 All right. I would like to now introduce Nathan Smith, who is the OER coordinator at Houston Community College. And he's going to tell us about their OER degree work there at Houston Community College. Thank you, Nathan. Hello. Thanks, Una. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. Glad to see quite a few participants that are on the line. So that's really cool. So I'm just going to give you the overview of our OER degree plan, or we are calling it the Z degree. And I've got a PowerPoint here, but then I also have my notes from the questionnaire that CCCOER sent out. So I'm going to be referring to that too. I might have a couple of things to add. OK, so we'll go ahead and get started. I'm the OER coordinator. I'm also an instructor of philosophy. I've been in the position of OER coordinator since about summer of last year. So I'll talk about that in a second here. OK, let's see. Make sure. All right. So just an overview of HCC. So Houston Community College is accredited as one district or one college, even though we have three regions and 27 campuses. We're a very large urban community college. And so here's some of our demographic information for you. An extremely diverse population. The largest number of international students in the United States at a community college. And if you look at the total individuals enrolled in the institution, I don't know if you can see my cursor as I'm waving it around here, but that might be useful to you. The total enrollments are close to 115,000 individuals in a year. So we reach quite a few students in mainly the Houston metro region. OK. So as you look at the OER or Z degree, what we're currently offering are basically two different degree plans. We have an associate of arts or associate of science in what we call multidisciplinary studies. This is basically the Gen Ed transfer degree program, transfer degree. And then we also are offering an associate of arts in business administration. The business administration degree is the largest enrollment degree plan that is not a Gen Ed degree plan. So it's the largest enrollment specific major. And we are currently offering these courses at three campuses, or depending on how you count it, we have two face-to-face campuses, the central campus, which is our largest enrollment campus, and then Northline campus where we have these what are called centers of excellence where predominantly workforce programs are sort of located in a particular region and coordinated with industry. And there's kind of a focal point on that. And we have our business center of excellence at the Northline campus. So we chose to kind of launch the degrees at our highest enrollment campus and at the campus where we had our center of excellence. And then of course we have most of the courses are also offered online. Let's see. Oh, and the way we construe, just to sort of add a bit to this, the way we construe a Z degree, I know this is a little different for different people, but we try to offer a structured schedule of classes that aligns with the advising plan. So if we say that students need to take these five courses in their first semester, then we are offering those five. We're offering a schedule of classes at a particular campus where a student could actually take all five classes in that first semester. And then the same thing with the second semester and third semester. And so there's a little bit of coordination that has to occur in terms of sort of lining up the schedule and working with the chairs, department chairs, to make sure that they get classes scheduled at times where their instructors can teach, but also so that we don't have like conflicting times. So students need to take English 1301 and they also need to take the student success course. We don't want to offer all the sections of 1301 at the same time that we're offering the student success course. All right, so I've got a timeline here that shows you kind of how we ramped up to offering a Z degree. And it happened very quickly. For many years, we had a decentralized structure and we had lots of people doing good work in OER, but it was pretty loosely connected. We had a new chancellor in 2014 who embarked in this transformation, which basically united all of the academics programs. We used to be in separate colleges and now we're kind of all together. So we created new departments and there's a lot of shuffling around. That actually enabled us, as far as the Z degree was concerned, to kind of unite some of our efforts. In 2016, the provost or chief academic officer, we called him the Vice Chancellor of Instruction, put together a capstone committee on open educational resources. And at the same time, we had this student group called the Student Library Advisory Council, or Slack, here. They did a presentation to the Board of Trustees on the price of textbooks and the need for OER. And that really put the need really in front of the people that matter. And at the same time, achieving the dream was coming out with their grants. And so we put together an application. We didn't get that application, but the whole process really helped us focus our energies. And what happened was in the summer, the Kendra Foundation, which is a local Houston nonprofit that focuses on education and the arts, they approached us and said, we're really interested in this idea of an OER degree. And we'd like to support Houston Community College. And we said, well, good news. We've got a plan ready. And basically, we shared that with them. And they were really impressed with how far along the process we were, how much we thought about it. And so they were willing to fund us. And that really helped out. In fall 2016, we kind of did a lot of the groundwork in terms of getting policy together, working with the Tidewater policy statements to kind of get our definitions right. Attended Open Ed 16, which was really helpful, kind of giving us a broad picture of how this stuff works. And then in the spring of 2017, we really started rolling it out. That's when we needed to do training, bring faculty on. We received the first installment of our grant funding. And then in the summer, I was hired as a full-time OER coordinator. We began recruiting students. We also were accepted into the OpenStacks Institutional Partnership. So this year, we've been institutional partners with OpenStacks, which has been really helpful as well. OK, I'm going to get you. And then in fall 2017, we launched the degree. If you look at the overview of the program here, so fall 2017, we launched. We've got 28 sections. 