 Thank you for tuning in today to learn about our aspirations for teacher education and the foundation with open education that Minnesota State has built to support this important life-changing work. My name is Kim Lynch, Senior System Director for Educational Innovations at Minnesota State and I use the pronouns she, her. I'm joined by two colleagues who will introduce themselves before I share a bit more about who Minnesota is and are grounding in open education. Hi, I'm Tim Anderson, System Director for Student Success Technologies in Educational Innovations working with Kim and Steven. I'll be serving as the Project Director for this grant and I'll be covering the why's we chose this product and the goals. And hello, my name is Steven Kelly. I served as the Innovation Program Director at the Minnesota State System Office. My pronouns are he, him, his. And it's my pleasure to share with you all today our open curriculum development workflow. So I introduced myself as an employee of the Minnesota State System of Colleges and Universities. This is a snapshot of that system and really a graphic showing our geographic reach from tip to toe of the state. You can see that we have 37 colleges and universities, 54 campuses spread across the state. We serve over 340,000 students with more BIPOC students than all other higher ed providers in the state combined. And we have a large number of faculty as well, about 15,000. The unit that I have the good fortune to lead aims every day to identify, seed and support innovative technologies and talent to drive and enable the highest quality teaching and learning experiences for students across Minnesota State. Increasingly we have embedded within our work attention to equitable and inclusive practices. You probably aren't surprised that open educational resources have been a key area for us to promote cultural fluency and digital accessibility. Before diving into the work, I do want to share the commitment that educational innovations develop collectively and iteratively and has been really operationalizing over the past two plus years. It has progressively informed our evolution with OER and other work we do. The project we're discussing today is really one example of this commitment coming to life. And that commitment is to serve our diverse communities. We seek to develop skills and strategies to engage in uncomfortable conversations that allow us to acknowledge and incorporate multiple perspectives. In our work, we seek to identify and dismantle barriers based on race, socioeconomic status, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and ability. By using an equity lens and stepping outside of our comfort zones, we can address the issue or issues at hand. Minnesota State has been building a solid reputation as leaders, promoting open education and open educational resources for over six years. We create awareness, develop skills and abilities both across the system and at local campuses. We have essentially been really building readiness to accelerate quickly with an opportunity like the Open Textbook pilot program or opening opportunities for teacher education. Well, we don't really have time to talk about each of these and how they've grounded that work. This snapshot really shows the breadth of our efforts at the faculty and at the course level. Additionally, we have a strong base of colleges that have implemented OER or zero cost options at the program level. With great support from the Minnesota State Legislature, in fall 2019, Minnesota State offered six colleges, eight campuses the opportunity to convert an AA degree pathway to one with zero textbook costs, sometimes referred to as a Z degree. Four colleges began offering Z degree pathways in fall 2020. Of note, this was achieved in less than 12 months and during a global pandemic. Two more fully implemented a zero textbook cost degree path this fall 2021. This graphic really shows participating colleges and projections about number of courses, average of students per course and progress. The six colleges really had originally predicted they would save over $1.5 million in textbook costs in the 2021 academic year. In fact, college Z degrees saved students over $3 million that year with an aggregate, as you can see on the slide, of over $4.2 million. So again, we really see that this work combined as a solid foundation for our next challenge, opening opportunities for teacher education. It's also a success story and we've been really trying to tell it. Not because we like to boast, but because success is contagious, meaning when our communities hear about something that has a real meaningful impact. And again, we have a lot of communities all over the state. They're more likely to support it and forward it and keep this system wide momentum of valuable purposeful work moving forward. Thank you, Kim. The United States Department of Education Award Minnesota State three year $978,332 grant to establish the opening opportunities for teacher education program. Like all FIPSI awards in 2020, the award was reduced. In our case, the request was reduced from a $1.2 million ask. The program will create open textbooks and open educational resources, also known as OERs for core teacher education courses that will provide significant savings for students while maintaining or improving student learning outcomes. But why did Minnesota State apply for this grant? Nationally, researchers have projected a teacher shortage of nearly 100,000 qualified teachers. Research also indicates that this deficit can reach as many as 200,000 by 2024, 2025 academic years. And worse, the national survey by the Economic Policy Institute in 2020 reported that as many as 20% of teachers indicated they were likely or somewhat likely to leave because of the COVID pandemic. So in alignment with the national studies, Minnesota teacher shortages is real and the impact can vary by district. The number of students in Minnesota grew by approximately 20,000 from academic years 2015 to 2018. The discipline shortages in Minnesota include special education, science, theater, mathematics, world languages, career and technical education, and bilingual education. To note, another alarming concern according to a 2019 teacher supply demand report is that nearly 3.4% of our active teachers were teachers of color in 2018, but statewide, 33.5% of the total students are of color. We also discovered a survey of school districts that found that 90% of respondents reported difficulty even hiring teachers of color. So what we've also found in the research is that race-matched teachers to students have been shown to benefit students of color through increased reading and mathematical test scores, reduced absences, lower suspension rates, reduced high school dropout rates, and raised college aspirations. These findings are of interest as Minnesota has one of the highest racial achievement gaps in the nation. Research has also shown that teachers of color positively impact all students, but mainly on students of color who continue to experience educational achievement gaps across the