 Hey everybody So today we are joined by Ed Beck who's going to be just walking us through his presentation from reclaim open Building digital capacity building capacity Or I believe it's Building system capacity system capacity soon. He's digital journey. I'm so sorry Totally fried this morning But you'll be giving your presentation and then we can sort of have some Q&A in the chat everybody Please feel free to join in This is Prerecorded so don't worry about interrupting anything And do you want to just talk a little bit about who you are and what you do at SUNY? Yeah. Hi, my name is Ed Beck I'm an instructional designer at SUNY Onianta One of the comprehensive colleges in the SUNY system Onianta is a lovely small university And we do primarily four-year degrees with a few master's programs primarily in Education or we also have like a nutrition and dietetics master's program And also some some master's degrees in biology, especially connected to our biological field station but we're a campus of About five thousand six thousand students depending on the year and part of this larger SUNY system and so one of the things that I'm going to talk about today is you know What it means for someone like me who works on an individual campus to have these goals And some ideas about what the system should be doing and what SUNY should be doing all together because there are you know major initiatives that we collaborate on and our open initiative is one example of that an Initiative that we collaborate on all across SUNY and I was joking at the the reclaim open We're re-recording this today because the sound went out in the middle of it, but during the reclaim open You know I was joking that you know I'm gonna tell this as if it's a you know a first-person narrative, but it you know I'm not I have to acknowledge I'm not the main character of this story and I'm just you know the unreliable narrator So I'm gonna sit here and tell a lot about SUNY's journey including things that happened before I got there Including things that I'm trying to do and trying to influence to think about how SUNY should interact in this open space Awesome, that sounds great. All right. I will sit back and let you sort of take center stage Just checking your screen share. It looks like you've got two windows layered on top of each other Which one do you want to show? Is that better? Yes, perfect. All right. Here we go Take it away All right, so Before we talk about SUNY's kind of digital journey We kind of have to talk about SUNY's OER journey and this is kind of backwards from a lot of domain of one's own Institutions, you know a lot was made especially in the recap Of the reclaim team about the different ages of the participants You had kind of like the og Reclaimers that have been you know hanging out for 20 years now And then you have these other newer ed texts coming into the community and I would kind of make an argument that institutions sometimes have a similar growth curve and SUNY's journey to be hanging out at the reclaim open is Very different than the experience of like University of Mary Washington And one of the things that you have to remember about SUNY's domains project is that grew out of our OER initiative So, you know open educational resources low-cost openly licensed Textbooks that are sometimes even free to students have been a major thing that's been you know Spent a lot of ink talking about in the last you know 10 15 years and The innovation in OER Started very much at the community college level We're seeing it all throughout higher ed that our students are coming in with a lot of financial stresses But the community colleges felt that first and so when you see and this you know this this timeline 2011 you see TC 3 Tompkins, Cortland's Community College Worried about their students and saying maybe we should convert a couple courses to use OER which at that time was a new idea Using the systems in SUNY they were able to get some funding to be able to do that And they had some open SUNY textbook pilots. They started in 2012 They participated in the achieving the dream grant starting in 2015 Where the five SUNY community colleges were starting to work together and think about OER They're working with Lumen learning at that time a very early Proponent of OER that kind of grew out of that achieving the dream grant when they said you know what we created all this Open stuff, but we don't know where to store it and a lumen was the people that were coming in and saying oh We've got an idea. What if we stored them online? What if we made them digital first? What if we stored them outside of the LMS and then we're able to integrate into your LMS and integrate into different courses using Open standards like IMS common cartridge Now, you know, it's one ed tech, but at the time it was the IMS group and CUNY and SUNY were working on this separately and sometimes together and the big thing happens in 2017 and the story behind that is CUNY was farther ahead in their open than SUNY was and CUNY said, you know what it's time to make a big ask of the legislature Let's ask for a bunch of money to support OER in CUNY And so their big ask was four million dollars Divided up one million dollars per year Over the next four years and that's what they asked for in 2017 now Sometimes state legislatures they work funny and when CUNY asked for four million dollars over four years The state came back and said what if we gave you four million dollars every year to each CUNY and SUNY So now what I'm