11 of those are online and 17 face-to-face. That netted us a little over 700 duplicated enrollments. And that's 12 unique courses. And we were doing it online and at central campus. Then in the spring, there are two factors that led to expansion. One was that we increased to another campus. We started offering at that Northline campus. But then also, you roll into the second. We started out with just offering the first semester's classes. And then in the spring, we offered the second semester's classes. But we kept some of the first semester's classes. Because once the faculty had developed the classes and they were comfortable with teaching them OER, we could easily just reschedule those classes. And we also could conceive of it as if a student missed a class or they needed to make up, or if they were slightly out of sync with the advising plan for whatever reason, the course would still be available. So you can see the jump in the total of classes significantly more online. Of course, it's really easy to offer a class online. And basically, as soon as you've produced the class, any faculty member can just offer that same class online. So it was easy to jump our number of classes online. Of course, our enrollments grew correspondingly. And so then we have the three campuses. So when you look at our estimated cost savings to students, in the Z-degree, we can pin this number down with some accuracy. We're assuming $100 per student per course. I really want to look at that number more closely. I've kind of done some preliminary research in it. It may be a little high for us, but it's not a bad number to start with. And it's a pretty standard one that people use. But if you use the $100 per student per course as the average textbook cost, we can pin down that over this year, just fall and spring, we've saved students close to $200,000. Now, we want to sort of project not only what we're doing in the Z-degree, but what all of our professors across the institution are doing with OER. And those may be people that we've trained in the Z-degree and they're offering OER classes, but we didn't tag them as Z-degree because they're just other classes the instructor happens to be teaching. They also may be instructors at different campuses that they just didn't fit in with our plans for the Z-degree right away. But there are people we really haven't contacted yet. But this is an estimate because we don't have a really great way of tracking the total number of enrollments in OER classes. We're working towards that. But we estimate this based on survey data and projecting how many classes instructors teach. So it's a little bit more rough. But if you put the two together, we do suspect that in just a year, years time, we're probably saving close to a million dollars in textbook costs for students. Again, I've got some caveats on those numbers, but I'll be happy to answer questions later. So as we look to expand the program, you've got the fall and the spring there. Sorry, this looks a little busy. But as we go forward, the goal, the next stage of our development with the Z-degree is going to be to try to provide a core curriculum zero cost option at every major campus in the district. So I mentioned that there were like 27 campuses. But a lot of those campuses are tiny. I mean, we're talking in the hundreds of duplicated enrollments per year. So when I talk about major campuses, we're talking around on the order of 4,500 or 5,000 enrollments per semester. We have nine of those in the district. And so my goal is to get at least the core curriculum, at least one or two classes in the core curriculum that we can tag as having zero cost to students, an OER class that has zero cost to students. And we want to try to get that at all campuses. So next year, I'm focusing on two of our largest campuses, the Spring Branch campus and the Stafford campus. So after Central, those are our next largest campuses. They're up in the 18, 19,000 student enrollments per semester. So they're big classes, I mean, big campuses. All right, so give you ideas of what goes on behind the scenes. We do have some key councils and committees that help guide the Z degree. And first of all, we have our Instructional Materials Council, which governs all the textbook adoptions and things like this. And then we also have this OER Steering Committee. And that was kind of an outgrowth of that capstone project that the Vice Chancellor of Instruction initiated in 2016. And the cool thing about this committee is that it really does have a cross-sectional membership. And I'll just kind of read off who is on that committee. But there are administrators, librarians, instructional technology folks, instructional designers, and a student representative as well. We have deans, faculty, as well as upper level administrators. So it's a very nice cross-section of people. And it provides some good feedback. And then fortunately, we have the full-time position. This is our OER quarter in your position is a faculty position. So I'm a philosophy faculty member, but I get a full teaching release. So basically, I can devote all my time to this. I teach one class online as an overload. So give you a rough budget. Now, I'm putting these numbers up here, trying to be just as transparent as possible. But I want you, if you're looking at these numbers, to just realize that, again, we are an institution of about 115,000 individual students. So if you're looking at this and thinking, how does that compare to my institution, just try to do a little comparative analysis for yourself. I mean, I think it's going to vary. So one of the biggest expenses we have is faculty stipends. We are paying faculty a stipend to develop courses or to adopt an OER course to change over their course. I can talk a little bit more about that in the questions. We're actually doing a little bit. We're changing