 Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for this pre-recorded session and OpenEd 2022. I'm Veronica Howard. I use they, them pronouns. And I'm DRC Hutchings. She, her pronouns. And we're here to talk about maintaining a robust faculty OER adoption program under challenging conditions. We first, of course, would like to begin by thanking many, many people who help make this work possible. We should disclose, of course, that most of our work was funded by USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Grant for Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students. And we had so many colleagues, peers, mentors and co-authors that we want to honor the incredible contribution that our colleagues have made to help get this program to where it is and where we're reporting on today. This is also a continuation of our presentation from OpenEd 2021, where we talk about the initiation and development of that program. So please, if you haven't already, we invite you to pop back to the 2021 proceedings and watch that pre-recorded lecture. And we're talking about the Alaska Open Education Initiative. DRC and I are privileged to live on the land of the Dena'ina people, the Dena'ina El Nania, unceded ancestral homelands of the Dena'ina people. They've stewarded this land for thousands of years. And on this land is the University of Alaska Anchorage, the largest of the three major universities within the University of Alaska system. The University of Alaska Anchorage boasts the largest enrollment of any of the three universities. We have over 60% of students enrolled in our university. And we're also touted and held up as the workforce development university for the University of Alaska Anchorage. That's where we focus. So we're pleased to report on the Alaska Open Education Initiative. The focus of this was to really bolster access to high quality education in this context. And I'm going to defer here to my co-author to tell you more about the initiative. So our initiative, which is grant funded, was running from October 2019 when we received our grant through this past summer, summer 2022. And the grant focuses on four key elements. The first is faculty. We promote the adoption of OER and zero cost of course materials through faculty development and support through various means, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Students, so our textbook affordability student ambassador program, partnerships, forging, reforging, and strengthening key partnerships to leverage resources and to further culture change at our institution and impact data. So collecting information on adoption, such as who our adopters are, the number of students they reach cost savings, adoption, sufficiency, impact, and more. The central pillar of our faculty programming is the textbook affordability fellows. This is year long faculty professional development and support program designed to encourage and facilitate the transition of courses from commercial course resources to zero cost materials. In order to complete the program and receive their $2,500 award, faculty need to complete a number of deliverables. These include participation in a week long intensive training focused on textbook affordability and course design, transitioning at least one course to using entirely no cost materials, doing a give back, which is what we phrase a sharing of their experience, transitioning to ZTC materials or zero textbook cost materials with our university community to help build awareness locally and encourage other faculty to make the transition and to share their course data with us. The support elements throughout the year include monthly meetings, one-on-one consultations with an OER librarian, that's myself, and instructional designers, regular emails, and more. And for those of you who are interested in seeing our curriculum, we will be releasing it openly licensed in the near future. A little bit on outcomes related to our fellows. We had three cohorts that ran through the program, three one-year cohorts, which 31 faculty completed. The fellows went on to offer 365 ZTC course sections over the course of our program. And many have transitioned multiple courses to ZTC beyond that one that's required for participation. And they've encouraged others to adopt ZTC resources as well. And of course we love the outcome data, what I am excited to present are raw numbers on adoption. Now we have throughout the course of our work been tracking the number of courses that are using zero textbook cost resources. Some of those are open resources and some of those are just free to access. So this graph that I'm showing you on screen will put those together. They will put together those two different categories just so long as students have no cost barrier to accessing their resources. And on screen I'm showing you a relatively complex graph on the left Y-axis. The number of students who are using zero textbook cost-course resources, those are free to access, are openly licensed per semester. And you'll see those data represented with the closed green bars. And on the right Y-axis is a cumulative number of students who've been reached from the time we began tracking data to now with OER or ZTC resources. And we've nearly reached 20,000 students using those resources. I'm also showing you on screen with that dotted yellow line right after summer 2019, our fellows program began in that year. So this is when faculty are getting intensive training, they're switching their adoptions to other kinds of resources, and you can see the number of students reached here grows. Perhaps not exponentially, but an incredible increase in the number of students who are being reached, really evidencing the fact that once our faculty fellows are making the change, they're not only changing multiple courses, but they're encouraging and demonstrating for other faculty users how powerful this change is. And we see lots and lots of other faculty also making this change, even when they're not in the program. We also asked our fellows for feedback. So we have qualitative and quantitative feedback on the quality of our programming. After the year long intensive was over, we asked our fellows, so tell us about it. And we asked them to rate a series of statements on a five-point like RIP type scale, one being the lowest value they could provide, five being the highest or most favorable rating. And we're just giving you a sample of some of those comments here, some of those statements that were rated. When asked, were you well supported in the program, there was unanimous agreement. Everyone agreed, strongly agreed that they were well supported in the fellowship. Asked if the program obligations were reasonable, that was a very high average rating as well. We see 4.76 on average, again, five being the highest value. Other questions