 All right. Good morning or good afternoon depending on where you're located. And welcome to Open Education Week. This is Una Daley from the Community College Consortium for OER. And we're so happy that you joined us today for our webinar on OER degrees emerging in Maryland and Texas. And I'm just very pleased to have four wonderful speakers with us this morning who are part of the ATG OER degree program. We have folks from Austin Community College and also from Montgomery College in Maryland who are going to tell you about the real experience of developing OER degrees over the last nine months. And in just a moment we'll get a chance to meet them. I did want to mention that we're using the GoToWebinar platform and we're relatively new to it. So sometimes things don't work quite the way they did in the past. We ask all of our attendees to use the questions area of the control panel to ask questions and make comments there. And we'll do our best to answer those and move those questions into the chat area so that you can also see them as they come in. So we do want to hear your questions and comments so please do share those. And our agenda today we're going to meet our presenters here in just a moment and have our usual brief overview of the Community College Consortium for OER. And then we're going to get right on to the presentations from Montgomery College and Austin Community College. Hi, Unia. I'm sorry to interrupt. It's Gay Lynn. We lost the slides. You lost the slides. Okay. We're back. Thank you for letting me know. Okay. How's that? There we go. They're back. Okay, perfect. Thank you for letting me know. All right. So first up, I want to introduce Dr. Gay Lynn, who is the Associate Vice President of Academic Programs at Austin Community College. She's also the lead for the OER degree at Austin Community College and also for the Texas Consortium, which is four different colleges, slash districts in Texas that are working on general studies OER degree. Dr. Gay Lynn, would you like to say a few words before we get started? Thanks, Unia. My name is Gay Lynn and Scott is the last name that confuses people sometimes. I have been at ACC since I started as an adjunct faculty member in the late 80s. And I was eventually hired as a full-time faculty member. Political science is my home discipline. I've been a department chair. I've been a department head. We had different organizational structures. And then I spent the last 11 years as Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences. And in December became the Associate Vice President for Academic Programs. That's a very quick overview of my history at ACC. Great. Thank you so much, Gay Lynn. And next I'd like to introduce Kari Gitz, who is the head librarian at Austin Community College and also has been running a lot of the training faculty development work around the OER degree. Would you like to say a few words, Kari? Sure. Hello, everyone. My name is Kari Gitz and I'm one of the head librarians at Austin Community College. We have 11 campuses and 11 libraries and I'm currently overseeing two campus libraries, Rio Grande and Highland Campus. And I've been at ACC for about six years. I've been in a variety of institutions over my career as a librarian. And I'm very excited to be part of the OER grant team at ACC. And very excited that the libraries are involved in this initiative. Thank you, Kari. And yeah, we're very excited that the libraries are involved in this, too. They're such an important part of bringing OER degrees to fruition. All right. Next up I'd like to introduce Dr. Michael Nils from Montgomery College. He is the VP of e-learning, innovation, and TT excellence. And he, along with Samantha Venerusu, are the co-leaders of the OER degree at Montgomery College. Michael? Or Mike? Thank you. Good afternoon. I, as Tuna said, I'm Mike Mills at Montgomery College. I've been here for a little over eight years. I came from a school in Delaware. And I'm excited about helping lead our OER efforts on a college-wide level at Montgomery College. We've got some wonderful innovative faculty and it's exciting to work with them. So I'm excited to present our ideas and looking forward to any feedback that you can have that will help us down the road. Great. Thank you, Mike. And last but not least, I want to introduce Samantha Venerusu, who is English faculty. She's also the chair of the General Studies and she's the co-lead for the OER degree at Montgomery College. Samantha? Hi. I'm really happy to be here today. I'm looking forward to hearing the conversation and to hear what kind of questions you guys have. I've been at Montgomery College for about 14 years. I was previously at a college in Texas in the Lone Star District. And as I've said clearly, I'm an English faculty as well as the chair of the General Studies program. I'm also the former chair of the English department. Great. Great. Thank you, Samantha. Fun to see that you have a connection with Texas as well. So I just wanted to mention the Community College Consortium for OER. Here's our mission. We are celebrating 10 years. We started back in 2007. So this is really exciting. And over the years, you know, we're all about promoting the use of open education to enhance teaching and learning. OER degrees is really a very promising emerging trend in this area. And we're so happy to be the community of practice around this. We have many resources. In addition to these monthly webinars that we do, we have a website that you can go to and find out a lot of information about OER in general and also OER degrees. We have case studies from these pioneers. And we have a community email list. So if you're not on that community email list and you'd like to get on that, go to our website under Get Involved and please join us. We have over 250 colleges that are members in 21 states and provinces. Many more of you join us on a regular basis. We do truly treasure our members, which help us create a sustainable open education project here. And as you can see, we're around the country. And if you're not a member, we'd love to have you join us. So you can also do that from our website as well. All right. Just a quick definition here for those of you who may not be currently involved in OER degrees. So an OER degree is a complete