 Welcome, everybody. Happy to see everybody here on what feels like a Friday afternoon at four o'clock, so it doesn't matter. The only ones, almost the only ones standing between you and a drink or you and dinner or you and a flight out of here. So we really appreciate you being here. You see up here on the title slide our long names and our long titles. So you just read those. Welcome to the session. Before we get into describing our project, we want to share with you a little bit about... There we go. A little bit about our institutional contacts. We're with a California Community College. There are 112 California Community Colleges. The system serves 3 million students a year. Our particular college is located in Northern Los Angeles County. Beautiful Southern California where it's what, 80 degrees right now. We serve a head count of about 25,000 students a year. Around 15,000 full-time equivalent students. Around 13% of our full-time equivalent students are in our online program or online delivery mode. So that's sort of the context within which we approach OER trying to serve that kind of students. I should also mention it's a comprehensive community college. We offer everything from automotive technology degrees to welding degrees and everything in between in history and philosophy and English and so on. The classic liberal arts curriculum as well as workforce development. We want to acknowledge that the support for our project comes from a U.S. Department of Meditation. FIFSI special focus grant and I should back up and say also with our institutional context we are proud members of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources which has merged with the Open Coursework Consortium and we're proud members of the Open Coursework Consortium. And with that I will turn this over to John who's going to describe our project. Hey everybody, how's everyone doing? So I'm going to slide ahead here. Oh actually I can go back and forth. So I'll give you the takeout menu of sorts, what I'm going to be tackling here in terms of the rest of this presentation. We're going to talk about our project as a whole and I'm going to give you sort of an overview of that but we're going to start with a brief discussion about the motivations for the alternatives to textbooks. Obviously the textbook is the traditional model, what are some of the alternatives as we go forward. We'll cover the goals of our Open Educational Resources grant, what our grant is, what the goals we're trying to accomplish are. Identify some of the basic steps involved in creating a content playlist and I'll go over in general what that means. And have a brief Q&A at the end talking a little bit about your thoughts about open content delivery. So that's where we're going to head in terms of the presentation today. Obviously through this conference there have been a variety of talks talking about sort of the driver, the motivation to produce OER. And even this morning there were several mentions about sometimes the motivation is cost, sometimes it's a belief in the movement. There's all kinds of reasons. Certainly one of the reasons that has motivated many of us to be so excited about the OER movement is trying to find ways to reduce the cost of instructional materials for students. We certainly know that that is a big core part of the problem. So I was at Nicole Allen's talks earlier today and she went over some of the cost of textbooks relative to the cost of instruction. In the California Community College system, let me just break this down for you to give you some context. Let's say an example, students spend $180 on a textbook, $30 on a textbook supplement, total cost of $210, right? In California, the community college system, though we are pretty significantly lower in price than a lot of other states, a three-unit course at $36 a unit, $36 a credit hour in California adds up to about $108 if I did my math correctly. That means in this particular scenario, the textbook and supplement represent about two-thirds of the overall cost of the course. I think Nicole had numbers around 70, 75%. So somewhere in that range in terms of significant chunk of the cost of the course. And this is what really drove us to want to pursue study and research and get involved with OER. Not just on our campus, but how can we try to solve the problem on a larger scale? So of course we have to ask questions like how do we challenge some of the traditions? Do we want to go down the traditional path of textbooks still? Is it digital textbooks? Is it learning objects? Is it collections? Possibly it's some of the more complex solutions with feedback loops and mechanisms in there. So these are all valid questions to ask. And what we decided to do in our project is really give some thought to the following concept, and that is this. There's a tremendous amount of movement now, especially in the last year with the Department of Labor Grants and whatnot, to create full course solutions to open educational resources, to start from the ground up and really build full, high quality courses. Well that leaves a whole farm of existing open educational resources out there. I mean we know there's multiple repositories out there, there's a lot of different objects out there to be pulled from, many of which are used actively right now. So our project wanted to focus on creating, first of all, on our campus, just individually at our campus, creating some supplemental materials, working with our faculty at our school to create supplemental materials. So we start with that, then sort of leading into developing the concept of the playlist, which again I'll go into greater detail on in a moment, of academic content to either supplement or replace textbooks. And then our final goal, and this may really transition into perhaps other opportunities, grant opportunities down the road, would be to try to expand this model into something that goes beyond what we do at our school, and hopefully make it that much more useful for other colleges, other institutions, other states, you name it. So that's where we're going with this. Now of course playlist is what I want to highlight. Now this term may evolve and change