 Hello and welcome to this space. Good morning or good afternoon depending on where you are. Thanks so much for being here as we kick off the global open education week at CCC OER for 2022. As many of you know this week is a wonderful celebration of the core values of social justice by way of open education. And in many of our institutions we might know this work specifically in the context of open educational resources or OERs, which are free and openly licensed course materials but you'll find today and you've known throughout your experience that this work is more than just about free. It's about social justice, equity, inclusion, and it's about transformational leadership. So I will share with you what we're going to cover during this hour long kickoff. I'll give you a brief overview of what CCC OER is. I'm going to talk about the global open education week. And then we'll dive into the panel presentation and a Q&A session, which is the real treat up today for you. And then we'll conclude with some of some things you'll need to know and things like upcoming events and how to stay in the loop. CCC OER stands for the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. As you see on this map, we've got about 106 members spanning across 36 states. We're basically a community of practice for open education. We provide resources, we provide support opportunities for collaboration for learning for planning, leading, and implementing successful open educational programs at community colleges, all in the name of student equity and student success. And as I mentioned earlier, this is a global celebration of the core values of open education. So this entire week throughout the world, higher ed institutions are carrying out their mission through relevant activities, events and projects to share with the world. So please do take a look at the openeducationweek.org website and see what is out there and celebrate with us. On a related note, it is our 10 year anniversary of the global week long celebration. So this year's events and activities are even that much more special. This slide has some fun facts that you can share with your institution. So for instance, in the last 10 years through open ed week, over 73,000 people have attended events and engaged in activities from 192 countries and 34 languages. That's my talk about the globalization of open education. And we've had more than 1,600 events with over 73,000 participants I mentioned, sharing over 1000 resources. So every contribution matters for sure. I'm really happy to see the widespread work that is happening here. So we have quite the treat for you as I mentioned this kick-off presentation is an open education leadership. And these four colleagues of mine from across the US came to my mind immediately when planning for this panel webinar. Before I ask the panel's panelists to introduce themselves, I just want to point out that if you want to follow us on Twitter. I certainly have a Twitter handle which is at the bottom at Prof Hernandez to CCC OER also has a Twitter handle which is at CCC OER. And if any of the panelists have Twitter handles that they want to share in the chat, please go right ahead. And for the rest of you, please tweet this live as we go. Alright, so now on to introductions and I like to go in the order of the headshots. So, I'd like to for each panelist to tell us their name, their institution, their title or their role at their institution, and how long you've been in the open education space. So I'm going to start off with Tanja Connerly. Thank you very much Shanta. Good morning or good afternoon to wherever you are. My name is Tanja Connerly. I am currently a full time professor of sociology at San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas. And I have had the privilege and honor of being a part of the OER community for the last 10 years. Thank you. Thank you for your contributions and thank you for being here. Next up is Rebecca Griffiths. And it's great to be here this afternoon. I work with SRI International, which is a nonprofit research institute based in Menlo Park, though I'm in Washington DC. I've been working in the open education space actually for close to 20 years. I'm sort of unusual vantage point in the sense that I, I've been a researcher in this space and in the early days worked with a number of projects sort of helping to think about audience focus and dissemination and sustainable business plans. So I have worked in open education more as a partner and as a researcher, trying to take more of an objective stance than as an activist overall this time but it's been really exciting to see the evolution. Thank you for talking more about that. Thank you, Rebecca. And thank you for being here and I appreciate your contributions from the vantage point that you just described. Alright, so next up Cynthia Orozco. Hello everyone good morning good afternoon my name is Cynthia Orozco I am a librarian at East Los Angeles College. And I've been working I first was working in textbook affordability when I was at the California State University Long Beach. Until I got to the community colleges and in 2016 when I really started getting involved in open educational. Great, thank you Cynthia. And thanks so much for being here. And we have Richard Sebastian. Hi, I welcome everyone good morning good afternoon. I'm Richard Sebastian I'm the director of open and digital learning at achieving the dream. I work where nonprofit works with community colleges across the country. And I've been working when I came to the community colleges in 2011 is really when I started working in the field of open education so about 1011 years now. Thank you Richard and thanks, thanks to you for being here as well. Thanks to all of our panelists again. And as you can probably gather based off of where they are where they sit in their specific spaces and open education you see why they were the first, first four to come to mind. And I am Shinta Hernandez I am the founding dean of the virtual campus