 The presenters are going to be speaking very informally about their own experiences, and after all of them finish, we're going to have a Q&A and we'll have kind of a group informal discussion. So let me ask everyone, as your kind of questions and comments come to you, go ahead and just type them into the chat box. We have people who will be curating those questions and will make sure that your questions get answered. If you want a particular question to go to a particular speaker, please, please notify us so that we know that, okay, this is a question for Pat, or this is a question for Mindy and so forth, okay? Okay, so let's get started. We have four speakers, and our first speaker, Melinda Bolan, is the director of OER Services at OER Commons, an important player in the ecology of OER. Next, we have Kevin Hawkins, assistant dean for scholarly communication at the University of North Texas Libraries. UNT is, of course, North and Denton, Texas. We're in Austin, Texas. Patricia Mulroy is a supervisor of World of Learning Institute, and last we have Anita Young, world language instructor and virtual learning specialist from the World of Learning Institute. So welcome to all of you. I think we're going to keep that order. We'll start off with Melinda, also known as Mindy, and Mindy, you have five to seven minutes, and just tell us what you have to share about OER Services and what is OER Commons. Okay, the floor is yours, Mindy. Thank you so much, Carl. Hello, everyone. I'm Mindy Bolan, director of OER Services at Iskney. Iskney stands for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. We are a non-profit. We've been around since about 2002. Our flagship product, I guess you could say, is OER Commons. It's a digital library of open educational resources, and it is something that has been developed over the last 13 years or so, really started through funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. So when I show you OER Commons, you're going to kind of see the result of years of philanthropic funding. So that's why it is such a robust repository. Really the nice thing that I think sets OER Commons apart from a standard repository where you would just be doing some search and discovery for resources is that it was designed at the outset to support open educational practice, meaning not only can you find what you might need on OER Commons, but also we've built in some tools and workflows to support collaboration among educators, both through the groups feature and through the authoring tool that's built into the platform. So I'm just going to start with showing you some of the search features because I think when I think of why would you use a repository, really it is to find what you're looking for, and I think of that in the context of a library, and that's what this really is at its heart. So whether you're registered on OER Commons or not, you can always search OER Commons. You can browse the work that others have done. So for example, you can look at the hubs that we have on OER Commons where organizations have curated and validated OER resources for their own specific goals. Usually those goals are pretty, you know, finding resources that are free and open to use. So that's always a great place to kind of start and find the work that others have done to leverage that in the spirit of open educational practice. I think it's, you know, a part of it is about not recreating the wheel and sharing with others. So that's one nice tool there. But I'm going to go ahead and do a search. Since this is the group that we're with, we'll search for French. And whoops. And note here, you can filter right at the beginning of your search by our first level subject vocabulary, by education level. Or if you're in the K-12 space, you can also filter by instructional academic standards. So I'll click search. Searching for French, I've got 428 results. You can see one right here from our friends at UT Austin for all of you. I'm not sure how to say it. And on the left here, you're able to filter your research results by a number of different tools. So again, instructional academic standards, subject areas. The languages are found under arts and humanities. So if I were to filter on the languages subject here, I'd brought it down to 124 resources. I can also look again at educational level. Material type is a great way, if you are looking for a resource to use in your class this week, as opposed to a whole course, OER can be so many things. It could be like a video or a lecture or a whole course. So the material type is a great way to filter for the level of granularity that you might be looking for. Further down, conditions of use align really to the Creative Commons licensing for OER. The content source reflects whether a resource is hosted out on the web or if it was authored on OER Commons, either our original open author or our launched last summer open author too. Further down, you can filter by some other tools here, primary user, format, educational use, language. So while OER Commons is a repository that is in English, we do support having resources in multiple languages. So if you were to create a resource that you wanted to share, you could write that in a different language and put your overview in a different language and that would be picked up by our search engine. And lastly, if you're looking for resources from a specific provider, so say I am looking for the University of Texas at Austin. Here it is. So I can click that and now I will see these resources largely from coral. So when you get into the resources, you are able to start saving them once you've created an account. So here I am, Texas French Grammar. I can see the metadata about this resource. One thing that we like to encourage people to do is to either evaluate with the Achieve OER rubric or add a comment or put a star rating because that helps other people when they come to the repository to have a sense of the quality or anything that you might want to share about a resource. And then I can go ahead and open it. And here we are. This one is a little tiny one inside there. While you have the resource open, you're all so able to add that same kind of paradata, the stars, the comments, et cetera. So it's a great way to share more information about your resource. If you're using Google Apps for Education, you can take any resource on OER Commons and create an assignment out of it in your class just by clicking that button. And you can also