll have a little bit of a presentation and then we'll kind of open it to a round table and Q&A. So I encourage you to think about questions you might have for them as we are introducing, as we're, everyone's introducing themselves. At the very end, we'll close with some talking about some upcoming events and ways that you can stay in touch with us. So CCC OER, we have our mission to expand awareness and access to high quality OER. We are here to support faculty choice and development of resources, foster regional OER leadership and improve, I mean this is the biggest thing, improve student equity and success. We have members from all over the continental United States, North America as well as Hawaii. So as you can see obviously from the chat, folks are logging in from all over. And so it's always great to see where people come from. We frequently, as you can also see we have our membership which is the community colleges but also many industry partners who also log into these. Today, I'm going to be talking with a group of panelists that I know you'll appreciate their perspectives. The topic of the webinar today is institutional policies and practices to promote OER. The idea was to kind of talk about those policies and practices that are most effective in promoting and sustaining an OER program on campus. So we have a diverse group of presenters that are going to give us a different, each of them has a unique perspective on how OER can impact your campus. So Charlotte Daley comes to us from SREB, the Southern Regional Education Board. She's a post-secondary specialist there. Anne Fiddler comes from the City University of New York where she's the open education librarian and helps lead a district-wide OER program. Vince Musil comes from Chippewa Valley Technical College where he's the executive, the director of library services and also the lead on a big OER grant project, the open RN project and nursing. Nina Owalabi comes to us from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she's a doctoral candidate and a research assistant in the Office of Community College Research and Leadership in the State of Illinois. My name is Nathan Smith. I'm a philosophy faculty and full-time OER coordinator at Houston Community College. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Daley. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Nathan. In short, I am going to try to explain the partnership that's called the National Consortium of Open Educational Resources. It's a partnership of the four higher educational regional compacts composed by the Midwestern Higher Education Compact, SREB, which is the Southern Regional Education Board. We have the New England Board of Higher Education and of course the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education. So we have all been, we all, our presidents all signed an agreement to work collaboratively on a grant generous funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. We each have different focus areas on how to best advance and increase the awareness and adoption of OER across the nation. Of course, SREB works in the southern states. Here are 16 states that are in the southern regional, the southern region. They begin with Alabama in West Virginia. And so under this grant initiative to increase the awareness and adoption of OER across the nation, SREB's outcomes and focus area are centered around research, data, publications, and convening of stakeholders. That's why I stress in research and data and publishing reports, policy briefs to our constituents. So as we move forward into what we're currently doing under this initiative, next slide please. So we're scaling the adoption of high quality open educational resources in states and systems across the region. And we're doing that collectively with the other compacts. Keep in mind that SREB's focus is on OER and dual enrollment and I'll explain how this breaks out in a little bit. So far, the activities that we have undertaken to achieve these outcomes, we participate in semi-monthly meetings. Well, actually every, I say bi-weekly meetings with NCOER with all four compacts and our coordinating body, which is NCOER under the WIS-SET, which is, I believe, the educational technology portion of WICHI. It's called WIS-SET. And so, Tanya Spillervoy is the coordinating body for the four compacts under this initiative. So we have bi-weekly meetings. So we strategize and formulate ideas that are going to take our message across the nation. So we began earlier this year developing, so my role is to create, develop and implement activities across our region that's going to help accomplish our goals as far as this initiative, this OER initiative is concerned. So prior to this initiative, SREB did include OER under the ATEC initiative. But for the purpose of this funding initiative, we have brought it out into a much larger scale. And so, during the development of the programming for this initiative, we started off with research along, in conjunction with the Midwestern Higher Education Compact. And in October of this last year in 2021, we published a report along with consultant Jennifer Zink of OER and dual enrollment. And to that report, I will speak a little bit later as how state policy, what it looks like for institutions and the cost of OER and book costs across the state. We're also undertaking under this initiative is the Research on Minority and Underserved Students. We have three initiatives ongoing, three activities currently underway at SREB. We are, the vice president of post-secondary education delivered a promise to SREB when he came on board in 2019 to bring this focus into SREB's post-secondary area. So one of the things that he has done in the last two years is create a student success advisory council. This advisory council is made up of senior leaders and student affairs administrators, provosts, some presidents, institutional presidents. The student success advisory council, and right now we're meeting bimonthly. We're meeting every other month and I will culminate with