describing here is all these community colleges had been working on their open infrastructure and working together and figuring out how to collaborate they even had Established a center that they were going to call SUNY OER services that they were going to fund internally and you can see on this timeline They actually hired the executive director before they got the money and Then all of a sudden they have more money than they asked for and remember SUNY didn't even ask CUNY asked and they didn't have infrastructure all around the state to be able to support an OER initiative and That's when people like me enter into this story all of this Predates me people like me enter into it and there's all this excitement about OER But the four year and university center Don't have librarians that have been following the OER conversations We don't have technologists that have been following the OER conversations. And so we had to very quickly Try to catch up to what you know, the community colleges were already doing and the the mentality and the approach that they were already doing and what this really, you know What this really forced us into is that we had to go out and find partners in SUNY vendors that could help us Build OER at the enterprise level This is an inside higher ed article from 2019 this is my first year of working at SUNY and In this insider higher ed article which I talked to one of the guys that helped shepherd this through the process of getting Approved in SUNY and sometimes we joke in SUNY that like things move at the speed of SUNY And that that's a joke because it's like about the speed of smell All we are at the enterprise level We did not have the capacity to do it at the time So we needed someone like Lumen and I know Lumen is a controversial name in the open community But I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my experience with Lumen and also my experience with other open vendors And so if you squint really hard at this paragraph right here, you know, there's 75 OER courses and that part of this 2019 agreement was they were also gonna build a Spanish one and Spanish two course in partnership with SUNY And if you squint really hard, you can see the names Ed Beck and Alejandra Escuadero and Maria Montoya and the SUNY Onianta professors and the SUNY Onianta Instructional designer that worked hand-in-hand with Lumen to create those Spanish one and two courses. These were funded by SUNY They said hey, let's make these let's make these robust open textbook that we think we can roll out to the entire system at the same time this can't be a Prototype when it's done. We need this to be robust and so SUNY invested money Lumen invested into this and we we co-created this together and what I mean by that is here's an example my faculty wanted to create a series of scripts that would be kind of readings for every beginning of every chapter and They would write them out and then Lumen for us invested in it and Hired some voice actors and made sure that we had a male and female voice actor and made sure that we had a You know Spanish continental accent and a Latin American accent So we had four different voice actors that worked for us and read those scripts that we had created and recorded them and then Embedded them back into the textbook as a multimedia My faculty were making exercises and making multiple choice questions and Lumen took those exercises that we had created and commissioned more they said okay Now that we see ten questions on this that you have created we're gonna go and and Get another 20 or 30 questions on this chapter and so every single learning objective in that entire book had 10 formative questions 10 summative questions to make it into a guided reading program using their waymaker format so When when when people talk about Lumen I have this extra experience of working with some great people like John Arang who was just a Wonderful collaborator from Lumen and helped build this course with me and now I think that about half a million people Around the United States have taken this course The impact of that one course has been huge Across the United States and I I say I think because I only know who took it through Lumen But it's openly licensed and so that that that has moved on and also been You know Libre text copies everything anything anyone publishes an OER they import in the Libre text Platform so there's a Libre text version. We make all those Interactives we made them in the Lumen system. They remade them in H5 P So I there people that are taking this course beyond those that I could ever know about because it was ultimately licensed It was a huge project where there was a lot of need In the open community and and and that is a definitely an argument, right? I think everything we're doing is an argument to one of the themes of my talk is that we're making arguments about the way things should be done and The argument here is that what we need is a textbook and what we need is multiple choice questions And that by having formative assessments that students can check their learning and check their pre can preconceptions and know how they're doing Understand whether they're doing great in the class or whether they need to spend a little more time with the material That's an argument, right? I think it's an argument. It's a very good one But that is an argument But at the same time as I was kind of buying into Lumen's argument that was very textbook and content focused It was also making another argument at the same time