 All right. Welcome, everyone. Let's go ahead and get started. My name is Stephanie Green, and I'm so glad you could join us today. I am actually in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am with Maricopa Community Colleges at Phoenix College. I'm faculty there, and I also work with our district office in open Maricopa. So, I'm so excited to have this presentation for you all today, and I want to go ahead and introduce who we have aboard, so you know who we are. First, I'd like to introduce Liz. Hi, everyone. Yeah, Liz, Liz Yada, manager of CCCOIR communities. I'm so glad you could join us today. All right. And then Lori, Lori Beth. And I'm trying to click off. There we go. I'm Lori Beth, and I'm happy you're here today. I'm VP of the professional development for CCCOIR. Looking forward to presentation. All right. And just a couple of reminders. So, today we have, in addition to this wonderful session, we have plans, right? We're going to, I'm sorry, our agenda, our presentation in addition to our presentation that we have planned today. If you have time to stay on afterwards, we're going to have a continue the conversation with members of our EDI committee where you can ask specific questions that you may have for them. And this is the first time we're doing something like this, so we're very excited. And then, again, we'll have our three speakers today. We're going to hold all Q&A until the very end to ensure that they have enough time to present their material. And then you're welcome to please ask questions in the chat and we'll pull them aside and we will answer them. The speakers will answer them as they can, or we will, if it needs more conversation, they will answer that at the end of their, at the end of all three of the presentations. Okay. We have some other upcoming events. I'm sorry, let me back up here. CCOER. We have 104 members over 36 states. And we welcome you to join us and become a member if you're not already a member. Next slide please, Liz. And then go ahead. Yeah, so I just wanted to let everyone know we know many of you couldn't join us at the Open Education Global Conference that was last month in Edmonton, Alberta. And just wanted to let you know that if you go to OEG Connect or Open Education Global's YouTube channel, all of the keynotes, as well as some performances and some of the presentations are archived there. They're really wonderful, especially the keynotes. There was an Indigenous focus and most of the keynotes were from local Indigenous people, so we really hope that you can check that out. And I'll put the links in the chat and submit. Thank you so much, Liz. And then our next slide. All right. Now, to get to introduce the speakers, I'm just going to go in order. I've got Debbie Baker, the OER Coordinator at Maricopa Community Colleges. She'll be speaking first, followed by Ben Loy, Librarian at Phoenix College, and Heather Bruce Sattrum, Professor of English Language and Academic Purposes at Montgomery College. All right. And as I mentioned, I'm your moderator for today. And so we're going to start with Debbie first. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Stephanie. Let me share my screen real quickly. Okay. Can you see that? Okay. All right. So thank you so much for that introduction. My name is Debbie Baker. I am the OER coordinator for the Maricopa Community Colleges. I'm also an instructional designer. And as an instructional designer, I would say I've been an educator my entire adult life. I started my education career as a high school teacher and was very grateful to spend the last 10 years working in higher ed. So I'm going to talk a little bit today about how universal design for learning applies and is relevant to open education. So we're going to start off by looking at who are your students, what are their identities, challenges, responsibilities, strengths. Designing your course with open educational resources provides an opportunity to design with the whole student in mind. Open educational practices provide an opportunity to design for and with your students, allowing you to contextualize in advance and them to contribute in the moment. Would it surprise you to know that a recent study showed 69% of community college students work for pay, and some of those are working two jobs. This is from a Center for Community College Student Engagement 2020 report, the intersection of work and learning and I'll drop a link in the chat. When I get done talking to that. Open educational resources can be designed to integrate and honor students life and work experience. Students are more than one thing, right, we all are. Here is a brief list of possible student identities take a look at that and think about what other identities might be present in your classroom, and please add those to the chat. So why does this matter. Well, research shows us that students who feel connected to their instructors their advisors their peers their college community tend to be more engaged in that course. The student success factors framework from the RP group. Certainly it provides some some information about that and that's another resource I'll drop a link in the chat in a minute and one starting point for connection is with identity. Okay, so faculty can leverage the adaptability of open educational resources to contextualize course content so that students can explore and experience various identities as they're learning. In addition to engagement and course materials, it's important that to remember that students like their faculty embody all of these identities and more a universal design for learning approach. Removes learning barriers for all students into the learning design from day one and openly licensed resources are one tool that provide opportunities for universal design. So looking at all of these identities form who your students are, and universal design is one way that allows you to design up front for all of these identities. Let's take a look at universal design. So the universal design for learning framework has its roots in the universal design approach to architecture and urban planning. Think