at Montgomery College in Montgomery County, Maryland. I also serve as the vice president of professional development on the CCC OER Executive Council and I'm happy to moderate this panel for you this morning or afternoon. All right, so I am going to stop share because the way I'd like to handle this is when we get started, we are I have a series of questions that I will ask each of the panelists. Then for the audience members just a few housekeeping feel free to use the chat to put in your questions to put in comments to share some ideas. We appreciate the use of the chat bot during during events like this, and then we'll allocate the last five to 10 minutes for a Q&A. And then I've got some concluding and closing remarks for all of us at the very end. All right, so let's get started I'm really excited to talk with these four leaders in open education so I'm actually going to start off with Richard since Richard you were the last to introduce you'll be the first to tell us. Talk to us about your journey in open education where you started in the equity and inclusion work to where you are today as an advocate and leader of open education. Yeah, you know, I think, and just maybe familiar to other folks I when I started working in open education 11 years ago, I was really focused on the affordability around open, open educational materials and we are, and seeing access really broadly as kind of a broad, you know, item, item of equity for students and work in the community colleges certainly you see students who struggled to pay for textbooks and sometimes it was, you know, whether they could go to school or not and so it wasn't even with the in 2016 I ran the OER degree initiatives, which are very large grants, building OER degrees out at 38 colleges across the country. And we had some general framework for colleges that were grantees to carve out, you know, space in these courses for first kind of a. Very specific that you know carve out kind of thinking about the students who most need the courses and to try to accommodate those and, and you know we didn't really provide a whole lot of structure around that or ways to do that and colleges are pretty challenging just building out these courses and so, so it really wasn't until 2020 you know with the, with the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning that we were having as a country that we really kind of shifted at ATD and think about OER as an opportunity to integrate it with our culturally responsive teaching work, which has been led by Dr. Juan Garza-Bacala at ATD and so it's fairly recent to the kind of way that we're, you know, really being intentional about kind of thinking about equity, think about racial equity and how open education really is an opportunity to specifically address that through classroom practice, through kind of thinking about students' backgrounds, thinking about their interests, right, and also thinking about ways that kind of structured racism within higher education needs to be dismantled and open education and other places as well so, so really that, you know, our current view is fairly recent, although it's been a kind of a thread, a broader thread, you know, throughout my work since 2011. That's wonderful, Richard. Thank you for sharing us the evolution of your journey, and particularly for emphasizing your work with achieving the dream, this community of practice, this network that has allowed for so many of the institutions who are members to benefit from, from being able to share with one another, to discuss, to implement together, because we all recognize that it's a large effort, it's a community effort, so thank you for that. Cynthia, I'd like to ask you that same question. Tell us about your journey in this equity and inclusion and open work that you're in. Sure. I think I first heard about open education at a ALA, American Library Association committee meeting, and I was just like, wow, that's cool, hopefully that picks up. So yeah, back in 2011, and then it wasn't until 2015 where I started getting into textbook affordability, but really wasn't focused on OER as much as, you know, buying ebooks for the library and that kind of thing, but followed the movement pretty closely. And when I got to the community college in 2016, it really became apparent. And I don't think it was, it was apparent at the university, but I think because I work so closely with students at the community college, it's just so much more intimate, so much more of an intimate space that I really started seeing how even a $50 textbook was just crushing to students. And, you know, there's so many programs to help with tuition in the California community colleges, but, you know, the books would cost more than the actual courses. So, actually, I know Suzanne Joaquin is here in the room from Butte College. I remember attending a workshop series that she led that was really, really great and started getting connected to other people in my state. I know Kelsey Smith is here too. We've worked a lot together. And it just kind of took off, you know, it's such a great close community where I was just trying to get OER kind of started at my institution. You know, people have been doing this work for a long time before it was called OER, mostly mobilizing it. And honestly, I always feel like a bit of an imposter in these leadership spaces because, you know, my institution is not as far along in OER and open education as other institutions. It's definitely kind of an uphill battle sometimes, but, you know, chipping away. I know that a lot of times this type of work is slow work, you know, you want to see immediate gratification, but it could take some time and it takes the right set of conditions to happen. You know, working slowly and getting there. And I loved how Shanta you started the conversation talking about OER is more than free, because I am at a majority minority institution where most of our students are BIPOC. And usually, I mean, while free is really important for us. A lot of times the