 Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon for those of you who are central and eastern time. It is still morning out here in the Pacific. This is the community college outreach director at the open courseware consortium and welcome to our first webinar of the winter spring series. Today we are going to talk about open textbook publishing and adoption. We really hope that you can take this information back to your campuses and help your faculty to select high quality materials and help save your students money in the process. I'm sorry about that. We are just clicking a little bit slow here today. We are going to talk about how you might be new to the blackboard collaborate system that we use here in the California community college system. The chat window and the participants are on your left-hand side of the screen. Please feel free to use that chat window throughout the webinar to ask questions and so forth. We will hold the audio part of the questions until the end, the chat questions as they come up and please use it for comments and to cheer on our presenters. If you have any issues during the webinar, do feel free to contact the tech support people at 1-760-744-1150 and that is extension 1537 or 1554. I will repeat the number one more time. That was 1-760-744-1150. All right. At this time, it is my pleasure to give you a quick introduction to our speakers today. Once again, I am Muna Daly from the open coursework consortium. Our first speaker is Surreal Oberlander. He is the director of library services at SUNY University. Surreal, tell us a little bit about your job there. Hello, everyone. My name is Surreal and at Geneseo, I am the library director which means an incredible amount of appreciation for some of the finest library staff and librarians working with great students and faculty here and across the world. Thank you very much. One thing I neglected to say is for those of you who are listening in today, welcome and please introduce yourself in the chat window and let us know what institution you are with or organization. Next up is David Harris who is the editor in chief of open stacks college. David, tell us a little bit about your day job. David is pretty busy at the moment. I work with open stacks college and I work with our content development teams, our partner teams and the community to develop open education resources for our project. All right. Thank you for being with us today, David. The third speaker is Dr. David Ernst who is the chief information officer at the college of education at the University of Minnesota. David is actually at a conference in New Orleans, I believe today. David, tell us a little bit about what you do back at the University of Minnesota. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. I am the chief information officer in one of the colleges at the University of Minnesota of the College of Education and I am responsible for all the IT services there but I spend the vast majority of my time working on educational technology issues. And I am also the executive director of the open technical initiative at the University of Minnesota and that is what we are going to be talking about today. Great. Thank you, David, for joining us today. I want to invite you to show us where you are on this globe here. And the way you can do that is by picking up one of the little tools that are next to the star here and dropping that on your location on the globe. I hope I explained that correctly. The star is in the little vertical toolbar in the middle. Okay. Thank you. We have a smiley face over there on the west coast. We have some east coast folks. Lovely. Looks like we have some folks in Florida. We have some folks up in the northwest. We have some folks up in Canada. I am guessing from Vancouver. Wonderful. Anyone in the center? Looks like we might even have some folks here in the center down in Texas. Lovely. Looks like we have a pretty good review of North America. It doesn't look like we have any global folks today. No folks from overseas. But maybe they will watch our YouTube archive of this. It should be available in about a week. Before we get to the speed of the show today, a little clicker is a little slow today. Here is our agenda. We are going to hear from Saril first about the open textbook SUNY initiative. Next we will hear from open stacks. Finally we will hear from David on the open text library at the University of Minnesota. As I mentioned, we will hold our audio Q&A until the end. For those of you who might be new to the community college consortium for OER, we are the community colleges at the open courseware consortium. We will be the adoption of OER to enhance teaching and learning. Our strategies are supporting professional development for faculty and staff and administrators that they can select high quality materials and help expand access to education. Our focus remains at the community college, although two of our speakers today are actually from the four year colleges and universities. We will move on into those. There is a lot of overlap between our goals. The community college consortium continues to grow. We have over 240 colleges now who participate in our consortium. I think we are actually in 16 states and provinces now. I need to update that slide. Finally, getting to the content for today. I don't think any of this is a surprise to you. Text book prices have been rising in the last decade. Actually 82% since 2002. At two to three times the inflation rate and the average student somewhere over $1,000 text book supplies. That is a really significant issue for our students, particularly our students at the community college who are less able to afford education. I will tell you a little bit about research that was done in Florida just a couple of years ago, which showed that 60% of students do not purchase text books at least at some point due to cost. Those of you who have been paying attention to the news over the last couple of weeks, there was a recent report that reported that 60% of students often don't purchase text books currently due to cost. We know that this is a decision that we don't want students to have to make. We know that it can impact not only their success in the course, as you can see here, 35% of students take fewer courses due to text book cost. We know that it is increasing their time to graduation as well. The folks that we are going to have talking with you today are going to tell us about some alternatives that your faculty or yourself, if