of sidewalk curb cuts and automatic door openers. Often abbreviated to UDL. This is viewed as a blueprint for accommodating students with disabilities. However, a universal design for learning approach removes barriers and optimizes access to learning for all students. Instead of reactively providing accommodations for individual students, applying a UDL approach to the design of course learning materials, activities, assignments and assessments helps to level the learning playing field from day one. So the universal design for learning framework is based on research on how learning happens in the brain. This is important to remember because UDL emphasizes three brain networks that comprise the vast majority of the human brain and play a central role in learning. And so I'm not going to get too technical about these different brain networks, but know that all these networks work together. But the cast, which is the organization that has created this framework focuses on this simplified model of the brain to highlight what is important and relevant for the learning brain and try to understand and plan for learner variability. Okay, so UDL is frequently, when we think of universal design for learning, we think about providing captions on videos, alternative text on images, color contrast, and it includes those things but it goes so far well beyond those things. At a very high level, this is about providing multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation and multiple means of action and expression. So I want to take a couple minutes to talk about these best practices in these areas. So here is a screenshot of the entire framework. You will notice that this spans three different columns and three different rows. Each box on the guidelines includes checkpoints which provide specifics and strategies. And then you access the framework through the cast website, which is another resource I'll drop in the chat in a second. Each of these bullet statements and cell labels are links to additional information. So I would encourage you to go through the website to find more information on each of these pieces, as well as the research that these are based upon. I'm going to look at, do a slightly deeper dive into each of the multiple means areas. So multiple means of engagement. Here is a closer look at a couple of the checkpoints for multiple means of engagement. And while connections could certainly be made across all other engagement checkpoints, these particular checkpoints apply when using open educational practices. When you're designing for open pedagogy and implementing an open pedagogy learning experience, if you're doing those things you are also designing for and ultimately implementing a universal design for learning approach by providing abundant choice, flexibility and customization, as well as meaningful, authentic connections to users context. So when you are optimizing for individual choice and autonomy. Think about the fact that OERs expand user options and control or can expand use student options and control students and educators can select resources that match their skills needs and interests. OER can promote self direction by allowing students to work through OER at their own pace and revisit sections as needed. So when you're designing for relevance value and authenticity, think about the fact that OER is often interactive using real world examples cases and activities which heightens the value and students can also contextualize OER with local examples and perspectives to boost relevance. When you look at multiple means of representation. You can see that learners vary in their facility with different forms of representation, both linguistic and non linguistic. A picture image that carries meaning for some learners may carry very different meanings for learners from different cultural or familial backgrounds. And as a result, inequalities arise when information is presented to all learners through a single form of representation. So think about creatively leveraging multimedia multiple entry points guided processing and explicitly linking representation to provide flexible options through OER. Think about including graphic organizers with concept maps and flow charts. Think about providing section outlines and objectives and advance organizers for scaffolding. Think about providing multiple entry points and pathways to the information. Think about illustrating through multiple media options, right? Presenting ideas through text, images, audio, video, etc. embedded within the open education. And then, very quickly, looking at multiple means of action and expression. This provides learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know. So think about building in graduated support, right? Providing OER can be used to provide scaffolded information. Adding additional worked examples, providing rubrics, providing step-by-step instructions, providing real-world scenarios, case and problem-based activities. And learners are encouraged to create products, applying unique perspectives. Think about providing additional goal settings, study skills, time management, other types of information embedded within your content to support student learning. So in summary, UDL principles allow OERs to reach learners more effectively, promote equity and access, and create flexible materials that can be tailored to different educational contexts, which both support student learning and enhances the usefulness and lifetime value of OERs. So next up, Ben is going to talk about promoting student success with open pedagogy. And folks, as he's pulling up, if you have questions for Debbie, go ahead and put some in the chat and then we can pull those up at the end and she can already answer some that she can get back to in the chat. All right, Ben, to you. Okay, can everyone see my screen okay and hear me okay? We sure can. Okay. So thank you for including me on this. I think this is a great panel. Some of what I'll talk about briefly. I think you'll see dovetails pretty nicely with what Debbie was going over with UDL. So I wanted to talk a little bit about