pathway where faculty have redesigned existing courses to use OER rather than publisher textbooks. So for students, of course, it's a huge cost savings. Estimates are as high as 25%. It may depend on the major and what your tuition fee is at your college. But very big savings there. From a faculty perspective, it can be an opportunity to redesign your course, customize it to your students' needs and your learning outcomes. From an institutional perspective, it can be quite a major transformation as well where you have many of your departments. Really all of the departments and divisions that touch a student as they go through their degree program are potentially stakeholders in this. So faculty are a huge piece of it, of course. But your library, your instructional designers, your student advisors who are directing students to these courses, of course, your administration that's supporting it, and so many others on campus who are involved in delivery. So I'm going to say no more about that and let my speakers tell you their story and how they have transformed things. And let's see. Mike, are you up first? I am. I am. Thank you. All right. I will turn this over to Mike, and I'm going to try and give Mike, yes, keyboard and mouse. I think you should have that now, Mike, so that you can move the slides. Super. Thank you. Good afternoon again. At Montgomery, we're focusing our OER efforts on serving students. We want to make sure that our students are getting not only the best possible education that they can get, but at the cost savings that they deserve. And so as Samantha and I talked about our work and the project that we're involved in, I think those two areas should come to the forefront. A little bit about Montgomery College. We are three campuses located in the Washington DC suburb of Montgomery County. We have about 25,000 students across our three campuses, 25,000 credit students, 60,000 students total, and when you include non-credit. And there on the slide, you can see the big breakdown of part-time females, all the demographics that you have access to. And as we're looking at these numbers, one of the things that I think started jumping out at us is, how can we do a better job of retaining students that we're losing? We're really focused on completion. We know that we're losing students because of textbook costs. They're taking their Pell money and using it for living expenses instead of buying textbooks. So that was one of the initiatives that we wanted to focus on as we entered this work. There we go. So a little bit about the project description. I'll let Samantha talk about the general studies degree. But our overarching infrastructure is an initiative that we're calling MC Open. And it's focused on the goals of improving access, success, and affordability for our students. So while we're working through the general studies that we are degree, we also have within MC Open a number of other Z course or Z degree initiatives that we're engaged in. And the goal is to involve as many faculty as possible, reach out to our students to engage them in this process, not just for the general studies degree, but these other Z degrees as well. And while we're talking about access, success, and affordability for our students, MC Open is also focused on the collaboration between faculty members amongst faculty members within disciplines and then between the discipline. So we're hoping to engage faculty in sharing not only with their own colleagues here at Montgomery College, but becoming part of that larger OER community. And that's been one of our challenges that we'll get into shortly, but we just want to make sure that our faculty are aware that they're part of a larger movement that's not just isolated at Montgomery College. Samantha, you want to talk a little bit about the general studies degree? Sure. Thank you. So when Mike approached me about doing this grant related to general studies, we had been doing some other OER work. We started with a fellowship specifically around redesigning some courses for the new general studies program and infusing OERs in it. The general studies program serves about 9,000 students at the college, between 9 and 13, depending on how you count each year. It's a really large, I mean almost half of our students end up in our program, it's the largest program at the college, but it is a typical general studies program in that it is designed to help students transfer into other institutions. Transfer in Maryland is not particularly straightforward and every institution tends to have its own particular transfer requirements. So the general studies program provides a lot of flexibility, but it also wasn't providing a lot of focus or cohesion. So part of our redesign was to create more focus in the program. And doing this OER degree or Z degree, it was designed to model pathways through for particular transfer options that students have. So we focused in on psychology and English because they represented two separate pathways and they represented two of the higher interest areas. We also wanted to hit our, we wanted to reach our populations that were often underserved throughout the nation. Our school is really focused on how do we be radically inclusive, how do we ensure that everybody has an opportunity, and developing this degree seems like a really non-questionable way to be radically inclusive because it provides so much opportunities for students. I noticed there was a quick question about the difference between the degrees and OER degrees. And I just, we're using the term somewhat interchangeably right now, but the grant requires us to focus specifically on materials that are openly licensed, whereas in some Z courses it may just be that they're free and openly accessible, but they may not be licensed openly. Our degree as the requirements for the grant focuses on all the materials must be openly licensed. Michael, I can go back with more project description. Well, and just to piggyback on that within MC Open, the courses are identified as Z courses, not necessarily OER courses. As Samantha said, we have a number of faculty who are teaching with free materials, no textbooks, but they're not open education resources as defined by the Creative Commons license. So if we talk a little bit about