our final meeting in September. We also have begun the HBCU MSI Collaborative. That's the Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions Collaborative, which we also have many sitting presidents. Dr. Rosalind Artist is the, she is one of the co-chairs for that collaborative. And out of that collaborative we have, we will have the signing celebration next week on the 19th, where we have launched a core sharing consortium. And of course I am advocating for OER courses under that consortium. Recently we have signed on with the Higher Education Leadership Foundation under the leadership of Dr., I can't think of his first name, but Dr. Felton, he is, they're having a HBCU ideation conference May 31st through June 2nd in Charlotte, North Carolina, where all HBCUs are asked to come and they're going to collaborate on ways to make HBCUs stronger. And SREB has signed on as the data collection partner. We will be producing the post-event report. So look for that. We expect to have it about 30 to 45 days out at the end of the conference. So along with our monthly meetings we have a webinar series. We have an SREB OER blog and I've attached the links here. Next slide and I'm going to get out of here, Nathan. So SREB advocates on, encourages use of OER at the state level mostly. And because of the HBCU collaborative we are also collaborating at the institutional level. So some of the things that we do, we include state or system level partners to increase stakeholder awareness and communication. Through the OER funding from the Hewlett Foundation we offer training and network of institutional support that is done through technical assistance. We have a grant to provide technical assistance to institutional systems at the state level. If you have more questions about that I can elaborate further later on in the conversation. We encourage conversations at faculty meetings, institutional and state level. And so other strategies that institution may consider in expanding the use of OER across their institution is a culture check. What's going on OER in local institutions? Have those initiatives been successful? What has the communication been like in the past? Are there major players supporting the adoption of OER? So you're an environmental scan. What's been done in the past to support this initiative within your institution? Are there existing or potential connections? Because many institutions have begun an initiative and maybe it just fills it out. Many of the initiatives begin with grant support and once the grant money runs out, so does the initiative. So that's where you can pick up. And lastly to consider, we encourage everyone to consider grassroots approach. Which means every initiative in your institution does not have to start at the top. As a matter of fact you can start at the bottom, gathering your stakeholder groups and garner support and more steam. And as that initiative rises to the top, you have answered a lot of the major questions for your institutional leaders. So visit our webpage for more information. It's www.sreb.org slash topic, open educational resources. And we have an upcoming webinar on licensing with Creative Commons next Wednesday. Back to you, Nathan. Thank you so much, Charlotte. Appreciate that. I'm going to turn it over now to Ann Fiddler. Go ahead, Ann. Thanks, Nathan. Hi everybody. I'm glad to be here. So I am the open educational librarian for city University of New York. And we have about 275,000 degree seeking students at 24 colleges in all of the boroughs of New York City. We also serve about 250,000 non degree seeking students. It could be certificate programs, et cetera, et cetera. It's important to note, and I think for many who are involved with this work that it was born out of need for sure, 50% of our student population comes from households earning less than $25,000 a year. And that's in New York City to give you some perspective. So there really was a very strong need for textbook affordability. So back in 2013 to 2015. We called it that was before we knew about talking about OER, and I work in the office of the dean and we are in support of all of the libraries across the colleges of CUNY. So we took an interest in textbook affordability. We started going to conferences and that sort of thing. And in 2016, we get the achieving the dream OER degree grant for three of our community colleges and for those of you who are unaware that that grant was 38 colleges across the country to develop associates degree pathways with using OER. And that kind of launched our, what we would call our current success. We became very involved. We got to know people across the country. What that did for us in particular was New York State took notice of us and they also took notice of CUNY, which is the State University of New York, which is the, the city in there, the state. So we are the public colleges in New York State. So our story basically goes that the governor's office came calling one day and said, we'd like to talk to you about OER. And so we had a hasty conversation with them and they said, Why don't you give us a proposal. And they said, Okay, we're going to ask you for a million dollars a year for the next four years. And, you know, it was a dream. And then we forgot about it. And the next thing we knew several weeks later they said, Okay, we're putting OER in the state budget so both us and CUNY each got four million dollars to spend in that fiscal year to do OER. And it was very open ended. It was very little restrictions. And so what we did was, I think you can go to the next slide. We spend most of that money in it goes directly to the colleges that goes to faculty for course conversion. And so we started to create OER projects across the university with an RFP style so we put out an RFP and the colleges would put in proposals and they would say this is what we can do. And in terms of, you know, readiness, there were some readiness at some colleges and zero readiness at other colleges. And because we ran the program through central office and were, you know, made