 Welcome everyone to our presentation today, entitled Access, Outcomes, and Engagement, How Student-Centered Collaboration Brings a Values-Based Approach to the OER Ecosystem. I'm Sarah Ann Stokes. I'm an Educational Developer at the Teaching and Learning Center at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. With me today, I have Prenjil Saloni and Rebecca Maynard, who are my colleagues also in the Teaching and Learning Center. We're so thankful to have you here today. I'd like to start off with a brief land acknowledgement. Ontario Tech University acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation. We are thankful to be welcomed on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered under the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation including Algonquin, Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. So a brief overview of what we'll be talking about today. I'd like to give you a brief overview of what the Open Education Lab is here at Ontario Tech University. Then we'll talk a little bit about access and how it relates to the Open Education Movement and Open Educational Resources. We'll talk about student outcomes and engagement and how they're related to our work here at the Open Education Lab. And finally a discussion from value to values and a way we can reframe the OER ecosystem. So we can all agree on the financial value of OER in their ability to provide students with cost-free quality resources that will help them through their educational journey. Much of how the OER ecosystem is supported is through financially-based structures. Institutions give grants to faculty in order to create and release OER. Authors of work pay to release their papers through open access journals and many other ways. But what if we thought of a way to change how we talk about the sustainability of the OER ecosystem by looking not only at the values for the students we make the OER for but also with the ones we make OER with. So now I'd like to turn the presentation over to the OER Lab coordinator and former Open Education Lab student content developer Pranjal Saloni. Hi everyone my name is Pranjal Saloni and I am the Open Education Lab Coordinator at Ontario Tech and today I will be talking a little bit about the Open Education Lab. So the defining characteristics at the lab at Ontario Tech is that it is created with students for students. The needs of our students were built into the concepts of the lab so we are also so we also needed students to have some input when creating our resources. So our lab as student run staff managed group that brings content and technology expertise to the to the time creation of highly quality OER that will be used directly in an Ontario Tech course by Ontario Tech students. Students working with us gain valuable project management content development example writing, editing, media creation and communication skills which can be implemented in their coursework and on their job. Open Education Lab jobs are paid position that are supported through the Ontario University Works program. The Open Education Lab creates resources such as textbooks, images, videos like TED Talks, articles, software, test bank, pedagogy, etc. We employ our student staff through the University Works program which is a branch of Financial Aid at Ontario Tech focused on providing students with part-time job placements. And now I will be inviting Rebecca who will be talking a little bit about access. Hello everyone as Pranjal mentioned my name is Rebecca. I am the Faculty Development Coordinator with the Teaching and Learning Centre at Ontario Tech and before I took that job I was also a student worker with the Open Education Lab. And today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about access within the open movement and the two are pretty inextricably linked as you all likely know. But I'm going to talk a little bit about of how we approach access at the Open Education Lab. But we don't want this talk to be just about the projects we've done at the lab although they're great and we're really proud of them. Rather what we want to do today is show you how the things we do in the OE Lab are intentionally based on values that deliver real impacts to real students. So to do that we asked a few of our student staff members to give us some insight into their university experiences. And the identifying details have been removed but this is a case study of one of our students who worked with the OE Lab. They're a third year engineering student who moved to Canada when they were in elementary school and to pay for school they rely on a combination of personal savings working during the school year and student loans. And even with all of that they're still thinking about their finances all the time and they're not alone. Canada as a whole has a very high participation in post-secondary education. As of 2019 73% of Canadians between the ages of 25 and 34 had earned some form of post-secondary qualification and this could mean a degree, a diploma, a trade certificate and so on. However the vast majority of Canadian students say that paying for university tuition is a challenge and part of the reason for that is that university tuition costs have tripled since the year 2000. And to illustrate that point we can think of it kind of like this. In 2012 the debt load of Canadian post-secondary students was over $28 billion Canadian and 2012 was 10 years ago so the student debt load in 2022 is substantially higher and we can see the impact of that debt load manifest in several different ways ranging from individual student experiences to the makeup of entire institutions. So 45% of graduating students in Canada owe more than $25,000 upon graduation. That's a significant amount of debt on its own but we also have to consider that it can take students in equity seeking groups much much longer to repay this debt and for that reason these equity seeking groups are often excluded from post-secondary institutions all together. So while rising tuition costs may only cause a small decrease in overall enrollments we have to remember that certain students are being disproportionately affected. The net decrease in enrollment might be small but the makeup of the student body is significantly changed and the