country. Under the leadership of educational elevations at the Minnesota State System Office, a consortium of six institutions of higher ed have agreed to assist in the authoring, reviewing, leadership, and piloting of zero-cost teacher education curriculum to support this effort. To support this project, Minnesota State has four primary goals in the redesign of teacher education program curriculum. The first is to lower the financial burden of attaining teacher education degree. A 2018 Florida textbook survey found that high school textbook costs led to students not purchasing required textbooks, taking fewer courses, earning a poor grade, or dropping a course entirely. Economically disadvantaged students and students of color, the specific populations in which will be the greatest beneficiaries of our project feel these negative impacts. When complete, we expect to save our students between $420 and $627,000 per year. Our second goal is to remove the barriers. An unpublished report from the Minnesota State University Student Association Survey noted that 59% of students reported that they had to wait for their financial aid check to purchase a textbook. The urgency to provide day one access to course materials has never been greater. The created OER will ensure that all teacher education students can receive their course materials on the first day of class, even if their campus is under the restrictions because of the public health concerns. Third goal is to reduce the teacher shortage. Teacher education faculty in Minnesota has further indicated shortages in greater Minnesota where attracting teachers to small town areas is challenging. By addressing goals one and two, we intend to reduce the teacher shortage in Minnesota. And finally, the fourth goal is to increase the cultural fluency of teacher candidates using culturally responsive texts that better prepare them to teach in diverse and multi-ethnic communities. Research has demonstrated that culturally responsive education, also known as CRE, decreases dropout rates in suspension and increases grade point averages, student participation, self-image, critical thinking skills, and graduation rates. This opportunity takes on a dual purpose for our teacher candidates of color who must see themselves in the work and ideally extend these same practices through the future classrooms. This project will meet the students and the education sector needs through the development of open textbooks or OER for five teacher preparation courses. A sixth course, Introduction to Special Education, will be considered later. As Kim shared previously, educational innovations at the Minnesota State System Office has been working on open educational resources at a system level for over six years. And during that time, we've learned quite a few things about how to get this work done on a system level. All the different things that we have done over the past years are informing the way we are approaching and strategizing around this work for teacher education. It really comes together in what we call our open curriculum development workflow. And you can see here that the workflow itself has 12 different steps. Next slide, please. We start with an open inventory for teacher education. The open marketplace, as you may well know, is fairly large. It's growing every single year. And it's really hard to keep track of all the different materials that might be out there for a particular discipline. Our first step in the curriculum development process is to go ahead and look at what is out there for teacher education. We are going to identify the different open materials that are currently available for the courses we're looking at, both open textbooks and ancillary OERs. We are also going to reach out in the case of materials that might be copyrighted that are really, really good for teacher education. Reach out to those folks and say, hey, you have these really great materials. Would you be willing to openly license this material so that we can incorporate into our work and share it with the rest of the world? After we've done our open inventory, we will move on to the open inventory evaluation step. And this is where we take all the materials that we've gathered together from our search and we present them to our teacher education faculty and we say, okay, one of these materials is maybe meeting muster and what maybe isn't really ready to work with or maybe not applicable to the work that we're doing. And from that work, we will develop a more tight list of different resources and materials that are available out there in the open marketplace that we can then incorporate or potentially incorporate into our work. Once that is done, we move on to our teacher education curriculum inventory. In Minnesota State, we have a teacher education pathway and we need to identify within that pathway where there might be some really great opportunities to create OER ancillary materials. So we'll take a look at that pathway itself. We'll take a look both the course and the module designs, as well as the materials that are available for them. And we will go ahead and mark those different areas that our teacher educators identify where we can really strengthen them through OER and through the authoring process. Now, once we bring these three together, we're able to make some decisions about how to prioritize our work on this project. And that's in the next slide. Here what we're looking at is our opportunity analysis step or our step four. And this is really important because critical with the limited resources and time that we have that we make some very good decisions about where to apply both of those. So we drill down to the module topic level within the course. You'll see that in the upper left hand corner. From the first three steps in the process, we take a look at our teacher ed OER materials that we pulled together during the open inventory. We take a look at the in-test standards and what materials might be aligned to those of those open-end materials we pulled together. And we take a look at our current teacher ed materials from our pathway. Then we go ahead and triangulate those to figure out whether we want to apply our efforts in those particular module topic areas for OER or not. So for instance, imagine what's called module topic A has some really great teacher ed OER materials in the marketplace. And those happen to be aligned with the in-test standards as well. But when we look at our current teacher ed materials, they're already really inexpensive and maybe up to date. We may possibly create OER in those situations because again, if the materials are already relatively cheap, maybe students aren't getting the best benefit from the creation of OER materials. So it's a possibility. Conversely, if we have great teacher OER materials in the marketplace for a module topic and our current teacher ed materials are really expensive or need some updating, but all those materials combined may not be fully up to the in-test standards, we may be likely to create materials for that. Again, in that situation, bringing those