 Welcome once again to the daily here from the community college consortium for OER and happy open education week. Can everyone hear me okay out there? Today we have a webinar on OER adoption to scale and highlights from four states. We have some very special speakers today who are going to share with you projects of several years standing. I think they vary from about two years through about six years of OER project development. So you're in for a real treat in hearing lessons learned and the benefits that their institutions have received through OER. And today we want to thank the California community college system which provides us with our blackboard collaborate system. I think most of you are familiar with it. We're going to hold all of the questions. I should say we're going to hold the audio questions till the end. Please use the chat window which should be on the left-hand side under the participants window for comments and questions as you go along. We'll do our best to answer those during the webinar. We'll hold sort of the name Q&A at the end but please put those in as we go along and let us know what you're thinking. So as I mentioned earlier it's open education week which is a celebration that the Open Education Consortium, our parent organization sponsors. And it's a worldwide celebration to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities that exist for everyone everywhere right now. And there's hundreds of online and local events that are posted up there that you can attend this week from around the world. You can come in different languages which are kind of fun to attend even though you may not be able to understand all of it. And then there's wonderful videos and projects showcases that are up there as well. So definitely get up there when you can and share it with your colleagues. Feel free to, if you yourself have posted things in the Open Education Week site, feel free to put that in the chat window to share that with others. So today we're going to do a really brief overview of CCC OER as we always do, our little advertisement. And then we're going to get right into those highlights from the four states from Arizona, California, Washington and Virginia. And let's see who the speakers are. So this morning we have Preston Davis, who is the Director of Instructional Services at the Extended Learning Institute at Nova Community College in Virginia. And Preston is going to be presenting on the OER based two degrees that they have developed there at ELI. I hope I said that correctly, Preston. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll hear more from Preston shortly. Next up I'd like to introduce Paul Gholish, the CIO and Dean of Information Technology at Paradise Valley College in Arizona. And Paul is going to tell us about the Maricopa Millions Project, which is an OER project that spans their entire district of Maricopa, which is 10 colleges. It's the largest community college district in the United States, and they've been running this program for three years now. And we're going to hear that they've already met their goals for their first five years within three years. Next up is going to be Richard Sebastian. He is the Director of Teaching and Learning Technology at the Virginia Community College System. And he is going to tell us about the statewide Z23 program. And next is Quill West, who is the Manager of the Open Education Project at Pierce College District in Washington. Also a longtime member of CCC OER, as all of these folks are, and Quill is our president of the CCC OER board. And she is going to tell us about the Pierce Open Pathways program that has been running now within its second year, which is a full OER based path. And finally, James Clapper Grossclinic is joining us. He is the Dean of Educational Technology Learning Resources and Distance Learning at College of the Canyons. And I think many of you know James, he was our past president of CCC OER and is the OEC president this year. And James is going to tell us about the many projects that are happening at College of the Canyons around OER that have been going on for five or six years now. And he recently started working in the last year on an OER pathway that he is going to share with us later on. All right. I think probably many of you are familiar with the Community College Consortium for OER. Our mission is expanding access to high quality open educational resources for both faculty and students. And we do this through supporting faculty and professional development and providing them and the other staff and faculty who work with them with the best around open educational resources. As you know, we do many webinars around finding high quality OER. And we often have faculty with us here on these webinars as well, speaking about their perspective of how they adopted. And finally, this is all about improving success, providing access for students and helping them to complete their degrees in a timely fashion. We're in 21 states and provinces. And we would love to have you join us if you're not a member and help us make this a sustainable effort going forward. All right. Now to the important part of our webinar, which is the OER adoption to scale. And I'm going to let my five wonderful speakers here tell you about their projects. But in thinking about some of the considerations where they have found success over the years, all of these are multi-year projects, as I mentioned, from two to six years in standing. So they have been working on this for a while. It didn't happen overnight. There were faculty champions involved who went out there and found the OER and created OER. There was administrative support in most cases, maybe not initially, but there was administrative support over the long haul to really make this happen, which is a really key piece. And then in many cases, there's been open education policies that for college or their district or their state now to support open education. And that also is really critical to the long-term sustainability of these projects. So without further ado, I am going to turn this over to Paul Goldish from Paradise Valley College. He's going to tell us about the Maricopa Millions project. Thanks, Luna. Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are. Luna, do I need to be bumped up to be able to advance? Oh, thank you very much. Let me get down here, Paul. Thank you, Paul. And as we're getting started, I'll just let you know I'm from the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, Arizona. We are 10 community colleges, well, actually 11 now that we have a corporate college. And we are in the Phoenix, Arizona area, as Luna mentioned. We, three years ago, came forward with the Maricopa Millions project. And one of our main goals was to save students $5 million over five years. And as you can see by the graphic on the right each semester, at least each fall and spring semester, we add to the tally. And the cumulative totals are on the right, each semester are on the left. And we've hit nearly $6 million so far. Just to clarify, how we do that is we call it no cost or low cost, because we figure that's what the students are most concerned about. So there are some low cost materials that maybe aren't open that we do consider as part of the savings for the students that we include in there. So we have been pretty happy with how that's been going. And as I'll talk about in a few minutes, looking at establishing a new goal. And how we got going on this project is three of us are the tri-chairs. And this is really, as others look at projects, I think these are the three main things I really wanted to highlight that I think have been key ingredients for us to be successful. And that is we have multiple people working together. Because we're such a large district, it really helps out to have three people working together as tri-chairs. We kind of split up the work. And as I'm presenting today, my fellow tri-chairs are working diligently on some tasks that we need to get completed here by the end of the week. So we split up that work and we bounce ideas off each other. And it really helps, I think, to move the project forward. Then on a bigger scale, we have a steering team of about 18 or so folks, many of them faculty. Because obviously an OER project isn't going to go anywhere unless we have the faculty involved in having some ownership in it. Several administrators. We have vice presidents. So we even have a couple of presidents right now. One president on our steering team that's actively involved. And then we have some instructional support, whether they be instructional designer, somebody from IT library, of course, involved. And then moving forward, we really can't do much unless we've got some executive sponsorship. So throughout the project, Dr. Maria Harper-Maranek, who was the executive vice chancellor and provost, or basically our number two person in the district, has been a great proponent of the project. Just this week, or last week, she was elevated to the interim chancellor position because our chancellor just took a position over at League for Innovation. And she elevated Dr. Paul Dale, who was our president at Paradise Valley, into that position. And I go through all that because I think it's very important to have leadership at that level invested in this. And as I'm sure we'll hear from Virginia and some of the other places that they had similar executive sponsorship that really helped move things forward. So I think that's key to get them involved, show them the value in these projects. So our project mainly can be kind of summarized in each semester. We go through a new phase. And in each phase, we do a call for proposals. And within that call for proposals, we ask faculty to give us a proposal of how they're going to transform a course from what it traditionally has been into hopefully a completely open course. And certainly very low cost or no cost, depending on maybe if there's print materials. Each semester, they submit those proposals. The steering team looks at them. We try and get multiple colleges working together. We think that makes a richer proposal. We also think it helps in scaling later. And then we have the steering team take a look at it and provide some feedback. And then we help them through the development process. So as I mentioned, we're in the third year or the sixth phase. So right now, we're in phase six. We are accepting proposals. And I think the deadline is even today for the sixth phase. The first three phases, as you can kind of see in the middle of that slide, are the courses that were already approved, piloted, and now we're in the scaling phase where we're trying to get other folks to adopt it. Not only at the colleges they were developed at, but also across the district. Then in the next phases, in the fourth phase, those folks are piloting the courses. And in the fifth phase, they are in the development process. So how do we communicate this to students and to others? And we have a filter. And you can kind of see it on the left there where students can check no cost or low cost materials. And then it will search only those courses offered at $40 or less. And then there's a note on the right there that indicates that as well. We also use this to develop reports at the end of each semester to determine those savings. I see a question here. I better check. The funding for the project is ongoing district funding, one time external funding to blend. So it has been supported with district-wide funds. So out of our operational budget at the district level, which is why that executive sponsorship was so helpful. But we certainly are looking for external grants to kind of blend that. But we've been fortunate enough because we're a large district that we were able to do that funding within. Some student feedback. We've got, you know, we have focus groups, surveys. And then here's one of our students at Phoenix College talking