professors are saying the existing OER that are out there are not culturally relevant in our community. Right now, I'm really trying to push that, get people to know about that kind of aspect of open. It's like we can really customize it to a hyper local East Los Angeles context, which I'm really, really excited about. And that is one of the beauties of OER, right, Cynthia, that it's customizable. It's something that you can make personal, personable to our students, especially as we know representation matters for our students as they go navigate the walls of higher ed. And being able to provide them with different perspectives that is relevant to their own lived experiences is crucial. And I, you mentioned earlier that you don't, your institution may not be as far along as maybe some other ones. And I'm sure that there are a lot of colleagues in this space right now who might be in a similar situation with their institution. So to hear what your contributions and how you've been able to lead the way will be really helpful. Thank you, Cynthia. I'm going to go ask now Rebecca, I'm going to go in the order of the opposite order of the headshot introductions. So Rebecca, I would like you to share with us, your journey in this equity inclusion and open education space. Okay, well, go back as I said a minute ago I first got involved with open education back in the early 2000s when the movement was just getting started and at that time, I was at another organization called Ithaca SNR, which was partially founded with support from the Hewlett Foundation and they were very eager for us to work with some of the OER projects they had been supporting to help them think about sustainability plans. And so our early work with a lot of projects was helping them to really think about who the audiences were that they were serving and what those audiences valued and where resources could come from when then primary value of what they were were a benefit of what they were developing was being given away for free. And, you know, I think that continues to be a challenge. But it's been, I think remarkable how much the field has matured over the past two decades where now you have really established programs like OpenStacks, which have, I think made a huge difference in terms of the credibility of OER across wide variety of educational settings, and the ability to generate resources and contributions from lots of different directions to support these. So I think on that sort of supply side, there's been enormous evolution. I don't know how much of that has translated into the crowd sourced vision that early proponents had in mind. I think there's there's probably a lot more diversity. So you have some really big established providers like OpenStacks and others that are much more organic or grass roots branded. Another, I think, big evolution and maturation in the field is just in the research part that I work in which is, you know, research in OER has always been challenging because it's it describes a whole category of content it's not a specific type of material or textbook or something that you can sort of field a set of very structured tests to say whether or not it works. So, I think it's been a, it's been a long term challenge for for myself and for other researchers in this space to define what it is that that we're studying when we to investigate what the impacts of open education are on institutions on faculty and on students or what the benefits are for all of these constituencies. But I think there's been a lot of progress in this by defining open education in different ways. So with research with with Richard's organization, we, we did a large scale study of OER degrees and we define that as a particular way of implementing OER across an institution through a pathway of courses. And we're able to able to demonstrate the academic and economic benefits of those programs and institutions. I've seen, you know, many other researchers like David Wiley and Liz, but there's a lot of researchers who've done really rigorous studies demonstrating the benefits of OER for students and looking and using, using innovative approaches like throughput for students and examining what the you know credit accumulation is for students who take away our courses. So that's another important evolution in the field that it's been fun to be a part of. Thank you Rebecca as you're telling us about your journey also sharing with us from where you sit in this in this world, the way that you've seen the open education discipline or field evolve and mature as you as you had said and and for the specific examples that you've given. So we appreciate that. Thank you. Now, Tanya, what about you tell us about your journey in this open work. Well, we know that OER is about sharing so my journey has basically consisted of me receiving all of my knowledge and my leadership from collaborations. In 2012, I was asked to pilot the intro to sociology textbook open stacks intro to sociology textbook. So I as a faculty member to me once you receive a textbook it's already outdated. So when I received the intro to sociology textbook. I just basically use it as a guide as I do with any other textbook I really enjoy the simplicity of it. But most of all I was just very intrigued by the point that my students didn't have to pay for a textbook. That was 10 years ago. In 2016, I partnered with Dr. Sebastian and our partner with Rebecca and they most definitely open my eyes to this institution of the or community in which I have the privilege of representing today. They literally brought our college San Jacinto College into a whole nother era. Within three years we were able to save $3 million for our students. I was able to as a director of that achieve the dream grant I was able to rally so many faculty members, as well as our administrators in order to express how important. This OER community is to our students since we are an HSI and Hispanic serving institution. In 2018. I had the privilege of working with I called