an effort to be particularly supportive and give a lot of give a lot of professional development in this area we are now successful and we have every single college running pretty mature programs at this point. The RFP includes funding for course conversion on, you know, variety of levels, whether it's creation or adoption or that sort of thing. And we also give them staff to manage the project which is a really important component without staff to manage the project there is no project without even, you know, aside from that particular staff that I'm talking about that we fund, you know, somebody on the campus to be a champion of the project. There is no project or it doesn't it's it's it's it wavers quite a bit. So we also support shared services. We have a website with OER Commons open at CUNY we use LibGuides we have a variety of other shared services, you know that we support. We also have a lot of open platforms that we support technically that are homegrown to CUNY but they're open and they're available to others. And so since 2017, which was really the first year it was 2017 2018, including the achieving the dream year, we've converted nearly 40,000 sections to OER saving students nearly $94 million. And that sounds really impressive which it is and we're something we're very proud of but you also have to remember the scale that I'm talking about we have so many different courses at CUNY and you know, so that's why we were able to achieve what we have achieved. In terms of policy at this point, when New York State funds an initiative such as this, it typically runs for three to five years and then it could stop happening, or in the case of us we are now completing your five. And basically at this point it's it's a line item in the state budget, which doesn't mean that the road can't get pulled out from under us at any time which we all know that that can happen. But in the meantime it would have to be on, it would have to be a willful act on CUNY's part to say, we don't like this OER project and we're not going to fund it anymore so we're kind of going forward thinking you know this is just a thing. And so that's pretty gratifying. I'll answer some other questions about it as we get into the questions in the roundtable but that's basically what we do. Ah, there we go. Okay. This my menu didn't want to pop up for me. Sorry about that. So thank you so much and we'll turn it over now to Vince Musil from Chippewa Valley Technical College. Vince, it's yours. Thanks, Nathan. So as Nathan mentioned, I'm from Chippewa Valley Technical College, which is in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where about an hour east of Minneapolis in St. Paul. And my institution has about 4,000 students or 4,000 FTEs. So we're pretty small and we're spread out over nine campuses. So my role is to coordinate OER efforts at the institution. And this often involves educating, advocating and connecting stakeholders with support from our OER Steering Committee. I'm also the OpenRN Lead Librarian. OpenRN is a project that is charged with creating five open nursing textbooks and related virtual reality scenarios. So this was one of the first Department of Education open textbook pilot grants for which my institution in partnership with our sister colleges in Wisconsin were awarded two and a half million dollars. And I support the project through my role as copyright officer, educator and librarian. So I wanted to provide some background for our OER program in kind of a timeline format to help you visualize how we got started and then how we evolved these practices to where we are today. So we kind of started out at my institution in 2013. We had pockets of faculty that began using OER. And between 2013 and 2017, we saw more requests in the OER becoming more popular from faculty and we needed to figure out a way to kind of support our faculty. So it was a grassroots effort from our faculty with a response from the administration. So in 2017, we formed our OER Steering Committee, a cross-functional team with reps from all throughout the college. And really from 2017 to 2019, we were kind of in this research exploratory phase like how are we going to do this, what do we need to do, like what does this entail. So really we spent two years kind of trying to figure things out, which made us really well poised to apply for that Department of Education textbook grant that we eventually were awarded. So we were in a good position to apply for the grant because we did all the research and then we awarded that grant. And then because we awarded that grant, it really bumped things up a notch here at the institution. So faculty became more interested, the community became more interested, and there was just a lot more interest in OER in general. We go to the next slide, Nathan. So then in 2020, we launched our affordable learning program. And we call it the affordable learning program because we're looking at cost saving ways, not just through OER, but reducing costs in general, thinking tools, calculators, things like that, etc. So as part of the affordable learning program, one of the first things we did is seek out additional grant funding. So I mentioned the two and a half million dollar open textbook grant for the Department of Ed. We were also awarded a $2.2 million title three grant, which had provisions for OER, and then a Wisconsin professional growth grants, which we also had provisions for OER to scale up in some capacity. So the open our end grant provided funding for the development of a faculty training course. We've seen 57 graduates from CBTC participate in this in about 200 graduates from outside the institution. So we opened it up for educators beyond my own institution. Now the state professional growth grant allowed for faculty to receive stipends for completing that course, which we have now built into our budget. So faculty can continue to receive those stipends on for taking that course, which the course is about 10 to 15 hours. So it is a considerable amount of time. And the stipends are