about not just the cost savings, but having those materials on day one and how important that is. We also have thoughts we get from faculty and administrators. And I'll put this in the chat box in case anyone wants to watch any videos later, a couple of minute videos, whether it be from students or from our president interviewed several faculty, asking them why they use OER and how that works in their classes. I wanted to mention a couple other things. You know, we talked about the steering team and how important that was in the folks developing, but really without our internal partners, all these different folks to get involved. So anybody working on a project, you want to get all these and probably more internally involved to make sure that you have the most successful project you can. Let's see, there's another question. Why would any student not check the box? So, well, they often check it, but then if there's nothing available, then they have to search for it with uncheck. I wanted to throw in that we have a number of external partners. We look to our folks that some will even be speaking later today that we either steal ideas from, collaborate with, communicate with, and of course, CCCOER is so helpful in doing that as we move forward. You can't do it alone. That's the beauty of OER is everybody's so willing to share. Some data that's consistent with, this is just that one college with math, but it's consistent with what I've seen nationally, and that is students do no worse than success, as you can see on the left. Then the next column shows retention, which is a little bit better. That's consistent. And I see I'm running short on time, so I'll just finish up by saying, what do we need to do next now that we've saved the students money? Well, we're looking at, we have a little OERNB with our folks, and a nice segue here into the next folks that are already doing some degrees, and we'd like to offer that also at Maricopa. So, without further ado, we'll move on to our next presenter. Thanks so much, Paul. That was really impressive. And on to James. All right. Thanks, everybody. Paul is very modest about what they're doing at Maricopa. They're so well structured. I admire what they do, and I will certainly say that what we've been able to accomplish at College of the Canyons in a very organic fashion, owes to a lot of inspiration by the community, but also a lot of hard work by folks here, but it's definitely more organic than what you see in Maricopa. And anyway, some of you have seen me use this image before, sort of the lonely, long distance runner, you know, you come back from a conference, you come back from a webinar like this, and you think, oh, I'm going to bring back this great idea, and pretty soon you find yourself, you know, you're just out there on your own just trudging along. In my case, or in the case of College of the Canyons, we came back from a visit to the Foothill Dam of the Community College District in 2007 where we had a good fortune of chatting with Barbara Olawski, who's on the phone here, and Dr. Martha Cantor, former Chancellor of that district and longtime OER champion, who told us about their OER project and inspired us here at College of the Canyons. So we knew somebody else in the world was working on OER, but still it felt pretty lonely. Fortunately at College of the Canyons, we've had the longtime support of our Chancellor. As Una mentioned, the administrative support is very helpful. And in our case, Dr. Diane Van Hook has been a true visionary and leader saying after that 2000 visit with Barbara and Dr. Cantor, this is a social justice issue. Make it happen. And what that enabled on campus was really the permission to experiment and the permission for people to try things. We are extremely fortunate to have faculty champions, as Una mentioned, who along the way have tried things and experimented above all in our sociology department, sociology faculty, and in a career technical education area, water technology and land surveying actually have been early adopters and real champions of OER, we've been fortunate to have both the high level support and the vision and leadership of the faculty. So I'll underscore and support Una's statement about the importance of that leadership. In terms of expressing a tightly focused goal in our variety of OER private psychology Canyons, we have not done a very good job of that or I have not done a very good job of that. Certainly, I have used all of the arguments you see here on the screen, lower student cost, increased faculty collaboration, reach a total cost savings, number for students, and then, lo and behold, improve learning. But I have not done a very good or consistent job of articulating what the focal point is of the variety of projects that our faculty have undertaken. So I imagine that if I had, I'd like to think that if I had done that more consistently earlier on, we would have had more large scale impact earlier on. So I'll suggest that as a lesson learned to everybody out there to tightly and consistently define your goals rather than just keeping your fingers crossed as I often do. One thing that has certainly helped make the case on our campus is knowing the numbers, knowing the data from our own students, our local situation. We're very fortunate to have a powerful institutional research department here who's very willing to collaborate. So we've been able to collect the kind of data you see here on the screen asking students what are the top barriers to achieving your educational goals and consistently we receive the feedback from the students that yes, the cost of enrollments and fees is a barrier for about half of our students. Maybe 60% of our students tell us that work pressures are the top barrier, but consistently 75% of our students say that the top barrier to their educational goal is the cost of textbooks and supplies. So having that data at your disposal is something I strongly encourage. There's terrific research