 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Una Daley from the open coursework consortium, the community college consortium there. And I want to welcome you all to our second webinar of the fall series on OER and open textbook adoption and sustainability. And we have some amazing speakers this afternoon from California State University system, the Florida virtual campus, and from BC campus up in British Columbia. And just a little housekeeping before we get started. For those of you who might be on the phone, if you are using the phone to listen to this, please make sure to turn off the speakers and mic on your computer so we don't get an echo. Also, over on the left-hand side of your screen, you should see a long list of participants. And I'm excited to see that we have almost 30 people today. And probably I'll have a few more join us as we continue. If you want to participate in the Q&A prior to the end of our session, we're going to hold most of the questions until the end, please do go and type those into the chat window. And we'll answer them as we can. Otherwise, we'll pick that up at the end. And if you are having any tech support issues during the session, please feel free to use that number at the bottom of the screen. And they will be able to help you. They're a great crew. They're at the California Community College at Palomar College. All right. So if you haven't had a chance to introduce yourself, please go ahead and do that in the chat window again. And once again, I'm Una Daly, the Community College Outreach Director at the Open Coursework Consortium. And now I want to give you a chance to hear a few words from our presenters today, talking about the work that they do real briefly before we get into the main part of our session. So first of all, I want to introduce Jerry Hanley, who is the Senior Academic Director of Technology at the California State University Chancellor's Office. And he's also the Executive Director of Merlot. Jerry, tell us a little bit about your job. Thank you, Una. And I always, like many of you out there, we have multiple hats that we wear. And I always say my day job in the Cal State system. I support all our digital library services, supporting learning management services, our accessible technology initiative. And a major initiative that I'll talk about today is about our affordable learning solutions initiative that is trying to reduce the cost of materials for our students. And then my night job as the Executive Director of Merlot is great to be in a place where we try to build friendships of people in teaching and learning around the world to support the open education movement in which the open coursework consortium is just a wonderful leader. And really thank you, Una, for inviting me here. Well, thank you, Jerry. We're really thrilled to have you. Next, I'd like to introduce Robin Donaldson. She's the Assistant Director of Instructional Resources and Support at Florida Virtual Campus. And she's also the Director of the Orange Grove Repository. Yes, that's correct. Welcome to the webinar, everyone. Yes, I managed the Orange Grove Repository. And one of the large pieces of my role is to manage OER projects in the state of Florida and conduct research on digital instructional materials and OER for the state. And then I also work on distance learning projects such as our state college course catalog rewrite. And then I work with our distance learning member council, which includes members from all of our public colleges and universities. Yes, that's correct. Florida Virtual Campus, what we do is we provide support to all of our colleges and universities in their delivery of distance learning library services as well as student services. Great. Thank you, Robin. I'd like to introduce the youngest member of our team here, Clint LaLonde, who is the Manager of Curriculum and Applied Research at BC Campus, which is the post-secondary, which is the technical services, student services organization for all of post-secondary in British Columbia. Hey, who would I say? I've got some slides. I want to talk a little bit a little later on about what BC Campus is, but thank you very much. I am the Manager of Curriculum Services and Applied Research at BC Campus. I've only been at BC Campus since the spring, so that does make me the newbie in this group, I guess, and you can tell by my picture I am the youngest. But I've been working in distributed education and with educational technology in the province since 1994. Before BC Campus, I was the Manager of Learning Technologies at Royal Roads University here in Victoria, BC. And here at BC Campus, I managed a learning object repository called Solar, and lately I've been spending quite a bit of time working on the Open Textbook initiative. Mostly around the technology pieces to support Open Textbook, but also doing outreach and faculty support. And I'm very happy to be here to talk about the BC Open Textbook project. Well, thank you, Clint. As you can see, these three presenters have carved some time out of their very busy days to share their expertise with you, and we're just very pleased to have them. All right. So here's our agenda. I'm going to give you a brief introduction to CCCOER, and then we'll be on to our presentations. So for those of you who might be new to the Community College Consortium for OER at the Open Coursework Consortium, we promote the adoption of OER to enhance teaching and learning. And our strategies around that are supporting professional development for faculty, staff, and in fact, students are welcome to participate in these as well. And so these webinars and other workshops that we do both online and face-to-face are part of that process. We're all about expanding access to education, which is why when we talk about OER development, accessibility is a huge piece of that, as Jerry mentioned earlier. And although we work with four-year colleges and universities, our mission is around supporting community colleges. We're very open to collaborations with everyone, though. And I just wanted to give you a picture. I do this every month to show you we are in 15 states and provinces, British Columbia being our first province, and we have over 200 colleges that participate with us. So on to our topic for today. Today is really an opportunity for you to learn from some of the leaders who've been championing OER within their state systems for a long time, in at least one case for over a decade now. And they've learned to ride out some economic and academic storms. And a few of the big issues that they're going to touch on today are why is OER and funding tied together? How do you get buy-in from stakeholders in your state and academic systems as you're trying to bring OER pilots on board? And why is collaboration so important? Not only across departments, but across districts, state, and even country