as I was building that OER textbook With those faculty members. I was also looking into open educational practice across the SUNY system And we applied for other funding. It was grant funding. It was not OER Funny, it was the innovative instruction technology grants and we were saying hey There's another different tradition in open that isn't so tied to the license and isn't so tied to textbooks but is instead focused on open platforms and communicating and sharing on the the public internet and so we started to to Work with reclaim during that time Established SUNY create now SUNY create at the very beginning. We said hey, let's not make this a SUNY Onianta thing. Let's not make this a SUNY Geneseo thing. What if we made this a SUNY thing that was easily shared and again much like the the the Money coming before the expertise In SUNY we set up the infrastructure before we had buy-in from across the system to do Something like a domain's initiative or a domain of one's own initiative So this was also something when I'm talking about building capacity. I'm like, okay We've got the systems in place But what is the human infrastructure that we need to be successful in rolling this out at five campuses at ten campuses that Hopefully all 64 campuses in the SUNY system So this is happening as We are talking about the concepts of open pedagogy The SUNY fact to group that is on the screen right now is a wonderfully Collaborative group that goes across all of SUNY And and because we had such an emphasis on open educational resources They said what if we did a whole task group on Open education and that task about open education specifically wanted to focus on open pedagogy now Again, you're gonna hear in that argument about open pedagogy. You're hearing a little bit that licensing Still matters very much to the people at SUNY When we talk about open pedagogy, we're talking about students collaborating and Creating and sharing what they did with an open license for an external audience so that that material can be reused Some real concepts in education but still very much focused on that open license That that I said was you know one of the defining things and one of the differences in how SUNY came into this compared to a lot of other institutions So as we establish SUNY create that background of OER is Really gonna be gonna influence a lot When we came in with SUNY create one of the things that we really asked for from reclaim was for Reclaim to support press books as one of the applications on our shared hosting server We wanted that because that was the open application that many of our people knew Press books what people people may know or they may not know was built upon wordpress But it's a series of custom plugins that really transform a wordpress Multi-site into a book Publishing factory and since we had librarians and we have people who are interested in open publishing Because of this other related initiative that was one of the things they were asking for is oh can we do press books on here in? fact Sometimes I have to explain that SUNY create is not just press books Because some people are like oh SUNY create that's the thing where I can get a press books, right? I'm like, oh if you stop there if you only think about SUNY create as Press books or only as wordpress you're missing a whole lot of the complexity that could be here So this was our you know start of the SUNY create initiative in that 2019 We were awarded a grant was a small great about ten thousand dollars for the six institutions that wanted to share a shared hosting initiative We were able to Bring reclaim to us and do a mini conference on the SUNY Onianta campus Lauren visited us for with us for two days and we made through that next year about 250 websites But I wasn't really satisfied with that initial pilot of SUNY create a lot of the faculty in that initial pilot found the systems too complex and actually some of them get kind of moved away from us and didn't collaborate with us in the future We were very technology forward in that first iteration in the fall 2019 and in spring 2020 and I think that You know it was not a success I know it would be harsh to call it a failure, but it was not a a resounding success that first pilot and so Amanda Wentworth and I Kind of in the fall of in the summer of 2020 leading into the fall of 2020 said it We have to do something a little bit different with this next Cohort we need to provide easier onboarding into our ecosystems if we want to get the buy-in that we really want and so in the second pilot we actually took an alternative route and really focused on Open labs and the comms in the box open labs as our primary Starting point for people in SUNY create and this was happening about at the same time that a lot of other domains Institutions were starting to say hey, how can we more closely integrate? a multi-site Network into our domains initiative as kind of an easy onboarding And so we were learning that lesson at about the same time That we were doing that and so those two open labs Published right together and that's when we started to think about our domains is stacking on top of each other with You know kind of a level one being just working with web tools And then what if you had your own site on our multi-site and then what if you had your own domain that was more Freeform and you had that cPanel environment and started just refine our message a little bit so that we could Attract more people and retain them. That's what I wanted to get better Is