open pedagogy and what we might call renewable assignments or open assignments and how they can lead to increased levels of engagement for students, inclusivity, and empower students. And I think all of those three things can really foretell higher levels of success, right, and higher levels of learning. So as we go through, I'll talk a little bit about some of my thinking on some of these, how you might accomplish them. But as much as possible, I want to avoid reading what's on the slide. So I'll try to pepper in some examples of assignments or activities that I'm aware of that faculty have tried to accomplish this. So I think most of you are probably familiar by now with the concept of open education and open pedagogy, but I did include these two kind of quotes or definitions because they get right to the heart of what I'm thinking here in terms of reducing barriers, right, empowering learners in ways that they take on roles that they don't always get to do in the classroom. So they are creators of information, rather than just consumers, right, they're engaged in a much different way. So they have to take some responsibility and ownership of their own learning in ways that they don't necessarily have to when you give them a midterm and a final or, you know, basic paper requirements to write and then it gets turned in and that's the end of it. So the first thing I want to talk about is how learners can be more engaged through open assignments and open pedagogy. So for example, with motivation, you might allow students to openly create an assignment, right. Discuss with the students what kind of a thing do we want to do to engage with learning to demonstrate learning. You can have students design rubrics those kinds of things and the faculty who have tried this that I've talked to are really impressed right and it's not like the students are looking for an easy way out they really dive into it and they try to figure out what would be worth my time right. What do I want to do and what do I want to create through the vehicle of this class and how would we judge if something is is of high quality, if we demonstrated certain skills. So that can be, I think highly effective. And I've even talked to faculty who start a one and ask the students to design the syllabus with them and figure out what do we really want to talk about in this history class right what do we want to cover within the parameters of the scope of the class. I think application is a really big one open assignments and open pedagogy gives students an opportunity to apply what they're learning and really creative and unique ways. So for example that this is more of a dream of mine because in a former life I taught college history. I would love to take a history or we are textbook and have students right starting on day one say okay here's our textbook. Right, the less perfect it is for the class the better, because we're going to critique this textbook we're going to add to it we're going to edit it we're going to add primary sources where it's lacking we're going to include narratives that it left out right we're going to correct the record where we think they made a mistake. This is the real role of a historian right and students who go through this, whatever they're lacking in terms of full coverage of that survey history class. And this application of what it means to be a historian how you do research right how you use different narratives on the same event in history to tell a certain story. And then finally kind of looking at deep learning I had a couple projects where I looked at, you know, different aspects of deep learning we we had a session here in Maricopa talking about threshold concepts and the speaker talked about the difference between learning and mimicking right and one major aspect of that was the ability to apply to something new, and this is I think what open assignments can really allow faculty and students to do. So for example you may have students create the instructional material or, or, you know, study guides or something that they feel it's not just helpful for them to learn the material, but they can share with their peers and probably share to future semesters of students taking that class. And so they might come up with videos or infographics or websites or whatever it might be, and this is asking them to take whatever they got from textbook or a lecture or whoever it is that you learn in the classroom and apply it to something new and they're taking on that role of a teacher then right there no longer necessarily just a student so to speak, they're responsible for teaching this concept and there's there's all kinds of mental processes that they then have to go through to understand well enough to explain it in their own words in their own outlet right and share it out. I also gave gave a presentation where I tried to argue that open pedagogy is a high impact practice. I hope nobody gets mad at me for trying to add one more high impact practice, but in the scholarship I was looking at trying to define what a high impasse practice is or how do you get to that point right I think open pedagogy at least has a potential to check a lot of those boxes right it really is right we talked about authentic assignments where it's learner centered they are driving their learning process, they're making connections to many different contexts and sometimes disciplines right the student is in the role of the creator at this point, and then more than anything I like the idea that students then kind of have to recontextualize right in other words they might take certain skills right or or content from the course and apply it in a different way right maybe synthesizing different arguments on the topic or evaluating the needs of their community to then carry through a certain project that they might have. So we are and open pedagogy can really lead to higher levels of inclusion for students, and I'll just draw on my own experience I taught a IFS information studies course and many library faculty here in Maricopa teach this course and oftentimes will use like a Wikipedia editing assignment