 Hi, everyone. My name is Elizabeth Nelson and I'm presenting today with Allison Bonner and Larry Mussolino from Penn State Lehigh Valley. Our presentation is titled Let's Make Something for Our Students, The Value of Discipline-Specific Communities of Practice in OER Work. Through this presentation, we'll discuss what a discipline-specific COP is, how our math-focused COP functions on our campus, the OER Authorship Project we've taken on, some benefits of using discipline-specific communities of practice for OER work, and some things to consider if you'd like to form a similar group at your own institution. So to start us off, I want to quickly define how we're thinking of this idea of a discipline-specific community of practice. If you're familiar with communities of practice, you'll know that they are uniquely oriented toward examining and improving the ongoing practices that are shared among the members. We're suggesting that for OER work, there could be unique advantages to focusing that work through that model and within the frame of individual academic disciplines. We'll get more into those benefits later, but for now, let's start off with some more basic definitions and discussion. We define communities of practice in the words of Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trainer as groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. If you'd like to read more about communities of practice in general, I'll point out that Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trainer's work is linked on this slide, and you can follow that to read more of their discussion. When we add a discipline-specific lens and a focus on OER work to this model, we can define this new version of a community of practice as a group of instructors experimenting with and assessing open educational resources and practices all within the frame of their own academic discipline and focused on the teaching and learning content that they hold in common. You'll also notice on the slide, I added an asterisk to instructors. That's just to remind us that focusing on a discipline does not mean that the group needs to be exclusive of everyone but teaching faculty within that discipline. There are usually also valuable partners on your campus who can help support disciplinary work like librarians, instructional designers, advisors, and learning support staff. And some of these partners may also be able to provide expertise in OER or OAER work as well. Finally, we should not forget that students could also be valuable members of these groups in some circumstances, especially peer mentors, tutors, TAs, and representatives from student government or appropriate organizations within the discipline. The thread that really should link all the members of the community of practice together is that they are A, heavily involved in the day-to-day details of this discipline's work and education, and B, interested in exploring and supporting OER work. So that's still a little bit vague as to what a discipline-specific COP is, I'm sure. So we're going to use our math OER COP at Penn State Lehigh Valley as an example of how a discipline-specific COP is organized, how it functions, and what it can do. In this case, in terms of OER work within math education. And just as a brief note, we use OER for open and affordable educational materials in our group's title instead of OER. That's primarily because Penn State as an institution is open to including affordable materials like library-licensed materials and low-cost materials within the umbrella of OER work, but so far our group has actually mostly worked with traditionally open materials. So the math OER COP at Penn State Lehigh Valley is made up of math instructors at the Lehigh Valley campus. Larry Mussolino and I started this group in 2020, and I'll talk more about where that idea came from a bit later. Right now, though, I want to give you a more practical idea of how this group actually works. So first we take advantage of having a very open and collaborative campus to use a really informal and open organizing structure. As the librarian and the OER support person for the group, I help organize meetings, minutes, and resources, but the actual decisions about what the COP is going to work toward, those are handled by members of the COP themselves, usually instructional faculty. We started our first meeting of the COP by having everyone share the needs and concerns that they felt could be addressed by using OER or other elements of open education within the math discipline on our campus. And then we chose a project to focus on as our first priority. In our case, that was specifically creating a tailor-made openly licensed practice workbook for students in our math 140 classes, which is an early calculus class. Not all of our members chose to or were able to commit time to that workbook project. But in the nature of a COP, we intend to have multiple projects running over time, some of them concurrently, so there will always be opportunities for members to contribute as they're able. And we'll give you some more details about that workbook project in a little bit. Finally, the last big thing to note is that our COP represents a variety of experience levels with OER. Some of our members have authored OER, some have taught with OER textbooks or supplemental materials, and some have never used OER before. That's okay. The main qualification for joining our group is, like we said before, that they want to learn about OER within the math discipline and they want to contribute to our work. The OER expertise for the group is provided by those members who have more experience, by myself as the OER liaison for our campus library, and by our OER expert teams within the larger Penn State University system as needed. So a little bit more info on that workbook project, since we feel like this is a great example of how a discipline specific COP's project can start from really personal specific goals within that department, but grow into something that can be shared more widely within the OER community. The COP members who are working on our workbook are Larry Mussolino and Allison Bonner. So this is just a small subset of our whole COP, but we're hoping that we'll be able to get some of our other members involved with some elements of the publishing process beyond authoring, like peer review, helping us write practice problems, things that are less of a time commitment than full authorship. The catalyst for this project was that open discussion in our first COP meeting. A number of instructors felt that their first priority should be addressing the difficulty students were having with those early calculus courses. They felt that students didn't have enough guided opportunities to practice their skills between exams. And of course it's easy to think students can always Google and find practice problems, they can work problems out of the book, but the COP felt that students weren't really confident enough to identify the areas they needed to practice, to find good problems to address those areas, and then to actually follow up with working those problems and getting help understanding what they were struggling with. So our goal was to create a more hands-on guided workbook experience to add back in some scaffolding that's