boundaries. And another point is why is emerging technology sometimes an enhancer for OER and open-ed, and why can it sometimes be a distraction? And finally, OER is all about learning and supporting our students and learners throughout the world. And I know that they're going to touch upon how OER and their projects are supporting that. And now I want to turn it over to Jerry Hanley, Senior Director of Academic Technology at CSU. Great. Well, thank you, Luna. And in that last slide that we're talking about the many issues there are many, many challenges. And the CSU, we've tried to struggle with some of them. And my goal here is to share with you some of the things we're doing. All these resources really are open for you as well. And I'm happy to help as much as I can here. So the start-off around the CSU's strategy here. First, just a quick overview of the California State University system. For those of you who may not know, 23 campuses, 427,000 students, we got a lot of them. And of course our 23 campuses work in peace and harmony together in wonderful ways. But the challenge, and I was being sarcastic there, but the challenge when we really look at the students within our system, a third of our students get enough financial aid to cover their tuition and their books and supplies. So the issue of the affordability of educational content becomes very important for a major constituents of our students. Because if they can't afford a college, they don't go, they don't succeed, and they don't really contribute to society through their education in the ways that we want. And on top of this, the institution itself in the last three years with the Great Recession, we've lost about 30% of our state funding. Tuition has doubled. And again, if we're trying to really succeed in our mission of providing access to an excellent education, we have to find ways to reduce the cost. And when we look at the content that our students are purchasing, well, this is an area, this is where open education resources can become a huge benefit. If as kind of the focus is on is how do you shift the adoption strategies and how do you sustain their use? So our affordable learning solutions strategy is driven by three critical principles. One is about choice. If you're looking for changing adoption patterns, you have to give people choice that really is attractive for them, that really will benefit their teaching as well as their students' learning. And the affordability element is important and finally to ensure that all students, including those with disabilities, have an ability to have access to this new content that really can be affordable and high quality. Now when we looked at the Cal State system, the complexity that we have and all the issues, we have this relatively simple model that we have to address many elements for this adoption and sustaining of the use of open education resources and affordable learning resources as well. So at the bottom, I'm going to be using these themes throughout the presentation that we have here. So at the bottom, leveraging your content providers. So what content that faculty use are from publishers, libraries, they offer their own stuff and open education resources. So how do you bring all those things together to make it easy for people to find what they're looking for that's affordable? The next level is creating these capabilities to create convenient access. This is really an important element for people to discover things easily. How do you make their lives better? Our theme is always how do we give you a gift and not a burden when we're looking at this adoption process? The next layer, developing the demand. That really says I want people to want this. So how do they know about it? Why would they ask for open education resources? So what's your communication plan? The training and professional development is essential for this adoption and sustaining process. And finally at the top, what are the policies? What is the leadership? The business models that create an enabling ecosystem to make sure that when you have the demand, you have an organization that can supply this open education resources and value the adoption. So when we look at the bottom layer, leveraging the content providers, really you can find a million free online instructional materials out there. And in Merlot, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later, we have over 2,500 online textbooks. But also thinking about your library resources, custom materials, and publisher content. And I'll talk about how the CSU is working in all these different content suppliers for reducing those costs. And here the issue of creating the convenience. CSU affordable learning solutions.org, this is open for everyone. And what we try to do is create that one stop shop for people who might just looking for pieces of course materials. What's free online courses, open textbooks. I'm just revealing the tabs at the bottom of this website here. And really enabling people to discover these things and become aware of them so then they can consider making those new choices. And again, all the resources, it's open for everyone to use on that website. And one particular tool that we put together is when looking at adoption, we built this little tool we called the OER Finder. And you can put in the ISBN number of your textbook. And after you hit the search key, the tool will identify what that textbook is and will identify what are related open textbooks in that subject area. Again, to make it easy for a faculty member to find the alternatives that are out there. And again, this OER Finder, it's a widget. It's available on this website. You can download the code and incorporate it into your own tools. The next thing that you can see on this website on the tab, deploying your ALS. I work in the Chancellor's Office, which is a system office. And with our 23 campuses, you have to really infuse this initiative within the local campus and culture. And so on this website, you can see how each campus has taken this affordable learning solution strategy and then made it their own. So Cal State, Dominguez Hills, and on this campus, 85% of our students have some amount of financial aid. And so the affordability of their educational content is essential. And what we've worked with these folks in within a year period, we've had over savings of almost half a million dollars by faculty changing their choice of their content. And this is called the Faculty Showcase. The URL is down there. And you can actually go through what faculty have done. And from changing from a textbook to using lower resources or using an open textbook or using a low cost digital textbook or using a library textbook, e-book that's available for free. All these ways can really reduce the cost for our students. Now the CSU's Affordable Learning Solutions Strategy is where we're also