this number slightly. We're going to have tiers of course adoption and development. But in our operational budget, we have a part-time administrative assistant that helps out with the office management. And then basically, there's supplies and contractor services, which is really just speaker fees and then a marketing. We do have an inclusive contract with Lumen Learning to provide some of the training initially. In the next upcoming year, they're not going to be providing that training in the same way they did previously. But they are giving us support for the courses. And instead of attaching that to a student fee, we are simply paying a lump sum to them. And these are our sources. So we are providing at least more than 150% of the grant foundation monies internally. And that's a goal going forward is to transition to shift the cost from the foundation to internally. All right, so I wanted to talk about surprises and challenges. And I feel like I'm coming up on the limit of my time. But I'll just go through these kind of quickly. Maybe you all can ask questions on this if you have any. So the first one refers to the issue of how many instructors and how many students we had. We thought that it would be really hard to find instructors and really easy to find students. And it turned out that it was kind of the opposite. We've got a lot of instructors who want to get involved in the program. And we've had a real challenge recruiting and registering students. I've got some numbers that I can give you in the Q&A, but it has just been surprising how challenging it is. We can collect student information, find people who fit. But actually getting them registered in the courses has been a huge hurdle. We've got just the internal stuff of bureaucracy. Working on agreements has been really challenging. One thing is the communication. You're dealing with chairs. In our case, we have to adopt the materials with a program committee. So you're dealing with a chair of that program committee, dealing with faculty. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts, student services, all sorts of different things that come into this. So managing that all is really challenging. OK, I'll come down to the next one. Some things to think about if you're thinking about building a OER degree. Definitely plan, plan, plan, but then be flexible. Be willing to scrap things or start over. You're going to require people who are going to push this stuff through. Because a lot of the hurdles that you run into in terms of getting people to adopt an OER or recognizing that this is a worthwhile pursuit really is people issues. I mean, it's just talking to people, working through their challenges, listening to their concerns. So you really need people that your faculty and your instructional leaders respect, that you can talk, that can take that forward. Oh, this last one I have, I do want to say this. I mean, I sometimes envy the folks who started out just promoting OER and trying to coordinate an OER effort, this sort of horizontal approach. Let's get as many classes as we can just to offer OER, figure out who we can bring on board, and then later on try to align that into a vertical degree plan. It's really challenging to do those two things at the same time. And so maybe starting out by building a base of OER and then going vertical would help. Although I will say from the point of view of upper level administrators and the board of trustees, the Z degree notion has been galvanizing and has really focused their energy. So I don't know, it's challenging to manage, but maybe it recruits people more quickly. Oh yeah, like I said, trying to make it sustainable, integrating it with our existing structures. One thing we did do that I hope is going to have a big impact is we are tagging our courses as a zero cost book option and low cost book option in our PeopleSoft student system. That is going to allow students to search for classes that are tagged this way. And a class can be tagged zero cost book without being a Z degree course. We decided not to try to differentiate those things for students. If an instructor can offer their class with zero cost to the students, we want them to highlight that in the system, whether or not we've actually put them in the structured schedule at the campuses that we've designated for the Z degree. Yeah, I mean, I think the reach would be just gigantic if we could get the core at all of our major campuses. But that's about it. I want to leave some time for questions. Sorry, I went on so long. But that's it. Anybody have any questions? I can continue talking. There's some other things that may be interesting to you in terms of the data we're collecting on this. We look at student success rates and withdrawal rates. And we need to go back and see if we can identify drop rates. That's something that we don't collect very easily in our Office of Institutional Research. We do find that the Z degree classes seem to reduce the withdrawal rates a little bit, potentially. But we did not find increases in success or rates. In fact, our Z degree classes were lower. We have a pretty small sample size at this stage, so I'm not willing to draw any kind of conclusions. It's all very preliminary data. But I thought that was interesting. I've done some interviews with faculty and students and had some interesting stories from them. But there are no questions. Una is telling me I need to wrap up. So I will sign off. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much, Nathan, for that interesting overview of how Houston Community College got started on the OER degree, because it was a little bit different path than some of the others. There is a question in the chat window. I'm going to let you answer that in the chat window, because it is time for us to switch to our next session. So thank you so much. And, Nathan, it might be helpful for folks to have questions as it come up if you could put your email address in the chat window as well. Absolutely, and I'll link to the website where I share all of this information. Oh, wonderful. All right, thank you so much. And thanks to all our participants this morning. We'll be starting our next session in five moments.