our motivation for this project, we've touched on the first two items. So I want to jump down to the third and fourth bullet points if I could. The focus on various learning styles, we are all aware that our students come to us with different learning intentionalities. Some enjoy reading a text, some would prefer to hear it, some would prefer to see it in a video. And I think as we progress through this project and our other Z efforts, we're seeing that faculty are able to pull in materials that touch on these various learning styles and it becomes a true focus on universal design. And so it isn't just capturing one individual learning style, it's working its way across the spectrum. As a result of that, what we're seeing, and I'll share some data near the end of the presentation, we're looking for increased student engagement with the material. Not only with the material, we're looking for increased student engagement within our Blackboard LMS, between students and faculty member and then amongst the students themselves as they're engaged in discussion questions and helping create some of this content by finding links that the faculty can then incorporate into their class. And our preliminary research shows that the engagement is certainly there and I'll share that as we go through. So as with any project, there are challenges and one of our biggest challenges that I think everybody faces is the finding quality open content. And I'm going to talk about that as well as finding that some of the content, the licensing is very complicated. So I can speak from my own experience because I'm also designing my own course to teach in the fall in introduction to literature. And so finding really good open content around instructional pieces for literature is actually fairly difficult. You can find stuff that it's not necessarily licensed appropriately to be able to use or adapt or to really tailor to the class that I want to create. It's also difficult in terms of finding openly licensed texts, teaching literature, finding texts that are appropriate to the audience that we have because if I'm limited to public domain, then I have a fairly narrow range that I can introduce students to. And those are not bad things. They're just things that you have to sort of adapt to. I think in some of the other areas, depending on the specificity of the course, faculty are finding difficulty finding content that they're really comfortable with. And so I think people are finding that they're developing more than they necessarily expected. And that's challenging because there's not a lot of time to do that when you're also teaching and doing the other things that we do as school-time faculty or part-time faculty. We've also run into the problem where licensing on materials isn't entirely clear. It's either inaccurate or it's incomplete or it's just complicated for folks. So for instance, we have a faculty member who adopted a text and on the outside of the text, it was a fully mature text and he was going to add some resources to it as well, but he really liked the structure of the text. On the outside of the text, it said CC by without a problem. But when you dig into the text, the majority of the content was actually linked out to all rights reserved materials and that actually created a problem in terms of how open the course actually was. So that kind of thing has been difficult for people. We've had other issues where faculty don't really understand, you know, at what point do they have to adapt the license to say that this is now adapted? Like what's the level of change that you make where you re-license it? There's been, you know, questions about where do you put in those? Like at what point do you add in the new licensing? If you've adapted material, do you just do it at the beginning? How much description? What's the format for doing those kinds of adaptations? So those are two of the big struggles that we've been dealing with and we've been working through and finding solutions as we go. Sustainability is another one that we're looking down the road toward. We're going to have 30 courses up by next spring and that's great, but all the content's going to need to be maintained. We're also concerned from the standpoint of our focus is a lot on... A lot of times when we hear about it, the easy door that people step through is, oh, we're just trying to give students affordability options. We're really focused on the cost. And from a sustainability standpoint, unless the focus also shifts over to pedagogy and to how having open content goes toward changing the way you teach and the way you engage students, we're going to run into problems, I think, with sustainability because the emphasis is going to be in the wrong place and publishers are coming to us already and offering us more affordable solutions, which is good on one side, but also at some point maintaining those materials, we have to figure that part out. We have... We're a large school. We have over 500 full-time faculty. I don't even know what the numbers are for the part-time faculty, probably 600 or 800 part-time faculty on top of that. And so having faculty collaborate across three campuses and really agree on materials and really try to create some courses that they can all draw from and everybody replicating their own individual course requires time and it requires opportunities for people to get together. And that's on the timeframe that we have for this grant. That made that a little bit challenging. And then finally, part of what we were trying to do with this is model some academic mapping and model some pathways and trying to create optimal schedules to invite the cohort population, the target population in, has been really, really challenging because we're working across so many different disciplines and so many different campuses. And so that's been another challenge that we've kind of been faced with. Mike, did you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I think you covered it. Wonderful. Okay, so as part of our project implementation, we put together a cross-functional team that includes deans and chairs and faculty members and librarian and instructional designers, our director of faculty development, the registrar. We've had schedulers come in. We have some