 My name is Brad Griffith. I work for the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. I'm excited to talk with you all and introduce you to my fellow OER State White Council members as we discuss with you the diffusion of innovations that's occurred within Oklahoma surrounding open educational resources. Our group primarily exists to address the challenges that arise whenever trying to promote and develop OER for classroom use. This can include anything from it being time-consuming to locate the support needed from administration to promote OER on individual institutional campuses. So how does our group actually overcome these challenges? It happens together. The first group that was established in Oklahoma to address OER in a collective approach is called the Council for Online Learning Excellence. As of today, our group under Cole, specifically within OER, has actually grown to above 45 members. Together, we've been able to achieve a lot of different outcomes, including applying for large-scale grants, winning large-scale grants, and proposing acquisition of platforms, for example, that our faculty can use to develop OER, and hosting collaborative professional development events. Most recently, in 2018, the online consortium of Oklahoma was created, and this is a membership-based group where individual institutions buy in to collective opportunities, so I'm as that we were able to acquire a consortium instance of PressBooks EDU. This is a wonderful system that allows our faculty to create accessible OER that can be adapted, remixed, revised in any way necessary across a variety of disciplines and integrated with any learning management system that is used across our system. We have multiple initiatives that are connected to the open OCO PressBooks platform, including grant funds that have been initiated because of the presence and availability of this development tool. In addition, the online consortium also offers professional development opportunities for faculty. We have a series of digital badge programs that allow faculty to tackle OER either at the 101 level through basic understanding of Creative Commons, what the five Rs are, and going a bit further for those that want to actually evaluate OER and go that next step to implementing it into their course. We also have a fully-fledged learning management system where we're able to develop courses such as the OER Basics and Beyond course that's available for free for all of our faculty and staff across the state. I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Alicia Baker from Northeastern State University. The purpose of the remaining portion of this presentation is to share through the lens of Roger's Diffusion of Innovations Theory how members of OCO intentionally supported the diffusion of the use of an online publishing platform. So the part of the diffusion of innovation at the forefront of the process was the rate of speed of the spread of the innovation from the originator to users or throughout an institution. And that was dependent upon certain attributes including relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability and cost of the innovation. So Roger suggests that if an innovation possesses a combination or even just one of these attributes the innovations more likely to be adopted at an increased rate. By using the attributes of observability and trialability of the platform we were able to make the platform visible to faculty and provide opportunities to allow them to witness the functionality and capabilities thus increasing the rate of its adoption and diffusion. So tryability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with. We knew that if we could get members of the organization to try the platform out before the decision to adopt it was made, the rate of adoption may be increased. Observability is a degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others. When individuals can observe the innovation the rate of adoption increases. However, one issue with observability is that some innovations are more easily observed than others. So with the online publishing platform being difficult to observe the consortium members had to consider how to make it more visible to the faculty. So we're going to hear from Jamie Holmes from Tulsa Community College who has experience with the tryability and observability of the platform. One of my colleagues literally went from saying, oh no, that tool is horrible. Definitely not worth the money to saying we need to have press books. It's the industry standard and it is awesome and we need it to do this work. Our librarian team here at TCC looked into press books early on and while we liked the end products we were seeing a few of us tried the free version and we're just not impressed. So we made use of the platforms and software we already had and tabled the press books conversation completely. Observing the end products without being able to observe the process just wasn't enough for us and the trial we experienced was too limited to achieve the goal of adoption at that time. I couldn't ignore what I kept seeing and hearing from other peers in the field who had access to press books EDU though and saw the great products they were creating was seemingly less time and effort than we were expending. So when a faculty member wanted to create an adaptation using content from four open philosophy textbooks three of which were on the press books platform I suspected the only way I could satisfy her timeline was to do the work in press books. Once I secured a more robust trial through a coal colleague the light turned on for me. I was able to experience the true value of the platform and through that project became quite proficient in using it. Not only did we complete the anthology on time we've continued improving it and just published our third edition in August. I've worked on three other press books projects since all of them have been collaborative adaptations where we remixed open content with original material of our own. I continue to learn with each project but more importantly the opportunity to jump in and try the platform as part of a team has afforded my colleagues throughout our consortium and on my own TCC library OER team the level of trialability and observability required to realize how much this tool can and does contribute to the success of our OER efforts. Now I'm going to pass it over to Dr. Kamala Ladderback who's the director at the Northeastern State University Broken Arrow Campus Library. Thank you Jamie. As Jamie pointed out OER is customizable for content and so it can be particularly useful for incorporating narratives and perspectives that are often left out of traditional textbooks and other curricular resources. And specifically in our state we have a large percentage of native students that we serve and particularly at my institution we have the largest percentage in the United States. So faculty can play a vital role in promoting those educational equity and embracing the assets of diverse student bodies with culturally relevant teaching. And so when you talk about culturally relevant teaching and that means developing intentional teaching and learning practices that include those traditionally underserved learners. When we talk about OER and the cultural relevance and equity we have the opportunity to ensure that all students have access to this high quality instructional material that represents diverse and culturally relevant perspectives. And as well it allows for locally adopted curricula that educators can put into practice in their instructional methods that ensures equitable access from a culturally responsive way. Specifically with open pedagogy that allows for creating and using those OERs by both the teachers and the students. So there are those who use that for social justice reasons as well because they want to reduce inequality in the access to that knowledge. So we can have students curate their own content to create their own textbooks and it's a little more culturally relevant. And so with indigenous knowledge with traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge there are characteristics of IK and it's basically knowledge that is holistic. So it's in nature and interconnectedness with people and then it's local. So the knowledge is based upon the locations of the people and then their knowledge is gained through direct active learning. And so when we create OERs it's very important that we take into perspective in the indigenous knowledge systems and it's important to consult with these IK bearers so that we make sure that native ways of knowing and learning are incorporated into OER correctly. We're going to wrap this up with Dr. Kathy Esmiller from Oklahoma State University. Thank you Dr. Latterbeck. So we'll bring this back around to the question that we brought up at the very beginning which is how are we now embracing these challenges? And the answer continues to be together. We have embraced the fact that we represent institutions whose communities and practices have different needs, interests and goals. According to Diffusion of Innovations Theory communication with people outside your local network can increase the rate at which innovations are adopted and diffused. We have discovered that to be true for us as our reflective collaboration has not only strengthened the OER community in the state of Oklahoma but has also strengthened the OER programs at each of our institutions. We really are better together.