access anything from OER Commons in a learning management system using an LTI tool. I want to go back to the idea of discovery and using the work of others. I don't know if folks today are here from K-12 or higher ed, but we have developed a couple hubs to support people as they are trying to make a pivot to remote learning. One of the ways is we've created this K-12 remote learning hub where we have organized OER by grade bands. So we've got elementary and middle school and high school content, trying to make it easier for folks to find things that they can use in the classroom. We've also got some provider sets here that you can access. And if you know of different content sources that you like, you can go there. In the higher ed space, we've done the same. Actually, we did this a couple of years ago with the open textbooks hub where you can find resources that are openly licensed for complete curriculum in higher ed. So again, those are some tools that are available to you. If you find a resource that you like and you decide you want to save it for yourself or save it to a group where maybe you're collaborating with others, you can open the resource and click Save. And it'll give you an option to save it to my items. These are the folders that I have in my items or into a group that you might be a member of. If you have colleagues or folks that you work with that you want to collaborate with in curating OER or creating it, you can create a group. And that's a great way to bring together just kind of create a little sandbox for yourselves to organize material. So these are just a few questions to create a group. And then you'd be able to create your own folder structure to organize resources. You can see here on the left what they did in Hawaii where they've got several folders here and they're using this to curate resources that they can then access with everyone in the group can access and they can also get through their learning management system. I'm sure that time is this is a quickie. So I just want to show one last thing, adding OER. If you have something that you've created that's openly licensed that you want to share, you can do that on open author. So this is our authoring tool. You just create a resource right here. You can add your license to it. You can check it for accessibility. It's a really useful tool. Everything you create would then be available to all people on OER Commons and also available for download in a number of different formats. So that is a great way to get your resources out there and share them with others. If you've created something in Google Docs or Microsoft One Drive, you can also import from those directly. You would just click the link here and it would log you into your account and you can bring that content over. If there's something on the web that you found that you want to share that's not already on OER Commons, you can click Add Link and just go through this Submit a Resource workflow and then you can share your resource that way. Lastly, I'll just go quickly to the providers page so that you can get a sense of the breadth of content in this resource. These are all different content creators that we've indexed on OER Commons. We try and make it really easy to find materials. That's part of the heart of a repository is that we have generated metadata for each of these to make them easily findable. So this is a great, if you're looking to see what's here, this is a way to do that. It doesn't necessarily show you things that have been authored by individuals but it does give you a sense of the breadth of content that is available on OER Commons. So I encourage you all to go and check it out and look for some resources. If you ever get stuck, there's a help widget on every page or you can go directly to the Help Center and you can submit a ticket or do a search in our Knowledge Base for more information. I think that's it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mindy. My pleasure. And I see that there's lots of activity now, people introducing themselves in the chat room and that's great. Over 60 people. Let me remind people to turn off their microphones, so mute their mics. I hear dogs barking in the background or whatever. That's how it goes on Zoom on our Hangouts. I also, people have asked for, I see Johnny Vargas asked us to post the link. Mindy was showing you the OER Commons repository and the link is right there.oerkommons.org. And again, she's from Iskme and a great nonprofit that does all kinds of wonderful work in the open world. Okay, so let's turn it over to Kevin now. Kevin Hawkins, you have the floor. Thanks. Hello everyone. So I am a librarian at the University of North Texas and while I'm not adopting, adapting or creating language OER for my own teaching, I am involved in outreach to instructors to make them aware of OER and help them consider options for sharing any educational resources that they adapt or create entirely new. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about my experience with this, but I'm aim to keep my comments brief to ensure we have plenty of time for discussion. So I'm gonna share my screen because I'm gonna show you a few sites as we go here or pages I've worked on. So at UNT, we really started maybe five or six years ago in starting to promote alternative to conventional textbooks. And initially I was keen to avoid the term OER because I didn't think it was well known enough, well enough known among our faculty and other instructors. And because we were also trying to be inclusive here in thinking about other types of alternatives to conventional published textbooks, maybe some lower cost options as well. And the third reason really is that in discussions with faculty members, it's become clear to me that the sort of, most of them are sort of not prepared to make this cognitive leap to the idea of taking other people's materials and recombining them in new ways as you might do with open educational resources and modifying them. And they're really just focused on replacing a textbook. And so focused a lot on open textbooks initially. And so really initially it was about textbook alternatives. This is our guide, which has evolved a bit over time here, but really talking about textbooks and alternatives to them. You'll see we do point to a few places to look for some textbook alternatives. One in particular that I've encouraged people to look at is the Open Textbook Library. So this is openly licensed