right where students are in charge of choosing a topic that they think is underrepresented or misrepresented or maybe not represented all on Wikipedia, and they're in charge of doing the research and deciding which sources are really important to site within their work and then they write something that then gets edited and fact checked by other people at Wikipedia but it's a it's kind of a long process they go through and in the end they are lending their voices their perspectives right and I think whatever you feel about Wikipedia at its best it can open up kind of a dialogue in a platform for different types of evidence, different perspectives and different topics to receive kind of like that that full lens right and that global perspective. And so I found that the students really got engaged with it they took it very seriously, because they knew other people were looking at their work not just their professor. It seemed to be very effective in terms of engaging them with both the content and the skills we wanted them to demonstrate to pull off the assignment. I think open assignments renewable assignments really empower learners as well. So a great example here with our dental faculty they're, they're getting more and more involved with we are and one faculty member, create a renewable assignment with their hurt students were creating infographics, right and they were they were like visually stunning and and simple to understand but they covered different topics in dental care and so the idea was they could add this to the portfolio right they might talk about this in their CV or interview process when they go out for a job, but also they're sharing it out for the community. And so you can imagine how over just the course of a few semesters right you have these wonderful infographics that they can share that people outside of the institution might use that the students are using to show. They can move forward with their careers and community engagement, how they can interact and use the knowledge they got from the classroom in this way. And then of course, as we all know open practices tend to accumulate both in terms of others build off your work, and you build off your own right so by helping students to kind of dip their toe and things like editing Wikipedia, or designing an infographic or creating an instructional video and posting it to YouTube. That really empowers them to continue some of those practices right whether it's on their own time in a different class, or as they leave the institution and move into their careers. So just a few things to kind of wrap up when you're implementing renewable assignments or open pedagogy into the classroom. I think one kind of frame thing is it doesn't have to be content focus so you don't necessarily have to stay right closely married to the outline of the course, you might engage students with certain concepts or skills that you want them to apply, but it's perfectly fine and sometimes you have to let them go outside of the content area of that fee. So, you know, for like information studies we want them to think about maybe misinformation or disinformation how do you evaluate sources right they can go well beyond whatever content we're talking about in those weeks to explore those skills in different ways. When you do work with students keep in mind that different ways of thinking and learning communicating and also learning technology that they might need to do some of these assignments. Right, they might be extra learning outcomes so just allow that time and space right to work with students whether it's one on one or within the guys of the classroom, so that they feel equipped because sometimes it can be intimidating when your instructor says hey great news you get to do whatever you want just make sure right you're highly engaged. You know students can sometimes freak out so you want to talk to them about, well what does it mean to critically think how do we synthesize things right how might you evaluate okay now we have these skills right but sometimes I can take a little extra work in the classroom. Now let's go out and do what we want to do. And then finally be prepared to give up some control and I know this is really really hard, but a really important open pedagogy, especially if you want higher levels of engagement, more inclusivity right higher empowerment for the students, you need to give up some control in your classroom right but encourage them to pick up the baton right encourage the students to be in charge of their learning to drive the process more right and sometimes the results can be really satisfying and really wonderful in the end. So, I'm going to wrap it up and I'm going to pass it over to Heather who has a fantastic example of exactly what I was trying to communicate here. Thank you so much, Ben for that lovely introduction thanks to the organizers today and my co panelists Liz Debbie Stephanie Lori Beth Ben it's so great to be here I was just reading through the chat with all the different locations that everyone zooming in from and it's really an honor to be here today. I'm going to share my screen with you. See if I can do that. The first thing I want to share with you before I get into my PowerPoint is so I teach at Montgomery College in Montgomery County, Maryland. We have several campuses. I teach at the Tacoma Park Silver Spring Campus which is just outside the DC. We also have campuses in Germantown and Rockville and we have a virtual campus as well and the Dean of our virtual campus Dr Shinta Hernandez is here today Hello Dr Hernandez. If you have questions about our virtual campus can direct them later, but I wanted to point out to you an amazing resource and I put this in the list of resources that I believe will be shared with all the participants later. And I'll put the link in the chat to but my several of my colleagues at Montgomery College have created these amazing open educational resources and press books. And when you have time later you can peruse them putting it in the chat right now. This is through our open initiative and Montgomery College is committed