impact is felt within the student body as well. Compared to their peers students who have debt loads are less likely to graduate on time if they graduate at all so in that way the cycle perpetuates itself. Students take on this debt but later have difficulties finding well-paying employment to repay the debt. And again it's important to remember that high costs do not affect students equally. The students who are most affected are first-generation students, students from low-income families and as we mentioned students in equity seeking groups. These are students who are usually reliant on financial aid to afford the costs of attending university and they also need to work while doing so. So we know all of this but why is it important to the OA Lab in particular? Because many of our students at Ontario Tech are facing these exact barriers. Our case study student who we met earlier is having a very similar experience to the average Ontario Tech student. Compared to the provincial average students from Ontario Tech are more dependent on financial aid. They spend more hours during they work more hours during the week. They spend more time commuting to school and they have more dependent or caregiving responsibilities. And because of all of this finances have a very real impact on our students. So when we were developing the concept of the OA Lab that's something we needed to keep in mind. We wanted to support our student body as a whole by providing open course materials. Absolutely. But we also wanted to be able to support the students who were working with us. And Pranjal already spent some time discussing how we set up the lab as a workplace. I'm going to try not to repeat myself too much but I am going to highlight three of our main objectives. First we wanted to provide paid work to our students. That's partially because of the make up of the Ontario Tech student body which we've already talked about. But also because of the context in which the lab started which was June of 2020. And this was three months into the COVID-19 pandemic and our students were frankly in a very scary situation. I mean if a global pandemic wasn't stressful enough many of them were also losing access to the supports that they'd been relying on. We had jobs that were cutting staff. We had work placements and internships being cancelled. And so our students were finding themselves in these very precarious situations. So we wanted to make sure that the students who worked with us were receiving financial support and we were able to do that by employing them through the University Works program as Pranjal mentioned. But we also wanted to make sure that the work they were doing felt meaningful. We didn't ever want the lab to be a job where they would do busy work. We wanted this to be a job but also an opportunity for experiential learning. Through working with the lab they could learn and practice a variety of skills that they could then take with them as they moved on to their respective fields. And finally we wanted the work of our students to have a lasting impact. By generating affordable resources that would be used in courses on Ontario Tech weren't able to mitigate some of the financial stresses our students are facing. Not just our current students but future students as well. So I'd now like to highlight one of our resources that has had this kind of lasting impact. What you're looking at right now is one of the first projects that we took on at the lab. These are interactive practice questions for an anatomy and physiology course and this was a course that had already been using an OER as a textbook which was great. But the supplementary material was very limited and in a discipline like anatomy and physiology that requires a lot of memorization and practice those kinds of materials are really really important. So our students stepped in and created these interactive review quizzes from each chapter of the textbook using an open program called H5P. And what was really neat about this project beyond the fact that we were able to reduce the resource cost of this course to zero was that students were learning how to design questions to test knowledge in meaningful ways and they didn't need to have a background in anatomy or physiology to do it. And that's the kind of experiences we mean when we're talking about experiential learning. Giving students the opportunity to practice skills that they can apply across disciplines but maybe wouldn't have had the chance to try. And that's just one of the employment outcomes we have at the lab but we'd like our students to be able to learn and apply a variety of skills but we also want to encourage their agency and innovation. We modeled the lab after an academic publisher so we want them to have experience communicating with clients, managing projects and completing work under production deadlines that they might find in a workplace. But while doing that we also want to give them the chance to explore and pursue their interests. I think we've now had students come into work in the lab from every faculty in Ontario Tech and we tend to assign projects based on each individual's interests and abilities. And we do all of this while providing paid wages and flexible work hours. The lab has been running for almost three years now which is really cool to think about and two of those years were spent primarily working online which allowed our students a lot of flexibility and ability to balance their other responsibilities. And when we put these elements that we value together students working in sustainable and meaningful employment while creating open resources that make attending university more accessible for other students we're making the university experience more affordable for everyone involved and that's incredibly impactful and it's something that we will always strive to do at the OE lab. However I want to wrap up the section by making one last point. When we're talking about access, real access, we need to move beyond reducing costs. Ultimately the decision to attend university is extremely complex and depends on much more than finances. Students make the choice to come to university depending on a huge variety of factors. This can include things like aptitude, their interests, influence from their