leveraging this whole strategy for other state systems. Members of the Merleau Consortium and the University System of Georgia has been a Merleau member. And they said, Jerry, we really like this. Can you create our Affordable Learning Solutions Initiative in Georgia, provide you that support? We said, sure, great. And so here's the website, Affordable Learning Georgia. And so they're able to reuse, repurpose, customize, remix their stuff related to Georgia, but leverage all the stuff that the CSU has done as well. And I think this is going to be a very useful strategy. We have other systems and campuses of higher education who are looking at adopting this approach so they can do it quickly, efficiently, and build a community of people who are all focused on affordable learning solutions. Now one of the areas, again, of the content is about the open education resources. And as I said, my day job and the CSU, I push the Affordable Learning Solutions. And my night job as the Executive Director of Merleau, I have to figure out how am I going to provide a wide range of open education materials that can be adopted and included into an initiative like Affordable Learning. I just want to highlight, just show you a few of the Merleau has been newly redesigned to make it much more easier for people to use. So I'm just going to pop through a few of these screen captures. So Merleau, not only can you find stuff, you can personalize it with your own bookshelves. We have communities. You can create things. And you can add and contribute to the Merleau community and digital library. So if I click on the Search My Materials, we have over 42,000 materials. We have 115,000 members throughout the world. And I think an important element is bringing together the people and the content who are using open education resources is very helpful. And the next slide here is just to give you a sample. If I'm looking for materials on the left-hand side, you can see a variety of the categories. Merleau has editorial boards that peer review the materials. You can have user ratings. And one area there, you can see on the right-hand side, there's a little box, something that says personal collections. So people create their own little Merleau bookshelves. And then you can begin to see how many people are adopting these books. Next slide here, we have a tool called Search Other Libraries. So you can search Merleau, but we have Orange Grove in there. We have the OCW Search tool as well. So again, the idea of how do we make it convenient for someone to find the open education resources that are distributed through a variety of wonderful organizations that are here to help you. Once we have the Discovering Materials, we also have community of people who do the adoption. And we have a variety of academic disciplines and partner communities. I just encourage you to explore a variety of these organizations, areas that are showing specific uses of Merleau services. And here's the Create Your Own Materials. We have social networking here too as well. And you can contribute materials. The Merleau.org is really focused a lot on the faculty side of things. We've also built Merleau X to be very focused on students. How do I just find, where do I find the free stuff? Professor Hanley, where do I get this? So we have Merleau X. And so you can see I'm looking for something in business. So in two clicks, you get into the materials in the business catalog within Merleau. The Merleau X also and Merleau 2 has translators. So if you're around the world, you need these sites in different languages. This one's in Thai, for example. Now part of creating that convenience that we have in Merleau is how do you integrate it into learning management systems. And so if you're a Moodle user, Moodle is built into Moodle 2.x. You can just enable that capability so you can do the search within Moodle. And we have a Blackboard building block as well. Free for you to use, adopt and integrate into Blackboard. Now I'm going to highlight one area around this rent digital. There's open education resources, but publishers are producing lower cost digital e-textbooks. And we've negotiated with the various publishers to find these at 60% off new print price. And the key aspect of developing the demand is getting into marketing. Higher education typically doesn't do that very well. But this is samples of brochures. And we have kiosks. We have shelf tags. We have a whole variety of things. Communication out to students. All about how that these new alternatives are available and you have a choice. And then the old saying, if you build it, they will come. Assumes that people know how to play with these digital text books. And we found out a lot of times the idea sounds great, but students and faculty don't understand the capabilities, the search capabilities, the highlighting capabilities, the note taking capabilities. So the importance of integrating that professional development program is essential if you want these things to work well. And just to give you an example of this student savings, almost $3.5 million. We saved our students with this rent digital program. And finally, I'll just highlight some things here around when you're looking at the ecosystems that you have. There are many political drivers that can drive someone to looking at alternatives and looking at what's important for your institution to drive them. There's affordability, graduation, accessibility. These are important things. And in California, we're working on creating a consortium across our higher education community colleges, CSU and UC, to build these shared digital library of open text books. So that's a quick fly by for a variety of the topics we're doing in California. I hope that was useful and I'll pass it on to the next speaker here. And thank you for that opportunity to talk about us. Thank you, Jerry. And there was a couple of questions there in the chat window if you want to address those or we can bring them back at the end as well. Great. I'll start on that right now. Lovely. Thank you. All right. Great presentation from Jerry. And now another great presentation from Robin Donaldson, the assistant director of instructional resources and support at the Florida virtual campus. Robin. Okay. Thank you. There we go. I'm going to give you a brief overview of the Orange Square repository and then some of the research we've done in OER and open text books. And what those findings have meant to the state and how it's impacting what our individual institutions are doing. The Orange Grove began in 2004. It was legislatively mandated and supported repository. It was a large investment of funds at the very onset. And it was to address the issue we were having, which many of you encounter now, which is how can the state support the sharing of resources across our institutions and give them a means for also