to the use of OER for students. And we are the leading community college in Maryland for use of OER and various Z degrees which I think is speaks to this value of equity and inclusion that is really important to us at Montgomery College. I'm going to now minimize this screen and put my PowerPoint. Can people see my PowerPoint. Some thumbs up. Okay, good. Yes. Thank you. So let me tell you a little bit about an OER that I developed. It is called history in the making documenting stories of immigrant and refugee students at Montgomery College. I teach in the ELAP program English language for academic purposes. And all of our students are non native speakers of English. We serve international students, immigrants and refugees. And last spring I had the opportunity to take a sabbatical. I am so grateful that I had that chance because I was able to conduct an oral history project where I got to learn the stories of many of the immigrants and refugees that are part of very important part of our college community. And then document those into and create this OER that is now available for lots of people to learn these really important stories. So let me share this with you. First I'll give you a little background about the project and then I'll show you the site itself and give you the link and then explain to you how it might be used in your classroom or for your institution. So in spring of last year, I took a sabbatical and my goals were to listen to and record stories of a current and former MC students from diverse backgrounds through oral history interviews. A second goal was to give immigrant and refugee students the chance to tell their stories so that people in the MC community, Montgomery County and Montgomery College community and beyond could have a better understanding of their experiences and hopefully more empathy for immigrant and refugee communities. And then my third goal was to create an OER that could be used by faculty, staff and students at MC and beyond. So, over the course of that semester I conducted interviews of 17 current and former MC students. The interview view is represent 16 countries, Afghanistan, Cameron China, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, the Philippines, etc. 15 of the students were enrolled in our program ELAP at one point in their educational journey before they went on to credit level classes and or graduating or transferring. And the participants have these amazing powerful stories of resilience and persistence and it's truly inspiring. So participants include a former female professional soccer player from Afghanistan who played for the Afghan national team, women's team, a filmmaker, a researcher for the Department of Defense, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins applied physics lab, an artist who recently graduated from Cornell and is now at RISD, a Montgomery County public school teacher, several nurses, IT specialists, political activists, a journalist and a family medicine doctor who now practices medicine in Los Angeles. So, I was able to ask them questions about their experience at Montgomery College and to get some insight into the obstacles that they faced and how they were able to overcome a lot of difficulties and manage to graduate, transfer and reach their academic and career goals. So in addition to the interviews themselves, which I recorded, the site includes their bios links to resources links to maps you can see where they're from their photographs that they shared of their family and their hometowns and questions for discussion and reflection that could be used in a classroom setting. So what I wanted to know. And I think it's important to add that I started teaching at Montgomery College in 2005. And I teach mainly writing so if you can imagine the number of essays over that time period many, many, many essays, and there were so many times when I was reading essays and I would say I wish I had more time to find out about this students life and stories, and the sabbatical gave you the chance to sit down and really listen and learn a lot so I had questions like, what was your life like in your country of origin. What push or pull factors led you to leave your country of origin. What was your like life like when you first arrived in Montgomery County and how did you adapt and what challenges did you face. And how did you overcome those challenges, how did you sustain hope, when things seemed hopeless. And how did Montgomery College help you to achieve your goals, what advice do you have for other mc students who are newly arrived, have newly arrived to our county. And one question that I asked that was very interesting is about the concept of home, where is home for you now when you think of home. What do you think about that was one of the most interesting questions I think that are most interesting answers that I got from the audience that gave me a lot of insight into their experiences. A little bit of background about oral history. It's a collaborative creation between a narrator and an interview interviewer. It's an effective method for gathering information about the past from a personal perspective. And it's a technique for generating and preserving original historically interesting information primary source material from personal recollections through planned recorded interviews. And this method of interviewing is used to preserve voices, memories and perspectives of people in history that's a quote from the Smithsonian Institution Archives and I use some of their resources to help guide me as I did these interviews. So the site itself is currently being used as part of a training program for new faculty at our college to help them better understand the experiences or students and the challenges they face. I know that some faculty in English are now using these as examples of personal narratives related to teaching college success skills resilience metacognitive thinking. It could also be used in disciplines such as sociology history women's and gender studies courses as examples of how to conduct oral history interviews. And they could also be used as, you