him Batman Dr Nathan Smith. And we created what I am so proud to say the Eastern area OER consortium. This consortium consists of. The Eastern area area colleges and university in the Eastern Galveston area and we all have the same motive and the same goal is to eliminate the textbooks cost for our students. So we meet and we congregate. Monthly in order to make sure that each one of these institutions are on the right path in order to receive this goal. In 2020 I was asked to co author the same textbook that I piloted in 2012. So now I am so honored to say that I'm a part of the intro to sociology third edition collaboration as one of the co authors for that textbook. And then in 2021. I was asked to be a part of the CCC OER community as being the co VP of the EDI serving along with that with Ursula pikes as I said all of my journey is totally a partnership with some amazing people. And last but not least, I was just selected to the board of directors for the open at conference. So I'm a total partnership. I am so ecstatic, again to be a part of this community and for you guys to ask me to, to, to basically state all the things that I've done in this community but again, it's not me by myself is total collaboration because that's it all yards about sharing. So thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you, Sandra for sharing with us the work that you have done over the years and we can see the direction that you're, you're going. And what really spoke to me as you were talking about your journey was the sharing part of the work right the networking part of the work the collaboration, having shared goals and then the process by which to get there is why it's so important to have communities of practice, the ATD network, CCC OER where we all get together in this space to learn and grow with one another. So all of that is is crucial as we see the evolution. And I'm going to Rebecca just steal your phrase evolution and maturation of the open education space. And so I appreciate all of your journeys and sharing it with us. So back to the, the evolution and maturation of open ed. I'm going to start off with you. How do you think it has impacted our students in our communities over time. Well, as I said before that San Jacinto College is a HSI Hispanic serving institution. So, and I also adjunct at an HBC you Texas Southern University. So I have hands on the experience and reference to teaching our minority population and literally understanding what their needs and wants is in order to be a successful member of society. So I can literally tell you that the, the elimination are the reduced costs of a textbook really contributes to both of these communities. Because again this is extra funding that they can use for other things that are essential. I mean food sheltering and clothing when I say essential. So these, they can contribute each funding to other essential aspects of their life. So I really can understand about how important open education is to our Hispanic population, as well as our African American population as well. Okay, great. Thank you Tanya for sharing that. Richard what about you you had mentioned earlier in your, as you were talking about your journey the, the impact of making college affordable through these open educational resources. As you've seen the nature of the work evolve and mature and grow. What are the impacts on students the communities that you've seen or heard. Well point to the work that we did with Rebecca and sri on the degree initiative, which really was a, is a very large study and it also included what we call the cost study right of, you know, what does it cost to implement these programs at colleges and what are some of the kind of cost benefits to that and one of the really interesting pieces of that was how this, you know, students in these we are degree pathways taking, you know, what are more we are courses tended to like reinvest the savings into into their courses. So I think we know from, you know, students who can take more credits, and you know get more credits under their belts are more likely to, to complete and get a credential. And so I think you know it really shows the impact an institution can have by kind of investing in their faculty and we are in order to really have a very large and significant impact on other students. I think we also at a TV see a really powerful intersection between open content and a culture responsive teaching practice which which we also know like when they see themselves in the, in the content in their courses when they're allowed to be their full selves when their, you know, identities are kind of honored. You know when there's a kind of more positive, you know, likewise around being a student, which you can do you know with the open content it's allows faculty to really customize and personalize their content and they're teaching practices with the content right to make it exciting and welcoming to students. And, and I think I'm really excited about that because it's, you know, know, we've talked about being, you know, in this field for two decades or decade or two decades right and I think the evolution is really getting to the real power of which is that that that licensing piece right of being able to, you know, make changes and revisions and sharing the content and I think I think that's ultimately to great benefit of the students not just through like lowering costs but that actually building content and curriculum right that includes these students and that pays attention to them and really cares about them succeeding. So, you know, that's, that's, I guess, I guess that's what I've seen the most important around that. Yeah, thank you for sharing that I will appreciate that the intersection as you said earlier of we are in culturally responsive teaching and what kind of impact that has on students in our communities. I think that since you worked closely with Richard on on these various studies, did you also want to add any additional remarks about other benefits