locating resources and other repositories and libraries. So with the Orange Grove, our faculty members are able to contribute the resources, use the resources. And then that includes open textbooks and open courses. And they can assign specific copyrights. We have a WYSIWYG built in there for Creative Commons. And then they can assign specific copyrights. Our institutions are also able to have their own collections. And those collections, they can have resources open to the public. Just the state of Florida for resources that we do statewide licensing for. And then they can also limit resources to their institution collection. So a faculty member might choose to share a resource either with the public or just with their fellow faculty members at their institution. We also have a collection such as, it's called the Orange Grove collection. Harvested one, which brings in resources from different repositories. And then we have the open courseware. So the other piece here, just like with Merlot, you're able to integrate the repository with your LMS. You could either search for resources while you're in your course, or you could actually be on the Orange Grove website and push a resource into a course if you've got the integration built in. So we've got different legislation occurring that's on the books right now. And one of them addresses the textbook affordability at our institutions where they are required to address open access textbooks as far as the extent to which they could be used in a course. It's encouraging faculty and institutions to review open textbooks and adopt or write them. However, there's nothing mandated in there and there's no funding associated with that. There's also the legislation for Florida Virtual Campus where we are actually required to promote and provide recommendations for institutions on using OER and open textbooks. And then work with our institutions to develop standards for reviewing and approval of open textbooks. Right now, during this fiscal year, there's an online task force that has been set up by the state. And coming out of that will be some recommendations on OER and the statewide repository. So we're looking forward to finding out exactly what those recommendations will be. So that's a key piece. Not only do you need the support from your institutions, but that statewide support from your government I think has been a critical piece. You need leadership, faculty, students, and then statewide approval and support of OER. So we had an open textbook project that ran from 2009 and ended in the fall of 2013. And what we had here was the very last year we revised our model which was for the success of open textbooks on your institutions. It reviewed different ways in which you could approach this. So it's sustainable. Then we also have done two times and we'll be doing it again in our spring. The first one is we have a statewide survey that we administer to our faculty at all our colleges and universities. And it's to get feedback on their perceptions and use of OER and open textbooks. The student one, remember, I wear multiple hats here. So part of this is not just OER, but it's also what is the impact and perceptions of digital textbooks, print textbooks, the impact of the high cost of books on their academic as well as success as well as the ability to continue their career in college. And then we also created an online short primer which covered an intro to Creative Commons and a video on how to create an OER product and then how to license it. Our feedback we got from our faculty was that they were interested in OER. However, they were very confused on how to combine the Creative Commons license if they had multiple resources that they wanted to use as well as their own content. So this two part video addressed that issue. And then we created an interactive OER license generator to help them with that too. And that's freely available online. And some of these survey findings, they were showing that while the students were not, you'll see here on the left, they really were not that aware of open textbooks and open course wear. The high cost of textbooks was impacting them academically and whether or not they were purchasing their books. In fact, 63% had said that at some point in their career they had not bought the textbooks. And 23% had said that they had done this frequently, not bought the textbooks because of the cost. Sharing a textbook, as you know, if you've ever tried to do this or you know any students who have done it, sharing a textbook with a classmate or a classmate would be your success in the course because you basically have a battle over who has the book and especially right before a test that could be problematic. And it was causing them to take fewer courses or dropping courses or to some extent withdraw from the courses. And they were spending $300 to $500 a semester on their textbooks. And so this gave us the support for why there was a large need for more OER products, open textbooks, and open courses. And we saw that this past year where one of our institutions was awarded a three-year grant from the state to develop developmental education mooks. And those resources will be provided in our repository. So there has been some positive impact from that. For the faculty, one of the large pieces that came out of this was that the reward and recognition was critical for a university faculty member. That if they were being expected to write any or share any open textbook, that they needed some sort of reward and recognition for that because of promotion and tenure. That was a very justifiable concern. And while they had heard of open textbooks, eight percent of them, they were not as inclined to write an open textbook. And as you can imagine, trying to tackle a full book can be definitely challenging. And what came out of this was not only was their use in reported writing of open textbooks and their use of OER, it showed us that there was a large interest in breaking out the OER into smaller units, your learning objects. So that they could combine them, modify them, and if they were going to tackle creating them, that it was something that they could more easily take on without a huge investment of their time. This quality and currency issue, you'll see that's part of the, I think, an influence on the legislation where we need to work with our institution in developing guidelines on the approval of and review of open textbooks. The key issues to our faculty were how they, of course, met the course objectives, but how current are they, how accurate are they, and how consistent are they. So quality was a key issue for our institutions. And that was a key issue for our faculty. And so by currency, I'm sorry, that wasn't meant by monetary, that is how recent is the publication and the information. Is this information that's 10 years old or is it very