over time, but really it came from the old model of, we've all seen this sort of thing before, the demise of the record store, right? I don't know how many of you know the title, Sam Goody, but in California that was a big chain of record stores for a number of years, and I think there might be a couple locations left, I'm not sure. But we've seen business models change very rapidly, extremely rapidly. So what we're all trying to do really, but obviously in our grant as well, we're trying to find a solution to the fact that there are a bunch of individual objects out there that we can work with. So what is a playlist? What do we call a playlist in our grant? Well essentially the idea is, and it's somewhat similar to what the folks at OER Blue are doing, but I'll kind of add a layer of complexity here on top of it, the idea is to create a common voice in learning objects. So if you go and farm learning objects out there, one of them was written by you and another was written by you and another was written by you and you all have different ways of presenting that material, right? Possibly you use different key terms, you have a different style of trying to introduce the concept to a student, there's all of these different issues that play into it. What we're doing is finding one author, and instead of having that one author write a whole book from scratch, we're having that one author develop transition pieces to essentially guide the student through the process of going through these OER objects. That develops the common voice of this content, right? So that's essentially where we're starting. An author, a faculty member, an author of some sort would write introductory text to lead the student into what we're about to cover in chapter 10, let's say, then lead to an OER object, perhaps a website with text and articles, another transition piece written by that same author that allows the author to provide a summation to what the student just went through in that last OER object and transition very clearly into the next object. So that's the goal there, lead into a chunk of media, you know, video, let's say, another piece of transition text, and then finally on to another website, so on and so forth, this chain continues. Now the goal is that this could simulate the effect of a textbook, but add another layer of sort of dynamic interaction between the student and the content. Now I've been fascinated with what OER Blue is doing. I've certainly gone to, I went to the talk yesterday about that, that the goal gave, and the sort of, I would say the biggest difference here is that this sort of uses the same idea of putting content, sequencing content together, the added layer is that common voice, right? That's the added layer of producing the transition materials in between. So why would we consider Playlist? As I said, there's a bunch of open content out there. Could Playlist development be an easier process to sustain than full textbook development? We know, I think all of us in this room know that it is not cheap and it does require a considerable amount of effort to develop a textbook from scratch. I'm sure that's very common knowledge in here. So this, we hope, is a way to reduce some of that effort but provide some of the same benefits of a unified object. Possibly down the road a fusion of models, right? Could actually play into some, play into a beneficial solution. The other benefit is for a lot of our faculty at least, and I think faculty at multiple colleges, is that the fundamentals of this technique are already familiar. How many of you use course management? Some sort of learning management system, Blackboard, Moodle, right? I mean almost all of us. When an instructor builds content in their course, typically they're trying to collect a bunch of pieces of content and put it together for their students. This formalizes the process a little bit more, right? Decouples it from the learning management system, produces a unique, separate object that consists of all these smaller objects. So this is just to give you a snapshot of where we are in the process. We're still in the process of making complete playlists and I'm going to go over the steps of what we've gone through in our grant. But overall, essentially you might have a chapter opener, just some introductory text that leads in. This is actually just where we are right now. We're building spreadsheets, just massive spreadsheets of identifying content objects out there and listing them out. We're going to be mapping these all into perhaps OER Glue, or some other sort of solution to be able to compile all this content together. I think OER Glue is a nice solution for what we're trying to do, so that's something that we would consider. I need to learn to breathe. Alright, got a lot to say. There we go. I probably covered that all in one minute, right? So this is where we are now. We started in October 2009. We were fortunate enough to get a no-cost extension on our grant, so we actually are in our third year of our grant. And essentially it worked out well because our project really has kind of organically developed into something that really should have taken three years to begin with. We started off in our first year collecting objects and having them faculty create objects from scratch. So we talked to many of our faculty on our campus and had them contribute things that they either already had or small objects they wanted to create, whether it's a video, a handout, you name it. So we started with that, and we're up to, we have a repository on our campus, a digital repository, that has roughly 360 objects in it right now, being that we started from zero at that point and we're just collecting at this point, primarily from our own faculty, that's pretty substantial growth. Our second year focused on collections and projects. So we actually teamed up with groups of faculty on our campus and developed sort of teams to solve certain problems. We had one project that is called Building the Scientists, which is the goal is to go beyond what's just in the science textbooks and try to provide a solution where students can get a sense of what their expectations are going to be once