smaller only about $250. The title three grant enable us to provide stipends to faculty for piloting OER with three different categories they could adopt, they can create, or they could maintain their OER courses. So we wanted to make sure that we built a sustainability component for future, future revisions. So since we launched this program, in the spring of 2021, we saved 6300 students across 294 course sections, about $1.1 million. And the stipends we've paid have only been $76,000 or about $50,000 a year. And we've now built that into our budget as well, kind of reallocating some of our curriculum development dollars. And all of these courses that have been stamped as OER have been shared out for other institutions too. So our sister colleges can use it or anyone that's looking to use the materials. We're also able to implement core search filters or limiters for students looking to take courses that offer OER or resources or courses that have resources that $40 or less. And these are tied to our enterprise reporting system, which allows us to tie in any metrics as a number of OER courses, students, etc., kind of let us track those better. So faculty were nervous about adopting OER. One of the reasons was because of quality. So we, in response, we developed a very simple rubric that they could use to review not only OER, but all potential course resources export. So we saw that a lot wanted the rubric just for OER. But, you know, we really said, you should really be looking at all your resources, not just OER like this. So they're using the rubric to look at all their resources. And then finally, and most recently we launched faculty OER coaches. We're just getting started here, but these individuals work with other faculty from across the college to kind of talk them through the OER conversation and process and then answer any questions they might have. And then the library, of course, is triaged after that. So that's kind of our policies or practices. I think that's all I have made for that. All right. Thanks, Vince. Now we'll move on to Nina Oalavi. Go ahead, Nina. Thanks, Nathan. Great. Great to be here with you all. So bringing greetings from the Office of Community College Research and Leadership, just a little bit of context kind of prior to my work with OCCRL and parlaying into research. I was a practitioner for 10 years in higher ed and community college space as an academic advisor, college advisor with a large community college system and other spaces. But honestly, my first true introduction to OER actually came through this project with OCCRL. And so I think that that actually demonstrates, right, an opportunity to really engage and collaborate with stakeholders really across functions. And that's something that we were even seeing as we were working on the OER project. Really at the center of the work that OCCRL does is constantly being in conversation about equity. And with this lens is how we really pursued thinking about OER and the OER project that we can move into the next slide, Nathan. The OER project was an environmental scan commissioned by the Illinois Community College Board, really to better understand what are some of these national trends. Equity considerations are relative to OER, but an OER usage specifically in Illinois with the potential for policy changes and policy growth. Ultimately, kind of what we found, similar to what others have kind of noted is that the use of OER, it really just varies so much from institution to institution. You know, unlike certain states, Illinois does not have a broad OER policy, and that's likely one of the major contributors to seeing such disparities in OER programming and OER initiatives really across the state. So obviously you have some community colleges that have really created strong supportive committees that are supported by their administration. You know, we're also seeing resource pages. So maybe there isn't this broad, you know, working committee behind OER, but there is a librarian who was at least providing the resources for those interested in diving into OER. But then you also have the institutions where there really is no mention of OER, kind of anywhere within their library website. And we found actually that several community colleges in Illinois do not have like the customized kind of web pages about that. You know, so ultimately our research shows the majority of these courses that are using OER, they're non-credit ones, or they're prerequisite courses for transfer to credit programs, but in terms of CTE, you know, there's so much opportunity there. And I should note that isn't to say that, you know, OER initiatives are not happening at community college campuses, it's just what is actually like advertised and put out there publicly for folks to see. You know, and we also know that there could be a number of reasons too, as my colleagues on today's panel have already mentioned. You know, we are seeing that there are some initiatives that are happening in Illinois. I'm thinking about the work of the consortium of academic and research libraries in Illinois who's working to build capacity and provide support resources for institutions that are pursuing OER usage. But you know, ultimately this even has some limitations. So there really is right opportunity for the state of Illinois to engage a broader policy that could be supportive of institutions. I know for us the next step of our research is looking at, you know, more specifically different programs, really understanding how they take, how they're working and doing so from the perspective of various stakeholders. And we can move on to the next slide Nathan. You know, one thing that we have also found in our research, you know, being some of the most successful programs that we've ultimately highlighted this was a report that our office shared earlier this year. You know, we highlighted achieving the dream. So I'm looking forward to hearing more, you know, about that and also we highlighted the Washington State Board of Technical and Community Colleges. These