textbooks in particular again. You see they have 708 at the moment. And in this directory here, they only include textbooks that they have evidence of having been used outside of their home institution. So it's a nice sort of initial filter of usefulness, right? If something's in here, then someone beyond its creator has used it. And so really good place to begin exploring entire textbooks that someone might want to use. Since then though, we have found that OER has become a better used term. I mean, there are various surveys done of faculty attitudes and opinions. And there's more and more awareness of OER. So we do also have a guide to OER. It includes the Open Textbook Guide as a tab here embedded within it. It's the same thing as you were just looking at. But we have some more information about the kind of broader conversations about open education here, which includes a tab on where to find OER. We have some temporary information here about these special offers that are going on now generally not openly licensed actually. But down below, we do point to some of the major directories out here. One in particular I'll mention is the Mason OER Metafinder from George Mason University. It's this search engine that searches across other sites. In fact, they're all listed here. And it kind of combines the search results. So it doesn't work as smoothly as some other search engines because of the way it's combining things, but it is also very broad in its search coverage. The trick here is that I think some people can be overwhelmed by what they find in using these broad search engines. It casts such a wide net of so many different types of material that having a more targeted search like we just saw in OER Commons can certainly be useful, right? You can filter your results in very specific ways. But depending what you're looking for, what you're considering as something as broad as this could also be useful to you here. So if you're, well, I've also, you know, we've done some work here in supporting our instructors who want to share OER that they are looking to create. So they're looking to adopt some existing OER and modify it, so adapting OER or create something new. And so we have two programs at UNT. I'll just mention is sort of models because you might look for similar things at your institution. We've begun offering these OER summer grants so instructors can apply for a small grant kind of designed to be used during the summer. I mean, your work is supposed to take place during the summer here for, you know, choosing some material to adopt or adapt something else, modify it, that is, or create something to go along with some other OER. And so we have this program that our own faculty can apply for this, get a grant, and then this kind of is a nice token incentive for that work. And then we in the libraries are working to provide, you know, a place to host the content you create through this. This spring was our second year of funding this. And then a complimentary program designed for those who do want to create a new open textbook, something entirely new is a partnership with the UNT press. So we have a university press and they will be handling the print version. The libraries will be hosting the online versions. They'll be handling also the sort of editorial work and design work and all of that. And then the press provides funding up front instead of royalties on sales here. So excited about this program. We have one or two books that are kind of in the proposal review process now and nothing has come out yet through this program. So anyway, with both of these programs we're looking to use the press books software for hosting these open textbooks. It's a great platform, a bit like what we saw from the end of the previous presentation with the open author platform where you can edit right there online and do things. It's great for producing PDFs that are suitable for printing like in print on demand. But the OER Commons editor is also great and especially useful of which you're looking to create is not an entire book, but a sort of smaller module of content some sort of form of OER now. So I think I'll stop there but look forward to our further discussion. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much, Kevin. Giving us maybe a little bit different view, different perspective, certainly from the libraries. And I would also just add on to what Kevin was saying that wherever you are, make sure that you know the librarians because they're the key players in the OER movement and open education. They, 20 years ago, people were saying that digital is gonna kill the libraries and just the opposites happen. They are more at the center of education than ever. So make sure you know your librarians because they know OER. Okay, let me pass it over to Anita. Anita, the floor is yours. Carl, if it's okay with you, I'm gonna have Pat talk first just so she can kind of give the landscape of kind of our program and kind of lead into me if that's all right. That's fine because I need Pat work together, right? Yes, we do. We do. So Pat, you're up. Thank you so much. And I just put in the chat a little bit. Anita and I both work out of an intermediate unit in Pennsylvania, Appalachia IU-8. It's right smack in the center of PA, but she lives closer to the IU. I live on the east side of Pennsylvania about an hour, about an hour west of New York City. So I'm in the Pocono Mountains and our other colleague, Olivia, lives in Pittsburgh. So we're spread out, but we got really interested in using the OER Commons and especially Carell. About five years ago, our program serves only students online. As you can see in the chat, our World of Learning Institute is created to offer support to school districts who either can't find a teacher in a rural area, particularly in the languages that they want for their students in high school. And we also offer students other critical languages like Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese to expand their options. So across the state of Pennsylvania, and we have a few others, I think in Ohio and Connecticut who subscribe to our program, we serve about 1,700 students a semester. So we have a fairly wide subscription and it's always exciting to see more students be able to be exposed to world languages. So we spent a lot of time trying to create programs that are equitable that schools can afford. And OER resources really do kind of like level out that barrier of students