marketing people that come in. We have representatives from one of the target groups that we're looking at, which is our ACEs population, which is a program that we're doing at the college. I'm missing, oh, our transfer articulation specialist. We tried to, oh, and our counselors. So we are counseling faculty, our faculty, so they're part of our faculty group. We've been trying to be as inclusive as possible and to have as many different perspectives and voices there. And that's been really helpful because it's allowed us to spread the word a little bit but also quickly adjust some of the things. And some of the successes that we've had have come from having those people in our room. The cross-functional team, we might monthly, smaller groups, smaller meetings sometimes take place if there's particularly target issues that we're trying to look at. We focus on the academic concerns, the student concerns, research efforts, and then our infrastructure needs. Our elite folks, that's our office of e-learning and excellence in teaching. They work on, they focus on professional development offerings and we run open labs. They run, you know, sessions where they help people find content. They run sessions where they help people think about licensing and how do you do that licensing and how to just redesign their courses and think about that. They're both formal workshop offerings as well as open labs. And then the faculty champions that are part of this group also offer open office hours for faculty who are working on the project to just come and sit and talk through the kinds of things that they're struggling with. One of the things that we wanted to really do was create a community at the college. Mike mentioned this earlier. There's, you know, there is resistance among some faculty about this move. And so having a collaborative community where you can reach out and say, hey, I'm struggling with this. What do you think? I'm getting a lot of pushback. You have somebody that you can go in and that's your same peer group that you can rely on. And so you're not feeling quite so isolated. And I think that that's been a really important piece of this as well. The other thing that we've had to do is really have regular meetings and regular sort of going out and taking a road show out and telling, you know, hitting all of our governance groups. Mike meets, has met regularly with the student council. We've met, he's done some work with the administrators council. We've done some stuff together at the administrators retreats and things like that. And then we've also, you know, when I'm at the chairs group, we do regular presentations with the chairs group. We, you know, go to the various governance constituencies and talk to them as well. And so that's been another really big effort that we've tried to stay focused on to raise that awareness. Anything you want to add to that, Mike? Yes, just, just briefly, one of our biggest wins and one of our easiest wins in all of this was a surprise. I think when we were able to, without hardly any resistance, get the Z designation within our student information system. And I know that's been a challenge for a number of schools. We've heard that as a challenge from different schools, but we were able to, as a result of this cross functional team, work with our registrar to get that Z designation within banner. And so when students go to register for classes, they can filter and look for those courses that are identified as Z. And so for us, that was a big win. It was an early win and it helped propel us to the success that I think we're now having. So some of the results that we've seen are, you know, obviously a greater awareness of how we are a lot of conversations about what's the difference between open and free. You know, what are the limitations? I think we have a new policy that's coming out about copyright usage that's a lot clearer for faculty to understand and for staff to understand in terms of how they use materials. And so I think it's engendered a lot of conversation about what OER is, why we might go that direction. And really, I think it's starting to edge into that question about how we teach and why we teach the way that we're teaching the other pieces that we've really been able to scale infrastructure. And Mike just mentioned the, you know, really early and relatively not hard win of getting to be able to designate courses of the courses and, you know, how many sections just immediately popped up. And again, the not necessarily OER and we're not making a distinction because on our from our perspective for students, it doesn't matter really much to them whether the content is something from the library that they can that only they're allowed to access or whether it's something that is coming from an external source that is openly licensed. So that scaling of infrastructure I think working with the bookstore, we were able to really scale that relatively quickly. And I do think that a lot of that had to do with that cross functional team, and having people be able to go out and and work with their constituents these pretty quickly. So those are I think two of our really early results. Anecdotally, I've heard from a number of faculty who are trying out out their materials this semester so they're they haven't finished the licensing process or things like that but they're already teaching with their materials. I've heard overwhelmingly positive results that the students are happy with the materials the faculty are more engaged with their ability to make changes into really shape and adapt the courses and not really be restrained by a textbook. And it really speaks a lot of what I've heard from the faculty who are currently doing this speaks toward the ideas of open pedagogy and really moving toward more intentionally toward the emphasis on open pedagogy and open pedagogy and pedagogy pedagogical practices. So Mike. This semester this this was our first semester, having the Z designation in RSIS so that students could register for the courses that they wanted based on one Z. We have about 3400. Enrollments in about 200 sections across the college, which you know we're thrilled with we we weren't quite sure what the expectation was going to be. So instead of identifying these courses as we realized