included, was the programming helpful in transitioning to ZTC, was the community of practice helpful in transitioning to ZTC, and would you recommend this to others? And all of these are rated very favorably, but I really want to call out being well supported and recommending this fellowship to others as evidence of the quality. We also have selected comments from our fellows. So for instance, one fellow said, I loved and found the first week of training very helpful. It was packed with excellent information and great facilitators. It was very nice to meet the other fellows and to learn so much that week. Another of our fellows said, I appreciated the weekly check-ins with reference to professional materials. This was a nice way to keep us on track. I appreciated the welcoming, warm atmosphere that was created by the leaders. I never felt intimidated and felt comfortable asking questions. And another of our fellows said, the enthusiasm, knowledge, and ideas of my fellow fellows was amazing and gave me the incentive to be open-minded about other ideas for course tools and delivering options. And this paid off big after COVID hit. So we can see that the training program facilitated good community that the information was useful and may have fostered some skills that helped faculty be more limber, more responsive, more robust during times of challenged course delivery. There are also a number of other programmatic elements I'll defer to DRC to discuss more. So these first two are very faculty specific. As I mentioned earlier, we didn't just do the fellows program. We also have what we call the CLACMA Awards, the Consortium Library, Affordable Course Materials Award, which was awarded over three years so far. So far it's been an annual award. Over this time, 56 faculty received this award for their contributions to transitioning to low or no cost materials. We also developed the self-paced ZTC slash OER certificate. So this does a lot of the same things that the intensive training did for the fellows program, but much more brief, much more approachable for those who can't commit to the larger program. And in that, we had eight people complete that certificate so far. Other related programmatic elements include course marking. So here we have a screenshot from the video that student government officers made for the R-transition to course marking. And we were so thrilled to have their support and the support of other organizations within the university to move toward course marking, which started during the course of this grant. And also institutionalized goals. So there was an explicit mention of OER or ZTC concepts within the institutional goals for UAA, as well as some P&T guidelines, including for the largest college at UAA, are now explicitly saying that you can include mention of these things in your P&T guidelines in order to get promotion or tenure. And then this helps us transition into talking about some of the institutional considerations that should be recognized when we're talking about this program. We've, in my opinion, I think we've been able to achieve quite a lot and continuing from the presentation last year when talking about or considering larger institutional change, there's a lot of factors that go into whether how the institution can change and how successful that change can be. For the duration of our presentation, we're going to focus on three key areas of this institutional change model. We're going to talk about leadership, we're going to talk about resources, and we're going to talk about climate for change. Continuing from the data that we presented last year, we have had a significant upheaval in our leadership at the organizational level. So when we presented in 2021, we showed we've had a number of different chancellors, a number of different provosts. We had a variety of other institutional leaders either leave entirely or have switched multiple times. Since we presented at that time, we've had even more institutional change over our Vice Provost for Student Success has retired and a new Vice Provost for Student Success was hired. And our Native Student Services Director transitioned from one individual to another individual over a relatively unexpectedly long period of time. So during these periods of leadership change, we see that it's sometimes hard to maintain a direction for the institution. And as a result, it can be hard to make sure that you're hitting particular marks. And every one of these leader changes means finding new ways of building those connections, recommitting to a goal of organizational focus on student success and student cost savings through OER, things of that sort. What's not reflected in here and what we don't have current data on are the ongoing faculty and staff attrition that's occurring under these circumstances. I also want to call out in our timeline, what we have on screen is the start of the grant indicated by that closed bar in October 2019. We also have that dotted red line in the summer of 2019. This was the period when our Board of Regents declared financial exigency as a result of a substantial budget cut for the university. 41% of the university's operating budget was cut. And then there was a compromise reach where the cut was not as substantial but was still a phenomenal cut. And as a result, we see that upheaval reflected in the university. We see cost-saving measures put into place, evaluation criteria to decide which programs will stay and which will go, and some institutional chaos. At the same time that this is happening, we also see declining student enrollment. So it becomes a kind of one-two punch. Our enrollment, especially at UAA where we're primarily workforce development, comes from tuition. So at the same time that we have the financial exigency, we also have a massive decline in our operating budget from student enrollment. And it exacerbates and perpetuates many of those budget-related issues. Not surprising, around these same times, not just at UAA nationwide, we see what's called by some the great resignation, meaning that many folks choose different institutions, maybe leave academia entirely. And we don't have data to show just the extent to which we have faculty and staff turnover. But when we presented last year, the number was incredibly high, something like 30% of faculty, 45% of staff, without knowing more accurately what they are today. I couldn't tell you for sure what those values are, but I am confident that they are higher. And this is highlighted, I think, by a recent tweet that I saw from leader in the field, Robin Derosa, who just speaks about this idea of scarcity logic and education, the way that when these start to happen, that it turns into competition and fighting for survival instead of focusing on a core mission and making sure that we are focused on students first