you are teaching, can use in your classroom to help students be able to afford education more easily. I would like to turn this over to Siril Oberlander, the director of library services at SUNY and he is going to tell us all about the open SUNY textbook project. Thank you all for wanting to listen to this because I think we all see that there is a great benefit to reducing the cost of text books and really the cost of education. The open SUNY textbook initiative is really an effort to think about saving the cost not only at the 64 campuses across New York, but in a larger picture, making an effort globally to make our text books useful, learning resources useful across the world. It is library led and it is from an innovative instruction technology that we have already done. Let's start with the problem and we have already seen some of it that we were trying to address. We looked at open SUNY textbooks as a severe cost to students or the textbooks because they were charging $1,200 roughly a year. More importantly, we also saw that there was a big business in text books. That was $6.5 billion in 2003. As a Florida student textbook survey, which was fantastic, it surveyed 22,000 students, it found that students didn't buy a lot of text books. The majority would take that strategy. A lot of times we focus on the idea that we are trying to get faculty to adopt open textbooks, but one of the major concerns that faculty are legitimately concerned about is that their students might not be adopting their expensive textbooks. I think of this as an opportunity. I would like to add one more graph which is the student debt has reached about $1 trillion and is a severe problem that we have to deal with. How do we do it? Well, libraries are interested in this problem specifically because not only do we want to help learning, we are also paying money for the cost of textbooks as well. We run course reserves which take staffing, which sometimes we are buying textbooks, and we are dealing with overdue fines, disputes, we are borrowing them from other libraries which cost money, especially because students keep them for the whole semester and we get lots of problems with overdues. There is a perception of a problem here. The parents and students are starting to perceive libraries and higher education as a problem, a cost of it. So we saw it as an opportunity to really create a win-win. We have an opportunity to curate a win-win solution by thinking of it as not just textbooks, but thinking of it as a learning environment. So if you look at the larger picture, these are learning assets. These are a way to engage the teachers and learners. And we think we have a role as curators of the learning environment or content. So we thought of it as an opportunity to create the win-win. And I think we have a role here as well. Recently the students for all of SUNY put in a proposal to SUNY saying we would really like you to address the textbook affordability problems, create some solutions, and in that they made a resolution that recognized our efforts in open SUNY textbooks. Students want answers and systems like the State University of New York, which has 467,000 students, are trying to find good answers to their questions. It's not just students who are looking for answers or who want to change things. This is an article, an excerpt out of an article that Jill Moxley wrote recently about open textbooks in academia. In it he talks that publishers have an enormous amount of money that they've made based on his content. But what gives him the most control over his content and the greatest impact in the lives of students and readers is to make it, is to release it under a creative content license. In fact, our own faculty member who wrote a book, Literature, Humanities and Humanities in Humanity, Dr. Theodore Steinberg, says that his profession in English has served a role of not making books accessible as they need to be. So in his effort, and he wrote a wonderful Humanities Literature book, he's basically contributing, making it available to everyone because he feels that that's one of his roles as a professor, making a big difference with his students and everyone else who wants to read literature. But if you haven't taken a look, I encourage you to take a look at this one. The next thing is, we know there was a problem and we know we need to solve it. So how do we do it? In July 2012, we as five libraries were granted an innovative instruction technology grant from SUNY, $20,000 to do a call for authors. So we were essentially offered on November 2012 $3,000 for authors to contribute a manuscript proposal. And if we selected it, they'd be given the incentive upon completion. We also paid for peer review and other services. In two weeks, we got 38 proposals. They were so good we were very reluctant to just say yes to four. So we have three libraries. Many of them pitched in additional funds. We actually contributed $40,000 to produce 15 textbooks. We're already starting to produce them. We have three up now and we're going to have two more up this month. And we're looking forward to making a difference in the year. This year it's 15 textbooks. This year, the libraries are managing the whole editorial workflow. Essentially, they receive the manuscript proposals. They review them. They select them. They do peer review. They send it out for peer review. They get all the information back. The librarians are also doing the copy editing. We have volunteers not only at participating libraries, but other SUNY libraries wanted to help in their supporting us with copy editing. Now, in addition to that, we do the text layout and then in the final proof, we do proof reading. We do hire freelance on occasion because we don't always have the resources to go through all those 15 books. Now, what do we accomplish? Well, we're putting all of our open textbooks as PBS and ePubs in open monograph press. That's a open source software that was developed by the public knowledge project. You see the URL here for our catalog of free eBooks. Please go ahead and take a look if you want. We catalog them in OCLC WorldCat. And thanks to David's help, we got them in Minnesota's open textbook catalog and we'll get them in below. What we're doing also is we're offering the authors a print on demand option. So we help them put it in Amazon for print on demand sales. It's an added incentive for faculty, SUNY faculty to offer these kinds of textbooks and make them open free available online, but also available on print because many people want them print as well. Now, what else do we do? Well, we add in every book a peer reviewer's public reviewer. The person who gives the peer review for this textbook also wrote a public review that is embedded in each book. So anybody can read a little statement by the peer reviewer about what's the strength of this book, who's the target audience, and what would be its benefit. This is an attempt to really help those who are evaluating open textbooks. Why should I read this, or why should I sign up for class, or why should I evaluate this as a curricular resource? It's important to really include the peer reviewer's statements, and that's what we decided to do in the book. We decided not to stop there. 