we've already had all along faculty and disciplines who were not requiring their students to have a textbook. And so this provided an infrastructure for them to identify that for students and the students responded and with the 3400 enrollments. And what seems to now be the acceptable average cost of a textbook of $100 that just this semester alone we're saving students about $340,000. And the goal is for them into the hope is that they take that money reinvested into their education, which speeds up the time to completion. The other benefit that we're seeing is increased student engagement within our blackboard system and this chart is a little difficult to see, but you can see the it compares interactions within ethnicities for all courses. All Z courses and then the final two boxes are all online courses compared to all online Z courses and across all demographics all ethnicities, the engagement within blackboard is up. On one average, so we know that students are going into the system and whether it's engaging in the content or engaging in discussion groups, engaging in emails to the faculty member. There's a lot more interaction taking place within blackboard as a result of these Z courses. We're in the process now of breaking that data down by discipline. So I had some data yesterday run for me on English and the numbers are are really, really encourage. Now the one thing that's missing from this is final column, which focuses on student success. So our hope is that we see not only increased engagement, but comparable or increased student success in the Z courses. What we don't want to see is more engagement and less success. So we're excited by these numbers. There will be follow up articles that we we provide based on the the grades and the student success measures that are are going to follow at the end of this semester. And here's some links that talk a little bit about a little bit more information about Montgomery College and you can you can check those out. As you do please. And if you have any questions, Samantha and I will be glad to answer them in this format or, you know, through through email. And there's there's our emails addresses. Okay. Thank you so much, Samantha and my family. Very comfortable with the work that we're doing. Appreciate you share some challenges about. And at this time, we're going to go ahead and go directly to our next session because we're just running a few minutes. If you have additional questions, please enter those in. Somebody. Excuse me. So we're going to go directly to our next panelist, but we'll answer the questions for the chapter. All right. Hey, Lynn, would you like the keyboard? I think Kerry's going to drive for me and I will just talk. Okay. We'll do that. All right. Kerry, I think you've got it now. Let me just move you. All right. And now we're going to have Dr. Gay Lynn Scott and Kerry gets from Austin Community College. Thanks again. I'll very quickly run through the first couple of slides and tell you a little bit about ACC. We are a one a single college district. So we are accredited as a single college, but we are spread across 11 campuses. Our campuses run in size from maybe 2000 to 10,000 students. So they vary in terms of their capacity. In addition to our 11 campuses, we have eight early college high schools that are still fairly new. So probably 700 students there and we have, I just double checked. We have 5500 dual credit students in our dual credit programs. Across those campuses and programs, you'll see our district size on the next slide. Or you might not. I'm not sure it just went black. But we cover six counties, approximately 7000 square miles. We tell people that our service area is about the size of New Jersey. About 40,000 credit students this semester, or you could also say we run about 60,000, 76,000 students each year. Our student population is 80% part time. It's 32% Hispanic 55% female and the average age of our students is 25. ACC opened its doors in the fall of 73. So we are sort of a middle aged college. And then one of the things we always have to brag on is the accelerator. The accelerator is a 32,000 square foot high tech learning lab. You see a picture of it there. 604 computer stations, not just for, we sort of envisioned it as primarily helping students in math, developmental and credit math. But it's also where you can get academic coaching, you can get supplemental instruction, you can get tutoring. We run courses in there from our success course to computer programming, to motion graphics, to a theater course, to a geographic information systems course. So we're very proud of our accelerator and so we always have to brag on it. But I'll get to the point of what we're talking about today, which is open educational resources. As Uda mentioned earlier, I'm the director of the Texas consortium that received a grant from Achieving the Dream to develop an OER degree pathway. The consortium includes El Paso Community College, Alamo Colleges, one district but five separately accredited colleges, and San Jacinto College as well as ACC. So in my role as director of this consortium, as you can see, the first and most important thing I do is communicate. I communicate with Achieving the Dream, I spread the word to the leads at each of the colleges. We engage across those colleges in the work that we're doing. I mean, the vision that we put together for our consortium is that across these colleges we would share in the development of courses. I believe we put in the grant that we would develop 26 courses. I think we're up to 31 because we're so excited in the work that we're doing. So in essence, we came up with a model where some courses would be developed by one college and then faculty in the other colleges would review those courses. The review isn't just providing feedback. I don't understand this or I have a question about that or have you thought about this, but the review involves actually teaching with those develop materials in a pilot semester. So across the colleges in the consortium, development and review is occurring over the next week. We started last fall. We launched our first courses this spring. We're continuing to develop. And so I expect we'll launch most of the rest of the courses this coming fall, maybe one or two