you've seen on students and, and others. Yeah, and I actually I wanted to also respond to a question that Rachel just raised in the chat about how supports for culturally responsive and open, open instructional practices. In a, we're recent study that we've been working on with achieving the dream, we have been investigating or exploring what open and culturally responsive instructional practices look like in community college settings. So I'm really trying to dive into the classroom and get some insight into how these practices play out in in in practice and as one. And one of the products of this research is a framework that we've developed and achieving the dream I think is also in integrating into some of their programming that helps faculty and institutions, sort of work through the different dimensions and of courses that are open and culturally responsive so courses that support student agency that are inclusive that have a critical consciousness component that foster a safe and, you know, a community of care where students feel safe and accepted and, and, and, as Richard said feel feel that they can bring their whole selves into their course. So, in terms of the benefits for students we have not yet had a chance to do a really large scale investigation into what this how students experience these kinds of practices but I can share that in the, we were able to do around 13 focus groups with students as part of this last study, and they really do appreciate instructors attention to incorporating authors that are from background similar to students and to, to, you know, having instructional materials where there's a textbook that's kind of plunked in the middle of the course like the embodiment of truth, but rather having access to a diverse range of resources that bring together different voices and different perspectives and, and, and, and feel more you know inviting to students who, who want to engage with with the, the materials and with the way that truths are presented. So we've, we've gotten some insights into how students experience these courses it's generally been really positive and looking forward to our sub our next study where we can delve into those questions more deeply. Terrific thank you Rebecca and Richard just shared in the chat that the report that Rebecca is talking about the study will be released on April 21 at ATD teaching and learning Institute, April is so far away, says Robin. Well and I, I'm grateful to hear of these focus groups of students and gathering some preliminary ideas of how it's going to impact students but I imagine that the framework that ATD and SRI created this the intersection of OER and SNCRT is positively impacting the faculty, the educators, who are likely thinking and, and rethinking and revaluating their course curriculum or program curriculum to allow for those safe spaces to allow for some critical conscious thinking that community of care that you mentioned Rebecca. So I can imagine the impact will short term and long term on the educators. Alright I want to ask Cynthia from from a librarian's perspective Cynthia what do you see as as the as the evolution and maturation of the open education space, what do you see are the impacts on students and communities. Yeah, so I was trying to figure out how to succinctly state this. So I'll just start with my first open education conference I think it was in 2018 and Anaheim. And it was great like it was my first open education conference I was like wow there's a lot of things happening, but two things really struck me and first, you know, as a woman of color I just felt really out of place for. I just didn't see a lot of people like myself and that was surprising. Because that hasn't happened a long time, especially in Southern California. And I also was just so confused because I said this is equity work. Why aren't we talking more about equity and where all the folks of color in the space. So I think one of the biggest things like I've seen is just kind of the diversity of people and the diversity of thought that have entered the space. When I first got into open education, I was a little, I was really into it but a little concern that there was a very, there was a lot of open or nothing kind of narratives going around like everything has to be open open is always good. There weren't any, I mean there was there was wasn't enough in my opinion, critical conversation about how open can reinscribe the inequities that we're trying to dismantle. Like for example as a librarian, I have no problem with ZTC zero textbook cost. We are because the student can still access the book for free, which is something like I will take ZTC over, you know, if like there's, if that's going to work. I also think you know with a lot of faculty, you know, as a librarian we kind of have a lot of relationships with faculty and get to talk to them and really intimate ways about, you know, what what they're thinking in terms of open education. I was thinking I took a class in art, and my professor is amazing he at my college and he has all his videos up online they're not creative commons licensed, but I'm able to access them and the class can access them without having to log into canvas which is another barrier. Other people non elac people can also take his class which is super cool. But I think a lot of times artists get, you know, asked to do their work for free. And so obviously I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not going to say to photography professor you know, make all your, your stuff free and like that's their livelihood they make money off of making art making photographs that kind of thing. The other thing I was thinking about is, again not related to being a librarian but I've been taking a now what class at UCLA it's indigenous language to Mexico and Central and I remember getting, you know, it doesn't have a standard textbook because it's not taught very in a lot of places. And I got PDFs of the textbook a dictionary all this stuff and I was like, this