being able to afford to participate in our programs. And so we really had to work hard to get our teachers to not want to have a textbook in an online course. So our first step into the OER Commons was just to kind of transition our folks and the Corel resources were really kind of turned them on because when you dig into the Corel resources, there are things in every language. So we do teach Spanish, French, German, Latin, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, as I said. And so we have transitioned everything but Arabic to completely online. And I'm just gonna share my screen real briefly because I'm gonna give a lot of the credit to Anita for being able to help our teachers find those resources. And I wanna give a shout out to Melissa Henderson who's here with us today, who's one of our French teachers who has also helped us in that development. So thanks for joining us today, Melissa and giving us a little support there. So yes, Italian is in our lineup as is Portuguese and Anita can also speak to that because she has gone to several of the Corel workshops that have specifically centered around Portuguese. She as a Portuguese language speaker is very excited about introducing that into our lineup. So I am going to turn it over to Anita, let her share her screen. I do, Anita, have a couple of our courses pulled up but I know that Mindy, you really gave us a great entrance because we've used all those resources. Our IU does have a hub and we have a lot of our resources right in the hub. So if you wanna use Spanish or German, they're the resources we have there so far. We've worked with East Drowsberg University. I present one time probably way back about four years ago, we presented it together with Jeff from East Drowsberg who uses his librarian in East Drowsberg quite a bit too. So we're super excited about these resources if you haven't checked into them and I will turn it over to Anita now who can dig in a little deeper to how we've gone about doing the development and the use of the repositories and putting them into our courses. Thanks, Pat. So one of the ways that Pat mentioned, so obviously we turn to open education resources as an alternative to being textbook based. So an IU, oh, that's a great question. It's an intermediate unit. So it's an educational service agency. So we kind of are the liaison between school districts and our Department of Education. So we're kind of like that middleman where we can provide a lot of services to all range of students and districts ranging from professional development to other services students need as well. So anyway, so I wanna tell you and as Pat alluded, so when we began to develop our courses asynchronously, so our program actually has two really cool components, our virtual teaching program. We meet with our students synchronously just like this in Zoom so many times a week and we provide direct instruction that speaking, that listening, those essentials for learning languages. But then we also have an asynchronous component which is their course where they would submit work, they have the content available to them. What we did is we transitioned from relying on a textbook, right? So we discovered, and again, Coral was the great, great resources. And I'm gonna tell you why it's a great resources. Some of you have not checked it out because when I speak Spanish to my students or when I speak Portuguese, so my Spanish is from Spain, right? That's where I was raised and that's where I practiced. My family's from Portugal, so that's my Portuguese. But I don't think it's fair to only expose my students to those dialects and those ways of speaking. I think if they're gonna be good listeners, they have to be exposed to different dialects, different native speakers. So with Coral and some of these open education resources, I can provide my students those opportunities. I look at some of their free resources, there's recordings of native speakers. There's different tools where they can listen and then respond. So the website is fantastic if you have not checked out their resources yet. But that's kind of what we've done. We've taken some of their resources and we've embedded them or have asked students to go and engage with them via their site in our asynchronous platform. And we've kind of transitioned our teachers to do that a little bit more. And we have a certain style of the way we build our courses. And one of the things I always tell my teachers is when they're building, because I support all of our languages, even though I don't speak Chinese or German or Japanese, I can help them by telling them when you go to find an OER resource, it's not gonna be the end all. It's not gonna be silver platter and that's all you do. The biggest keyword that I use with them is remix. So you're gonna take different components that are available and find it so it fits for your students. You're gonna, so whether you're teaching ninth graders, whether you're teaching college sophomores, right? So we still have to personalize and remix those resources that are available to fit the needs of our students. So that's really, really important. So that's probably the biggest way we use our resources just to give students opportunities to listen to different native speakers and improve on their listening skills when it comes to a different language learning. So like I said, not every OER that you're gonna come across is gonna be perfect and ideal that you could just find it today and use it tomorrow. There might be components of it that you can use tomorrow, but it might take some work. So then I could tell you right now, OER Commons, and that's such a small world, Mindy, that you are here. So OER Commons is where we, then after we have found resources, we need to share, right? That is our responsibility. If we're gonna use OER OERs, I think there's a responsibility where you take what you give as well. And that's really, really important. So as Mindy had shown you, the OER Commons, we actually have our own personal hub and group in OER Commons. Ours is entitled Appalachia IU. So when I click on that group, you will see that we have a variety of resources essentially. These are non-language. So if you have any teacher friends, these are very well-developed, I will say that. And then there's our world language ones that we have uploaded so far. We have 104 Spanish resources ranging from novice low to like I'd say intermediate high, ranging in proficiency in their variety