I wanted people to say like not like oh, that was a cool thing that I did But I'm never gonna do it again, but I want to work with you again I want to do my next project in that same way as well So I keep talking about the arguments right what we have to keep refining our arguments And this was something that we were doing for our teaching learning technology center is we were saying, okay Coming out of the pandemic What is it that we do and what is it that we support? And so one of the things we started to lean on was the AAC and use high impact practices and we started to say, okay Watch high impact practices fit really nicely with the domains work with the Sunni create work We're doing and we're trying to again Shift the dialogue here much in the same way I was like hey we have to we have to talk about purpose built We have to get them having success very early on this is part of shifting the conversation away from the technology But to the learning experience and so we have these high impact practices This is like kind of an abbreviated list of them. We kind of picked from their list of I think they have nine High impact practices and we said hey, which ones are things that our teaching learning technologies center supports in some way And we really focused in on just a couple of them project-based learning collaboration E-portfolios and open education These are the things that we can do in the Sunni create area And when we put those things in front of our faculty when we put things in front of other instructional designers around the system Let's talk about the learning experience of product-based learning. Let's not lead with WordPress Let's not lead with cPanel, but let's talk about the career skills. You could be learning by doing a project like this We also leaned on that language too as we Build our argument to why domains should be happening at our institution and at other institutions around Sunni We started to look at frameworks that were available to us that our provosts were already aware of that our student activities centers We're already aware of that our career centers. We're already aware of and be able to say hey technology is a core career renaissance competency Working with the technology learning new technology being able to adapt and and take from one system to another system You know key understandings and key learnings to work on it as a team perhaps distributed Geographically perhaps distributed across time What does that mean to collaborate and how can we use the infrastructure and the tools that we've been developing? ahead of time one of the things that The takeaways I had from the reclaim open conference was what we wrote on that whiteboard the very first day like have a goal then have a secret goal so My goal my forward-facing goal is this it's the project-based learning the collaboration the e-portfolios My goal is career competencies technology professionalism What does it mean to have a professional curated online presence and keep going with that? Starting in school, but then building it in a way that you can keep building on it once you once you leave us and once you leave the school and then my secret mission is To get people to respect the open infrastructure because I think that that is a key way That public universities should be part of the technology conversation It's one way that we can support the ethical ed tech that we talked about at the conference that we want to build So 2022 We said okay, let's let's bring all of these people that have been working across SUNY Working with me working with their faculty many of them doing this type of work before we had a united infrastructure What if we bring them together and you know, we named the conference, you know It was a SUNY digital learning conference, but the first year we called open And public and this again was us trying to merge these two different worlds together The open that has so much energy around SUNY and that is money people's Entry point into this But also acknowledging the people that want to create on the open web But necessarily are tied to that open license. Maybe they don't think it's this is appropriate to make a portfolio With an open license that is to make a textbook with an open license. That's a valid and reasonable argument so Again, you're going to see these same arguments that i'm putting forward project-based learning collaborative assignments public facing scholarship e-portfolios Let's create this SUNY wide space to have this conversation. Let's get together And we were well attended there. We had about 60 people Coming to it. We had another like 100 or 200 people signed up online that maybe participated in a couple of the Sessions, maybe just maybe they just came in for the keynote and saw lisa rote give a great talk about What we can do when we work in the open? And that's a completely legitimate way to to work with this group But we we were trying to bring these together and say like hey, this is worth doing and it's worth repeating And then this is my favorite slide. This is my favorite part of the whole thing. This was my conference planning committee and each one of these, you know different rectangles represents a different campus Or a different person from SUNY who is invested in Digital learning and this is the team that i'm talking about This is the human infrastructure that can make SUNY create work or will make SUNY create not work, right? these are the people and Each one of those is color coded by the institution's primary color