 All right, I'd like to introduce Jan Kemster, who is the Dean of Distance Education at Pima Community College. And she's joined us today to tell us about the OER degree work at Pima Community College. Jan? Thanks, Una. Hello, everyone. As Una said, I'm Jan Kemster, Dean of Distance Ed at Pima. And in the summer of 2016, I was hired here at Pima, and I walked right into the Achieving the Dream grant OER degree initiative that the college had just received. It literally was hot off the press. So I walked into that having really no knowledge about OER, but I learned very quickly how things go. So a little bit about Pima. We're a comprehensive community college. We are a Hispanic-serving institution, and we have the notoriety of being the nation's fifth poorest community. We have six campuses across the city and approximately 45,000 students at this time. Our OER project, like I said, we were one of the grantees for the Achieving the Dream Foundation grant, and our task was to create a fully online AA liberal arts with an OER pathway of what turned out to be 21 courses and 64 credits. Again, we chose the degree because it is our most popular degree at Pima Community College, and we really set out to target adult students who want the flexibility of online learning but who struggle with the costs of education. Our motivation for going in the OER direction really came from our students. Again, in 2015, a student textbook task force sort of raised the issue that textbook costs were increasing exponentially to the point that it was causing students not to go to school. And they asked our board of directors and our faculty to do something about that. At the same time, our governing board then declared an initiative across the campus to lower the price of textbooks for students. At that time, there was some budding interest in OER, especially in Pima Online, the Distance Ed Division for the institution. So all of those sort of led us toward applying for the Achieving the Dream grant to create a foundation for us to move forward. Our goals in creating our AA liberal arts in an OER pathway, you know, we wanted to create high quality engaging OER courses. We did not want these courses to be one time offerings. We wanted them to have significance within their divisions and be something that would be offered continuously beyond the life of the grant. We also needed to develop a faculty culture around OER. While we had some early adopters and early interest, overall the faculty were unfamiliar with OER and in some cases a little bit suspicious about it. We of course wanted to save students money. And ultimately also improve student retention and completion of online courses by having materials available on day one and also by having what is in the course and in a text be highly relevant to the learning outcomes. So as we went down the path of our degree development, you know, our primary challenge was creating faculty awareness and acceptance of OER. So we worked in that in different ways. We attended department meetings. We offered presentations. We offered information days. And we started to gain faculty interest. Once we had some of that established, though, we still face the hurdle of the time on task for this kind of course development and the design expertise to actually get it done in D2L, our learning management system. It was a reality that this was a major time commitment from any faculty who took this on. So realizing right from the start, we needed to address that. We partnered our staff in the Center for Learning Technology with our faculty subject matter experts who had agreed to create courses for the grant. And that partnership involved connecting a faculty member with an instructional designer, a media specialist, a web designer, and a librarian. So it really became a team effort to create the courses. And because of this, we were successful in meeting our deadlines and following a really a structured process that began with a kickoff meeting and clear understandings about the course of development through the completion of the project. For us, our OER degree centered in Pima online, which is our centralized division supporting distance education. And that came about simply because some of our faculty department heads in online learning had the initial interest in OER. So we picked it up from there. Our degree implementation is supported by a dedicated online student advisor who helps in getting information to students. Faculty awareness was one of was our primary challenge, but a very real secondary challenge has been how to let students know about these course offerings and about the ability to sign up for courses with OER. So we've struggled with that as I think other institutions have and our dedicated online student advisor has certainly helped spread the word about the availability of our courses. We also had a good partnership with our bookstore who helped us eventually create a tag in the textbook offerings that identify a course that has OER materials and that's been very helpful for students. And then we've had efforts to market the degree on our website. And of course we have more work to do in that area as well. Just to kind of sum up our progress by fall of 2018, our OER pathway for the AA and liberal arts will be complete. We're on track to meet all the goals that I listed earlier in the presentation. So that's been a really successful rollout for us. To give you an example of the impact of OER at Pima Community College, I'll share the example in one division. Our department head in writing and communications work to create writing 101 and writing 102 as OER courses as part of the grant. And then with the conclusion of that course development, he was able to offer 28 sections of writing 101 and 18 of writing 102 this fall for the first time. And just offering those sections alone saved our students nearly $90,000. This also spread word of mouth among students about OER and how to get into the courses. And it's just a great example of how in this one division we are developing a faculty culture and awareness around OER that will continue on into the future as these courses are offered, not only in more online courses but also into the face-to-face and hybrid modalities. With our grant work concluding this fall, I'm very aware of our need to roll out a sustainability plan to continue to create OER courses at Pima Community College. I'm working on that now. We're working on developing incentives for faculty to create OER and continue the support that we can for those who agree to engage in the work. We also have efforts to make towards our marketing of OER because we aren't really supported by a very high quality webpage right now and we've been investing some efforts there trying to get the institution to come along with us and