of things. German, that's more we have right now like novice low, novice mid. We have not really ranged too much into the intermediate proficiency level. But if that helps a little bit, and they are designed in the way that we design our courses. So if I pull one up, we're just gonna start very simple. And I'll just show it to you real quick, but our pedagogy in the way we design our courses we use the five E model, but then we've expanded it to add another six E where we take students through a variety of kind of just steps and engagement. So we have an engage and explore, explain, evaluate, elaborate, express. None of these rely on a textbook, which is huge because a lot of the schools that we are working with, again, funding is an obstacle. Locating a teacher is an obstacle. So we wanna make it as feasible, as economical as possible. So that's really important. And last but not least, so obviously we've been successful with finding resources and I'm gonna put another plugin for Coral that I attended a webinar probably about two months ago on Portuguese OER. So I am a native Portuguese speaker. My family is from Portugal. And that is the next course we want to develop. And I just kind of was starting to throw around ideas and I attended a webinar and it was absolutely fantastic. Some of the OER resources that were shared around Portuguese even. So I'm so excited I've started diving into them more and via your website. So I'm looking forward to building that now and again, and then being able to share it via OER comments. So I just wanna thank, and Sarah, you've done a great job providing professional development and learning opportunities for people to work with OERs as well. So I thank you. And look forward to answering any questions. Great, thank you so much Anita and Pat too. So I just wanna tell people we didn't plan this to be all these plugs for Coral. I mean, I just delighted to hear that people are using our materials, our resources. The idea here is to really talk to people who inhabit different parts of the OER or the open education ecology. And in listening to what people were saying, we have then organisms like Coral or even teachers that produce materials or produce OER, open educational resources. And then we have this other kind of this entity, the repositories. Many was talking about OER Commons and Kevin was mentioning the different kinds of things that they're doing at UNT. So they're places to go to find those materials. And then it's really cool to hear like Anita and Pat talk about at their institute how they are meeting with teachers and it kind of comes full circle. Take going to the repositories, finding these OERs and then kind of metabolizing them with their instructors. So this is great. We have different people from different parts of the OER ecology. And that's really cool. So let's see, what are the questions coming in? A lot of the questions are sometimes of a very specific nature of people listen and they get an example from Portuguese and they immediately think of, what about Italian? So these are, since we're representing foreign language OER, you have to go through and search for the repositories because they may have it in Portuguese but they may not have it in Italian. I know at Coral we have resources in 20 different languages. And on our front page, our splash page you go and the first thing that you're gonna do is go to the dropdown menu and search by language. Somebody asked about, let's see, Korean. At present we do not have anything Korean but Coral is one of 16 national foreign language resource centers funded by the federal government, by the US Department of Education. And there is one center that's entirely devoted to East Asian languages and they make plenty of materials in Korean. So, and for that you can go to nflrc.org. Sarah, would you type that into the chat room so that everybody has it? That's another large repository but just for foreign language materials. That's national foreign language resource center nflrc.org. Okay, you can find again Korean. So let me start off with a question as people type in their questions now into the chat box. I noticed that Kevin mentioned this kind of, a couple of years ago the word OER wasn't in common parlance and they weren't really sure what to do. And I think that you mentioned nowadays it's much more accepted and people kind of know the acronym OER, know what it refers to. And then Anita was also using the word remix. So some of these terms may not be all that familiar to people and what we have found at Coral is that they're definitely is, I don't know, people take a while to kind of assimilate all this information. And so I just wanted to go back to Kevin. Have you noticed that and what are the changes you've noticed in the kind of OER world in the past five years? Because you said that most people still just want to adopt a textbook, a wholesale. Anita mentioned remix. Do you think that teachers are into remixing now or is it still just, let me get something that looks like a textbook? That's question to Kevin. Yeah, right. I mean so I think the term OER is becoming better known but I think people at least initially when they learn the term they tend to just think of it as a textbook that is free for my students and that I can go get to for free. And I remember in the conversation with a faculty member at UNT maybe a year ago he had been using an open textbook for years and it hadn't occurred to him that he could improve it even though it was openly licensed. Had a license on him explicitly permitting him to make improvements and publish this new version here. And so it just hadn't occurred to him and I don't blame him, right? I mean this is a specialized area it's something I kind of work in all the time so of course I know these things but not everyone does. I think some of the discussions about OER go a little beyond this. We're not just taking this or that resource and making a few improvements or tweaks but remixing, right? Combining a whole bunch of individual components into a new whole here. And so some people it can be more ambitious to undertake all of this but could really go out there looking for a whole bunch of individual pieces and pulling together and recombining them in a new innovative way. Part of what is sometimes called the remix culture. So to that I would just make sure that everybody understands the idea well you mentioned the word free which is important that's where people start. I