is what I would pay $500 for. This is what I would totally I would totally like support this as a, as a, you know, go fund me or whatever to support indigenous communities in Mexico where the Institute is based. So I think just being critical of open, not pushing open on to everybody I don't think open is always the solution. I think is really, really important and so I'm really glad to see that being contested and then I think also I, Rebecca had mentioned this but I don't think that there is, you know, one universal truth. I really kind of push back on that enlightenment thinking and want to see more perversality more diverse perspectives, like, there's more than one form of knowledge in textbooks and I think we're really starting to see that in really interesting ways so that is my answer. And I appreciate your saying, you know, let's be open about the work right let's be open about the different perspectives as we venture into this space so many of us have shared goals. We have very overlapping values and it's just a matter of how can we all get there in a space that is safe. Someone mentioned the chat open does provide some safe space for all of us. But all the while making sure that our students are getting the high quality learning that they all deserve. And so Cindy as you were talking about your, your perspectives here I was thinking about the term decolonization, which many of you are familiar with and if you're familiar with what it's really this idea that we challenge what we have known for centuries what we've been taught for centuries we challenge it we rethink it, we reevaluate reassess and we redo some of the things that we have been used to for so long and and just moving in a direction where we can be more inclusive and more equity minded and include those voices that may not necessarily have been a prominent voice in the past. Can I can I just say like, I, you're such a great moderator so I apologize for cutting you off, but I like floor versality is very much decolonizing like decolonial language. I can not say decolonizing just because you've seen that word get, you know, muddied a little bit. And I just wanted to just reiterate what, you know, Shinto is saying about how this is a really intentional thing like really disrupting decoloniality and it's not a synonym for EDI. So I think decolonial work is really important. But I also just want everyone to be really cognizant of what that means and not use it willy nilly. I even like struggle with using the word decolonial sometimes where I'm like is this decolonizing or is this just EDI. I don't know I don't know if that that helps or anything but I just wanted to put that out there. I think it works because it works in the sense of you're giving us some food for thought. And that really is what open education week is about it's really learning things or relearning things and just having conversations that allow us to advance in the ways that we need to be advancing in higher education So Cynthia I appreciate that. Thank you. I have another question for each of our panelists and that question is this. With Tanya, if I may, what successes and challenges, did you face or do you face in carrying out your leadership responsibilities within open education? Well, let's see that's a good question. The challenges I'm going to say I wouldn't I'm going to rephrase that and say these are going to be new opportunities. One of the new opportunities that I will be experiencing is I am on the path and a mission, ever since I think I met Richard and his group that even though I work for a Hispanic servant institution that is my full time job. My passion as an African American woman is to make a huge change in my ABC use. My opportunity is that I would like to, and that's the reason why I started working part time at Texas Southern University. Because when I first got involved in open just like Cynthia said it was, I didn't see many people of color. So I really started working heavily with rice, and I told them from a perspective that as an African American woman that in order for you to come and tell me that here is a book that is saving my students, you know, an exorbitant amount of money. But you're a white person knocking on my door telling me that you're here to save me and I'm like, I've never heard of this before. What do you know what what's the catch. So I have been partnering with open stacks for a very long time to try to make a difference within that African American community at my HBC use going know this is true. We can save you this amount of money. So now you're attending college and make a huge difference and you're going to receive the same education. So I want to partner with the faculty members at, they're going to allow me this fall to to utilize intro to sociology in my sociology course at Texas Southern. So to me that's just one step. I know that Dr. Robert Mel Robbie Melton is working a lot with our HBC use. Again, you tend to relate to people that have some familiarity or similarity to you so for me to be a woman of color to go and knock on the doors of the HBC institutions. I think that they are much more welcoming. And so that is my plate. That is my opportunity and that is going to be my mission for a very long time to see what I can do in order to to knock down some more doors and to make this community much more open to people of color. Thank you. Thank you, Tonja and and for for talking about the contributions in the HBC use space, and I especially like to be areas of opportunities that you have shared with us so I am going to next ask Rebecca to share either successes or areas of opportunities for growth. As you continue the work in this space. Well, also I'll share one of their observations from our most recent study which was, I said, trying to get more insight into the way that open and culturally responsive educational practices are playing out within classrooms. One of my observations was that this work is really nascent in community colleges, particularly at the institutional