programs are able to build out sustainable, healthy programs because there was broad support that equated to funding policy that ultimately set the stage for broad use. The work was spread across discipline and role. It was not, here's one faculty member, you know, working on this, it was really spread across multiple folks. And there was specific emphasis on providing the tools that faculty will ultimately need to generate and use OER effectively. And the other piece to really think about is these programs developed over some time. These weren't microwave programs and with many stakeholders truly supporting the effort. However, you know, I will say one critical piece that we haven't necessarily found, you know, in the literature is how OER is engaging issues of justice, accessibility and racial equity. And this is an important piece that, you know, and ultimately I hope that we do get to dive into this a little bit more, you know, later in our panel, really thinking about how do we integrate those beyond cost. You know, yes, we know OER is cost effective and supportive but really in what ways is this being used with racially minoritized students or students with disabilities or, you know, other special groups who really could benefit from the usage of OER. And then kind of the last thing I would just mention here, you know, as we think, you know, we think about how racism oppression really are four tenants of the US educational system. You know, it will likely extend to even a seemingly innocuous technology like OER if we aren't approaching the work with a critical anti-racism lens. So really emphasizing OER without that push to dismantling racist and ableist mechanisms will only further cause harm. And so looking forward to diving more into that with my colleagues here. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, so I'm going to open it up now to a little roundtable discussion so I'm going to stop sharing my screen and hopefully then you can kind of see us on screen and I'll be able to watch the chat. There definitely, there was a question in the chat that I would, I'll go ahead and raise. Initially, I think there's kind of a sort of a specific question I think related to Ann and Ed Cooney but I want to also turn it into a kind of a broader question as well for anyone else who wants to jump in. But a specific question, Ann, is when a faculty member or a course goes through a course conversion at Cooney, does that then immediately get adopted across the campus or does it get adopted across the system? How does that translate into other adoptions at your institution? Yeah, that's a good question. So if I didn't make it clear before we're really big. So that's so it's really hard to, those kinds of things are hard, not just because we're so big but because there's so much differentiation in what people is acceptable to people for coursework. So it could be adopted by an entire department. It could be adopted just by that faculty member. It really is very site specific. We try to make things available and discoverable as much as we can. And that's pretty much limited to original creations of work that could be syllabi, which we put in our institutional repository. So if you want to look there, you can. We also have the open ed site, which I mentioned earlier, which is on OER Commons. And we do, we do deposit things there as well by school and by subject. So I guess the bottom line answer is no, we don't necessarily share it out, but we try to make it as available as possible. Excellent. Yeah, thanks. And sort of a to broaden that out a little bit I think so and you talk about how it really is dependent on the faculty and the department in terms of whether a course gets converted at the class level the section level or at a broader level. What have you all seen in terms of policies or practices in terms of conversion to OER or textbook approval. Do you find that at community colleges that tends to be a faculty decision, or you tend to find that that's a program wide decision and are there benefits to either Vince, do you have a perspective on that. Thanks. Yeah. So at my institution, it's a department decision. So whatever the department agrees on is what text they'll use. The exception to that is if an instructor wants to pilot OER, in which case they can go ahead and pilot it. And they have Dean approval to do that, or even the program director department here to do that. So that's kind of how it works for us. And the reason why we do department level adoptions is because if a student drops the course and then take that again the next semester. They didn't want to have to buy and sell different resources. Right. Do you all have anything to add to that, you know, Charlotte, in terms of, okay, that's fine. So, and then Vince and Anne I wonder just quickly if you do have a OER tagging procedure at your campus and how does that impact adoption do you think or sustainability for that matter. I'm just reporting to you about the number of sections and students that we've affected is is we can read that number because of our tagging system so we have what we tag as a ZTC course and that's it's derived from a variety of sources that we get that information but it gets put into our LMS which is system wide so we're lucky for that so we can see everything that's tagged as a ZTC course. We also have an LTC designation which is low textbook cost course which we at CUNY designated as $25 or less I know that nationwide $40 is a typical amount to use but we feel that it's too high for us and so, and we get that information also from our LMS and from the bookstore from the, you know, from the online bookstore. Students can search for a course by the designation by both ZTC and LTC. Our biggest problem I would say over the past five years is, you know, if you tell a student that that's available to you we go through advising we go through student services we try to communicate with them as much as we can we do email them and still communication is the hardest part and it's the hardest thing to, to tell students