next spring. And just to give you a little feel for what we've done here and I may be jumping ahead a little bit, but we have run some pilot courses this semester. We're offering 11 OER courses that were developed under the grant, 29 course sections, and we have about 700 students enrolled here at ACC. So it's been a very fast-paced grant, which is another reason why you see that my primary responsibility is to ensure that we really communicate effectively. You'll also see on the screen there it talks about recruitment because we have this model of shared development and shared review and engagement across those consortial colleges. Part of my job in the summer was just to recruit faculty to either engage in course adaptation or development or to engage in course review. And then I have to, of course, track all of that. Did you actually complete the review? Get faculty assigned to the sections and how's it going? And are you continuing to offer feedback to the course developer? All of those sorts of things, just practical, logistical issues. And then as you might imagine, it's a grant, so I have the responsibility for making sure we spend the money appropriately and wisely. And that's a very quick view of some of the key elements in my work. And then I'm going to let Carrie talk about what she's doing in support of this work. So the librarians have been involved, sorry, I'm getting a little feedback. The librarians have been involved kind of since the grant proposal stage. We had input on what was going forward. And so as soon as the grant came forward and we were part of ACC was part of it as a Texas consortium, one of the first things that I did was kind of deploy out the live guide and make it available for faculty to consult to sort of get a little bit more information. About OER and what it is, where to find information, a little bit of understanding about Creative Commons licensing. So from the beginning, we've sort of played the role of the curator and the educator to put information out there to make it useful for faculty. A couple of the other bigger roles that the library and the librarians have played is both researcher and collaborator. We have put together a small team of librarians across our 11 campus libraries to sort of serve as the main lead OER librarian. So this team of librarians has worked together with me to sort of educate ourselves about OER so that we can work one on one with faculty. We've participated in faculty training with instructional designers. And so we've sort of done a two tiered approach where we've gone in and taught faculty development sessions on everything from finding OER and then also looking at Creative Commons licensing, how to create the attributions, how to evaluate, but then also turning it over to the instructional designers to help them work through the Lumen Learning Platform and also the integration into Blackboard. So it's very much been a team collaborative effort and then also involving the faculty. The librarians have been involved with one on one consultations with faculty that are reviewing and developing the courses. So whether they're stuck on a certain point with some of the licensing questions or they need help finding additional OER sources or even just understanding some of the licensing information that's out there. We've been invited to attend various department meetings. Some of them have been areas outside of the grant, but a couple of them have been in areas like philosophy and developmental writing to go and talk to the faculty about OER and the progress of the grant and also to point them in the direction of resources that they might find useful. And then some of us have spent a great deal of time assisting faculty with kind of going through those course maps and helping them identify and vet the information so that it does meet the requirements of the grant. So depending on the subject area, I know Samantha talked earlier about her struggles with finding English literature resources. And so I spent a great deal of time with one of the English faculty members earlier this year, you know, going through the public domain content and verifying some of the licensing on other resources that were found. So we've played a big role in just assisting faculty because as we've all found out in this process, it is a lot of work, even if you're just adopting a course to sort of align this new material. So it's very much been a collaborative effort and we sort of supported it in a variety of ways. I'll start with some of the surprises or the unexpected things that have come up. One of the first things that we realized was just sort of a overall broader understanding from both the librarians perspective and also the faculty perspective on OER as a whole. And so just, you know, the improved conversations and the more frequent faculty training that we've been able to provide in the one-on-one sessions, you know, just that broader understanding of the creative comments licensing, what OER is and what it incorporates, has increased and improved the creation and adoption and definitely the collaboration across the college and the consortium as well. I put this example in here about faculty realizing they might have already been using OER because in some of the conversations that we've had with faculty as they're developing and reviewing the courses, they've said they've made comments to the effect that they have incorporated freely available resources in their course content over the years. But now they have a broader understanding of what it means to find material that meets that OER requirement, but also to find it and be able to adopt it and adapt it. So they've been using course material that's freely available, but now they have a broader understanding of how to implement it, where to go and find it, and the different ways that they can incorporate it into their course material. And then another unexpected benefit, or perhaps it's just a greater benefit than we expected, this model that we created across four community college districts in Texas from El Paso over to Houston and in between, it really relies on faculty across those institutions collaborating, and that has just been a wonderful opportunity for a history faculty member or the whole history department here