So you can see people from all over from purchase from all many from as we go from binghamton from onyana SUNY polytechnic SUNY empire state. We're all thinking about this differently But we can through the digital choices that we're making we can put forward an argument Perhaps there's other ways to do things Other than you know outsourcing to a vendor and that I would say i'm not anti-illumin I'm not I probably one of the most You know not anti-illumin people because I had that great learning experience from them of building that huge Spanish textbook and I appreciate them for the work that they do But when there's things that we want to do is SUNY that don't fit within the lumens narrow perspective Of what open is and what open means We can come back to this larger group and say okay What is open meaning for SUNY and for a lot of us it means the infrastructure that powers these sites and we have an equal Equal commitment to the to the open source Infrastructure as we do to the content as well And that's been a huge part of my growth in the open community is wanting to do that And I'm trying to build this network of people who are like-minded and thinking about the same things Um, we're running out of time, but one of the things that um I have to acknowledge is we wanted to go to the next step We wanted to create a student fellowship that would be kind of uniform across SUNY that would involve creating following some of the footsteps of that the um w Team or following this the footsteps of like night, uh the night labs that they do And we were denied this grant funding when we tried to Create micro credentials for students that were doing these digital projects and going through a digital fellowship program it's something that I have to be very aware of because um You know at this conference rss kind of got an ovation when rss was was talked about But when we submitted a proposal that was like hey, let's teach us about rss and html and structured documents and how to Build their own server. They kind of looked at it and said hey, this is kind of 2002 internet This doesn't look like innovation to me So we have to be very careful and think about what our argument is as we build tools like this as we advocate for it that Our arguments being deeply meshed in the ecosystems might not ring true And so i'm starting to play with that already, you know, i'm starting to play with language about, you know Hey, your first server probably won't be a docker eye a scaling container, but what would it look like? If you were taught first on a lamp environment watch competency scale and and i'm really looking at some of my ed tech heroes as I go through here um and seeing how they invite people to into very complex conversations At binghamton My colleagues amy gay and ruth carpenter. They have been working With the digital humanities research institute and running their own digital humanities research institute And and one of the things I love is like the final projects for the sort of things like, you know mapping with q gis Or analyzing a text with python But if you look at the schedule and how they arrange themselves They're like, hey, if we have to spend three hours on the command line first To make sure that you're then can get to that final part Let's do that and let's go slowly and methodically through a structured curriculum that gets us to that end point That like we're all excited about but acknowledges all the fundamental skills you have to get there and I i'm always wondering What would a, you know, if not not a digital humanities research, but what would a digital learning institute look like? What are the zero entry skills we would have to teach students so they can do those complex things by the end? But teach people outside of the computer sciences the basic digital literacies of what it comes to look like And that's something that I want to continue to work on in in in the years to come And the other thing, you know, the last thing that i'm leaving with is i'm i'm sharing a lot I'm borrowing a lot of my language and a lot of my arguments From the open science Conversation that's happening. We're talking about open science. They're already breaking it up and like, okay, the knowledge is important The content is important and it should be open But the infrastructure should be open as well the way we communicate and dialogue With knowledge systems needs to be open. This is a global awareness This is them saying we need to respect indigenous knowledge. We need to respect cultural knowledge and not just You know, uh, not just dismiss those things and then how do we engage across our societies? How do we create that university community dialogue when we're doing this open science? That's things like citizen science and engaging people in the process and I think that that is Really important the language we that they are using we can borrow and we can use again um As we make the argument of why this is important and why it matters And that's all i've got That was great. Ed. Thank you so much. Um, it was How it was really cool to see I did not know I mean, I knew a little bit of it I was actually lucky enough to go to the oar conference that you all hosted back in november and to just Hear about so many different individual Projects and the impact that they're having but I didn't know a lot of the history of how sumi got to that point and got to the point where it's You guys have done so much work to make that Really a part of the system and the culture and the learning