want some free resources but they're called OER open is really where it's at. And so what makes something open? Well it has to carry an open copyright license. So that's the thing that gives people the permission to remix or to change or to do what you want within those parameters of a license. So I just want to make sure that everybody understands that we're talking about using materials that are different than copyrighted materials. The little C in the circle locks down those practices. It does not allow you, you have to buy them but then you're not supposed to make copies of it and you're not supposed to change the textbook. And so well teachers want to change everything basically and they violate copyright all the time. So this is creating a new world where we share our materials and then people can metabolize them in different ways and use them in different ways, adapt them essentially. That's what it's about. So open means really adaptation. Okay so let's see what the new questions that are coming in. I did have a question for Mindy. People who are creating them these repositories and OER commas is just this amazing repository that's actually now very powerful. Do you guys do any kind of research on how people are the end user experience and how people are using your material? Like what kinds of metadata do they look at and what part of OER do they look at because you can keep building and building and making this bigger and more complex but how do people use it? I think a lot of users come to OER Commons to find a resource in the moment. We obviously through our hub partners and groups try to encourage folks to get more deeper with it and do kind of collaborative curation and authoring. We do user research really when we're looking at how we can improve our user experience. So that does include things like how we prioritize the schema for search for the search, refine your search and advanced search pages, what we require folks to enter when they add resources and what's not required. Obviously the more information that you use to describe a resource the better. Ask me as an organization, in addition to my team that does the services which are OER Commons and all of our partner implementations. We also have a research arm. So we do a lot of research kind of in the field related to OER and kind of curriculum improvement, continuous improvement with educators. So we try to take those findings and always apply them back to the work that we do in the OER services as well. Ask me stands for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education in answer to Susan's question in chat. Great, okay, thank you so much. But, Carl, do you want me to read back the questions that were posted in the chat room? And then I'll also mention the answer if I was given. Before I forget, and then yes, you need to read back the questions, okay? So there's a question that's been lurking in some of the comments and that's about quality control. Or it goes by different names. People often ask me about how good is this? What is the value of this object? And so that, how do you assess the quality of a resource before you put it into your repository? Or, and that would be like for Mindy, or for your classrooms, that could be for, or your instructional units and that could be for Pat or for Nina. So how do you deal with the issue of quality? It's a big one. Yeah, I'll go first just to say that, so our librarians do check resources that are added to OER Commons and we aren't checking necessarily for instructional quality. We're checking to ensure that it's OER, that it's not behind a password, that it's, those are kind of the main parameters. We have a list of submission guidelines. And we really encourage our users to add that feedback to resources. So as I was showing, there's the comments feature and the stars and the evaluation rubrics. But really I think that educators, curriculum specialists, anyone who's assessing something to use in their class should assess it the way they would any other resource. You don't just take a textbook and go use it without ever looking at it. You need to assess the quality for your purposes and adapt it if you need to adapt it. So I do think that leveraging the work that others have done, like looking at what PAIU has done in their hub or what other folks have done, who have done some significant work to curate resources is a good way to ensure that you're finding the higher quality materials. But again, you have to look, you have to assess the quality of the resources you're gonna use and ensure that they're working for you to meet your goals. That's a really good, that's a very good point. So I think people understand that when they adopt a textbook, they still have gone through some kind of a process internally and they decided, maybe their criteria are not explicit for their instructional goals, but typically they are. So you've thrown it back on the institution or the instructors and rightly so. So let's pass it off to Pat and to Anita because when it gets down to actual instruction and working with teachers, Plains, do you have any kinds of criteria for some of them in New York? I'll just start by and I'll just start with the big broad picture is we've made a commitment to stay in line with actual standards. So when we ask our teachers to find resources or use resources or if we're working with them to develop out a level or a revision of their courses, we ask them to stay within those actual standards. So like, you know, Mindy was talking about, you know, you have some criteria as a curriculum person who's gonna look at what resources you're gonna put out there. But I think the highlight of going to Coral or the OER Commons to find things is that you can get outside of a typical framework in which a course is delivered, which is also really important to us. When our teachers would say, well, I have to teach this next because that's next in the textbook. Even when I was working in brick and mortar with teachers, it would just drive me crazy that that was the way that people wanted to deliver instruction. And they weren't really thinking of it in terms of, you know, where is student interest? What's the relevance of the actual topic? And I think that's what the beauty of looking into something like the resources that are developed by a wide variety of people because you can build that course in a way that I can meet the standards that I wanna meet still, but I'm also looking at what's