that's been done all over the United States, so by a lot of the folks on the phone here on the webinar here today to which we can point that certainly having our local data has been helpful to get the attention of our faculty. The other key element for us has been patience. Letting things percolate. It's funny how you can talk or I can talk and talk and talk and talk and nobody pays attention until people pay attention. I'm very much reminded of the institutional change or the change management that many of us have gone through in promoting business learning or online learning. You can demonstrate that there's no significant difference. You can demonstrate that it's cost effective. You can demonstrate that it serves students, but it seems that there comes a time when attention, energies, funding, karma sort of crystallizes. And so I do certainly encourage everyone to be patient. Keep going out, keep talking, keep making your presentations internally, keep directing people to the CCC OER activities, keep replaying these webinars for everyone on your campus, keep circulating research briefs. But one certainly needs to be patient when one is trying to implement or support really significant large scale change in your institution and in the way that higher education does business. The next slide shows what has changed over time for us at College of the Canyons. This is an image of survey results with our faculty last spring during which time we were planning an OER degree initiative to exactly crystallize our efforts, again very organic efforts, bubbling up here and bubbling up there throughout the institution, but not having a focal point. And a group was planning to, was developing a plan around the OER degree. So with survey of our faculty, it was about 25% of our faculty surveyed. Lo and behold, this thing that James has been talking about all these years that nobody seemed to want to do, hey we have been paying attention and this sounds like a pretty good idea. So that's been very satisfying and we've been able to invite a lot of people to play this year when we have a bit more funding at our disposal. And I think we're very well poised to invite a lot more people in to play with us as more funding becomes available. I'll take us back to the persistence, persistence idea of the not just patience but persistence, keep it on, keep it on, not just waiting but keep on moving. And my experience certainly and I think I hope that a lot of folks on the webinar today would say that being in the OER relay race or being in the OER game feels a bit more like this image today. There are a lot more people out there and that's really satisfying to know that you're not the only one on the road. But what you can also see here is that they're all heading in a particular direction and what we've been pointing towards and building towards that college of the canyons with the elements that I mentioned before the high level administrative support, the faculty champions, marshalling the data, being patient has brought us to a point at which there's really incredible excitement at the institution and really widespread agreement that implementing an OER degree pathway or a ZTC degree is just simply the logical thing to do. Many of you know that across the United States in the community colleges there's a movement towards a degree pathways period. The sense that our community colleges offering smorgasbord of course elections to students who are really unprepared and ill-advised to choose the courses to get to a finished point doesn't do them any service. So there is a large movement towards pathways overall. Certainly in the California community college system we've been required by law to develop degree pathways that provide a mapped out transfer from community colleges to our state university system. College of the canyons has more degree pathways than any other community colleges in California already developed and approved by our local academic senate and state chancellor's office. So we're well poised to expand the implementation of OER around already existing pathways. So the ground is fertile but I suppose I should have added one more slide here emphasizing the ways in which we've been able to use OER to amplify if you will the existing student success efforts that we already have underway around completion of pathways and the development of pathways and supporting the completion agenda nationally. So with that I will just encourage you to keep on the race and identify early on your goals and early on your focal point so that your structured efforts can bring a large scale change sooner than our organic efforts have. And turn it over to the next speaker. All right, thanks very much James for those words of wisdom. And now we want to turn it over to Quill West to talk about the pierce open pathway that's been in place now for I believe a year and a half which is exactly those OER based or Z degree that James was speaking about. Quill? Thanks, Zunat. And thank you all for giving me the opportunity to talk about our pierce open pathway. So yes, the pierce open pathway is an open education-based degree pathway to a general education degree. So we call it the POP because that's a lot easier to say than pierce open pathway and also because you can market that a little bit better and marketing is not my strong suit so I always choose quick things. For more information to check on some of the things that we're doing you're welcome to visit that URL that's on the screen and I'm going to paste the long version into the chat window so there's that for you. So when we started with the POP we were trying to figure out realistically what makes the most sense. So when I came to Pierce College the mission was already to create an open textbook degree. We knew we wanted a degree that has your textbook cost mostly because we were losing students. So we knew that we needed to eliminate textbook cost in the program that we were dealing with textbook