current? Is it within the last year to two years? Yes, those are actual links on the page there for you. And as Eunice said, the contact information for me, that will be provided later. I'll be happy to give any of you links to the resources. And if you're interested in taking part in the surveys, we will be opening it up to any state and any college or university that's interested in taking part in either one of these surveys. So I'll send them to you, the links that are broken. So during the time of the grant, we partnered with the University Press of Florida. And in that partnership, the goal was to develop and market and inform our institutions about open textbooks. And that had a huge positive impact on our institutions. We were able to do lots of webinars, go to campuses, inform the faculty about open textbooks and OER. There were some publications of textbooks. University of Florida published three calculus textbooks. These books by University Press of Florida are called Orange Grove Texts. And these that I have listed here, American Government, the Research-Oriented First-Year Experience, Essential Physiques, and then theatrical world. Those are the most recent ones. So what we're doing right now, we continue to support and promote OER and open textbooks as well as open courses. And our biggest issue right now is working with our institutions on those who are developing MOOCs content or open courses. How can we bring that content into the repository in a manner that's best for the institutions that would like to download the content and modify it? That is one of the things that they mentioned at various meetings is they want to be able to modify it to better meet the needs of their specific students. So we, of course, use the social networks. That's been helpful. We continue our collaborations with the institutions. We provide them PowerPoints when they want it, webinars when they want it. And then within the repository, one of the key pieces is the fact that they can have their own collection. And they can modify the contribution wizard. We have the common course number. If they want to add specific metadata to it, such as learning objectives, we can add that to them. And so Broward and then one of our other colleges, Florida State College of Jacksonville, I apologize, I put that abbreviation in there. I should spell it out for you. Both are working on developing courses using OER. Or if no OER, then at least they're trying to minimize the use of the commercial textbooks. We are also working on statewide licensing, the possibility of statewide licensing of digital textbooks from our publishers. And then as I mentioned previously, the task force on post-secondary online education, that one will be having a report coming out of it which will be addressing various issues dealing with distance learning. And I think that those will be OER in our state and how we can best support it and encourage our faculty and students to utilize it. And I'll save my questions until the end. So Una, I'll pass the baton so our next speaker can move forward. So thank you very much Robin for sharing that today. And now we're onto our last speaker here and we're headed back to the west coast and up north to British Columbia. So Clint LaLonde is the manager of curriculum services and applied research. And he's going to talk to us about the open textbook project up there and all the open projects that BC campus, which is his institution, has been involved in over the years. Clint? Great, thank you. And just before I get to talking about the project, I just want to take a minute to tell you a little bit about BC campus because some of you might not be familiar with our organization or the work that we do. We're a publicly funded service organization funded by the BC Ministry of Advanced Education. We work on a number of collaborative projects across the post-secondary system here in British Columbia. We have three main streams of activities. We do student services and data exchange, collaborative programs and shared services. And there's the stream that I work in, which is curriculum services and applied research. And within that curriculum services stream, we have two main functions within the system. One is to support instructors who want to integrate technology into their teaching practice. And we do that with a number of initiatives like our RETUG and our SCOPE communities. And the second is to support and promote the use of open educational resources and higher education here in British Columbia. And we've been involved with open educational resources since 2003, primarily through the administration of a grant program funded by the province called the Online Program Development Fund. And that fund has funded over 150 collaborative projects across the province since 2003, creating open educational resources to be used across the system. And we host those in our learning object repository solar and made available not only to the BC system but also to the rest of the world. So the open textbook project is really an extension of the work we've been doing with OPDF over the past few years. It began with an announcement from our Minister of Advanced Education at OpenEd in 2012 that was hosted in Vancouver last year. And the goal of our project is to make open textbooks available for students in the top 41st and 2nd year subject areas here in British Columbia. And the reason we're doing this is because we have a problem. We'll actually have two problems. And I'm sure this next set of slides is going to be familiar to most of you here. First, textbooks are expensive for students. Research from the student public interest research group has shown that students spend around $1,200 per year on textbooks. Textbook prices have risen at four times the rate of inflation in recent years. And most troubling of all, 70% of students have not purchased the textbook for a course because of the price. And we see this as a barrier to student success. And while a lot of the emphasis in the media here in the province has been on open textbooks as being a good deal for students, we actually see free as much more than that. And referring back to some of the research that Robin's group did, research from our colleagues at the Florida Virtual Campus suggests, there's a direct relationship between textbook costs and student success. And students are often making choices between what courses they can take based not on their learning goals, but on the economics of textbook costs. And many are also trying to go through courses without all the resources that they need because of those costs. So high textbooks, high textbook costs are a barrier to student success. The second problem is that textbooks are closed resources, meaning they're copyright resources from publishers. And faculty don't have a lot of legal flexibility to customize or contextualize those