at ACC, you know, to look to see what's going on with the San Jacinto history folks and the kinds of materials that they've developed. And that collaboration at the discipline level with faculty has really been a lovely, lovely benefit of our approach to this Achieving the Dream grant. And then we'll go to the flip side, which is the challenges that we have encountered here in this work. And let me just say the first challenge is both good and difficult. We're having a little trouble with the slides, but as in this grant we here at ACC agreed to be a research partner. We are engaged in a quasi experimental design research study to try and really dig into not just the question of course level student outcomes, but if we're trying to design a degree pathway, what are the outcomes on that forward movement of students? Do OER courses help students maybe take nine hours instead of six hours because they're not spending money on course textbooks? Do OER courses because students have the material available on the first day and they have the benefits of open pedagogy? Does that mean they keep moving forward? Are persistence and retention rates better? Are completion rates better? So we're a research partner looking at some of those questions. And what we've done is designate three of our campuses as treatment campuses and three of our campuses as control campuses. We couldn't really do a historical control group because we've made so many changes. We're doing pathways work and a lot of other things here. So I find myself in the middle of this work supporting and cheering and encouraging OER sections at the three treatment campuses, but then trying to tamp down interest in offering OER sections at the control campuses because we don't want students contaminated. We want this to be a really good research study. And that's an ethical challenge, shall we say, as well as just a logistical challenge. You have to ask faculty if they can teach at another campus if they want to use OER until the research study is concluded. And you see other challenges there on the screen persuading the reluctant. That would be a challenge with a lot of initiatives. And so I'm probably preaching to the choir on that statement. The logistical issues, the communication issues. How do we help students understand what OER mean? What that means in the course schedule? If they see and know how do we help students understand the broader elements of this work? And I know we're sort of watching the clock, so I'll move on. A lot of OER course materials are good in terms of quality and rigor, but they don't always come with the ancillaries that faculty members want. And so that's a challenge that we need to address. How do we ensure that the development of these courses includes test banks and slides and assignment suggestions and all of those sorts of things? Quality and rigor, that's an ongoing question. Some of these courses have been adapted so quickly that faculty who are reviewing them have some concerns about some elements and think that more work needs to be done to ensure appropriate quality and rigor. And of course we're getting a lot of phone calls and emails from proprietary textbook publishers and vendors who want to work with us on all of this. And we have to navigate that. What does that mean when they say they have OER courses? Well, it's a much more restrictive license and probably includes a cost. And then one other thing real quickly at ACC, textbooks are adopted at the department level. So our psychology department meets across the 11 campuses and those faculty decide the approved textbook list. So part of the obligation of a course reviewer under this grant is that if they find the OER material or the OER textbook to be appropriate and viable, then they take it to their department and ask that it be adopted as an approved textbook on the list. And so that helps kind of spread the word and help more faculty understand what OER is all about and what we're doing in that way. And then I think I'm throwing it back to Carrie. So when we talk about what's sort of coming next and the next couple of semesters in the life of the grant and beyond, looking at how librarians can support faculty further and work together with instructional designers, there are lots of great models out there from other colleges that have OER initiatives. So sort of taking a page from their book. But looking at, you know, we have 11 campuses close to 30 faculty librarians, including the head librarians, each with their own subject area. So how can we get the librarians in those subject areas to work with the faculty one-on-one or collaboratively in those disciplines so that the OER work can be kind of shared across the area? So that's one thing that we're thinking of and looking at further. And then I think we mentioned at the outset that I'm in a new role as Associate Vice President. And so directing this grant is my second job. And at some point we really need faculty leads on this, right? Not just the instructional or the librarian faculty, but instructional faculty who can take over some of this work and work with their colleagues in supporting what we're trying to do and moving it forward. So we haven't quite figured out if it's going to be a faculty lead or some other sort of position, but that's something on the horizon. And then of course we need to figure out our policy around all of this work. We've saved that conversation until we got a little further into it, but we do need to figure out what our rules and policies might be in terms of development and adoption of OER. And we also need to figure out Montgomery College has already gotten it done, but we need to figure out how we're going to tag OER course sessions sections in our registration system. We need to figure out the sustainability question. Are we going to maybe just embed a tech fee into the student fees that they pay or a course materials fee because as has already been mentioned, sustainability has to be part of the design of this work. The repository of the OER materials, how they're adopted and adapted and revised and how you ensure that licenses are still correct. And if you want more faculty to develop more courses, you need to find money for release time or stipends for that work. We are in addition to