cost and because it was affecting the students so much and we're choosing not to take classes because of the cost of textbook. So our pathway is to get on the general education degree pathway at joint-based Luc McChord which is where our degree is right now. They're saving an average of $2,200. But more importantly for us we really wanted to draw out a line. Most of these classes, most of the program is an online program but students have a choice to take face-to-face or online classes. And we really wanted to draw a line between course design and textbook selection because for us in particular there's always that question about is the textbook doing the teaching in an online course. And we know that's not true but we wanted to really, really showcase that with the faculty that are teaching these online courses. And then I was handed a mission to include information competency and open pedagogy in most of our classes. So that's our big push here. So it's our general education degree. It's 40 plus classes and originally it was 32 but it keeps getting bigger. It's face-to-face and online. And our idea here is that students have a choice. So we defined a very narrow pathway that we said this is where we know most of our students are needing to take classes to either further their professional choices or to be able to. Most of our students, well, about this program that I'm talking about serves military students and families particularly. So we wanted to be able to help them get promotion points and those kinds of things. So we picked classes specifically that would do that and said to the faculty, these are the classes we're going to do. And the faculty said, okay, we'll do those and then they did more. So the pathway keeps getting wider which is great but we're still trying to stay on a pretty defined pathway because we worry that too many choices in our general pathway leads to too few classes and then we have to cancel classes. We don't want to do that either. So we're trying to maintain a pathway that best meets our students' requirements for their degrees. But every one of our open courses is offered every single quarter. So students can start on the day one of their pathway and say I'm going to take these classes and know that we are always going to offer those classes. It leaves online. Not always face to face but it leaves online. So they always have the choice to take the classes and what that means is that we have to continually keep faculty sharing resources because if one teacher stops teaching, say we have done our math and society class. So say the teacher who does the math and society class online decides not to teach for us online anymore. We have to be able to give that course to the next teacher we hire to the next person that takes over the course. That person has to be able to teach online because they're open because they promise the students that will happen for them. So we've already started to have a tiny bit of turnover because teachers are changing the classes they prefer to teach. So we've already kind of empowered our as an faculty to be able to evaluate courses and make changes to them and teach them as is. And it's kind of a beautiful thing when a new teacher comes on and it's a week before the class starts to be able to say to them, oh, I'm going to hand you a textbook and say good luck. Which has happened in so many other faculty members' careers. But to say, here's a full course and tell us how we can help you to make changes to your teaching style. So it's pretty great. And the students have been really positive about this experience because they like having choice. So right now our challenge is defining what scale is like for an entire district. So Pierce College at JBLM is a small part of our entire two-college district. So it's two colleges, three campuses. How are we going to expand these offerings across the district? That's the question we're dealing with right now. Districtwide, our strategic plan says that we will have 50% of our courses open within the next, I think it's five years. So that's the big vision. And that ties very closely to our college mission. So the question then becomes sort of the appropriate course is to expand. And I would encourage anybody who's starting the conversation right now at their institution or even people who are starting to it to talk to advisors. Because I learned the best thing when I sit down with our advising team. We're not necessarily on our steering committee, but I'm reconfiguring that and thinking they should be on our steering committee. Because they can tell us where most students take them as classes and they can tell us how those classes are better incorporated into the student's future plan. So when we decide which classes to adopt next for when we invest institutional money in adopting open materials for courses, we're doing it in a way that best supports the student choice. So I actually am going to quit talking and turn this over to Preston now and I will take questions and I'll go back through questions when we come back around. Thanks. All right. Thank you, Quill. That was amazing what you were sharing about how your faculty are working together and also about how Quill works with students as well. I just wanted to put a plug in that Quill will be talking tomorrow at the same time, same channel here. And she's going to have a student panel join us. So do tune in tomorrow if you can for that. And now I'd like to introduce Dr. Preston Davis from Northern Virginia College. He's also the VP of our partnership program that CDC OER. And we've been, you know, cheering Preston on from the sidelines with his OER based associate degree for three or four years now. And we just love to have him present and talk about the work he's doing. Great. Thank you so much, Euna. I'm really happy to be here with all of these great colleagues today. And I'm happy to talk a little bit about what we have been doing at NOVA to focus on developing OER