that this exists and you should be using it. We did find one student who had 12 courses that they took. So that student got it, but we got a lot of students and they didn't all get it so they typically take about two or three courses that we can see. So that's consistent with what achieving the dream found across their OER degree initiatives so that's interesting. Vince do y'all have a tagging process. We have a very similar system to CUNY it sounds like we first of all when faculty go to report it, they report it through our bookstore interface and they have a very, it's a very simple toggle at the very top of the adoption form that asks if the course uses OER. So that triggers into our limiter system and it also triggers into our reporting system, so we can tie any metrics into that as well. And then there's a little definition about what OER is along with that tag, so they can decide if it actually is OER and then we do periodic audits of those courses too, just to make sure. So as far as if students are preferring courses like that, I think so, but we still have some of the same challenges that Anne had mentioned of getting the word out there, especially if they only do this two to four times in their life. It's something that's pretty easy for them to forget about so our advisors are well trained on it so that is how to get the word out as well, and it has perhaps put some pressure on faculty to maybe take another look at OER too. Just because they know that they're getting this another area of the college. That's great. Thank you. So I want to kind of move it to the state level. Someone asked in the chat about ways to share open educational resources across a state. Now seeing things I know we've got a great system in Texas where we use the OER Commons or we have an instance of the OER Commons platform called OER Texas Repository. And that's a place that we're trying to encourage people to use. But do you all have other other ways that you've seen resources get shared across a state. I don't know of one that I, other than, well, Texas, of course, I've been, well, first of all, I'm new to the OER space here in the southern region. But I don't know of one other than in Texas. Texas is one of the states in which I'm focusing. There may be something in Arkansas. I'm not sure if that's another state in which I'm working with because we were actually bringing the institutions together in Arkansas under a membership for open educational network. And they'll be soon signing their contract on that and moving forward with training. But what we're doing at SREB right now, we're encouraging this core sharing consortium. So under this core, under this, they can share, you know, they can share the courses. And I'm not sure how the, I'm not sure how the coursework or how that will play out if they will have a recreated repository for that. We're hoping that will happen. But of course, we want that to unfold naturally within this group. But right now, that's the only one that I know of in this area, other than Texas. Someone, someone posted open Oregon as a site and I know they have a very active statewide OER initiative. And Veronica clarifies that, you know, part of what she's really interested in is sharing entire courses or I know at HCC we do. We share through Canvas Commons courses that have been certified OER courses. That goes through a certification process and then we can post it to Canvas Commons. And you mentioned that there's a repository at Cooney where you can and where you can share syllabi and other features of the course does that include things like say a shell LMS shell and assessments and stuff like that. So it does not include a shell. We have explored how we can share OER courses via Blackboard to make shells available across Blackboard. And now of course we're changing over from Blackboard. And so that that's something that we talk about, you know, tagging courses in Blackboard by OER. So it could be explored by faculty across the campuses, but we haven't been successful in the repository. We don't share things like that. We do lesson plans, it could be textbooks, we have quite a few textbooks in there. We have PowerPoints, anything that somebody considers an OER and they can deposit it into the repository because it's, you know, it's available to anyone to deposit. Sometimes they put stuff in there and they call it OER and we're not sure what that means but okay, it's an OER, it's words on a page and it's freely licensed and useful. Everything that goes into the repository gets fed into OER comments, which I put in the chat a little while ago. It doesn't get sliced and diced as well as we'd like it to. Again, there's this blur between adopting things and creating things and what we're putting forth as a course, you know, so, you know, if you're doing into the bio and you're using an open stacks textbook, that's not really a, that's available to everybody, you know, everybody could know that so we wouldn't really list it as a course to be shared, particularly. Yeah. So, one other question that has come up from Catherine in the chat is, what were, and I'm paraphrasing here, but what were the, what are the kind of the biggest bang for your buck in terms of like spending the grant monies that you all have had or you've seen, if the ways you've seen colleges spend money, what have been the most effective ways to spend money on to get that OER program going at a college campus? Yeah, I can answer that. So I mentioned when I talked earlier, we spent money on faculty stipends for conversion, faculty training. But I really think that the biggest bang for our buck has been in faculty in service. So our last in service we devoted to OER or affordable learning. And we had some good speakers come in. It was Rajiv and Robin DeRosa came in and did our keynote for all faculty at the college. And the breakout sessions were devoted to OER. We had an OER showcase at the college, kind of getting, you know, we talked to faculty about this all the time, but getting them excited about it, making them