know, for a tool for writing or class discussion. I know that our history department is also interested in using some of these materials and interviews for courses on the Latino experience. The Asian American experience international relations and other courses. I think in the interest of time, I don't have a chance to go through all of this but you can later look at some of these slides if you want to learn more about some of the guidelines and doing oral history. If that interests you if you're interested in doing a similar project of your institution. I think that I will just mention briefly that it's really important to do research and prepare in advance. And of course I, you had to get, you know, approval from the institutional review board, I had to complete human research protection foundational training to make sure I was following ethical guidelines. And I had to create, you know, a very clearly worded written release and conditions of use form to make sure that the participants understood exactly how the information would be used. It was really important to me to make sure that I, you know, establish trust with all of the students that I was interviewing. I'm going to skip through some of these just for the interest of time and you can look at them more later if you're interested in learning about guidelines for doing oral history. I want to, before I show you the site itself, share a quote with you that I shared with my students when I gave up presentation recently for celebration of the global humanities at the college. This is a quote from James Baldwin and I often think of this quote when I'm thinking about storytelling. So let me read it to you. The quote is, you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. And I think that quote to be very inspiring and I think that at the time when he was writing this books probably were like the main way of telling stories and now when I think about how we have so many other ways to tell stories through, for example, digital storytelling which I use in my classroom or through oral history projects and I think that quote, if you substituted stories for books. It's equally relevant now and I think it really speaks to me about how the power of learning the stories of our students and what they experienced before they came to us and to learn more about their goals and to share those stories with others can be a really inspiring and transformative type of experience. So let me show you the site itself here is the the link to it and I it could also be you can find it through the Montgomery College website as well. Let me pull it up on my screen. So here's the site itself. And I think I have three minutes and 43 seconds. So let me hear a little bit about the project and gives you some background and then if you are interested in questions for discussion and reflection at this interest you that can be a helpful way to incorporate it into your classroom. This link here shows the all the different interviews with the students. So for example, this is an interview with Dave LeGron a student from Haiti. If you click here to read more I can show you this is one example. Here is the link to the recording which was originally done in zoom and then posted on YouTube. And there are captions and transcripts for all of the interviews as well that that helps a lot. If you're using it in the classroom, a bio of each student students also shared photos and artwork. This student is an artist and you can see that his artwork is just, I mean, unbelievably beautiful and powerful. You could go through that he's now a student at RISD Rhode Island School of Design. And then for each student. There I have links to like encyclopedia Britannica to learn more about the history of their countries. Links to maps transcripts of the interviews. If the students wanted to share their contact information I included it some of them did want to do that. Some did not. And then if they mentioned materials or resources during the interview that could be beneficial to others I included links to that as well. So for example, Titus Kaffar is an artist who talks a lot about public art and representation and diversity in art. And we talked about that during the interview so I included a link there. So if you're using in the classroom, it's easy to find then resources that are referred to in the interviews. He mentioned a book that was very important to him. This is a New York Times series about Haiti and colonialism in Haiti. So we mentioned that in the interview so for each student you can click on those links and then get more information. So if you go up here to the students themselves you can see. I'll just give you a very quick overview here but where they're from. Moncy originally from Iran and she and her husband were political dissidents they had to start their life all over here she's now a teacher in Montgomery County public schools. Some students chose to use pseudonyms and keep their cameras off to protect their family back in their home country so there's two students with that situation, including the student from China. We have a student from El Salvador, Dr. Stephanie Baker is a originally from the US and Guatemala she grew up in both cultures and she's now practicing family medicine in Los Angeles she has she talks about her struggles with learning differences, and how it was very challenging for her to get through med school and how she did it it's a very inspiring story to students who have learning differences. Here's a student who was born in a refugee camp during a war, and went on then to live in Sweden and then came to Montgomery County. He's a filmmaker now. Here's a student who recently came from Ukraine. Here's the soccer player from Afghanistan I'll briefly show you some of her really cool pictures here. She then became a soccer coach. And now she works for soccer without borders in California really great nonprofit organization. And I don't think I have exactly 10 seconds left. Here's a student who grew up in a kibbutz in Israel. This is a relevant story now. This is a student who started off in our lowest level of our English