families and their culture and social supports. And if we want to look at the statistics, financial constraints explain only 12 percent of the difference in enrollment between affluent and less affluent students. The OE lab and open education in general is valuable for more than just reducing costs for students and it's important to remember that. And now to discuss that in more detail I'm going to turn it back over to Sarah. So I'd like to bring another case to the forefront for our presentation and this one is really relevant as well. So we have a student who is in the third year of a business degree and is relatively new to Canada. She's spent about $300 on textbooks alone this semester and what is more interesting is that she never finds representations of people like her or those who have her particular focus in her resources despite the classes she's in. And so we're probably all familiar with this. Maybe some of the resource fits the course. It's sometimes the case with traditional textbooks and sometimes with OER. Sometimes the examples we find are of things we haven't really experienced before and really who tries to fit a ladder around the corner of a narrow hallway by way of trigonometry anyway. But imagine all of your resources being like this as a student. So the uniquely editable feature of OER can allow faculty members to customize those resources to suit their courses and their student populations taking into a consideration their unique needs backgrounds and desired outcomes. We know OER allow faculty members to align their resources with current research but more importantly with current global social and political trends and current events because those are what are impacting students and their families right now. They can be included for discussion and analysis giving validation to students lived experiences and this kind of culturally responsive teaching can really enhance the education that students are signed up for. So OER can really impact student outcomes and engagement in some really interesting ways. We do know that the editable nature of OER can support diverse learners so students are able to see themselves reflected in the material because it's been edited for them. It's aligned with global events as I mentioned so giving validation to their lived experience and it also improves access. So these culturally responsive really available resources improves that participatory access to learning earlier on in the semester. So now I again I'd like to highlight some of what the OER lab has done to respond to this feature of OER and we applied the experiences of students who have taken a course to a newly developed resource for that same course and what it really let us do is add a unique perspective with many diverse student voices. So these students were encouraged to find relevant content not only to their lives but to their discipline and create a resource that they actually had input on and thought would benefit other students in the course. So this is our resource for management of the enterprise which is an introductory business course and what it does is it takes those introductory business ideas and really adds the unique IT or information technology spin that is integral to our program here at Ontario Tech. It also includes relevant examples pertaining to work in the IT field and it also includes student created content like outlines and glossary terms and uniquely Canadian examples. So really allowing students to see themselves reflected back in the resources that they're using. And I want to highlight in this case the benefits of student involvement in the OER creation process. So students really have the potential to realize many of the academic tasks that take place at institutions of higher education including participation in publishing, running peer-reviewed journals and making their work available to other students. They really possess an awareness of technology tools that may otherwise be overlooked by faculty. It allows for the division of labor in the creation process and students are rapidly able to adapt and innovate which allows us to create even more useful and discoverable OER. When we're looking at a values based ecosystem for OER having students put their own personal details into the material is really one of the ways that can contribute strongly to increased engagement and improved outcomes is the inclusion of those relevant examples and importantly the validation of their lived experience. And so that's where I want to talk a little bit about value versus values. So we all know that a lot of the initial discussions about OER were the financial impact. It's easy to quantify OER and a lot of institutions that's how they're tracking the value of OER programs at their institution. But I think and my other colleagues as well think that instilling other values in that ecosystem as a way to measure the efficacy of OER programs is really the key to unlocking that sustainability of OER. And when we talk about values we're looking at student access, engagement, achievement of learning outcomes, their participation in experiential learning opportunities, their application of knowledge and skills, their ability to learn how to innovate and take risks and also give and receive valuable feedback. So the focus on values gives us the freedom really to move away from the strictly financial sense of OER and then focus on how teaching and learning can be improved particularly through OER production by our students. You can still include increased affordability and financial outcomes as a measurement of the success of OER programs. I don't think that's ever going to go away but our argument is that the system is more robust and has many more opportunities for student and faculty engagement and creativity when you include these other values as measurement. So thank you so much for joining us for this presentation today. We are always happy to speak with others about the work we're doing at the Open Education Lab and you can reach us at OERatOntarioTechU.ca or follow us on social media or visit the Teaching and Learning Center's website. I would just like to draw your attention to the attribution for the beautiful graphics and slide template we've used today and thank you so much for listening.