think more intentionally about it. There was an activity where each of the departments reviewed how much their program or major cost using purchase course textbooks. And it's the first time that many of them have ever looked at the prices of their textbooks. I think devoting that two days to OER has been the biggest kind of game changer for us. That's really interesting. Thanks. I would say that to be blunt, stipends have been the biggest bang for our buck. I mean, that's what makes people sit up and say, I'll do that, you know, and then, you know, as you say, Vince, you know, a lot of times they haven't never even checked. They think it's okay to, you know, have a bio textbook for $300 and, you know, that's clearly not okay. But stipends, yeah, biggest bang. Well, from a regional perspective, Nathan, of course, the biggest bang for SREB to increase, you know, just to get the conversation going about OER is our recent OER and doing enrollment conference. We invited everyone across the board because that's our initiative. It calls for faculty, educators, administrators, college faculty, policymakers. So we invited everyone to the table. And our opening keynote was, of course, Dr. Sebastian from Achieving the Dream. And our closing keynote was Kim Hunter Reed, former Undersecretary of Education and now Louisiana's Higher Education Commissioner. So we brought everyone to the table to talk about, first of all, what is OER, the benefits of OER, and then try to get the conversations going, especially between K-12 and post-secondary for those dual enrollment agreements. But we had some other institutional presidents there. And so I agree with Ann that on an institutional level, stipends will spark your development because the faculty complain about, well, the faculty awareness is a problem across the board as far as getting it started. When you do have faculty who are aware of OER, aware of the benefits of OER, and actually know how or they may be interested in doing it, they want release time. So if they don't have, if you don't have any budget money to just give them, you have to give them a stipend or release time to create the course if they can't find one and adapt it. So again, that's the biggest bang for your buck on the institutional level as far as the research that I've read on getting it started. But then once you get that started, the institution has to look at making a line item, or like I said earlier, once the grant funds go away, once the stipends go away, your initiative goes away. That's an excellent perspective. Nina, do you want to add something? Go ahead. I'm just going to jump in here that I think this, speaking a bit to what Ann and Charlotte shared, this speaks to the question of whose work is honored, right? And so you also have to consider, in addition to the release time, in addition to the stipends, which honestly I think is like number one, but also thinking about tenure and how this can, how will you honor the development of OER courses within tenure? There has been some research that has shown that this has been another way to broaden OER usage at individual institutions. That's a great point. I would also say that to the point of tenure, I think that stipends will not be so important to tenure if it counted towards tenure. So it could just be a thing, you know, we wouldn't have to pay for them to do it. It's a great point. It's a great point. I wanted to transition a little bit to a question that Nina raised. I think it's just a really important one for us to think about, and I'll start with you, Nina, to see if you can add some thoughts on this, but how do you think OER programs can include that focus on equity and inclusion? You know, how do you think colleges can integrate those value concerns into their OER initiative? What kinds of things can they do? Do you think that will be effective in that? Sort of addressing those inequities that are historically the case in the U.S. education system? Sure, sure. Thank you for that question. Well, first, I think it's important to know that it's not a particular initiative. It's not another committee. It's, you know, we really have, this has to be an iterative critical examination process that, you know, is really ongoing. And so I think really one of the first steps is even noting it on the OER agenda, that as you're having the beginning of the conversation, that it comes up. I'm going to reference a little bit, Velet Sianos wrote an interesting piece and asked some, you know, very poignant questions, simple questions, but very poignant questions that I think can help us think about, all right, how are we using OER? How can we, you know, really ensure equity is happening here? And so one of the questions he even asks is who creates OER, right? Like what knowledge is privileged? Who is rewarded for those efforts? How are they rewarded? Who is and is not represented, you know, by the OER that's created. So, you know, even looking at what has already been done by faculty and kind of taking that critical lens to it. And, you know, what forms of knowledge have actually been reproduced and, you know, by who and for what particular purpose that that's really huge. And I think it's, you know, it is not the answer, right, but it is the kind of initial framework that can support some that critical deep diving. So, you know, these pieces I think, considering who is at the table as you're creating these different, you know, different kinds of OER initiatives and whatnot. And when I say that I'm not just thinking tokenism because that's important, you know, we don't want to do that. But I'm thinking about even cross-functionally, you know, how are these different voices actually like represented because they could bring a perspective that, you know, maybe, you know, one particular administrator or one particular faculty member might not have even brought to the table. And so I, last thing I'll probably mention is even pulling in the institutional researchers at the, you know, at your institution, at your community college to really look at OER