language program and he, he reached out to me a few months ago to say I just defended my doctoral dissertation I wanted you to know. So inspiring. He's doing really well as a student who came from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines, Syria, and Venezuela, the student was one of my students I did not know at the time that she was actually homeless when she was my student her story is very powerful. And I think it helps me and I hope it helps other faculty to realize some of the incredible obstacles our students face and they continue to pursue their goals. It's just incredibly inspiring. I am out of time but I hope that was an okay brief interview overview of the project and I'm happy to answer questions about it as well. Thank you so much. All right, thank you Heather. Yeah, so we'll move on into the questions. Does anyone have any since Heather was just presenting does anyone have specific questions for her that you would like to ask. You may unmute yourself and ask if you would like. Yes, go ahead. Okay. And again my name is Natalia Soka. I'm from Liberia, West Africa. Thank you for joining us today. Okay. Thank you for your presentation is quite great and it's actually overwhelming and one thing I learned from the presentation is it's inclusive and is clear that how instructors should get to students to get involved. Like the speaker before you say you are going to bring the picture of it. So my question has to do with how are these presentation. going to be used to be able to help other students that are in the process of learning. Of course I know that it was set as a motivating factor so that it can be able to tell the students, but what process will be used to be able to explain them better for them to be also be motivated to take those challenges and step forward. Thank you so much, Nathaniel for your question. I think that's a great question. I think there are a variety of ways that students could make use of this. We recently had we have an annual celebration at the College of the global humanities, and I was able to introduce this resource to a larger group of students and just the ones in my program. And I think that it has been very useful to students who were born in the United States and grew up here to get a better understanding of some of their peers at the college and their experiences so I think it could be used as a tool to better understand some of the experiences that their classmates have gone through. I think that when I think about so many things that are happening in the news like really devastating stories, sometimes in violence and war and displacement. We have experts at our college who personally experienced some of these things and I think that that is such an incredible treasure for us to have and it's really important for us to recognize their accomplishments but also to learn from each other. One of the students I interviewed, she fled with her children during the bombing of Aleppo. So instead of or maybe in addition to reading a textbook account of that or an account in a news source, talking to her or listening to her to give you would give a different perspective and more personal like what is it like to be a mother fleeing Aleppo with your children like that can shed light on a historical event in a way that a textbook cannot. So I think that's one way I hope that that's answered your question. I think I think there's a variety ways it could be used but that's one that comes to my mind right now. I see another question in the chat, which I'm happy to respond to. I hope I'm keeping up with the thank you so much for all the comments. One of the questions from Cindy says, are you going to continue adding students stories to the website. That is my goal. There are more students that I want to interview. And I'm hoping to resume interviewing process. I hope in the near future, of course right now I'm like grading 10,000 papers so priorities but that that is a goal to continue to add to the project and I hope that I can do that thank you for that question. Thank you and then Heather there was one other one. I don't know that you answered this. Someone wanted to hear more about how students in this project learned about open licenses and the support they receive in choosing or declining to add an open license for their stories. That's a great question. And I had to do a lot of learning myself. We have. There's a wonderful woman at the college who used to work as a librarian Christine Crofton and now she works for our professional development arm of the college and she helped me a lot when I was trying to figure out like how do I set this up so that I can protect the rights of the employees. And I don't want someone to profit off of their story. So, I had to think about, you know, the exact designation that I needed to use to make sure that no one would, you know, benefit from this financially. So, if I can share my screen briefly with you after talking with her. So this is how it's licensed non commercial share like, and then people can click here to read the license. It was really important to me when I met with the students. Before we had the actual interview to, to make sure that I clearly explained how we would use it that it would be available this information would be open to anyone. And to explain to them what their rights were. So I had to be really careful about how I wrote in very clear language, the liability waiver and release form. And as I mentioned, you know, some students chose to have their cameras off and to use a pseudonym to protect family members back in their home countries when they were telling their story because some of the students are were political dissidents. I mean, there's a risk and sharing your story like this and I feel like they were very courageous to share their stories with me. I feel like it was really an honor. Thank you, Heather. Does anyone else have any questions. Welcome to open up your mic for any of the speakers. Yeah. Go ahead. Thank you for the first speaker for Debbie. Yeah, for Debbie. Debbie presentation was more like scientific and talking about the brain