and supporting those folks who support our students. As a result as well, there's been an incredible amount of difficulty to reach some contract agreement with the union. So currently, the faculty do not have an approved contract for the following year. Contract negotiations have stalled, and among the many items that are still under consideration are issues of payment, fair payment, especially at a time of the last three years when faculty and staff have been asked to do more and more and more and more and more with less, there are not sufficient raises to help cover those costs. And what we see, at least for this institution, is that the amount that faculty would be accepting is actually a decline in salary due to inflation. That contract negotiation has stalled, and these are really challenging institutional times for the University of Alaska Anchorage. But that doesn't mean that it's without hope. There are some very practical things that we want to conclude with when talking about, well, what do you do when it seems as if all of the doors are closing and the ship is truly on fire? So one thing is collect that data. Show your local need, show your local impact, the impact that your programs have had. Now data does not necessarily mean buy in, it does not necessarily mean institutional support in the form of dollars and cents. However, still collect it because you never know when an opportunity will arise for a funding opportunity or just a new opportunity to get into the ear of an administrator who ultimately can take that information forward and do something with it, maybe in the future. We do also recommend institutionalizing your data collection whenever possible, something like course marking so that the data collection happens no matter what needs to happen moving forward. And if I can just pop in with a little item on there, we specifically designed the course marking program so it became part of regular operations. It was just one tiny little checkbox to add to an already established system. And for the first time in many, many years, the folks who collect those data and collect those metrics said nobody had any problems with that, which told us it was incredibly socially valid and did not add a ton of extra work to folks already super, super full plates. Another recommendation we have is for you to apply for grants. So cash-strapped institutions make sense for us to look outward. We hear this a lot, but we take it to the next level and we encourage you to think outside the box. Don't just stop with the OER grants, the things that you're seeing in the OER circles that come up. Our grant funding came from the USDA and it was a general education grant. It was for educational programs generally and we took the OER ZTC slant in our application and said, here's how we can use this strategy to meet the needs that you set forth in your grant. So think outside the box. You might be more successful there than you would be with the OER grants that everyone else is applying to. And then continue to work on institutional change. Okay, so seek out your champions, have them help carry that message. Continue to advocate individually and together at every opportunity. Mention your programs in every meeting. Mention the need for your programs. Mention your data. Keep working on that institutional change wherever you possibly can because that will continue that ball rolling and hopefully it will lead to more opportunities in the future for funding and growth. And just another couple of suggestions. It's so essential to honor the work that's being done because switching, adopting, creating, openly licensed or even free to access resources is an incredible lift and the amount of effort can vary from field to field. First hold up and really try to insulate many of those early adopters and earlier champions because they may be facing a heck of a lot of organizational resistance. They may be pioneers in their department but that doesn't come without a social cost for them. It may even come with a professional cost for those people. When possible, try to make sure that you can tie every different kind of reinforcer into OER or ZTC adoption and creation. If there's a place where you're talking about research and creative activity, make sure OER ZTC is explicitly listed. If you're talking about innovative teaching, make sure that it's listed. Like Kool-Aid Man, that suggestion into every place you possibly can and tie reinforcers to it. Advocate for more resources. Many stipend programs focus on, you know, is it this amount of money or that amount of money? Or really think about the amount of time that goes into making that transition and when you think that it's, oh, maybe X amount of money is good, I would suggest really asking stakeholders to see what it took and assigning those resources fairly. We had an incredibly generous stipend of $2,500, $500 for the intensive, $2,000 for the adoption, and if we had had the option, I would have probably suggested that we increase that given how much effort and time and careful consideration goes into it. Last, acknowledge that this can come at an incredibly high cost. We see that OER ZTC work is disproportionately done by folks who are historically excluded and underrepresented in higher education, and so if we're not careful, those folks who are already working harder to get here and already probably working harder to stay in academia are also working harder by trying to help open and make academia more welcoming and inclusive, and that comes at a heavy cost. If you haven't already, you may want to check out the Rebus Communities Open Office Hours, number 57, on legitimizing burnout in open education roles. It's really insightful, and don't be afraid to scale back. Scale back, especially when folks are not being compensated or honored fairly. Scale back if you're not receiving support for your program, don't do the work for free. From an institutional perspective, there will always be a leader who wants very much to be able to sell the value of open and how much it's doing for students who may not be looking very carefully at the cost to the individuals who made that happen for free. The very best thing that we can be doing for ourselves and for others is by putting up those personal barriers and recognizing that this is hard work, this is sacrifice, and it should, like every other workplace behavior, be honored and compensated fairly. Don't do it for free, and don't give up hope because there could be opportunities in the future to scale a program back up when those resources become available. Thank you so much for watching this recording. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us. Our email addresses are located here on the screen. You can find us via email. You can find us on Twitter, and we'd be happy to connect about this topic.