usage among racially minoritized students, you know, how are they doing? So a big gap in the literature is that there's this general, oh, the students, they do well with using OER, but we're not really deep diving, we're not disaggregating that data. And so that's another piece to consider. Excellent. Thanks so much for kicking that off. Charlotte, you have something to add. Go ahead. Yes. I am just piggybacking off what Nina is saying. Nina is talking about the creation of OER, and so my perspective is more spreading the message and who it impacts. So in my experience in the last year, I've had a variety of experiences with OER from the talking points using the word equity access. So in my quest to expand the message, I've had to tailor the message for the audience, so to speak. My experience has been that some words were triggers to some audiences. So if my goal was to expand and increase the awareness and adoption of OER, so I had to divert to the age-old conversation of cost benefits. But when you get into the room with people with whom you can actually get down to the nitty-gritty about the benefits of OER, you know, providing access, equity and education. Because from my perspective, what I love about OER is that I have an experience from K-12 all the way up through post-secondary higher education. So if you can get into some of those rooms and get those teachers or faculty members to create OER or adapt OER from a cultural perspective. I think, Nina, you'll get some of the research that you're looking for as to how students are reacting or whether or not they're successful. I'm in the process of reading some of that right now. I'm just not well informed enough to talk about it. But OER has a part that is culturally sensitive and it allows a person who's designing it to develop that culturally sensitive part to actually meet the needs of their students. And so I think once this is actually put into our conversations, we have to, I have conversations at different levels. So I know what pieces to pull out and what pieces to stick in, whatever, whatever, whatever. And so, but I think once we're able to have the full conversation of the benefits of OER, we will see that some of those things come, what's the term, full circle, Nina? And just to add one quick thing, definitely ensuring that disability support services are at the table from the beginning. Too often we find it's very difficult to retrofit OER later down the line. And so having those voices, that's that's part of having that diverse table as well. That's a great point. We recently was looking at analysis of that at HCC and we find actually OER actually do pretty well because they tend to be created in a digital environment. So making them accessible tends to do better. And OER courseware providers tend to be more transparent about their accessibility standards than publishers are. But I think a lot of the times when faculty are just creating their own resources, like in a Word document or saving it as a PDF, that we know is not very accessible. So we need to try to find platforms that are better on that front. So thank you for that. We need to kind of wind down. There's so much going on in the chat. I want to highlight two things. Judith Sebesta shares the DOER framework for tenure and promotion, some different guidelines there. So you might check that link out. That has different ways that OER can be promoted through tenure and promotion guidelines. And then Veronica continues to have some great resources from open Oregon. She's linking to the BC campus model. So they're not quite there with their course pack, so fully developed courses being shared out onto an open platform. But she links to the collection of BC campus, which is a model for them and I think is a model for a lot of people. So that's a really useful thing that people ought to think about. Finally, just say that achieving the SRI and achieving the dream recently published a report about culturally responsive learning in OER and open pedagogy, which was a topic we wanted to talk about, but didn't quite get there. And what they found is that while that's going on and certainly some community college instructors have really great assignments that are engaging these innovative practices. They're not as widespread as we'd like to see it. So that's something for all of us to start working on is to think about how can we, how can we adapt OER to make it more fit for the students we teach to make it genuinely diverse and inclusive. And also how can we modify the way we teach using OER. So all of that I think is really food for thought. I'm going to kind of close out just by hitting some of the key events that are upcoming with CCC OER. So coming back to my, coming back to my slide deck here. We've got, we are closing out this was the last of the 2022 spring webinar, but we will be back in the fall so make sure you are checking out the website. And also all of our webinars are recorded so you can always go back and watch other webinar recordings if you have are interested in that. Make sure you stay in the loop. One of the greatest resources that people tell us they love about this community is our community email listserv, just a wealth of information for OER practitioners for policy folks. All kinds of resources get shared out there. So make sure you sign up for that listserv. And also we make an effort to post blogs about student impact about initiatives we've got one actually that just came up about the Wisconsin initiative so please check out the blog for that. And, and before you leave, make sure you take a quick survey it's just a couple questions but we just want to know how we did. And if there's any topics of interest that we could cover in future webinars. Obviously, we've got too much to cover in a single webinar so please let us know what else we could, we could cover in future sessions, but thanks so much for joining us. I'm going to go ahead and stop talking here so Liz can shut off the recording, but really appreciate you all showing up really means a lot to us.