 Hi, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Mindy Bolen, the VP of Services at ISCME, and I'm joined by my colleague, Michelle Brennan, the Product Manager for OER Commons Tools and Platforms. ISCME stands for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, and we were founded in 2002 as a nonprofit focused on conducting applied social science research around how teachers perform continuous improvement on curriculum over time. Our founder, Lisa Petruides, was there in the early global meetings focused on developing and defining it. ISCME continues to conduct grant-funded research in the field of open education, and about seven or eight years ago, we started shifting from being purely grant and philanthropically funded to a services model. This shift really contributes to our sustainability and longevity, helping us to continue supporting open education worldwide. Our hubs and microsites are one part of that OER ecosystem, and it's made more vibrant through the community development, professional learning, and all of the other different services that we offer. With support from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, we launched OER Commons in 2007. It started as a spreadsheet of OER that was carefully developed from what was then a limited set of materials. From the outset, OER Commons was designed to be a free public digital resource where educators could find OER. Soon after its launch, we started to move beyond being just a repository and developing tools for sharing and collaboration that are still used on OER Commons today. Our first authoring tool, Open Author 1.0, was launched in 2012 as a place for educators to create and share and collaborate on the creation of OER. It was quickly followed by the groups feature, which was initially created for Hawaii's Department of Education in 2013. We still see groups as a critical tool in our toolbox, in the open education toolbox, something that users can leverage to create their own spaces for collaboration and curation, but also something we and our partners use in professional learning, professional development work, creating a space for our participants to curate and share and discuss OER. In 2014, we launched our first hub and we now host over 50 hubs on OER Commons. These are landing pages where an organization or project or institution can share their own curated collections of OER, can host multiple groups, working groups, communities of practice, and share information about their own OER projects. We aim overall for platform agnosticism, creating ways for our users to get the resources where they need them via download options and LMS integrations, for example. We also seek to highlight the highest quality OER via curation of collections and our partner engagement. We seek to create the spaces that can facilitate community development and participation, understanding that the work of OER benefits for mentorships and collaborations and cohort models. So what you're looking at here is our current setup for OER Commons and our microsites. When we began developing our microsites, we were really focused on the differing needs of our partners and less cognizant of the limitations of our approach to that technology. As we've worked with our 20 microsite partners over the years, we've learned quite a lot about what they would like to share and what successful sharing might look like. In the model that you see here today, this is OER Commons as the main library downtown with sponsored wings, which would be the hubs, and with groups as those big round tables where people can collaborate in the library. The microsites really stand apart as individual branches with their own resource collections, their own users, and their own regional contexts. They too can have their own sponsored hubs and community spaces. Our microsite partners represent many different contexts, and that often means that they have differing needs around how they describe their OER, different ideas about how to organize their sites. And so that was how we really initially developed these microsites was to create these standalone instances of the platform. In the end, this wasn't a scalable approach and we'll look into what we're doing now to move beyond that. Overall though, we do recognize the power of connecting people from different backgrounds to form networks. We understand that OER is naturally disaggregated, siloed by creators and institutions. And while we don't wanna replicate the excessive centralization that exists in the traditional publishing market, we do wanna encourage and facilitate sharing while letting people access OER where they want and need it. So we don't want to put everyone in one giant silo together, so much as connecting those different silos. We wanna bring people together from across regions, contexts and roles in this work through networking and also through the tools we develop in our platform. For our microsite partners, we host a bi-monthly community of practice call. And the goal of this call is for our partners to share their own successes and challenges and resources with one another, really we're seeking to foster those relationships among them. We'll develop prompts for the calls to facilitate conversation. But again, we really want to have them forge those relationships and their own network. In our both grant and service offerings of professional development, a component that we seek is to create communities of educators who can rely on and support one another as they learn about OER or learn how to evaluate OER through different pedagogical lenses. So now I'm gonna pass it over to Michelle who's gonna talk about the next gen tools for OER sharing beyond the people and back into the technology. So take it away, Michelle. Thanks, Mindy. So as Mindy mentioned, developing our hub and microsite infrastructure and then working to really connect our communities across our hubs and across our microsites. We noticed that there was a real opportunity there for not only creating connections between people but bringing our technology more in alignment with our mission. So building digital connections between those digital spaces the same way that we were building connections between different folks and creating human networks. And in 2020, we received a grant from the IMLS which funded a year long research study nationally doing user interviews and focus groups with faculty and librarians across the country. And out of this research, we built the concept for service that we call the OER Exchange. The OER Exchange allows our OER Commons digital librarians our hub leaders and our microsite leaders and librarians to select content from their digital libraries to share with the community. So I'll show you what that prototype looks like today. What you're seeing on your screen here is the OER Exchange as it exists on the Viva Open microsite. The Viva Open microsite is an OER Commons microsite that was built to house and share content created and curated by Viva faculty and librarians. So Viva has a suite of grants currently where they're working with faculty and librarians to curate and create OER aligned to course catalogs across the state. With the OER Exchange, they are able to share that content with others in our network as well as access work that is funded by other initiatives. So what you'll see here is that we have collections that were created and shared by the Maryland Open Source Textbook Initiative as well as the Affordable Learning Lewis Initiative which is doing much the same work that Viva is doing but replicating that programming in Louisiana to create and align content to their course catalogs. So what's next? The Open Metadata Exchange, the Open OER Metadata Exchange is the next step beyond the OER Exchange. The Open Metadata Exchange seeks to bring communities and institutions together and allow them to share content and resources with our communities as well. So we really see this as developing infrastructure for the public good. So thank you so much and that concludes our presentation. Thank you for joining us today. If you have any questions or wanna learn more about our work, you can contact us using this contact information here. We hope that you have a wonderful open ed. Thank you.