resources. And as you know, one of the key components to open educational resources is that the faculty or end-user should have the ability to legally adapt those resources. And commercial resources don't often let us easily do that. So the main reason we're doing this project is to address that cost barrier for students to give faculty some more control over their learning resources. And to move this idea of open forward in a really real and meaningful way here in British Columbia. Projects like this really act as a doorway to have deeper conversations with our faculty and our other constituents about open education and the different ways that open is increasingly being used in education these days. So onto our project that we set up this website, open.bccampus.ca. This is kind of the central clearinghouse for the project. So if you want some more information about the project, you can check out this site. The open textbook project here in BC is being rolled out in three phases. And I'll dig into these in just the next few minutes here. The first phase happened over the spring and summer this year. The adaptation phase has just kicked off now. And the third phase is going to be the creation of new open textbooks in the new year. And I should say that we are not looking at creating 40 new textbooks. When we started this project, we had some really high level objectives that have driven the project from the start. And the first thing is we didn't want to recreate resources that were already available and matched our subject areas. We know there's great open textbook projects already out there. And we really wanted to leverage those resources and emphasize the remixability of OER with our faculty. We also know that students want choice with their resources. So we're making these resources available in many different technical formats. I saw in the chat someone was talking about print on demand a little bit earlier. And we have just actually signed an agreement with Simon Fraser University to provide print on demand options. An option for students who are using open textbooks. We also wanted to create a small curated collection that matched the subject areas. Because we know that instructors and faculty sometimes find the world of OER resources overwhelming. So we wanted to create a small curated collection that really matched those subject areas to make it easier to find and evaluate resources. And on that evaluation point, we also knew that having peer reviews of resources was important. So we wanted to make sure that we had some British Columbia based reviews of existing resources. And the final thing is anything new that we create from this project is going to be released with a CC by license to allow it to be reused by other projects. So our goals for phase one this spring started with identifying what those subject areas are that we're talking about. We've been given a number by the Ministry 40. What are they? We also wanted to find at least 10 open textbooks that aligned with those areas to get our faculty engaged. And we wanted to get some reviews on those open textbooks. We also needed to engage in some system outreach, which we did in a number of ways, including we sponsored some adoption workshops across the province. We did some face-to-face and in-person workshops. And we've also been doing a number of presentations to provincial articulation committees. And we also wanted to find an early adopter who could really help us tell that story of adoption to other instructors and other faculty throughout the province. So our top 40 subject area data was based on course registrations across the province. We pulled that from our central data warehouse to compile a list of subject areas. And here's what happened with the rest of phase one. We wanted 10 textbooks, but we actually ended up with 15 textbooks after we did our first scan of what was out there. We also had some suggestions from instructors within the province as to other textbooks that we hadn't considered. So we paid faculty a $250 honorarium to provide reviews for the textbooks. We put together an evaluation rubric put together by my colleague Mary Burgess for the reviews. And in the end, we actually had 44 instructors from 20 institutions across the province providing reviews on the existing open textbooks that we had gathered from the commons. And we posted those reviews alongside each textbook in our collection. So we've also released all the reviews with a Creative Commons license so that other repositories and other referritories can use those reviews to help drive adoption with their local constituents. A lot of books that we have in our collection are books that are already widely available. And we thought that this is one way that we can help others drive adoption of open textbooks. We also found an early adopter in Dr. Takashi Seto, who's a physics instructor at Kwantlin University in Vancouver. And this fall, Dr. Seto is using the OpenStax Physics textbook with his class. And he has, by just adopting that open textbook, has saved his students over $11,000 this fall. And I think it's important to point out that this is one adoption at one institution for one term, and it has saved students $11,000. We're working with 25 institutions across the province. And if we can find one adoption at each institution that can save this kind of money for students, we think we can save students about a quarter of a million dollars each term in textbook costs just with one adoption at every one of the institutions. And thus, it seems like a very doable goal. And it would not take the system very long to recoup the $1 million investment that's been made to this project this year. Phase two of the project has just begun. We released a second call for proposals looking for faculty to adapt the existing open textbooks. And we're doing that in two ways, which I'm going to speak to in just a moment. We've also added 13 more textbooks to the collection. We now have a collection of 28 textbooks. And we're looking for reviews for those new textbooks in this second phase. We continue to do outreach. And this time, this phase, we're really focusing on libraries and bookstores. And we want to bring them into the project as well at the institutions. And we're also looking at technologies for remakes. The first technology that we have is a print-on-demand service that we'll be launching in just a few weeks with Simon Fraser University. But we're continuing to evaluate some remixed technologies. We're looking at a tool called PressBooks, which is a plug-in for the WordPress platform. And we're also looking at the Connections platform. And actually, TAC, the physics instructor I talked about just a few moments ago, they're exploring that tool to modify the OpenStack's physics textbook that he is using. So the two types of adaptations that we're looking for are broken down