 All right. Hello everyone and welcome. This is Una Daly from the Community College Consortium for OER and we are starting our fifth session of the morning and I'm very pleased to introduce Jason Pickavance who is the Director of Faculty Development and Educational Initiatives at Salt Lake Community College. They have been a member of CCCOER as many of our speakers have been this morning since 2015 and they have been doing some amazing work in OER adoption and similar to our last presenter they have not pursued an OER degree option but have gone for, I'm not sure if massive is the right word but it might be OER adoption across their courses and have made a significant impact on student savings. Jason I'd like to turn it over to you. Okay thank you Una. So again I'm Jason Pickavance I'm the Director of Faculty Development and Educational Initiatives at Salt Lake Community College and I currently lead what we now call our open SLCC initiative which is our OER initiative and so I have a handful of slides I don't have too many I want to just talk about some of the work we're doing and then you know leave it open for questions that people have. If I can get it to my slide to advance. There we go. First just you know a little bit about Salt Lake Community College to give you some institutional context so Utah is kind of weird when it comes to community colleges most states have like community college systems we are the only community college in the state of Utah. There is a little college called Snow College down in Central Utah that's like a little junior college but in terms of a comprehensive community college we're it so we're one college we have about 60,000 students 10 locations but it's one president one set of deans it's you know so we actually have a relatively light administration administrative layer I like to call it for the size of the college that we are and so we're not talking when I talk about the Salt Lake Community College kind of open SLCC initiative it's not a system office initiative it is a college it's a single college initiative so that gives you some context for where we are and in terms of you know our programs and our students about two-thirds of our students identify themselves as people students interested in transfer so the bulk of what we do is you know students who are wanting to transfer to the University of Utah or to Utah Valley University or to Weber State and then about a third our kind of CTE students career tech students are looking for an AAS degree or certificate of some kind that leads to workforce and the bulk of the OER work that we're doing is in the transfer area in general education so I'll talk about strategy although I joke that you know I sometimes you know it was probably not until a good year or so into the initiative that I started to think more strategically it was really you know David Wiley and Kim Fanos kind of visiting our campus boy I think it's four years ago and approaching me and then Provost Chris Picard with this idea of piloting my open math you know in a couple of sections of math and that's where it sort of started and then as it began to you know kind of develop then I started to think more strategically so I in my presentations assign intentionality and deep strategic thinking to what in fact when reality was a much more organic process but I have here a little screenshot one of the things that I did do because we were in the middle of a few years ago of redoing our strategic plan is I did convince cabinet to include mention of OER in the strategic plan itself which I think helped legitimize the initiative it went from being something that was on the margins something that just a handful of faculty were doing to something that was recognized officially in our strategic plan so under one of the elements of our plan is improved transfer preparation and pathways and under the you'll see our strategies right here offer open general offer an open general education certificate which we have accomplished now we do you can complete all of your general education pretty much at the college through OER so just that getting that in in the plan I think helped increase the visibility and again the legitimacy of the initiative and it made it so that when I approached faculty after the plan came out it they recognize that this is something that upper administration valued and wanted to support I also made every effort to connect it we we kind of have followed I don't know if you're familiar with the whole kind of free community college idea but we followed I think it's Tennessee promise is where the is one of the earlier ones and we followed that so if you're a Pell eligible student at Salt Lake Community College and you agree I think to go to take nine credits at least we pay for the difference between what the Pell pays for and what the education costs so we're offering to a certain kind of group of our students who are in need essentially free community college and I've made every effort to kind of try to connect our OER initiative with SLCC promise and I've made the argument at the open ed conference but more importantly here at the college that you know we have open access as a part of our mission and that working with OER is just a logical extension of what it means to work at a community college we're all about access and anything that we do to construct some kind of artificial barrier between a student who is in need especially first-generation under prepared students that we you know often deal with you know if we're if we're charging you know we're assigning hundred or a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollar textbooks we're really not following through on the mission of being an open access institution and I think for a long time you know among our faculty that wasn't it wasn't that there was they just weren't thinking about it you know wasn't visible to them that that was an issue and I think both with the rise of the rhetoric around free community college and the increasing visibility around open open education nationally that's just become a much more visible issue to faculty and no faculty member that I've met has told me you know Jason I enjoy assigning expensive textbooks so just walk away for me with your open-ed you know gibberish every faculty member I've approached has been in principle supportive of it and then they just have questions about you know is the content good is it peer-reviewed is it well designed etc so I've made real efforts to both kind of make open visible in the strategic plan and affiliate it with the broader kind of rhetoric around access at the institution as Una mentioned we decided not to apply for the achieving the dream grant I actually think there's I think open degrees are really cool and at some point I wouldn't mind us developing one but in the shorter term I thought it was more important for us to continue to develop open at the college without without forcing the issue without forcing the issue of a degree I wanted it to develop more organically and I talked about horizontal versus vertical development so we really have done a lot to especially