15 books in one year, one and a half years is pretty ambitious. But we got a second grant, thanks to SUNY, and we got a $60,000 grant to run another call for authors and increase the type of publications and the participating libraries. One thing to mention is now it's eight participating libraries, but we're also having support from other SUNY libraries along the state of Kansas. We also have SUNY Press, who's working with us in consultation. It's really a great benefit to collaborate with a university press like SUNY Press. This second pilot just finished its initial call for authors. We did a call for authors that had a deadline of January 31st, and we received 46 proposals, seven of which came from community colleges, and we are going to fund 16 of them. This year, we're trying a different selection review process that is a way of thinking about adoption that I think is really important. What we're doing is we have a blind abstract with some of the details of the textbook that we're sending out to different faculty in the corresponding disciplines across the 64 campuses or as many campuses we can reach. We'd like the faculty in the same course teaching the same courses that the textbook is designed for to evaluate it on how likely would you actually select this textbook if it were published? What are its strengths? What courses might this textbook be useful? What are very important features you really want to see in this textbook? The last question is really an interesting one. Would you be willing to serve as a peer reviewer? The important thing here is that we want librarians and the teaching faculty to be discussing these proposals because it's a way of doing a market analysis and communicate or discuss what's the nature of open educational resources today? What's the interest level on the faculty across SUNY? And how do we really target the best textbooks, open textbooks, for the market, which are the teaching faculty, so that they might really assign these textbooks? We'll compile all the scores so that we'll have some idea of what community colleges want, idea of what comprehensive colleges want, and doctoral universities. In a sense, it's a selection review advisory board that's distributed across our 34,000 faculty and librarians. Now, this is the overall map that kind of gives you an impression of the next pilot. Essentially, we do the author's proposals, we do a selection review, we approve, the next phase is author writing. We do enhance the authors. We provide authors librarians support, instructional designers, templates, and we're there to help the authors deliver a high quality product. The peer review, we'll be doing two peer reviews per textbook at least, and there's an author revision phase, a copy editing, an author revision last, and a textbook approval. In the end, what we're really delivering on is by September 1st, 2015, roughly 31 high quality open textbooks. I suspect we'll be doing more because as last year, libraries tend to really want to produce and help their faculty publish these books because they know it makes a big difference. Overall, long term, this is an important point about our program is that we're really seeking not just to publish open textbooks. We're really looking at how textbooks are really learning objects or digital assets that we want to be able to integrate in the courses, in the teaching faculties, LMSs, or other tools. And really give the students the tools to look at the quizzes, work with them, and also work with the faculty. These books are one dimension of the learning environment. What we're really trying to build is a more robust one that the academy really appreciates and works well for students, faculty, and libraries. This is a lot to take in at the last slide, but if there's any questions, we'll save them to the end, but it's a way of saying the SUNY open textbook initiative is more of an exploration about how do libraries and faculty and students work together to make a very rich and affordable learning environment that could be shared globally. So thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, Surreal. And I think that's a real inspiration to other systems that would like to foster this kind of creativity among their faculty in order to expand access to education for their students. So really, really exciting. And thank you so much for sharing that. All right. Next up is David Harris, who is the editor-in-chief of Open Snacks College, which has been producing some high quality textbooks now for close to almost two years now. And David is not only going to tell us about some of their current work that they're developing, but he's also going to tell us about adoptions of the open textbooks that they have already released. And I think we're all going to be very excited to hear about how well they're doing. Thank you so much, Una, for having me chat with the audience today. And good morning to everyone. And I would like to really congratulate Surreal on the amazing work that they're doing at SUNY. In fact, we see incredible innovation coming out from many libraries. They are really driving OER. So what I thought I'd quickly do today is give you an overview of how technology and OER are really a perfect combination together, and then talk a little bit about what we're doing with Open Snacks College, OER licensing, et cetera. And then, of course, we'll talk about adoption. So many, many years ago, before the internet age, life was simpler. You'd have a professor in a school. They'd select maybe a text. It would reach 30 students. And it was a confined closed system, if you will. But the internet really changed everything. And what we're seeing is the formation of knowledge networks, of communities of learning that are beginning to span