into these two categories, new and existing. For new, we're asking faculty in the province to bring us an existing open textbook that we might not have discovered or something that they might know of and they want to modify. And we're specifically looking for books in the subject areas, which we haven't found books for yet. So if you happen to know of any open textbooks in these areas, you can pass on those reads. I'd appreciate that. The second type of adaptation that we're looking for is adaptations of the existing textbooks to take a textbook that we had in phase one, which has already been reviewed, and modify it based on the feedback that we received from those reviews about those textbooks. And here you can see a couple of examples of the modification calls that we've put out and the amounts that we're going to pay to subject matter experts to take on those modifications. So that's phase two, and we're just underway, we're just collecting that information now. And the third phase is the phase three of the project, which is the creation phase, which will begin in the new year. And this is when we're going to look at gaps in our collection. Where are there not existing textbooks in the commons? What do we need to create from scratch? And our goal is to try to reduce the number of textbooks that we need to create from scratch because we feel that there's a lot of very good material out there in the commons already that can be remixed, and we want to focus on that material and the remixability piece of open educational resources. And the other thing that we want to do is we want to be able to create at least one exemplar textbook, e-textbook, something that can really show off what a digitally native textbook can be. And if you can see me now, you can see I'm using the word air quotes around the word textbook. But we want to try to break out of the boundaries of some of the limitations inherent in print-based textbooks and see if we can create something that really takes advantage of the digital affordances of digital textbooks. So there's my presentation. Thank you very much. Happy to take any questions, and I'll pass it back to you. Thank you very much, Clint. I'm going to start off by saying, boy, these three presenters not only had amazing information, they were on time to the minute, which allows us just about five minutes for questions. So go ahead and start typing those questions in. I just want to let you know a few things before we move to questions. Our next webinar will be on the 13th of November at noon-specific time, 3 p.m. Eastern, which is the same as today, at your campus and beyond. And we have some great speakers for that as well from Creative Commons and a number of our colleges will be speaking as well. So hope you can make that. And at this time, we are open for questions. You can either type those in the window, in the chat window, I'm sorry, or you can use the talk button. Or if you're on the phone, you can simply speak up and ask those questions. And I see some things going on in the chat window. All right. So Carrie has asked, how many people or staff are involved in each of the major projects? And I'm not sure if Carrie is talking about each state project. I guess we're going to assume that. Jerry, would you like to share? Sure. This is definitely a Wizard of Oz production. There aren't very many people behind the curtain pulling the strings on this stuff. In the CSU, I'm actually just hiring a full-time affordable learning solutions director after running this for three years. And I've used, I probably have a number of part-time consultants for working with my bookstores. And I try to make friends on campus as much as possible. And push money out to them where they can assign a librarian, a faculty development center, a director of academic technology to take local leadership in doing these things. So you don't need a huge staff. Within Merlot, I have two programmers and a technology manager. And then I have two part-time people, one person running the peer review process. I've been both Clint and Robin pointed out the importance of quality assurance. So we have that. And then someone working with our partners there. So it's a pretty slim organization. Yes, it sounds like it for all the work that you do. And Clint, I see you shared in the chat window that there's five people involved at the system office around the OER efforts. And Robin, I'm not sure if you had a chance to answer. Robin, the question was, if you can hear us, because I know Robin lost her phone connection a moment ago. The question was, how many folks are involved in OpenEd at your system-wide office? So at the Florida virtual campus. There is very few. Me. Okay. I do the OER. And then we have staff who provide the support on the technology side for the Orange Grove repository. That's why I'm very excited about the online task force and any recommendations that come out of the task force report. But one of the other areas that we are working on is the librarians at our institutions are very interested in OER. And I encourage everyone to engage with their librarians. They have a wealth of knowledge. And they also serve as copyright expertise. But in our office, it's just myself for OER. Thank you, Robin. So the slimmest staff of all and doing amazing work. And I think what we're seeing to some extent, Carrie, is that as green technology was once something outside of existing corporations, many organizations are bringing open into their existing staff and organizations. And it's becoming part of the mainstream job. Not in all cases, but it is moving more in that direction. So let's see. We had a comment or a question, I think, from Jim. Jim Heeter earlier. And he asked about the different OER organizations getting together and building a database of adoption. And would any of our speakers like to address that? How about I'll just jump in quickly. The California legislators have put a law in effect to create the California open source digital library. And very much on Clint's point of let's not reinvent the wheel, especially when we're talking about OER. And I think with that funding, if we get it to implement this, I think building those partnerships across these organizations that allow us to leverage each other's efforts much more efficiently and effectively, I think will be very important to do. So I see that coming up forward. And I think there are a few ways that we can do this through federated search. But ultimately, it's going to be for the adoption side is how is an institution really supporting the adoption through its policies, through its faculty development, and looking at the learning outcomes. Again, that's an institutional outcome that we have to share and work with too as well. Thank you, Jerry. We are having some more discussions here in the chat window. Kathy has asked Robin about the Florida