session. And we're talking about universal process of learning. And I'm quite happy and happy to have the opportunity. And to hear of these things, by school from primary days up to now and in college. And all of the process is spoken about. All like, more like strange, you know, the processes that we go through in the learning process in Africa. And they are also diversified when it comes to countries in Africa as well. Before talking about a universal process. And the universal process that we follow in our country is like, we have, we have books, we have classroom. We never go to school by 745 or either class or session starts from this point to this point. These are the universal as the boy comes to the actual presentation. And they are not applicable to many of African countries. Now my question is that having the opportunity to be here tonight from my end, and saying that it is universal. So I want to, I want to ask Debbie. For research, go to class. Only the, maybe Western countries or African countries to include no gaps, you know, to be able because we are talking about global open source learning. So I want to know what the extent of research went to to see whether where we can close our gaps. This is a great question. So this is research that is based on how learning happens in the brain. So thinking about learning as changes to the brain, learning, being time places and situations where learning sticks and stays is not what we would sometimes call sticky learning or lifelong learning. But this is ground this work, this framework, this is not my framework. This is an established framework that has been around for quite a while, that is grounded in that brain based research. I'm going to share one of the links that I did put in the chat, but I'm going to find it again is questions about that alignment to the brain. And so there's a collection of resources here that point to the research that was used to derive those that framework and all the different checkpoints. We look at it when we read the framework we look at that first level is access to learning. So oftentimes with universal with a UDL approach, for example, in education we talk a lot about providing captions on videos and how captions on videos help students who are hard of hearing, but they also help students for whom English is their second language. Or they might help by translating and providing the content of the video in the students first language. So that's one layer of a unit, a UDL or a universal design for learning approach. My information, what I shared really was trying to get past that that initial access to information layer of learning to look at all the different ways that like optimizing choice and optimizing learner autonomy is also an inclusive approach and is also providing a removing barriers to learning for more students above and beyond an access level of learning. So, I will find the resource that lists the research behind each piece, but I'm going to share my screen very quickly to show you these guidelines online. Let's see share screen. Okay, so when you go to the website for the UDL guidelines, you can drill in up here at the top to each of those areas that I talked about multiple means. So for example, if I looked at multiple means for action and expression, I can look at expression and communication, and I can drill into the checkpoints for those I think that this was one of the ones I talked about. And then within that, you can see some more specific strategies that the universal design for learning recommends. And then over here to the side is the research that was used to generate that particular checkpoint and strategies. So, I would if you want to take a closer look at the research behind why these suggestions are recommended and why they're considered relevant for affecting change in the brain. I would recommend coming back into the website for the guidelines. So here's the framework that I had a screenshot of challenging to get that down into one screen. But then you can also you can go through the top up here but you can also drill in each of these is a hyperlink that will take you to find more information about the checkpoint. So this particular one is about goals and objectives. So it's more than simply providing, you know, writing the goals and objectives on the whiteboard but also, like, what do you do with that and then off to the side here is all the research behind why that's important. Great. Thank you helpful. Thank you so much for sharing that information. All right, we are out of time and Heather I wanted to point out you had one more question in the chat. If you would please take a look at that and answer that question first we're going to transition now to the end of the presentation. And these are upcoming webinars for December 13 measuring impact with open education course markets with Beatrice. And you can register with the link that's provided on the slide I want to thank all of our presenters today for the wonderful contributions and discussion. We appreciate your time and being with us today. Also, I want to remind you that there's also other links here for the community emails and our EDI blog post, and also most importantly, as we come forward, we're going to have a survey. Please take the survey. This is so important because this is how we decide what topics that you want to hear. So when you fill this out we actually do read it and we will take what you want to hear and provide webinars for you guys so please take a few moments to fill that out as that as we're transitioning to the rest of the continuing conversation which is our very new feature that we're launching today. So we'll have about 30 minutes with Wade and Andrea from our EDI committee, and it's going to be an unrecorded conversation and we're going to get started in just a few minutes. And if you still have questions for the speakers, then you may continue to put that in the chat as they're still monitoring that. And we can get those questions answered but thank you so much for attending this webinar today. We appreciate your time and hope you enjoyed the information.