level. So we had a very purpose of approach to finding faculty we were not looking for a kind of representative set of people using faculty using for for instructors who are really kind of pushing boundaries in terms of trying it using using OER materials to enable innovative teaching practices and to try to understand what those are. And what we found was that we did, we did get to work with a number of faculty who were doing really innovative exciting things in their classrooms but they're they're very much sort of individual heroes working somewhat in disconnected settings and I'm not going to say that I think Montgomery College is an exception. Pima online college, I think, has more of an institutional movement towards open pedagogy and open educational practices. But in a lot of cases, you know they were they were pretty established institutional supports and programs to support OER faculty can get stipends they can get release time. There were, you know, there are efforts where faculty can collaborate to redesign courses, but we did not yet see that sort of structured approach to supporting transformation of instructional practices using OER. So those still tended to be, you know, some, some teaching and learning centers might embed some innovative teaching practices that use OER in their programs but those are not generally the focus and there's not sort of an organized effort to do that or consistent or coherent approach to supporting open and culturally responsive teaching practices. So that's one direction that I think there is room for growth and that's part of what we're hoping to support with the resources we've developed. Wonderful. Thank you, Rebecca. And yeah, that structured approach. It's something that I think so many of us can relate to the wanting and needing a place where we can come together and work together institutionally towards our shared goals. Certainly one of the things that we've done at Montgomery College you mentioned Rebecca Montgomery College. Having open education sprinkled heavily throughout our institutional strategic plans has helped a great deal, because that has allowed for there to be the resources the support the infrastructure needed to get us to where we are today and it's taken time it's not something that happened overnight, it's taken a lot of time and leadership support so that's certainly one of many ways in which an institution can it can move in that direction. So thank you for for sharing that Rebecca. What about you Richard what are some of the successes or challenges slash areas of opportunities that you've experienced in this work. Yeah, I guess I guess I've done what you just said, we've seen that when you can get institutional support or a system behind these initiatives, you can really have a huge impact and we've seen over the years with New York State investing a lot of money and we are programs so that you can, you know, hit a lot of the colleges and faculty that want to do this work and begin to really scale it in California. You know, recently just infused billions of dollars into their program policies, you know, that's where I think I've seen the most, you know, significant change and success with. You know, it certainly has built out of faculty kind of grassroots, you know work and interest, but when you can connect that with policymakers and systems and policies themselves. It's, you know, it's a it's a it's a game changer for a lot of life students. I think on the, the challenge that I see is that you get back to I think Cynthia mentioned this kind of intentionality right and and that I think we haven't yet quite grappled with how the kind of open context open content open textbooks can really change the model of how we deliver instruction. So, I think we're still in this process of kind of replicating the textbook process right and it's almost you have to an institution where you faculty put work and they develop their own they replace their, you know, expensive textbooks. And they really to begin to collaborate more, you know, between faculty among institutions to think about how you know the how faculty should be involved in compensated in this work how institutions can invest in this work because we see the benefits and we see that students reinvest the money into the taking more courses right they save money it's very it's when when when right all over and so it's sort of makes sense to really think about how, how these efforts can be supported at assist, you know, significant scale by institutions and, and then hopefully spread systemically to, whether it's a state or a region or kind of assist you know a system like in Virginia. And, and that makes me remind myself, Richard after you made the comment about compensating at for faculty work but also just supporting the faculty and the staff for all engaged in this work. And this is why organizations like achieving the dream CCC OER are also important open education global, because they're at least they're provides a platform that faculty and staff and administrators can use to see what others are doing and how can we do what what why school is doing or what why school is doing or modify a little bit to make it fit our needs. And so the, these exchange of ideas is so important as we tried to as many institutions tried to garner that widespread support for the work. So thank you. Thank you, Richard. There's a question in the chat but before I get to that question let me conclude my series of questions by asking Cynthia. The same question, which is, what are some of the successes or challenges slash areas of opportunities that you have witnessed that you would like to share with us. Yeah, so I love that in, you know, we were talking about the evolution, the availability of high quality OER is really really helpful because you know at the beginning was like there's no OER. There's no high quality OER so those arguments get harder to make each and every day. I think one of the challenges at a community college is certain disciplines