in what's called our core general education in the Utah system of higher education there's what's called the core component of gen ed and then distribution areas and the core is English math and American institutions and then distribution areas are like humanities life science you know social science physical science etc in our core gen ed our core gen ed now is mostly open so most probably 80% of English 1010 in 2010 which those are giant courses we run you know 200 sections a semester of English 1010 and 100 something of 2010 courses like math 1030 which is intro to quantitative reasoning which is the main way non stem majors fulfill their quantitative literacy requirement and math 1060 which is algebra and our entire dev sequence those are totally open and then our main American institutions courses like history 1700 which is the American history survey and polis I 1100 which is introduction to US government those are totally open courses as well so if you you know those are that means it probably 70% of our core gen ed is open at this point so sorry I'm gonna go back here so if you're if you're a student at the college you're gonna you're gonna be taking open content if you're a transfer student at this point in terms of the numbers we started in 2014 so we're about we're like four years in I think this semester into the initiative and we're at 5.8 million we just actually came up with that number yesterday just before the meeting so this was our deadline this spring we're at 1.1 million and 739 sections and last fall we ran 700 658 sections so and again that 739 the bulk of that is in our core gen ed so the way we kind of think about it is we've kind of cast this wide net across our transfer areas to make open kind of unavoidable and and then in distribution areas like biology 1010 which is a big life science one is open we have some physical science like geology is totally open some social science is open some business is open as well as well as education so if you're a transfer student you'll probably take two or more OER courses at the college and I'm actually trying to work with institutional research more to figure out like if we can kind of construct some number that represents not only total savings but if we can look at students or transfer students with the average savings might be and I would like to do some follow-up research to see you know I know there's been some research done at like Tidewater I think about you know what are students doing with that saved money are they reinvesting in their education can we see that you know are they maybe completing more quickly taking on average more credits etc but that's where we are right now in terms of our total numbers so we feel pretty good about it and we feel like what we have now is a pretty durable commitment so we're we're we feel pretty safe in the coming year so we're gonna hover around you know 600 to 800 sections because departments like English and math and history and biology the associate deans in those areas are really committed to open they've really bought into it and have been real leaders and then a lot of the faculty in those areas of well really committed to open and so I don't get the sense that you know next week I'm gonna hear from the English department and they're gonna tell me you know Jason we're gonna go back to using you know the St. Martin's Guide to Writing that's just not gonna happen in the near future so all we are is unavoidable for the SLCC transfer student and that's something that has been I'll say good for us in terms of especially during the legislative session as we kind of talk about you know every every year in our at least in our legislature there's always like the rising cost of higher education and education success you know accessible still to the average student and it's been nice for us as a college to be able to kind of turn back to the state and say we're doing something to control the cost of education and we're doing it in a way that we feel like is scalable and really affects a large number of students so I'm gonna turn to working with faculty like how have how is my office incentivized work around open like others we've done OER grants and stipends I'm in the middle right now trying to kind of revise some of that you know honestly the first few years was a little Wild West and I was just kind of working with whoever would come to me and and we had a mix of faculty building open content so we have a geology professor that worked with the lead geologist in the city Utah to to build an open textbook around geology if you go to open geology org you can see that textbook it still needs some work but but it's being used right now in all of our sections of geology 2010 but beyond stipends it's interesting you know one of the things I found is stipends only I initially thought going in that stipends would be more effective than they are but I actually think what faculty are more interested in at least at our college are are how thinking about how they can link their work around open to professional development opportunities and their own professional advancement and so I've been putting more of my energy lately I've been trying to move away from stipends which I think are more short-term and really try to get academic administration to recognize open as something that counts toward a faculty member's professional advancement at the institution so I think a faculty member wants to be assured that if I'm doing this work you know that his or her associate dean or his or her dean will look at that and say yes this counts towards your tenure this this is something that we want you to do and then professional development sort of opportunities like going to the open education conference right I think that there's a real appetite among our faculty to think about how they can you know especially to teaching an intensive institution I the way I kind of describe it is I think that there's a lot of there's a real appetite for doing scholarship and working around OER is a highly appropriate and I think realistic way for faculty who are trained as scholars after all to kind of give back to that scholarship in a way that benefits students to be kind of have some scholarly activity to produce stuff and so that's been something I've continued to work on to really kind of dialogue with faculty about how can this how can this count for you how can you get professional capital out of this and how can you you know use this to go to conferences and present and and be a professional and do stuff that's professionally satisfying for you that that in turn also benefits students so that's been I feel like it's been really good for the culture of the institution in terms of getting a lot of faculty to go to the conference every year you know I mean next year we I hope to have another 12 to 15 faculty attend open ed and some of them will present and that's been great and then I want to do more in terms of researching efficacy I mean it's it is nice that we're just you know a half hour drive north of BYU and you have John Hilton in his group and he's reached out to me and I need to follow