degree programs for our students. Hello. I'm sorry, something just happened with my system. Can you guys hear me okay? Okay. Sorry about that. You're back. Great. I was having trouble trying to move the slides. Oh, let's see. You should have access. But if you need me to do that, I can. Okay. I'm not sure what's going on. Oh, okay. You go ahead. You need to do the slides for me, Euna, because my system's not functioning properly for some reason. Okay. You just let me know when you want me to move them. Perfect. So another one began building our OER program courses in 2012. And from day one, we had a degree program in mind. So we started by selecting specific courses that we knew would create a degree pathway. We started with certificate and general studies and an associate's degree in general education and also an associate's degree in social sciences. So by selecting specific courses that we knew students could follow to earn a degree, we were really helping to encourage students to continue and complete, which is something that community colleges in particular really have started to emphasize within the last few years. And it was important for us to recognize that scaling any OER program requires an emphasis on digital literacy. It's critical for faculty and especially students. Millennial students as digital natives have a comfort level with technology. And so adjusting to a program that uses digital content and materials is really not something that many of our students have difficulty with. It can be more of a challenge for faculty in some regards. Faculty also need to have a desire to share. And that's really not difficult because most educators are in this business because we want to share knowledge and help folks grow. And it becomes kind of a natural offshoot of that to be able to not only share with our own students, but to share resources back that others can make use of as well. Okay, thank you. We also wanted to make sure as we were taking advantage of all of the digital materials and content that were available, the openly licensed materials, and more and more of those materials have become available certainly over the last year or two. But to make sure that we were not missing out on outstanding learning content and resources that are available through our own library collections. And so to fill gaps that may exist in the licensed content and to make sure that we had the ability to focus on a full and complete program that met all of our learning outcomes, combining open and licensed material, as well as the material that were free to our students through our own library collections. We also felt it was very important to develop an organizational structure that supported access to materials, affordability, and increased student success. And so this framework has to have necessary support to define the process and to keep the momentum going because this is a lot of work that involves a lot of people. And so we actually incorporated reviewing and vetting openly licensed materials in our course design process and made sure that we added a librarian as a resource to our instructional design team to help faculty through this process and encourage faculty to incorporate OER. This is part of our ongoing process that came out of our initial project. So even though it was a requirement for our OER program that we built, this is something that we have incorporated into our process to encourage all faculty, as they are revising courses, to try to make as much use of openly licensed material as possible. And we couldn't do this without the help of our friends. We have so many folks in this community that are able to provide support, expertise to really share their knowledge, their experience. Also, the bumps in the road that they have had to deal with to help us avoid some of the things that are inevitable when you undertake any type of project like this. This community is an outstanding community with so many excellent folks. And it's also important to be able to give back and to share the content and material that we have. And so we're making all of our online OER courses available for anyone to be able to adopt and adapt because it's important to share back to the community. We've benefited from the community and we want to make sure that others are able to benefit from what we've done and our lessons learned. And so the results of what we have done really quickly are degree programs that have served over 10,000 students and saved them over $1.5 million to date. And that's as of the fall. So that doesn't include our current spring numbers. And the increase in student success, which is very important to us as well. And really the most important thing that we're most proud of is seeing that students who have taken the courses in our OER program are seeing better success rates and completion rates. Because that's really what we're in this business for in the first place. So now I would like to turn it over to my colleague Richard and he can expand more on what we're doing throughout the state of OER. All right. Thank you so much, Preston. Before I turn it over to Richard, I want to apologize. Preston's slides were truncated. This will be available later on this afternoon. He had beautiful slides and I do apologize for the truncation. And on to Richard who wants to tell us about the statewide work being done in Virginia. Virginia is really active in OER right now and we'd love to share their great work. Yeah, thank you, Oona. And thanks, Preston, and everyone else who's presented today. I'm going to zoom out now. All the stuff that's been said so far is probably part of what some, you know, at least one of our colleges do and that's part of what we're calling the Z times 23 project. So I'm going to talk a little bit about this kind of statewide effort from my position here at the system office in Virginia. And it really is, you know, kind of, kind of like Preston said, building off of the work that's gone on at