the globe. And this is having a tremendous impact on many, many industries. You look at the computer industry, the open software movement, how innovation has set up as technology developments have progressed. You look at the transformation in the music industry. You look at newspaper industries, how they've undergone wholesale change. But then on the left side, you see the textbook industry. And that really hasn't changed that much. Yes, the publishers have incorporated some technology, but the same revision cycles exist. The same higher prices exist. And it's very controlled distribution of content. The economics of that, though, as we discussed earlier, have broken. And this is going to be driving and it's beginning to drive some significant change in the market. Let's talk about the licenses for a second. I think the audience is pretty well versed on this. I know we've got cable green on. So if I make a mistake, you'll be sure to point it out to me. But Creative Commons has various licenses. One of the least restrictive licenses is a CCBI license. And this means that you can take the content, you can adapt it, you can use it as is, and you can redistribute it for free to the community. When we move down the licensing schema here, more restrictions are imposed. So if we look at the last one on this case, CCBI NCND, that means that there's no commercial use, no derivative allowed. All of the materials in open sex college are under a CCBI license. That means you can take the resources and you can use as little or as much of them as you want and you can redistribute them without permission. This also allows what we call frictionless remixing in the connections platform. The connections platform is really the platform that runs open sex college. In connections, we have over 20,000 learning objects and they're all under a CCBI license. So just for the purpose of today's discussion in terms of open sex, you are free to take these materials and do with them as you wish. So the next point we like to discuss is really how OER can enhance academic freedom. The reason we point this out is because some opponents of OER will talk about how OER limits academic freedom, how it will be mandated. Well, we really want to put those notions to rest. At the course level, OER provides faculty with more choices in their courses. You now have options beyond what just traditional publishers would provide you. As we just discussed, if you have OER resources, you're free to edit them and adapt them and redistribute them. You don't need permission to do that. So you have more choices. And OER prevents you if you're using an adaptive online homework system or an LRNX from being locked in to a particular platform or system. I'm always surprised at the number of faculty who say, boy, I really like the homework system that I don't like to book, but I'm locked. With OER now, you don't have to be locked in anymore. In the marketplace, our position, OpenStack's college and rights position is OER should never be legislated or mandated. This needs to be made at the local level, at the faculty level. And OER needs to stand on its own vis-a-vis the publisher material. It's the faculty and the course coordinators, ultimately, who will determine what is best for that course. Another important component to consider with OER is students and digital rights management. And this is a critically important issue in the way that the students now interact with content. Cost is certainly paramount. And we think this is too. Digital rights management, especially when you start to adopt e-books, basically limits your rights to what you can do with the content. Most notably, it limits access. With open licenses, students have unlimited access to the materials. So if they go to OpenStack's college.org and they download our physics book, access to that will never expire. A lot of textbooks with DRM will expire after 180 days. There is unlimited printing. You can use the information and the content across devices. That's not so with DRM. And probably the most significant aspect of an open license, it encourages students to share this information and this content in that informal learning network. We know students are on Facebook all the time. And so being able to share that content in those informal learning groups is critically important. If they do that with traditional DRM content, they're violating copyright laws. So Open really lives where students live today. So what are the high level goals of OpenStack's college? We've discussed this earlier. It's to increase access to high quality open education content and practically provide students with financial relief. There were some limitations of what we call the OER 1.0 model that warrant discussion. Generally speaking, if you hear objections, is that there were inconsistent quality standards. Some materials were exceptional. Other materials weren't quite up to par. Generally speaking, we all made it very difficult for faculty to find turnkey solutions. If you went on to connections, for example, in your types of physics, you might hit thousands of pieces of content. I think a lot of work for faculty to piece together. There's a lack of cooperation with for-profit providers. The for-profit providers can play an important role in this market and we need to work with them since they have to play such a role to figure out ways to improve access and dramatically lower costs. There needs to be a sustainable reward structure for content producers. Orders need to be rewarded for their intellectual work. Reviewers need to be paid if they're putting a lot of time into evaluating manuscripts. And finally, and this was brought up in the last section, too, learning not free must be the priority. You must apply analytics to the open education resources and determine what is the learning outcome taking place. Are these materials helping students learn more effectively? And so that's what we wanted to do with OpenStaff College, really meet these challenges. So if you go to OpenStaff College.org, it's very easy to find the materials. You go and you select your discipline and the textbook will be right there. Next, we impose fairly rigorous development standards. We recognize that free is not enough. So our texts are authored by scholars. They're extensively peer reviewed. I think the biology texts have a hundred reviewers on it. They're professionally developmental-added, and they are professionally illustrated. These books really meet the quality thresholds. Third