up with him but he you know there's an army of graduate eager graduate students down at BYU we're researching open ed and I would love to have them do more research on OER we do have our own analysts here at Salt Lake Community College so I'm a co-author on this but really I was just the pretty face on this paper Jesse Wyninski-Stevens has really did the analysis of this so we published this in the international review of open and distributed learning last last summer and it's and it shows like a lot of other OER research shows that you know there's no significant difference between in terms of success of students we have one of our analysts partnering with Phil Grimaldi at OpenStax right now on an analysis of our history adoption we use the OpenStax US history book in all sections of history 1700 and we flip that over maybe a couple of years ago and so they want to do some kind of look into how students are faring in those sections that are open so so we want to continue we want to start publishing you know and contributing back to this kind of scholarship around OER and that's kind of a goal going forward in terms of making the initiative sustainable you know I did look into a couple of grants early on we we had some money from the Cerritos Foundation for our work with my open math and that helped kind of you know give me some starter money and then we were a partner with OpenStax alongside the University of Georgia they were also a partner on that next generation courseware challenge and that kind of helped start things off in biology and sociology we we piloted OpenStax tutor which obviously required that we use the OpenStax content but one of the things I did manage to do early on is get cabinet to agree to assign a $5 fee to sections that are open it initially came about because we are partnering we partnered with Lumen with it was my open math and at the time it cost $5 since then it's gone up to 10 with the online homework manager which is still a great price but I extended my argument to say you know for those sections where we don't have some kind of platform we're paying for where their content is just free can we just assign this fee and it will go into an index and that money can be used to kind of we can be folded back into the initiative can it can stipend faculty can pay for their professional development etc and they agreed to that so I'm the I'm the budget center manager over that index and I create sub funds for different departments and I pushed that money back down into the departments where that open work is happening and it has been nice I mean for history for example they had to do some significant adaptation of the history book and that money has made that work possible you know we've stipended faculty both full-time and part-time over the summer to create a create some additional assessments for the resource to adapt the resource and and again to pay for faculty like Ted Moore for example in our history department to go to the open education conference and present on the work and you know I've been pretty realistic about the fact that working with open you know it does take some additional work when I've presented to Faculty Senate on this issue I've said you know this this isn't this isn't something that that is easy necessarily in some cases it does take more work and I do think it deserves in some cases some extra compensation and the fee has made that possible and so that's been that's been a nice kind of thing for the initiative and we've recently become one of the cool kids we actually made oh we are discoverable in our banner system so you can see now when students look they can do and we totally copied Maricopa I mean Maricopa was way ahead on this but we put the no-cost low-cost there as well so students can find you know sections that are no cost low cost and we're in the process now if it's not as I actually think Maricopa I think they use people soft when we use banner it doesn't work quite as well as I would like in banner so it needs some design improvement and then we're in the process so kind of educating students about how to find this stuff I'll finally say and I didn't have a slide on this you know the three kind of areas where open is worked the best I mean our partnership with Lumen has been essential for the success of the math part I mean of those 700 sections probably close to 300 are in math Suzanne Masdy in the associate dean of math has been a total superstar when it comes to leading open efforts at the college having open stacks as a partner has been really great I mean when I show faculty some of the open stacks textbooks it really it really you know I think sometimes when you say open and for a faculty member who hasn't been involved in the OER movement it conjures in their minds kind of amateurish stuff and you show them an open stacks book and they're really wowed by how professional it is and then we have had we've had a handful of faculty really interested in creating open content and again I think it gets it that there's a lot of especially to teaching as intensive institution there are a lot of faculty here that want to do scholarly work they want to produce stuff and the open content initiative has been an opportunity for them to do that in a way that fits with their career so I will stop there again I'm Jason answers my contact and see if there are questions all right thank you very much Jason that was that was an amazing journey through the work that you've done at Salt Lake Community College we did have a comment from the audience from Peter Nevin who I believe is with Edu Global a subscription service in Canada for content he mentions that UBC the University of British Columbia is offering tenure development on open access and OER so thanks for doing that Peter you're welcome all right well you obviously wowed them Jason you probably will have some follow-up questions over email so thank you please feel free to email me questions and also in terms of the staffing you know it's it's part of my job now I mean I'm over our fat I do you know new faculty orientation all these other things so it's a it's a little chunk of my job I might have a part-time person that supports it and you know like the last presenter said I'm trying to institutionalize the initiative so we're trying to bring in library e-learning as well to kind of make it part of what just the institution does I'm really trying to transform it from an initiative to just this is something that we do now it's a part of a part of the culture and that's you know beyond student savings as an obvious goal and I really want it to be like others I would like to move the discussion to a higher level and you know start getting I'd like faculty to start thinking about how open leads to certain approaches to teaching and learning that that are better for students you know wonderful yeah all right well thank you so much Jason and thank you for those who are joining us online today our next session we'll start in about four minutes and speaking of librarians we will be hearing from an amazing OER project manager and librarian at Lansing so stay tuned