legislature getting behind the OER movement. Yeah. Robin, do you want to? Sure. I'll speak to that. Originally for the repository, there was state funding for its development. And then the buyout of the license, which is very key. The legislature has continued to be supported. They do understand the needs of OER. I think one of the bigger changes recently is that there's more understanding at the institution leadership level and faculty level and students on the importance of OER and MOOCs. And then, of course, the economy. And for funding to occur in our state, and I assume in many others, it also has to be driven by our faculty and our institutions. They truly need to see the need. So to get your funding and support, you have to have faculty buy-in because you're doing a service for the students and for faculty, bottom line. If the faculty and students don't want to use it, it doesn't matter what you have. Really good point, Robin. Clint, do you want to address the funding situation in British Columbia? Well, I wasn't privy to how the decision came about to release the funding. But I think it's based on, I mean, open is in the air right now in education. You don't even have to be paying attention to the movement and all of the other open talk that's been happening. And something caught the ear of the people in government who have been supporting open education and resources in this problem, like I said, with OPDF funding since 2003. So I think the timing just happened to be right that the funding was released and targeted. I also happen to think not to be too crass on it, but we were coming into an election year for our government. And I think they were perhaps looking for something to help with their platform. So I think we might have benefited from that happening. And the timing, like I said, just happened to be right for the legislators to go, let's target this funding for this particular purpose. I mean, the justification for it, when you look at the numbers for it and how much students are spending, it's not a hard sell to make the case to legislators that it's costing students a lot of money and it's impacting their learning by not having access to all of these resources. All right. Well, thank you for that, Clint, as well. Timing is important in many parts of life, including education. So we're going to stay online for a few more minutes. And so please keep typing in those questions or speak up if you're on the phone or on a microphone. But I really want to thank our presenters today for the amazing job they did. Jerry Hanley, Robin Donaldson, and Clint Lalon, let's give them all a big hand. And we'll be here for a few more minutes if we can answer any other questions. This webinar is being recorded and should be available to you within a week. We will Twitter that out, but it's also will be on our website. Hi, my name is Chris Bergeron from Link Systems, and I have a question if that's okay. Yeah, go ahead, Chris. Fantastic. Thank you. I just wanted to say, first of all, thanks for the presentation. All three speakers were fantastic. And I have just a general question about the open textbook community and the acceptance of ancillary material. So, you know, linking an algorithmic question test bank to an open textbook or linking online tutoring to an open textbook just from the market standpoint whether or not that's generally acceptable and whether or not attaching a price point to that is acceptable because I understand that open in the textbook arena means that the access for the student is free. But I know that, for example, if you want the print version, that might have a cost associated with it. So, I'm just curious about those ancillary materials and the supplemental academic support. Okay. Thank you, Chris. Would one of my speakers like to address that? I'm happy to start. And Robin and Clint jump into here is one is if you notice the CSU initiative isn't called open textbooks or free textbooks. It's called affordable learning solutions. And the reason for that is that there are multiple services that have to be brought to bear to help the learning of the student occur and including test banks, tutoring, adaptive technologies, social networking tools, all these things that can help the student learn. I think we want to put, you know, wrap them in kind of a bundle to make it convenient for people to have access and then provide the professional development so they learn how to use it. So, and it's also, again, I didn't say free, it's affordable. And I think, you know, like Clint's slide where it says $1,200 a year. I mean, we're seeing some, you know, that level of expenditure. I mean, cutting just that in half can really make education affordable for those students. So I think any way that we can reduce the total cost and increase the student's success is a good thing. All right. Thanks very much, Jerry. Anyone else like to, Robin or Clint, would you like to add to that? This is Robin. And I'm really sorry, somebody knocked on my door, right? When you asked that question, so I missed it. Could you go, Robin, the question, please? Certainly. The question from Chris at Link Systems was, is the open textbook community open to the use of, I'm assuming you meant low-cost ancillary materials, Chris, but you didn't say that specifically, the addition of affordable ancillary materials such as test banks, technology to support student learning? Definitely. I think that it is truly low-cost and no-cost. However, creating an open textbook, there are huge costs associated with that. Now, in the repository during the, during our grant, we did work with WebAssign to develop low-cost interactive quizzing and support for the students similar to my NAPLAP. That's not free, but it's low-cost. And so that's, you know, definitely there. And another part of, at least for our repository, is realizing that it's not everything is going to be free, but you can work at statewide licensing or licensing with different vendors to get low-cost for them. And so, low-cost, you have to work with the commercial. Yeah, and that's Clint here. I'll just echo what's been said by my colleagues here that, you know, the differentiation for us is that those core materials that are needed for students to succeed are free. And anything that we create out of this project that we create ourselves, or our faculty create, or our partners create, will be free resources. That said, partnering with low-cost ancillary materials that are not core to the experience, is not something that's out of the realm for our project. All right. Well, thank you, Clint. So once again, thank you to our wonderful presenters. We really appreciate your time today. And so glad that all of you were able to join us and participate in this discussion. Hope to see you back here on November 13th. And have a great afternoon. Thank you. And thank you, everybody. Thank you.