Northern Virginia at Tidewater and some of our other colleges are generally taking advantage of some of the momentum. So we know what a Z degree is, right? It was created by Tidewater Community College 2012. So they kind of launched the idea of the Z degree as kind of a foundational unit of OER that's really kind of caught people's imagination. And so the Z times 23 project is really the idea of taking, you know, that to its logical conclusion, which is you have these degree programs in OER that are openly licensed that, you know, a college may create Tidewater, for example, or NOVA, that these degrees really, you know, need to be shared across the system and how do you do that? You know, in concept it seems pretty easy, but it's not exactly, you know, there's some challenges with that. And so that was really the goal of the project is to take the Tidewaters kind of innovation and the work that NOVA did as well and really kind of share it with our other 23 colleges, which we have a history of doing. We have a pretty centralized system in Virginia that really, I think, benefits us in scaling these things. So we got a grant from Hewlett Foundation and we got a significant match from our chancellor and I was able to cobble together some other funds. I don't know how, but I did. So we're really about a half, a little over half a million dollars for this year-long grant. And so in July, really kind of, by the time we kind of got the grant, we got everything set up and released an RFP and all that in that process, we had 16 colleges awarded, they could have gotten awards up to $15,000. And so what that money was used for is included in the grant was technical support. So we had a paid program manager, Cheryl Huff, and many of you may know, and kind of Lumen Support Services were part of the grant as well. So colleges needed to use the money to pay faculty stipends, travel, library and instructional designers. Things have been talked about before that are important. These were all kind of packaged together into a grant that was sent to the colleges to use to launch these projects. And in the RFP, there were conditions on it, of course, they had to, and the goal of the, I should say the goal, the cause of the timeline was to get started on the Z-degrees, so they had to build at least 12 courses on their way to the 20 or 21 or whatever for the full Z-degrees. So 12 courses to start that pathway. So we're hoping that we either get another grant next year or we'd find some way to kind of finish those off and have complete degrees. Now the reason that Virginia, places like Nova and Tidewater and elsewhere are, I think, one partial reason for the success here is really Chancellor Glendobois. I won't dwell on it, I don't have a lot of time, but he was a community college student. He couldn't afford textbooks and he talks really compellingly about that experience and that experience makes him very supportive of these issues. I would say this is kind of where we are is really kind of a pet project of his. So he is that champion leader that we need and he is putting resources where his mouth is and that's been, really has made a big difference. It's not all, you know, it wouldn't be able to carry this entire project but it certainly is crucial. There's not a whole lot of new money. There's not a whole lot of things to develop a new project from scratch. And so, you know, really kind of being creative with adapting, aligning this project and I can't emphasize this more, aligning it with what your institutional strategic goals are where you already have resources devoted and you can say, hey, this supports, you know, kind of what we're working towards, you know, access and success and in our case completion. And so, we're able to get some money that, you know, to make it part of existing projects and not say, hey, this is a brand new kind of pilot project that we want to try out and really kind of aligning it with other stuff. And we have these trailblazers, we've heard from them at Tidewater in Northern Virginia. Again, I think it's been, I mean, sometimes it's not such a good relationship between system office and colleges. I think anybody will, you know, I think maybe Preston will attest to that. Sometimes it can be a little bit tense. But I think in this case, you know, like being able to support these colleges when I can and also benefiting from their work is kind of a really great partnership. I'm hoping you can ask them, you know, when I'm not around, maybe they have a different story. Another really crucial thing, and I know this because sometimes this hasn't been the case and things haven't gone well, is really kind of asking your faculty or the colleges or whoever's involved in doing this is just to do as much as possible for them and ask them just to take that last step, right? So that support is really essential. You don't want to say this is a good idea and go out and build some degrees and we're all for it and good luck to actually putting some resources there so that they're supported and are able to take a risk but it's kind of calculated and it's kind of couched with this other support and they're all in it together. We have some structural advantages that some of my colleagues at other institutions always remind me of. We have a shared LMS. All of our 23 colleges use Blackboard Learn as one instance, so we log in and everyone sees the same thing. So that's really helped sharing our courses. It's really just made it much easier. Same thing with our SIS system. It's PeopleSoft. And unlike many systems, community college systems, we have a pretty centralized governance structure. The most important thing, I think, is that our 23 college presidents are evaluated by our chancellor. So, you know, there is a little, both through the technical infrastructure and also just through kind of personnel level, some ability to scale things that are good ideas. So results, again, 16 institutions. We've done, they're completing six degree