is scope and sequence. We work very closely with the community when we're developing texts to make sure that the texts meet the scope and sequence of a typical course. And so that when you go into OpenStaff College, which I'll show you in a second, if you're teaching physics or biology, you'll see that it will map up to really virtually all courses. If you want to adapt it to your specific course, and many people do, you can do that too. We have the tools to do it. In fact, of the first six books we published, there's already 70 derivative versions. And then finally, we provide essential learning resources. There are solution manuals free for students. Those now cost $100 as you go to a publisher. We have PowerPoint slides. We have test item files. We also partner with organizations in STEM markets that provide online homework. So thanks to the foundation support, we've been able to build this library. We'll be up to 25 textbooks when we're done. Back to the Hewlett Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation, I think one of, I think Mario's on today. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and others who've really supported the development of these books. So the titles below here, Physics, Sociology, Biology, Concepts of Biology, Anatomy and Physiology, Statistics, Barbara Lapsky is on the call today. She's one of our authors. These are available today for students to use. And Economics, these will be coming out in about two weeks, followed by Pre-Calculus. I did see a question, is OpenStack College, do we provide coursework? No, we don't. We're not a MOOC, and we don't plan on being one. Okay, so what happens when you go to the OpenStack College website? Well, as I said, it's very simple. The student or the professor simply comes and select the discipline that they want. There is no password required, no registration required, and then they can select one of the versions that they would like. We do offer books in low-cost print that full-color, very inexpensive. The Concepts of Biology book, I think it's $28 or $29. We do offer iBook versions. And the vast majority of our users, they go for either the PDF, which they download. They can read it live on the web, or we offer it in EPUB for mobile devices. Our goal on this is clear, access anywhere at any time on any device in any format. So you select the text, and then you download your textbook. And this is an example of the Biology text, which is 47 chapters. And this is just a discussion of the carbon cycle, but it gives you a sense of the quality that we're going towards. Well, most people will tell me, after they look through this, they like the authors perspective, number one. Number two, they like the fact that we integrate interactive elements. For instance, in the Biology book, we have a partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But at the end of the day, they say, well, really, what is the difference between this and a $300 textbook, or $250 textbook? And I say, well, about $250. And everyone laughs, and they realize there's a great opportunity. So this is terrific. We've got six textbooks now. How are we doing? Our faculty responding, are they adopting? And overwhelmingly, we say yes, that we are inspired by faculty who are leading the charge in adopting OER. So if you look at the number on physics here, 245 adoptions, 1.8 million web views, being downloaded 205,000 times. And that means doing something. You have to wait for it to download. It's a huge pile. And we save students with physics alone over $2.6 million. And I think what's really also encouraging is that we have great community colleges using the book, like American River College, Austin Community College, Matt Space Community College. We also have four-year state schools at Pitt Park State in Utah, Austin. So we're seeing the need across the market, one, two. We also think that the books are really pitched at the right level because a lot of community colleges are concerned about matriculation. And so it gives them great comfort to see that schools in which their students will matriculate to are using open-stacked college titles. But college physics was our first title, and it really is just the beginning. If you look at our total metrics, the usage is growing exponentially every six months. Savings now exceed 5.5 million. Web views over 3.1 million times. It downloads 400,000. This year, we estimate the impact on students' enrolled in courses. There's a lot of students who use these materials who aren't enrolled in courses to be 58,000 plus. And so the whole network is growing. And our ecosystem partners are also growing. That used to be like one or two. We've got 14 ecosystem partners now. So let's talk about that for a second. Because we know that a great book is not enough and that people need more advanced technologies. Incidentally, all the books are being metatized to be used in adaptive learning platforms. But we have partnerships with great organizations like Lumen, Google, Saffron, Apple, Learning Pod, WebAssign. And they're providing extra services and products to go with these resources. You can find out more about them on the website. Some of these are for sale. So if you signed up with Wiley Plus with Biology, the price of that will be approximately $50. That's still saving the students over $100 over conventional systems. And some of these ecosystem partners also provide a small mission support feedback for sustainability. So we think this is a very vibrant development. One in which the market is going to shift from the publisher controlling everything into a market that's much more distributed, highly efficient, and improve access for everyone. And this is what you're seeing here in this diagram. This network of connectivity around OER 2.0. So let me briefly wrap up here with some FAQs. What's the catch or obligation? There is none. This is really philanthropy. The only thing we ask is if you like what we're doing, please tell a friend. We don't have a sale force. I don't like X or you don't have Y. Great. No book is perfect. Our books are not perfect. And these can be adapted very, very simply. I'm happy to work with you on that. Do we have a single sign-on? Well, in a way we do. If you use DTOL or you use Blackboard, there's many customers who will take the file and embed them in their courses. May I adapt and distribute without permission? Yes, you may. Do you have comp copies? Yes, we do. We don't like to give them out. We're a nonprofit. But if a comp copy is