lacking from those back of the book practice problems. That workbook is in progress and is being written in sections to complement the course structure, but also to work well with our assigned textbook, which is OpenStacks Calculus I. Each section of the workbook begins with a really short review, some worked out examples, and then sets of practice problems for both in-class and solo use for the topic of that section. There are two main reasons that we provide both in-class and some try-it-yourself problems. We're hoping that including problems to be worked in class will help acclimate students to the workbook, make it feel less like an ancillary and more like an important part of their learning, and also encourage them to use it on their own as well. The try-it-yourself exercises are meant to encourage students to test their own learning and become more comfortable with self-assessment and self-advocacy within their math courses. Again, this is something that came directly out of the COP's discussions of issues that they wanted to address within their discipline, namely student under preparedness, increasing student confidence, and giving students the tools to identify and more clearly discuss and take control of their learning within their math classes. To help facilitate this, our recommendation is that these try-it-yourself problems should not be assigned as a typical graded homework assignment. Ideally, if they're graded, we're hoping that students would be awarded points for completion and not correctness, and that mistakes would be identified but not penalized. The hope is that students would be able to work these problems and then consult with their instructor or TA to figure out exactly what they're not understanding as needed, and that having the diagnostic kind of one issue, one concept per problem aspect to these try-it-yourself problems might help prevent those frustrating office hour conversations where a student comes in, you ask them what they're having trouble with, and they say, I don't know, or they say all of it, for example. Finally, I want to mention that this project has received a PA goal grant from Affordable Learning PA, or ALPA, and will be published as an OER ancillary that can be used by anyone alongside OpenStacks Calculus I or any calculus text, or even on its own. And our aim is to get that into a repository by summer of 2022. So now I'm going to stop and pass us to Larry Mussolino, who's going to discuss how we'd implemented the Open Calculus workbook so far, as well as some feedback from our students. Hi, everyone. This is Larry Mussolino. I wanted to share some first experiences of using a calculus workbook. We've implemented this in fall 2021 as an initial draft, and I'm using this right now in a course called Math 110, Techniques of Calculus. This is a first level calculus course intended for business and social science majors, and right now I've initially shared chapters one to three of the workbook. Chapter one is a review of pre-calculus topics that students will need for Math 110. Chapter two is limits, and then chapter three is derivative rules. And the workbooks have been integrated into the Canvas LMS so students can access each one of these chapters through Canvas. They can download the file. They can print it out and access these chapters through Canvas. And the way the workbook is set up and organized is typically we start out with an overview of the key concepts for a given topic or a given section. And then, as part of those key concepts, we include any definitions or terminology the student might need, any relevant formulas, and any graphs and visuals. Then we follow that up with worked out examples that takes those formulas or that concept and shows students a step-by-step progression with a step-by-step explanation. Then we provide for the instructor some in-class examples. Typically, we're providing the solutions to those, and this is intended for individual or group activities during the class period. In addition, we're providing some try-it-yourself examples. Here, we're not providing any solutions in the event that the instructor wants to assign this homework or assign these as some kind of challenge exercises for the student. Let me show you a quick example of a typical setup for a topic. In this case, here is the explanation shown here in the upper left-hand corner. So this would be the explanation to the student. It's showing them some visual displays of how to determine if a graph represents a function. Then we take them to a worked out example here. Then we ask the students to do an in-class practice. And finally, there's a try-it-yourself. This is intended as possibly a take-home exercise for the student to work on. And so we'll have typically between five and ten practice questions and typically between five and ten try-it-yourself examples. Some sections have more than that, but we try to give enough examples in the workbook so that instructors can feel confident in assigning these activities either as in-class or take-home exercises. I have received some preliminary comments from students in Math 110. One comment was the student was very happy to see the worked out examples with the step-by-step guidance. The student felt that it was very useful to be able to see the worked out progression. Another student said they liked the short and succinct explanations. It was much easier to understand a short summary than trying to go into a textbook with a lengthy explanation. And I am planning a more comprehensive survey of student and opinions and suggestions later on in the fall 2021 semester. All right, thank you. And now I'm going to pass the microphone to Allison Bonner, who's going to share some of our plans for future implementation of our COPs open calculus workbook. Hello, I'm Allison Bonner, one of the authors of the calculus workbook project. I just wanted to share a few reflections on the creation of this committee to put together this project. Because we are discipline specific, we were able to immediately jump in and start on the practical work. Our shared experiences as instructors allowed us to have a smoother collaboration. We were able to share what each of us saw as needs for our students, we were able to bounce ideas off of one another and start to develop the lessons that we thought should go into this workbook. There was a great push to initiate the project because of that fact. We've been teaching calculus for several years, and we can see in our experiences where students would need help. So it was very exciting to put this calculus workbook together. And I feel this shared workbook, it can bring a little bit of cohesiveness into different class sections, even though each instructor has their own unique presentation skills. Other students who are in other calculus sections would have this cohesiveness brought together by that workbook. For the future plans, I usually teach calculus in spring. And so my plan is to bring the workbook into the classroom and use it for active learning in the class. I'm going to take advantage. I've noticed that students more and more are bringing their own laptops or tablets to class, and they can follow along with the workbook during the lecture, and they can actively work on the problems together. With the format