goals. Um And that's really amazing. Um, I just took a bunch of notes Uh But you know, but it's it's it's it's a takeaway that I think that reclaim Can take from this as well is you know the way you communicate with sumi Might be a little bit different than some of these other institutions because of that that Open foundation that our digital infrastructure was built on, you know, that's why when I come in and I'm like, hey I heard about this. Oh, we are studio that you know, someone's building on top of droopal Is that something that we could get rolling and shared hosting? It's because On my suni campuses working with h5p and doing it in a way, you know that oh, we are studio is like a spot for h5p It's really cool, but it's built on droopal. Um and and You were saying like, hey, this is something that'll be really interesting to us Suni can't be the only ones of those kind of younger institutions that are like looking at all the energy around open Education and going oh if there was a vendor that could help me get started with that You know, that's there's there's this divide of these young We're not a younger institution, but we just kind of got into the open conversation later It's really influenced what matters to us because of our because of our age in the open conversation Yeah, and one of the things that we really want to and Try to hopefully we succeed most of the time to do is to meet to understand institutions goals for what they're trying to accomplish because Everyone's trying to do different work and all of this work is in conversation with each other like you're saying you guys are newer to the oer conversation, but you're not the only ones but you're doing it in such a Targeted and focused and intense and passionate way that the ability to see what you guys are aiming for what you want is really important in just understanding and not just for us and how we work with you, but how You you've talked a lot about the collaboration that's gone on in SUNY and between institutions, but you've also talked about collaborating with With lumen and you've talked about the language that you're borrowing from the larger open science movement and the Is oh gosh, I wrote it down the a a c and you that you borrowed your The high-impact learning Yeah, that's a very important organization for a lot of colleges and universities That's the american association of colleges and universities can be very important in accreditation And so when you borrow their language your provosts will listen Right there there are powerful organizations so mapping what we're doing to them gives me street cred On campus perhaps not at a digital learning conference perhaps not at the reclaim open But you know in in the hall very good at oryanta. It can be an important thing for us and this is Specifically learning about SUNY, but also I think the larger presentation that you're talking about is how to meet People and this is what I want to take away as well how to meet people where they're at and see What they want and how to talk to them and frame your Goal and then your secret goal in a way that will Inspire them to Want to work with you and give you grants and yeah, you know You know at the reclaim open every time oh ds 106 ds 106 That was like that origin story for that group of people and we have a different origin story. Yeah, you know Yeah, and it it is really great to just see how you guys have Grown throughout the years I think We have gone a little bit over time, which is all right because per my schedule. This is the final presentation of the day Thank you so much for all of this. This was Amazing to see I really enjoyed this and I really appreciate you taking the time to Meet with me and to re-record the presentation. This has been I really appreciate it. Well, I'm glad we're doing this this online and open I had the unenviable task of being scheduled at the same time as a i la veen so Being able to re-record and then represent for An online audience might be the first time that many people have the opportunity To hear it. So, uh, thanks for doing that. Yeah, of course And I just want to thank everybody in the discord in the audience Who's participating right now with their converse with their questions in the conversation? Please keep joining us throughout the month. I think we've got about one week left But we want to see you coming up on monday We have our other keynote from ean link letter about his legal battle with proctorio Regarding student surveillance and trying to help higher ed maintain Control to provide these equitable and ethical learning environments where students can do Their sort of best work and grow. They're not worried about It's sort of almost the opposite to the oer philosophy In some ways of maintaining ownership and agency over your work and what it Means versus this sort of Contracting with outside vendors who maybe don't understand what you're going for and Aren't interested in collaborating with you in that way that you were able to experience with lumen Yeah I've rambled and taken us even further over time But thank you again for this presentation for the work that you and that sumi are doing With oer and that you're bringing that to this larger community and participating in that open education dialogue building that Community that you were talking about and also everybody I guess thanks to everybody on that slide that you showed everyone who's making this possible But thank you for talking to us about it today Thanks pat. Yeah, no problem. All right