like automotive technology just don't have the really are kind of in a place still where my campus really needs some kind of solution for those textbooks and programs. So the career technical education programs I think still have a ways to go. I also think that you know at first, one of our struggles was getting the campus to understand what open education is, and then you know, tacking on to the conversation about labor, then right now, still it's administration saying oh OER is great. We need to do OER. And it's like no no we really need an infrastructure for OER we need people who are leading this. I'm like a de facto OER librarian I'm not even a real like appointed OER person. We need infrastructure we need funding we need release time to really get the stuff going we can't expect faculty to just make this happen. Although, I think we all know that faculty are often asked to do a lot with with very little or nothing at all. So that's definitely a challenge. I also think you know, Tanja I think brought up the, you know, OER is sharing and it's absolutely true but I think one of the things that a challenge is sometimes there's like a, I don't know how to explain it I should have probably thought about this ahead of time but sometimes there's kind of like leadership. You know, grabs, people are trying to get into OER, but don't, you know, recognize the work that's being done already or not kind of building a community I think building community is such a great part of OER work. I love my OER colleagues, who I collaborate with. It's just an amazing community but sometimes I think maybe people are trying to make a name for themselves or try to get a sweet OER coordinator position with release time I'm not sure. But I think it's really really important to recognize the work that's been done before you come on and bring people in and not to be open not to be. I don't know what the opposite, not closed but yeah just just being cool with other people. And your point to that you made about recognizing the people recognizing the work that is so important because it helps emphasize the importance of the work it helps emphasize the support that they're getting. I would like to having wider support, a wider platform on infrastructure that is needed to help really advance the work in the way that we needed to advance so that all of our students can benefit instead of just a selected few. So I want to just give a round of applause to our four panelists, Rebecca, Richard, Cynthia and Tanja for sharing so much of their insight on their leadership experiences and responsibilities and just being really frank and honest with us about the work that you've all have done in the last, however many years you've all said in your introduction and the work that you will continue to do as you move forward and helping us to to sustain this work. So if I go to the Q&A session and I do see that there is a question in the chat bot I'm just going to read it out loud, and then anybody who would like to take a stab at it go right ahead. So Robin is asking, do you find yourselves or coworkers struggling between wanting to promote OERs but also finding amazing courses and resources and wanting to take them only to realize there is no possible way to make time for all of them. If you're a dog with someone holding a tree just out of reach. And then remember I'm supposed to be helping people find the resources, not selfishly chasing after them for myself. We would like to answer that question. That's a, that's a big one to unpack Robin. And you're right about your question of there's just no time for everyone, or no possible way to make time for all of them. Go ahead, Tanja. I think with all of the, the databases and the resources that that that is labeled, you know, OER and you're doing research and you find all this wonderful material, it is as a faculty member. It's very challenging when you're trying to assist someone or even for yourself doing research and trying to find the best resource in order to, to utilize because again there's just so much, you know, out there and before you know it it's like you know you pulled up, you know, so many. And it is kind of harder to to narrow it down so I really understand that part. I just, I'm with her. That's a good question. Totally a good question. And Robin you've given us a lot to think about during open ed week this week. So Liz has just put into the chat the survey to tell us how what you thought of today's webinar. I just want to share real quick I'm going to go back to share screen so again I thank you so much to all of our panelists for being here and for sharing your insight on leadership. I have a few concluding remarks on my end here. Just so that you know what else is going on this week. As soon as I it allows me to move forward. The rest of our open ed week panels or webinars rather sorry are listed there. So there's another one tomorrow on Arlo and then another one on Wednesday on the open education global strategic plan. So we proceed with our monthly webinars one in April one in May. And please sign up so you can register and get the zoom link the bitly is stated at the very bottom. We hope to see you all there. And then just a couple of different ways to stay in the loop here. So if you go to our the CCC OER website and under the get involved tab or menu you'll see all the upcoming conferences, you can also join by our community email and you can receive information that way. You can read. And then as as Liz had already put in the chat, please just take the short survey to let us know what you thought of today's webinar so she put that in the chat so it's there. And then just on just to conclude is our the email addresses for the CCC OER staff if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. And Liz Yada will be more than happy to answer any and all questions. Thank you so much for being here as we kick off global open education week with CCC OER, and I hope to see all of you during the rest of the week. Have a good one everyone.