OER materials that are available in the marketplace up to the in-test standards where we want them might be worth our time. And so we'll look to apply some effort there. Now, if we have in-test standards aligned curriculum that's already available in our pathway, but we're not finding any OER materials out in the marketplace, we are unlikely to create OER in that situation. And the reason why is because it would present a tremendous amount of effort to kind of bring all of that together and pull together those new OER materials. The sweet spot we're looking for is we want to find OER materials in the marketplace that are in-test standards aligned in situations where we also have expensive need updating or non-existent materials in our pathway and that represents the core in the middle. We are absolutely creating OER in those situations because that is worth our time and resources. Moving on to the next slide, please. So that's our opportunity analysis. Step four, moving after that, we go into the faculty and personnel training. In this situation, we pull together some of our best practices and faculty development from in the system. Over the past six years, we have launched many OER learning circles, more than I can count. And these are opportunities for faculty who are brand new to OER to come together in a learning community and work alongside peer mentors who are faculty that have been doing OER and publishing for several years now at least. And together they're able to mutually help one another and new faculty to OER are able to build the kind of skills that they need working alongside, again, a peer expert. We are also gonna work with our partners at the Open Education Network to provide a publishing short course. And through this publishing short course, faculty who are brand new to OER creation in Teacher Ed will be able to become informed about how to make great decisions on for instance, publishing format where they wanna publish their things and other sorts of decisions that they may need to make along the way when considering publishing. Next, we go to our OEM curriculum design mentoring. And this is an opportunity for the faculty member to work alongside an instructional designer looking at the actual design of the open material and open content that they plan to create. Now we will also be focusing on applying in test standards using a rubric to all the design work that we do within that process. So that not only our faculty learning in the last step all about OER but they're also learning to do some really great planning and curriculum development and curriculum design alongside the trained expert. Moving on to the next slide. After all this training, we move on to the actual material development. And this is where faculty begin authoring either individually or in teams. We're gonna work with our faculty to figure out what makes the most sense and where their comfort levels reside. We'll also provide the opportunity for faculty to work alongside equity coaches to help inform the creation of culturally responsive materials. And once all that authoring is complete, we will be looking at a module of personalized learning. Now actually, in reality, this is probably going to work hand in hand even though the one step comes after the other in the workflow, they'll probably be intermingled a bit. Modular personalized learning is really our attempt to open up the personalized learning landscape. So we are aware that many personalized learning platforms on the web are proprietary and oftentimes for faculty or students to access them, there's a subscription cost involved. That's not very consistent with the idea of open in our opinion. And so instead, we are going to pursue the creation of modular personalized learning materials inspired by a program inside Minnesota State called FlexPace. This focuses on the creation of materials and leveraging the learned management system to create the kind of pathways that we want to see in personalized learning. So for instance, ancillary design for plug-in player customization will be created and these will appear as either SCORM or common cartridge files that can be plug-and-played into a learning management system like D2L or Blackboard. We will also create this aggregated folders of all of our content that will allow faculty to take individual folders or modules and either put them into a learning management system or up onto a website. And then all of these will be accompanied by specification guides which inform our instructional designers or the faculty how to set up links and how to connect everything together to come out with an outcome of personalized learning that best fits their needs or their students' needs. After we get all of the different materials created in modular format, we move on to a comprehensive curriculum review. And in the curriculum review step, we invite both internal and external reviewers and who are teacher educators and we get a mix of faculty and industry partners in there. So it might not just be educators, it might be some of our partners too from for instance, the Minnesota Department of Education. And all of them will apply custom rubric that sort of checks all the boxes that we wanna see checked along the way to ensure that our curriculum materials are being created consistent with cultural responsive best practices, consistent with good and strong curriculum design or applied to a rubric such as quality matters. And also that are all going to be fully accessible ready. And that moves on to the next slide in our next step, which is an accessibility review. Our instructional design in partnership with some of our other technology experts will do a comprehensive accessibility review on all the materials we create. And any materials that are found to be slightly deficient will be kicked back to the authors and they will be edited and then returned for subsequent publication. Once all of those materials are ready, we will begin piloting and revising. This is where we scale out all of our different materials to our six campuses who are part of the consortium and they go and run them in the courses and we get feedback from students along the way. We will then take that feedback and we will further revise all of our materials so that we finally reach the last step which is OER taken to scale. And this represents a few different steps that we intend to take to bring all of our materials to the world. First of all, we'll upload all of our materials to our Minnesota State repository called OpenDora. Secondly, we will promote all of our materials through the Open Education Network. And in the case of open textbooks that we create, we will pursue having those posted in the open textbook library so that folks can download them there. The last thing is we intend to promote at conferences and associations for the next few years. In fact, right here at the OpenEd conference, we hope to come back every single year and share the latest updates on this project with all of you. And with that, are there any questions that anyone here today would like to ask the three of us?