they leave school and become a scientist. We worked with some teams on some basic skills, guided learning activities on our campus, and a virtual learning lab, which is sort of a compilation of videos and tutorials to help students become more successful in their classes. So, you know, all these separate projects we worked on, and right now we're in that third year where we're developing a playlist. So we're actually taking those collections of content, trying to compile them into courses, and taking different collections that we worked on separately. In particular, the three major courses we're working on right now are earth sciences, business, and an animation design course. So those are where we're going to actually have these playlists developed. You can imagine that the animation design course is going to be much less text heavy, and probably have a whole lot more in the way of, you know, interactive design tools and features and whatnot. But that's the idea in terms of the playlist development. And we've had our challenges, as everyone in this room has had probably in working with OER, on a single campus, at the scale of a single campus, which is what I'm referring to at this point. Faculty incentives have been a big deal. You know, we're busy, there's no time. That's actually one of the biggest issues, faculty workload. We've also been challenged but also successful in working with our bookstore and printing facilities on campus. Our goal is to try to find, you know, at least on our scale, of our campus, a solution that allows students to be able to go get copies of these playlists printed that would have at least references to the interactive content in there so that students could access that separately. We, you know, again, Nicole Allen's talked earlier, she did talk about the fact that 75% of students are still interested in getting print copies of textbooks. So there's still a bulk audience that's interested in that, and we want to appreciate that. And then, you know, we've had challenges, of course, with communicating the language. And I don't know how many of you have experienced this before or in the involvement of production of OER, especially media content on your campus. But, you know, our media production staff speaks a very different language than our faculty. There's a lot that gets lost in translation there. So we have to have frequent meetings to make sure that the goals of the faculty are working very well in tandem with the goals of our media production staff. And we've had, you know, other challenges along the way. And I think that one of the biggest ones is time. Just time. It takes a lot of time to put all this together, and, you know, the victory is sweet, but it does take a lot of time and effort on the part of many people. So... Did I go too fast? Where am I at the time? Wow. Okay, so I went very fast. This leaves us a lot of time for questions. And I can go into greater detail on the description of our process and answer any questions you might have. Yes? Just trying to look at more about working with the faculty and kind of what... what works in your situation and were pulling some of those that were reluctant at first to engage with you? The first carry is the following line. You already did the work. You know, faculty have already created content. They created it before we started this project. The question is, are they willing to share it openly? Some aren't, you know, but some aren't. So that's one of the biggest factors is, you know, have they already created it? For those who haven't created it, who are interested in creating it, we mentioned to them and were fortunate through our grant that we were able to get two production staff, so we provide those resources to them. We say, you know, yes, it's going to take you some time. You know, you're going to have to help build, you know, piece together the subject matter, but we have the staff to at least help you get together in some of the more complex details. If I can add one bit to that. Within our context, we've been extremely fortunate that, I think this is fortunate, that in contrast perhaps to many OER projects and institutions, our OER project was really initiated at the very top of our institution. Our Chancellor, Diane Van Hook, believes passionately that lowering textbook costs, increasing student access is a social justice issue and it's a core part of our mission, so she has essentially said go out and do this. She certainly does not order individual faculty to do this, but she communicates across the institution that this is a desirable goal for the institution. So that when we approach individual faculty members, individual faculty members, they know that this fits into the larger mission. They'll get a nice note from the boss, they'll get a pat on the back, they'll be mentioned in campus meetings and so on, so they'll be lauded for their efforts in that case. So that really certainly has really helped to smooth the way and I would encourage anybody else who's in an institutional setting to try your best to get buy-in from the top because that really has helped. I mean, it's incentives beyond just time and money. It's those incentives of institutional support are really beneficial. Piggybacking on that issue of incentives. Did faculty members have incentives in terms of raising their representation? Well, I think each individual faculty member, as James commented on, gains some level of recognition on our campus at least, for the work that they're doing and I think recognition goes along the way. When somebody's working really hard on teaching courses and developing that content, when they have a chance to kind of be on the stage of sorts and get some recognition for that, that's been a real sort of badge of honor for a lot of the faculty and what we've noticed in conversations with other faculty is they said, well, wait a minute, this person's doing that. Maybe I should consider doing a little bit of that. They kind of step over a little bit. They don't always step all the way over, but they start moving in that direction and I think that's how you, the momentum begins slowly, but I think those sorts of things make a big difference. What