relevant to the group of students. And Anita will expand on this a little bit more, but not every Spanish course we teach is the same. We adapt those courses based on where students are in their learning journey. And I think that's one of the really important things to take into consideration that all Spanish one doesn't look like the same course. All Japanese one doesn't look like the same course every year. We really have to know where our students are, what the level of relevance is, why they're taking the course, why they want to learn to speak the language and then make that relevant. And being flexible is part of what is the beauty of not having a paper book that you open saying, well, we were on 98 yesterday, so now we're gonna be on 99 today. And so I'll turn it over to Anita in terms of because she has gotten down to the more granular level, but for me as an administrator, that's where my philosophy in developing and using these much more flexible, much more student-centered resources are valuable. But thank you for saying that, but that is a big mind shift. It's a paradigm shift of open education so that people are so used to taking the textbook and then opening it up and just marching along from page to page. So it does require teachers to be somewhat more engaged in curriculum development and even pedagogical design than they may have. And that's a good thing, right? But it does force you, many teachers will say, but I'm not a textbook designer, I lead that to somebody else. So that's why I think that what the work that you're doing, working with teachers to show them how to do this is really important. So Anita, Pat kind of set you up there. What exactly do you do to help teachers understand this new world? No, that's perfect. And Mindy kind of alluded to that too. I think no matter what you're using, you always obviously check your resources prior to showing them to your student just to ensure validity and privacy and those types of things. So I think that's the first thing I tell my teachers is, is that safe? Is that appropriate for students? So that's the first thing we check. Then two, as Pat mentioned, we have goals for specific students, specific classes. So it's really important at the very beginning of the year, although we have a shell and how it aligns to the proficiency levels and what we want them to accomplish that year, along the way of the course, we allocate OER resources that are more personalized and relevant and someone in the chat box alluded to authentic resources. Absolutely. I think that's what your main focus, especially with language teaching is authentic, authentic, authentic, how much can you expose to your students in maybe the not so authentic environment, right? So I think it's really important that we find OER resources specifically that refer to authentic resources. And again, I'm gonna put in a plug for Coral, but that is where there's a lot of authentic resources. Like I had told you earlier, there's native speaker videos and things like that. So a lot of the OBR comments, some of the professors that have built some textbooks have made videos and have gone to these different countries. So I encourage you to check those out. And then I know as we build, we encourage our teachers as much as possible to build an authentic resources. And it's not necessarily just OERs, it could be something as like, for example, our Spanish classes might use el país, right, the newspaper. Maybe we have our students watch a video from Univision. So any of those things could also fall into some of those authentic experiences other than just the OERs, kind of a combining. Thank you, thank you. So I just wanna say before I like turn it over to Natalie so she can ask some of the questions in the chat box. The way we look at textbooks at Coral is everything is a template. Everything is a module or a module. So we design more and more for modularity so that our textbooks can be taken apart and rearranged. You don't have to march through a textbook. So if you start to see, so Anita was just mentioning the keyword authentic, authentic materials. So many of our activities are based on authentic materials but if you say, I don't really particularly like that, that cultural activity, you can use the framework of our activity and just plug in different kind of content. And so once you start to understand how you don't have to start from scratch, you can do this, it's pretty freeing. And I wanted to also go back to something that Mindy said. So when different repositories are thinking about the criteria, their criteria, the first criterion is, is this open, is this object open? And again, I wanna repeat to people, this is not just free resources on the internet, it has to carry an open license so that you can participate with the authors, with the creators, you can remix and change and re-edit and so forth, okay? So Natalie, what's appearing in the chat? Okay, so a lot of those questions have been answered already, but I thought I would just go over them and put again some of them. So as you have mentioned, Carl, some people ask for specific resources in specific languages like Italian, Greek and Korean. I can speak for our website, we have a Italian podcast that is OER and somebody was asking about Heritage Spanish resources that would kind of rate the students. I think that's how I understood it. So we have a Heritage Spanish-focused website, I'm gonna share the link right now on our chat box and that one, you can ask any questions about Heritage Spanish resources on that website, they have a specific chatroom there. So somebody else might have that answer because we don't have those resources. I can just add on to that. So when somebody asks for something very specific, I'm looking for OER in Heritage Spanish. So we have an entire, as Natalie just mentioned, project devoted to Heritage Spanish and included in that are resources that people are developing around the country. But more important than the resource is the community that goes with the resource because there are lots of people who are creating Heritage Spanish resources and the person who asked the question actually really needs to be in touch with those people. So this is another cool thing about OER is that a real person has developed them and oftentimes will have their contact information and you can just contact them directly, people are very happy to share what they know with you. So our heritage, I believe Natalie, did you put