create something more dynamic and presentable. So those are our challenges ahead for sure. So that's what I wanted to share about Pima's experience with our OER degree initiative and does anyone have questions for me? Hello, can you hear me? This is Pete Surgeon at Community College Baltimore County. I can. Sorry, it took me a while to get my microphone going. I was just wondering if you can give us a little information on where you found the best OER resources if there was one particular place or where were you bringing the, did you claim yourself? Where were you bringing them in from? Well, that's really a good question for our librarian who assisted us on the project, but I know that we utilized open stacks in several course scenarios. And we also utilized some of Lumen's, Candela and Waymaker material. Other materials were gathered in different ways, but again, the librarian would be the best person to speak to that. I wasn't involved directly in the curation of the materials. Okay, thank you. His name, if you'd like it, is Keith Rokie, ROCCI at Pima and he would be happy to share more with you. Okay, great. Thanks. Hi, this is Juviel from Central Virginia. Hi. Okay, I have a question about motivating the faculty that are just so reticent and just do not want to participate. Do you have any tips? Well, yes, I do. So I guess, you know, my biggest piece of advice for institutions who want to take on OER work is to be able to have some kind of compensation for faculty who do it because honestly, I don't believe we could have got it done without the financial incentive to do the work. That combined with our ability to partner our faculty with the Center for Learning Technology team was really instrumental in keeping the work on schedule and for creating really high quality versions of the courses. There may be people out there who have managed to do it without compensation, and I would sure like to hear how they managed it, but from my point of view, that was the incentive to begin the initial work and to learn to understand more about OER. They just simply weren't going to build it into their schedules without some motivation to do it. Well, how much did you have to pay your faculty if you are willing to share that? No, well, through the grant, we were able to compensate them. I think it turned out to be, this is a rough estimate, right? Just around $2,800 per course. As part of our regular online course development at Pima, we pay $820 per credit hour of the course for new course development at the institution. So that gives you kind of a ballpark of what our faculty felt was reasonable enough for them to get involved in it. And, you know, I think it's worth every penny because what I've witnessed is once faculty took the time to understand and learn how to use these resources, they became advocates for it and they started to change other courses of theirs just on their own because they believed in the resource. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. Wonderful. I was just wondering, are your OER materials that you've developed for each of the courses now available on your website for everybody else, like for us to go in and look at and learn from and because it's, you've developed new materials. So it's, in some instances, you've maybe just adopted a textbook from OpenStacks, but in others you've recreated something whole new, entirely new. Are those materials now available public facing? Yes and no. So from what I understand, the courses that we've created for Lumen will be shared, well, for the ATD grant, will be shared via Lumen Learning's catalog of courses. So we will have our courses there as part of that. And there's a link to that that I'm sure Una can provide or I can provide to you to Lumen Learning's, excuse me, Lumen Learning's course catalog. Now we do have courses internally. For example, our Bio 100 course, our professor for that has made that course available for others to view through a link that he created. So that can be shared. But other than that, no, they're not available from Pima in a public facing way at this time. Okay. Is that something that could be beneficial for the rest of us is to be able to access those? I think it could be. We're challenged again by our antiquated webpage and the ability to make changes to that. But I would say, you know, I'm happy to share the list of OER courses we created as part of our initiative. And if you have a particular interest in any one of those courses, it would just be a matter of asking me to access the resources for it. Okay, thank you. Janice, you have a couple comments slash questions in the chat window if you wanted to take a look. Okay, let's see. Do I think there should be a global universal clearinghouse or database of all open ed resources? Well, I suppose that would make things easier in some ways, but my sense from this project was that once faculty kind of learned where to go for their particular subject matter. They didn't struggle too much with that. What we learned along the way, as many of you have, is that there are many rich and diverse OER resources on certain subjects and limited OER resources on other subjects. For example, we began a humanities 260 course as part of the grant that we eventually had to abandon as a grant project because we just couldn't find the right OER resources for it. And I know other schools have had challenges with technology based courses and even some business courses. So you kind of learn along the way what's available and what's out there. And again, you know, assisting your faculty with an actual OER librarian will definitely support that quest and cut down their time on task to find those kind of resources. Let's see here. Jessica said I wasn't paid for my work. However, I am lucky enough to have a dean who supports me by giving me the schedule I want. So yeah, yeah, so, you know, there's other ways to think about compensation in the higher ed realm, of course, release time and scheduling. But again, I just come back to that idea that there has to be some reason to venture into this because just given faculty workloads, it's a struggle to do it otherwise. Let's see, would I be interested in a list of courses with someone who might be able to answer questions? Yes, absolutely. Do I think open ed resources should be available for free independent learners, especially K-12? Yes, absolutely. I don't see why not. I think that captures what's in the chat room, Una. Are there any other questions for me? I think you answered all of them very well. Thank you, Jan. Okay, thank you. All right, I think if we don't have any other questions, we're going to go ahead and stop the recording and we'll be back in about 10 minutes for our next session. Thank you for joining us and thank you, Jan. Very, very informative presentation.