about the peer recognition among the, you know, subjects specialist in different campuses in the Brazilian system? Oh, got it, got it. You know, at this point, I've mentioned one of our faculty in particular, she teaches water technology courses on our campus and she's pretty tightly connected to the community of other faculty who teach similar subject matter at other colleges and so they have certainly paid attention to the fact that this content has been created and I, you know, there have been conversations with her colleagues at other colleges about maybe we should think about doing stuff like this. Has it led yet to production in mass, no, but again, I think that's a slow step like process. And I'd add to that, at a community college, we were primarily teaching institution so that our faculty are not, their success is not dependent upon publishing, their success is not dependent upon gaining recognition from their peers in the field, in the larger field which also though can serve as a carrot to the faculty to get involved in this kind of production, this kind of sharing and that is that they are so focused on teaching at their local institution they don't have an opportunity to interact with other faculty around the state or around the country by sharing, by producing and sharing and adapting, that gives them that opportunity to get back into a little bit of that. I was wondering about the kiosk solution for students, was that in printing? Yeah, it would essentially be printing we've been in some initial communications with our bookstore, our campus bookstore and, you know, the library to some extent in our reprographics department and I think that the big challenge is sort of getting the rest of the campus to sort of come to that overall understanding of the role of OER and what it plays, though we've been talking OER for a number of years a lot of that conversation was with faculty. So, you know, I think in terms of other departments on campus they're starting to get on board, the bookstore is starting to get interested in finding solutions that go beyond just selling textbooks because I think they're aware of the fact that textbooks aren't going to be, they may be there for a long time, but the numbers of them probably will somewhat diminish over time. Right, and with the idea of a kiosk that would allow print on demand the goal there for us is to keep our campus bookstore in the game our campus bookstore is a third party vendor as far as you know we don't want to put them out of business, you know they're good partners we want to have a place to buy t-shirts we want to have a place for our students to buy traditional textbooks we want to have a business partner that kicks back a percentage of their revenue to the college general fund that's good business for the college we want to work with them, we want them to be part of the solution, and so our conversations with them about a print on demand kiosk in their facility is a way of doing that we're not there yet, we're not there yet but certainly as the conversation about OER gets louder generally our bookstore gets more interested they're hearing about it from their national and regional level and they're saying, oh gee this really is real, we need to engage these guys and they feel fortunate that we want them to be part of the solution and two of our faculty have started putting the pressure on too, which is a big benefit for us, before it was us having a conversation about this is coming down the road now two faculty who have adopted open textbooks are going, wait a minute, I want a solution so that puts additional pressure on, in a positive way puts pressure on the bookstore and whatnot to engage even more heavily in that conversation I was wondering at what level is a playlist created in other words, is it an individual teacher that goes in and puts together this playlist or is it created at a departmental level that you implement for a certain course? Good question, ideally both initially in our first three pilots of the playlist it's individual faculty, what we're hoping is to approach the departments on our campus and have them develop a more collaborative solution definitely at the conference, I've heard some really good ideas about how there's been a little bit more collaboration amongst teams and whatnot in developing OER we'd like to see this progress down that road that's a real culture question our campus has to be very decentralized you can take an active department of ten faculty, everybody's using a different book everybody's teaching something different and at other institutions it's not the same very good question, we've given a lot of thought to that too I'm curious about your end product, how is that going to be shared and what other venues are you thinking of other than OER Gloo? Well you know one minute, got it, that's what the hand up was, okay good thank God we work as a team here so far because we're at that process of simply assembling the content that polished end product is somewhat foggy at this point OER Gloo presents a really good solution because it allows us to piece things together in a very logical way packaged way that can be distributed to students even within the context of a learning management system we're open, extremely unintended to other solutions that would provide us a good pathway I will also put in a plug for our content management system that powers our repository, the Equala, which is also used by British Columbia, North Carolina Florida, Georgia it has a federated search option so that content that's in our repository can be discovered by other users of Equala who federate with our repository and vice versa so that really increases the discoverability and I think again we're your additional question, you know we would try to then take that content playlist and find other popular repositories to distribute that through so not just necessarily growing our glue but and not just through our repository but try to seek out other repositories and say hey by the way we've got this thing you guys want so we're getting the hook from the back of the room thank you very much for your attention to your questions thank you very much