that in the chatroom though? Yeah, great thing about it is, this is a group of, I don't know, 50, 60 people around the country who are creating Heritage Spanish OER and they can plug you into this community, okay? All right, so then we had several questions about does anybody review materials before they were shared? I assume that was, yeah, that was for Melinda, this question, and she answered several times, yes, but not for pedagogical content, mostly for licenses and other quality, I guess. But to add to this answer, there's a lot of stuff coming in, so I'm trying to multitask. But Natalie, while you look, I'll just say I posted the submission guidelines to OER Commons in chat, so if people are curious what we're checking for when resources are submitted, you can see that there. It's kind of high up, you can also just go to the help center and search on submission guidelines. But yeah, as you said, we look for open licensing to make sure nothing's behind a password and that it's instructional materials and beyond that, we're not looking for the quality of the instructional materials. I think that same person then expended and asked also if you have, if you also have a guidelines to check quality of repositories, I'm not sure that was directed to you or to everyone, but I think somebody answered that already in the chat too. That's kind of up to everyone to, but you also know by the association that has created the repository if you can trust them or not. Can I? Yes, please. I had something important to say and of course I can't remember, I slipped my mind. I think what Kevin was saying earlier on about, oh, I remember it was open textbook library. So different repositories will handle the issue of quality control a little bit differently. And sometimes they have a editorial team and so this kind of depends on who you are and what you're looking for in the repository. So you should just check the repository and see what their guidelines and their criteria are. But for example, at the University of Minnesota's open textbook library, they do control quality by giving you all these reviews of product. So you can read other reviews. So we have choral material, I know like our French materials, the French textbook, our open textbook, I don't know, 12, 15 different reviews and they're quite extensive. They're from people from all over the country who are using it in different kinds of contexts. So you can say, oh, well, that's a college professor. I teach at a high school. I wanna find a high school teacher. You can find that. And so that's just, that's built into the open textbook library. They also have like a little rating system too. So five stars or four stars, et cetera. So each Merlot is a large repository too, for example, and they also have an editorial team and criteria for selecting. So each repository handles the question of selection and value control a little bit differently. That's on you as an end user to kind of read over those guidelines and figure out what you're comfortable with. If you, so going back to the questions there and statements that were made, if you wanna share something on OER comments, knowing the answer to that question by, you have to go to add OER and you can submit using a URL and the author your resources there. So if you have an infographic like somebody mentioned, you can create an account and submit it there. And then, I think last but not least, there was a lot of chatter going on about finding grammar resources that would be graded kind of like the publishers do. So I don't know if college, you wanna answer this, we have like five minutes left, but or if you want me to answer it in half. This is a perennial question. People want kind of self-graded online work. Most of the content you're gonna find is not akin to like my Spanish lab or things that are produced that are like the technology that exists so that it takes away some of the grading actually. So we do have some of those kinds of things that are self-graded at Coral, for example, in the French programs. But and we do have some materials in Spanish as well. So those things do exist, but most of it is just kind of content and you have to figure out how to, how to grade it and make sense of it. So I wanna close now, because we just have a couple, we're coming up on the hour and I wanna thank our speakers for telling us all the ins and outs about repositories and how to find OER, it's great. It's a perennial question. These questions, this is just kind of scratching the surface because there's a lot to know about OER. And we have, as I said, we have developed a course at Coral, which leads you through the basics to kind of more advanced questions. For example, how to read a creative commons license and what do the different licenses mean? How can I use search engines to find, when should I use a search engine or when should I go to repositories? There are all kinds of questions and we've tried to answer that. We also have a community for people who wanna create and wanna share their OER. We call that the learn community, ha ha. It's L-O-E-R. It's a language OER networks. That spells, that's another silly acronym, learn. And anyhow, you can go and go, that's also available on our website. Go to the learn network and you're gonna find people across the country who are doing this. And again, you can contact them. It's not just the resource itself. The great thing about the open educational sphere is that people really wanna talk to you one-on-one and tell you how to use this. So go check out learn, go check out our OER course. And the last thing we asked you to do is because the money is taxpayer money, we spend it very carefully and we have to show the federal government that we're spending it carefully. And so we have a survey. So there's a link here on your screen. The last thing we ask you to do is to take this link, the survey, click on the link. It will only take you just a couple of minutes. It's just clicking on some buttons, but that's important data that we need to get back to the federal government. Thank you. We'll share that link also in the chat room. Yes, it should be the last thing there. So if you can share that link. Yes, there they are. OER Hangout Survey is what you can click on. Thank you all for your attention. I really appreciate it. And thank you guys, all of our speakers are doing just the really wonderful work that you're doing to promote OER in repositories and education. Okay, thank you all.