absolutely mandatory to get an adoption, we'll have to revise you one. With no sales reps, how do I get service? Very simple. Info at openstatscollege.org. If we don't reply within a day, don't use us. What about revisions? Great question. Some subjects don't warrant revisions frequently as the publishers do. Physics doesn't change that much. It will not be revised. People will not be forced into a revision. Some subjects do warrant it, like economics. There we will revise when it's pedagogically warranted. Who do I call if I find an error? Info at openstatscollege.org. And we have a page on site called the Stack Dash. We're the only publisher in the world that posts our erratic. And then finally, can bookstores order physical copies? Absolutely they can. We work with them every day. So in conclusion, I thank you for listening to this. I hope I didn't ramble on too long. Together we can build a sustainable future. And we love this quote from Gandhi. First they ignore you and we know who they are. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you and then you win. And where are we? I think we're somewhere probably getting towards the fighting stage. Anyway, thank you very much for your time. All right. Thank you, David. David, we have a lot of exciting conversation going on in the chat window. We'll get back to some of that at the end here. But excellent presentation. And on to our last presenter who also has some really great information for us. And this is David Erz to as the Chief Information Officer at the College of Education at the University of Minnesota. And David is going to talk to us about the Open Text Library which is a listing site for open textbooks. And David's focus is on getting faculty to adopt which many of us who work with faculty and administrators know that faculty need a lot of information before they're ready to adopt high quality resources. And David is going to talk to you about the strategies they're coming up with there. David? Great. Thank you, Luna. Before I start, I do want to tell you, I just want to mention in my introduction that I'm in New Orleans right now at the Education College Learning Initiative Conference. And I'm just bringing this up because I'm finding open textbooks are all over this conference. I was a keynote this morning with Steven Ness. He's at the University of Texas Systems Institute for Transformation Learning. He was basically talking about innovations that will change the face of higher education by 2015 which is coming up pretty quickly here. And the top of this list was open textbooks. And anyway, there have been a number of presentations and it's clear that this is a movement if you want to call it that, that's really gaining momentum. And I agree with David. I think we're getting maybe to the fighting stage and closer to the winning stage, I think, of all of you. So what I'd like to do is I want to talk about the textbook library, but in context of kind of the work that we've been doing more generally, which is answering this one question. And so for the last about two and a half years, this has been our focus. It's been the question we've been asking. So my job as the CIO of the College of Education Human Development at the University of Minnesota is really an on the ground job. I am with faculty every day helping them without technologies, helping them, supporting them and improving their courses. And so that combination of asking this question and really having access to these faculty who ask really good questions, who have real problems that they need to get through and questions and misunderstandings. That's at the core of where we are is solving those. So what I'd like to do is I think Seral and David gave a really great background on the issues, I know we are on licenses and all that. I'm not going to get into that at all because they already did and really talk about the barriers that we have discovered and try to overcome with our faculty and other faculty that we have talked with. Okay, let me think here. So number one, I'm going to start on this is number one is in some ways there's really that really much of an understanding that there's even an option, right? So it's kind of an almost decided, well this is just the way things are. And so one thing that we do is spend a lot of time, we've created some faculty development that has worked really well here and kind of sensitizing faculty to the issues. You saw some statistics earlier about the financial situation of students. This is just in Minnesota, the funding sources that have their funding higher education. This is a per FTE state funding in red versus tuition in the green. And you can see that the load is really being put on students. And so we'll give them data like that. I think you saw a graph similar to this earlier, students' loan debt is in blue, credit card debt is in red. This is a national numbers. So it's sensitizing the fact that students are really more than ever in a pinch. This I believe is from the Florida survey that was mentioned earlier as well just the impact of cost of textbooks on basically on academic success of students. Which we really, really care about of course. So after we presented that to our SCAR faculty and brought that up to them, this is how many adoptions we had. Zero. So all right, what's the next pair then? We knew these textbooks were out there. Why weren't faculty adopting them? So the next thing we realized that they don't really understand what open is. What open textbooks are or just what the concept with open is. Sometimes they confuse it with just free textbooks or electronic textbooks. Now of course, open textbooks are free. You can be free. They are. They do kind of live in an electronic world. But it's not the same. Publishers create electronic books that are models where books are filled with ads and free. So anyway, it's the understanding of the creative commons license and understanding what how open is really defined. So we've been sometimes planking. We've kind of defined the problem for them. And now we're saying here's a solution that we really think is possible for you and your students. So what we've developed is basically a faculty development program that puts together those two pieces. The urgency part is making them aware of the issues. And the open part is really explaining to them here's a solution that's possible. After that, we still had zero adoptions. So there must be more barriers. Next, we really learned pretty quickly that faculty just don't know