established for this workbook, we can expand and create workbooks for other OER texts that can be used in our algebra classes and our trigonometry courses that also use open resources. It's very exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing this workbook in action in my class. So now that we've walked you through the details of what an OER focused discipline specific community of practice could be and what our specific COP is working on, let's dive a little bit more into the benefits of why you might want to use a structure like this. First, let's talk about why we use a community of practice model rather than a working group or committee. The first reason is that emphasis on the idea of organizing around practice. While we do want our members to learn together, we don't want to just focus on learning about OER. Instead, we want to focus on the practice of instruction and student support with OER and how our members can be more actively involved in that immediately. Additionally, our campus already has an open working group that focuses on education about OER and campus wide data gathering projects, other things like that. The second reason is to emphasize the aspect of communal sharing and shared work. When we formed the COP, we made it clear to our members that while we understood that levels and styles of contribution would of course change over time. The focus of the group was really on having every member contribute and participate however they could whenever they could. We really want to have opportunities to address everyone's concerns and try out a variety of projects as the group learns and evolves together. So on to the benefits of working specifically on OER with a disciplinary lens. I originally decided to experiment with organizing OER work by discipline on our campus because of some of the experiences I was having as an OER liaison librarian when I conducted OER outreach and workshops for our campus. When I held a workshop, I kept noticing that instructors would start to ask a question about their own courses, but then apologize for derailing the conversation, because they wanted to discuss say OER for physics courses, but realize that not everyone in the room was a physics instructor. We recognize that that hesitation or that feeling that they might be wasting the other participants time or dominating the conversation might be holding other instructors back from asking their questions at all. And then the process of following up with me after the presentation and getting help with their courses that all might get lost in their schedules and we lose that opportunity to work together. So by organizing these discipline specific groups to discuss OER within those disciplines, we avoid those awkward moments of hesitation. The instructors are all teaching similar content, they may be using similar resources, and they may be seeing similar needs or issues come up in their shared courses or shared student body. So a question raised by one is likely to apply to all. The instructors in the same department may have courses that impact each other or tie together, so changes to one can have consequences for the others. By getting these instructors together to discuss their shared content in a space that's just for them, we can also create an environment that encourages shared work. The instructors seeing their shared concerns and the impact a change could have on their students may be more able to work together to address that shared concern, then they would be to address an individual concern on their own like adopting an OER just for their own course. Part of that is some motivation of working with your peers and having people to bounce ideas off of, but part of it is also just a purely practical ability to pool resources and have more hands to help get the work done, especially during busy semesters when faculty are working under overloads and things like that. So if after hearing about our COP and some of the ideas behind this, you're interested in trying out the discipline specific COP model for your own institution, here are some tips that we've learned along the way that we hope will help you get started. Most of this is from my perspective as a librarian who supports OER work, but it may also be applicable to instructors or others who want to start a project like this. So you want to consider how your own viewpoint might be slightly different if you're working within the discipline as opposed to, like I do, being a support person from outside the discipline. First, I would suggest that you start by figuring out who your OER experts and advocates are. Are there instructors in your discipline who are already working with OER? Is there an OER expert or a support person for your campus who you could partner with? I know in my institution the library has a lot of OER liaisons, and I know it's also very common for libraries to be involved with OER work, so that's definitely a great place to start. But there are also often OER experts among instructional designers and other areas of campus as well. So cast that net broadly. Then think about what it is that you want your COP to do in general. How are you going to pitch it to your potential members as something that's worth their time and effort to join? What are the pain points that you've all already discussed within your discipline that you're thinking OER could help you address? That might be a good way to direct that pitch. I would also suggest don't just focus on the people in your department who are openly pro OER. There may be people in your department or in your discipline who are unfamiliar with OER or uncertain or hesitant about OER, but who would wind up being amazing contributing members to the COP and could learn about OER along the way if they're willing to join. And I would also encourage you not to forget about adjunct instructors, but also about librarians, instructional designers, advisors, and others on campus who could be great assets to projects like this, but are sometimes forgotten. And I would especially encourage you to think about your students. Do you have graduate students, TAs, undergraduate peer mentors, or just stand out students in the major who could include their voice and give you that student perspective to your discussions? Finally, I'd encourage you to think about the resources and the expertise that you're going to need along the way and who exactly you're going to go to to get that as you work. We learned the hard way in our workbook project that you might think you have access to lots of in-house services and resources, but when it comes to the specifics of your project, there may be roadblocks you weren't aware of. So as your project is getting started, take the time to reach out to those groups you think might be helpful in terms of things like accessibility, access to resources, instructional design, graphic design, et cetera, and see what it is exactly that they're able to support and if they can help you define your project as you get started. So I want to thank you all so much for your time and attention. If you have questions, thoughts or suggestions that you'd like to share with us, please feel free to do so. Our contact information is listed and linked on this slide and we would be thrilled to hear from you. Thank you.