programs that have been targeted. So Business Admin, Management, Criminal Justice, Genad, Liberal Arts, Social Sciences are the degree that have been targeted by these institutions. Over 100 courses have been adapted and adopted for this program and we're being kind of integrated. And it's different versions of similar courses, but really a really kind of explosion of new OER courses that are available to faculty within Blackboard Learn and then publicly on Candela and our Blackboard site. And participation from about, at this point, about 427 faculty members, at least documented, that are participating. And some of the results. And again, the evaluation is still out. We haven't really done a lot of evaluation, but fall, about 11, close to 12,000 enrollments, using that $100 metric, a little over a million dollar savings, spring, incredibly, about 29,000 enrollments. Again, close to, so it's totaling for two semesters about three and a half million in savings. Just textbook savings within this project and some other organic adoptions. This is really, really conservative because we don't know the full numbers. And for example, Nova, if you were to count all system-wide stuff like the Nova work, the Tidewater work, with the Z-Lite courses, and then other organic adoption that's happening through our Blackboard Learn course site where any faculty member can adopt these courses. Lessons learned. Set clear goals. Align it, like I said before, align it with your kind of strategic goals and kind of make sure the idea here isn't to really build degrees. You know, that's not the end game, it's completion, right? It's got to contribute to our completion agenda and that's the case at least at my level to make all the time. Some flexibility. You know, we have rules, but again, you want to get the colleges on board. They're dealing with some constraints. So, you know, I try to be as flexible as I can with some of the requirements and reducing friction. It's important, like I said, make it very easy for faculty. Some of the things that have come out of this is our OER course tab. Again, in Blackboard Learn, all faculty members can see this. They can look preview courses and they can adopt courses. And we're seeing a lot of that just from faculty members who just kind of stumble upon it and, you know, say they like it. And then we have a spreadsheet of all of our courses that are being developed that lets us some kind of interesting collaboration between colleges, and we're working on for years and years. And this is the first time I've seen it really kind of happen this way. And then model openness. Try to have public webinars, share information, share our successes and failures. And I think that's important, too. And there's some resources for the slides of some of the things that we've created or some information that you might want to know more about. And that's it. Thank you. And so we ended right on time. I want to thank all our amazing speakers this morning because they each had eight minutes. And I think they were all like right on the dot. So to allow you folks out there to have some time to ask some questions. And before we flip to the Q&A side, I just want to say we do have another webinar tomorrow at the same time. And it will be featuring the Pierce College District students. They'll be talking about OER. And also we will have Northern Essex Community College talking about the faculty development that they have done over the last two and a half years and in general talking a little bit about what's happening in Massachusetts. So exciting. Join us for that. And we are open now for questions. I did see one question that several folks answered in the chat session. It wasn't directly related to this, but it was about printing OER. So making that available on campus for students when you need hard copies. And we had some good answers out there. I don't know if any of our speakers would like to address that issue. I'm going to guess that no. Great. Thank you. Quilt says create space. We know that a number of folks have used lulu.com in the past when there's an existing PDF that can be posted up on lulu.com by the faculty for free and then students can print from there. So thank you for that. Do we have any other questions for our speakers? All right. Well, thank you, Amy. Amy has a question here. She says she likes Quilt. The question is about sharing courses when there isn't a shared LMS. Does anyone want to share success with either course cartridges or other ideas? Anyone out there who has been sharing OER without benefit of an LMS? Okay. My speakers can speak up if you've got microphones. So LTI interoperability, if you have one of the more popular LMSs like Desire to Learn, Blackboard, Canvas, there's a limited number at this point. LTI is something that the courses, many of the courses, and I think eventually most of the courses for my project live on the Candela site, which is Lumen's site, and are kind of piped in through LTI and Blackboard. And so that could be done on multiple LMSs. So you can have a canonical kind of version somewhere and pipe it in that way through LTI. That's one solution. Great. Thank you for that, Richard. Yeah. That's a great solution. I also use any other shared solutions for that. I know in the past, there's been some of the big projects have used Google Docs to share course, actually full open courses. I think we're probably moving away from that somewhat. All right. We're at the top of the hour. Any final questions for our evening speakers? All right. Well, I want to thank Paul, James, Quill, Richard, who came here to tell you about their successes, their lessons learned, and what's been really key in terms of ingredients for success and sustainability. So I want to once again thank them, and thank you all for coming. And we hope to see you tomorrow at the same time for our student panel and faculty development webinar. Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you very much.