where to find open textbooks. And so that's why we developed this open textbook library. We realized that there needed to be pulled together in one place. So we kind of looked around the internet and pulled them all in so that they are in one place. It's searchable, easy to look at. We had help from many people in designing it to make it easy for faculty to use. And there's the URL of it right there. If you weren't aware of where it is, it's at open.umn.edu. And I think we're up to between 140 and 150 textbooks in there right now of various content areas. Making people aware of this catalog, creating it, we still in our university had zero adoptions. So what's next? What still is needed? Faculty obviously are very concerned about quality. And so what we did is made sure that in the catalog, we actually had the opportunity for faculty to do peer reviews. Now, this is something that we've learned a lot about. We don't have a lot of reviews in there yet. For the next two years, we should pick up hundreds of them actually. A long story about how we would get that, but we're very excited that that's going to come soon. So we have some in there. Most of them, thanks to our friends at Beaston campus. And hopefully, those will help faculty trust each other as they should with academic resources like this as far as quality goes. I'm not qualified to judge the quality that they are. I would mention, I'd like to kind of look on the side here, as I'm talking to faculty, quality is a big issue. They make the false assumption that something that's free can't be good. But I think from, you probably have seen from the URLs and David's presentation that the process is very similar, if not a bit better, than what some commercial publishers don't hear as far as peer review goes. I actually met the author of the upcoming OpenStacks e-con book this morning, David. And he basically said how he was impressed how many, how much peer review happens. Our faculty need to know that. Because they, again, make this assumption that free cannot mean it must just be someone wrote it through it on the internet. So I think that's that open textbook 2.0 that David is talking about. It's a different world now. Okay, so all of that. We tried to scan a lot of peer reviews. All of that, we had no adoptions at all. And I can't blame our faculty at all. They're very busy. They're being asked to do so many things. And frankly, if they didn't know what it is, they didn't adopt an open textbook. The world wouldn't end for them. So what we needed was, well, what we needed was an education strategy. And we needed to just get them to stop the merry-go-round that they are on in academia. I mean, they are constantly busy in research and outreach and their teaching and all of that. They're very, very busy people to just get them to stop. And that's when we asked them to actually review an open textbook. So just, and we actually incentivized it with a very small amount of money, but just enough to get their attention. And when we think about the money invested in this study, $1 to $200 to write a very short, concise review that we can use in the catalog that would be useful to somebody else. And then you think about the savings. A $1 to $200 investment is nothing. That's one textbook. And if they actually stopped adopting an open textbook because they did take this time to review it, again, the savings are our instance. So in our college, I was only working with a small group of faculty. We had seven, excuse me, nine faculty review textbooks. Seven of them ended up adopting. So we did through the professional development to explain, again, the issues and what open is. We did all of these things. And it's kind of like the capsule event that we really needed was this, was this engagement strategy of just reviewing. We had nine faculty review, seven adopted of those nine. And then they also went back to their departments and convinced three others, three others of their colleagues to adopt. So we ended up with 10 faculty adopting. I don't have final numbers right now, but it's somewhere around $200,000 in the fall of 2012 that they've saved students. And people working in the open textbook world know that it adds up very fast. So what's next? What we're trying to do is, I mean, what we learned within one context of our own institution, and as we are reaching out now to other institutions to help them, we're going to do a foundation grant within the last couple of months to actually go to other institutions and help them create an open textbook initiative. So we're looking for institutions actually where the leadership is ready. They just don't quite know what to do, and they could really benefit from us and the kind of hard learning that we did, that we had to do in the last two years. But we already know that as we reach out and go to our institutions, there will be other barriers. For instance, we hear quite regularly, and I know David, I think, has heard this, what's going to happen? Our bookstore is actually producing revenue for our institution. What's going to happen to that revenue? And what kinds of questions that we need to be able to answer? Those are legitimate questions, and we need to be able to have some sort of a path forward for institutions and help them answer those. The answer to that one that I give, by the way, is a better one. Feel free to add and give it, by the way. The answer to that one is that institutions simply, I'd say, they have to have an internal conversation about their priorities. If selling books is a priority for them and making a profit off of that, more than anyone. I guess you can tell what my opinion is on that. And so we will continue to learn, and hopefully everyone will continue to benefit from what we learned as we kind of reach out and help other institutions. So again, there's the URL for our catalog. Feel free to use it or send it around. Anyone who wants to use it, we just crossed, I think, the 100,000 user mark just this last week. And it's being used by, I think, 188 countries around the world. So you're welcome to it, that's why it's there. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, David, for sharing all those different strategies for encouraging adoption of open textbooks by faculty. Having worked in this field, they all sound excellent for quite a while. And I could see a lot of chat about engagement, faculty engagement. Thank you for that. We are going to move to questions, although we have a, because we had such wonderful presentations, and our presenters really had such great information. We are almost up on the hour. I want to tell you that our next set of webinars will be occurring in March. And we will do those in alignment with Open Education Week, which is March 10th through 15th. And Open Education Week is all about promoting open education globally to enhance teaching and learning. So sounds familiar. And on Tuesday, March 11th, we will have an OER and Accessibility Day, which the Community College Consortium is participating in. And then Wednesday, March 12th will be the Community College OER Day. So stay tuned for announcements on those. And if you would like to participate in any of those presentations, please contact me. We'd love to have your participation. All right. At this time, we're just on the hour. I think we're going to try and keep the phone and the conference going for another five minutes for questions. And we've had some excellent questions over the last hour that have come up, which I think possibly we might want to just recap a few things and go ahead and type in, if people have additional new questions, do go ahead and try to get to those. If not, there is the contact information for Cyril, David, and David and myself. And please do contact us over email after the fact. And once again, I want to thank our wonderful presenters today. They were amazing. So one topic that came up was what is the difference between free and open? And I know that David Ernst addressed this. I know we happen to have Cable Green online. Cable, would you like to address that? Are you on mic? A quick one minute elevator speech. Yes, I can hear you great. Well, at its most basic level, free means no cost, meaning you can get access to something without paying money to get access to it. And that's great. And certainly OER is free. And so is a Coursera course on their MOOC. And that's great too. Open has an additional requirement to it. And open is something must be free and, so the and is critical, and you must have the legal rights to exercise what we call the 4Rs. So you must have the legal rights to reuse the resource, revise it, remix it, and redistribute. So if you don't have the legal rights to do those four things, it's not open. So take an open stacks textbook as an example. Is it free to users? Yes, it is. So it meets the first criteria. Can I legally revise, reuse, remix, and redistribute that book? Yes, I can. So it meets both criteria. Therefore, it's an OER. Take a Coursera course. It's another example. Some of the courses are openly licensed, most are not. But let's pretend that we're looking at one that's an all rights reserved course. Is it free? Yes. Is it, do you have the legal rights to revise it, reuse it, remix, and redistribute? No, you don't. It's all rights reserved copyright. And if you do those things, you will be violating U.S. copyright law, and you could be sued. And so we call that not open, although it is free. All right. Thank you for that, Cable. Really good distinction there. We had a question about open test banks from Patty. And because this is really a critical piece of textbook content today. And I wonder, David Harris in particular, can you talk about test banks and open stacks and what you're doing about that? Yeah. So I actually have a question to that question. We have an open test bank of questions that expands beyond just the open stack called Quad-Base. Those are all openly licensed. And then we do have test banks, test items for most of our titles. Not all. We're working on them. We know it's important. Barbara Lasky's test actually will have a comprehensive test bank that was actually developed at the University of Minnesota. I've got one question for you. Of course, when we come to test items, we're concerned about, you know, that they don't get into the wrong hands. They don't fall into students' hands, so to speak. How can you prevent that if they're openly licensed? An excellent question in and of itself. And perhaps we'll leave that one for another time, because I think that that's a longer one. But thank you. Barbara has a great explanation here. Let's see, regarding test banks, some folks worry about students getting into the wrong hands. So she doesn't worry about it. If a student wants to practice on 2,000 plus questions, then it's fine. Excellent. That is one great answer. And I think there's a lot of different points on that one. Before we run out of time, let's see. There was questions about licensing. And particularly, Cyril, these were directed at you. And you shared in the chat window that your faculty decide on the license of the textbook that they produce. Could you elaborate just a little on that? Sure. Actually, it's more of a... We've got a CCBY NCSA license that we distribute our open textbooks on. That's what the authors do. Now, the author retains the copyright so that they can put it on print on demand, and they make all royalties off of it. That's the model that we decided for pilot one and two. It makes the most sense in many ways for the faculty to have an incentive in addition to what we're offering to produce their work in print as well. So it's open. It's got a share alike license and a non-commercial license because that is a concern of many faculty who author works is they don't want other people to monetize their work. So we put that in as the agreement if they want to publish with us. And it's a good license because others can make derivatives so long as they give attribution to the work. And that's really key. Others can't commercialize it. Great question. Thank you for sharing that, Cyril. That's a really interesting approach. But as you say, the faculty author retains the copyright and can release it in any manner they would like in addition to. Exactly. Wonderful. All right. I think at this point we're probably going to close out the session. David Ernst, I didn't give you a chance to recap. Would you like a final statement before we close off here? No, I don't think so. I think we're in good shape. I would offer actually some to this part of our grant that our institutions that are looking for some help in that where we think the leadership may be ready to do something. We're happy to have a conversation. Wonderful. And David's email is there in our main window here. So I want to thank once again all of you who joined us today for this very informative webinar. And I do want to thank our presenters. You guys were amazing. So thanks everyone and see you in March. Bye-bye and everyone. Bye-bye.