being a research partner in this grant, we're also a cost research partner. And we're going to try and look at not only the costs that are obvious, that is the time and efforts of the faculty members and the librarians and the instructional designers, but the less obvious costs. We're looking at cost savings to students, but costs to the institution, the kind of early costs to really get this going that would presumably decline as you get your repository of OER courses. So a lot going on on the horizon. Carrie and I have been engaged in this work since last summer. And we were at a conference last week, we're asked to come up with a headline for what we're doing here in Texas. And we decided the best headline was Texas two step quick, quick, slow. And that's kind of the nature of this work. You can move forward and then you have to sort of stop and then you get some more forward movement. But we appreciate the opportunity to get to tell you all about what we're doing and to answer questions if you have some. And you'll see our contact information on the next slide. And I think that's it from the Austin Community College crew. All right. Thank you very much, Galen and Carrie for sharing that story. It's lots of benefits and challenges and thank you for sharing that. At a very honest level of what you're facing. And I'm looking at the questions right now. And I haven't received any more questions. I'm going to ask my backup moderator, Mary Lou forward. Are you seeing any questions in there, Mary Lou? So this is our time to answer some questions while we're waiting for those to come in. I just wanted to mention a few things this week that are related to open ed. Of course, this is Open Education Week. And thank you once again for coming to our webinar this morning and hearing our amazing presenters. If you're attending the open ed conference in October, submissions for presentations are due this Friday. So do get those in if you want to present. And I know many of you are doing really exciting projects. So we really encourage that. In April, April 12, which is two weeks from today, we will be having a webinar on the OER degree research. So this is early research on the OER degrees. We will have FRI International, which is working with the Achieve the Dream grantees. They'll talk about their methodology. And in particular, Galen just mentioned the cost analysis. This is something that hasn't been done on a very wide scale. Tidewater did do a little bit of research on this, the cost to the institution of developing OER degrees. They looked more at what was the benefit, potential revenue benefit. So some of you may have seen Tidewater's research article on the potential benefit of tuition retention. But this is a much wider cost analysis of what it costs the institution to produce these OER degrees. And I don't know, Galen, would you like to elaborate a little bit on what that cost analysis is? It is a lot of work. That's what it is. They are looking at personnel costs. For instance, Kerry is, and I am, and anybody who does this OER work, we're submitting time and effort sheets every month. They're trying to get us to sort of document hours spent on particular tasks, right? They are looking at, they're trying to get information from our bookstore. It's not our internal bookstore or proprietary bookstore. Obviously, the time and effort that faculty members are putting into this or instructional designers, they're trying to understand our tuition and fee structure and get some baselines. So it's a multi-pronged effort to really dig into the institutional commitment that goes into creating an OER degree. Thank you, Galen. And yes, this will be, yeah, Mike, would you like to? This is my, I would. We're also a cost partner with Austin in that study, and I would echo the same challenges that Galen has expressed. One of the challenges we find is identifying the amount of time we're spending on this particular project because, as Galen said, we have other jobs as well. So we go in and out of roles. So trying to figure out how much time you're spending on this one particular project is not an easy task. And I think our faculty are also struggling with that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that, Mike. We had another question come in from Brenda Teal at Prince George Community College. And she would like someone to explain the difference between the courses and OER courses. And I don't know, Carrie or Samantha, would you like to grab that one? Sure. Sure. This is Samantha. I can do that. So for us, a Z-Course would be a course that is free to the students. This is for our definition of a Z-Course. There's no instruction cost for instructional materials. They might have to buy goggles or they might have to buy, you know, basic supplies for the course, notebook paper, whatever. But there's no cost for instructional text materials. That may be achieved through using library resources or other resources that are sort of protected and used by the institution or paid for by the institution. But those things may not all be openly licensed. So when we talk about openly licensed or OER courses or OER course materials, those are things that have been licensed to be able to be adapted or used openly by faculty anywhere. So the difference between Z and OER has to do with the licensing. Thank you. All right. I'm looking for other questions. And at this point, I think that was our last question. And we are just hitting up on the hour. So once again, I want to say thank you so much to our presenters today for sharing the work that they're doing, the challenging work that they're doing, but also the benefits that they're seeing at their colleges. And developing these OER degrees. And we're hoping to hear back from them over the next year about their further progress. Any final comments from my panelists before we end the webinar? No, just thank you for the opportunity. We appreciate it. Same as for Montgomery. All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. And thanks once again to our amazing presenters. And I hope that you all have a great rest of your week and go out there and celebrate Open Education Week. There's a number of other events happening later today and Thursday and Friday. And hope to see you on April 12th. Bye-bye.