 So, welcome everyone in the Open Education Community to the second of our Fall 2018 webinars from the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. I'm Matthew Bloom. I am English faculty at Scottsdale Community College in the Phoenix area in Arizona, and I am on the CCC OER Executive Council, serving in the capacity as helping with professional development. So I'm really excited to have some folks here today to talk about their experiences with sustainability in Open Educational Resources, and we'll hopefully have some really interesting discussions and I want to try to get as many responses and questions from the community as well. So we set aside some specific time for that. So our agenda for today is just to kind of do some very basic introduction and then give an overview of CCC OER. The introductions, please take a look at the chat because I know that a lot of folks have already gone through and introduced themselves in there. And after that we have our round table, that'll be the main part of it, and then following that we'll just kind of let you know what's going on at our next webinar and then we'll be done. So let's go ahead and get started because I think that we will have more than enough stuff to talk about today. So just in case you need a reminder, I guess, about CCC OER, if you're not familiar with the organization, the mission of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is to, as it says here, expand awareness and access to high quality OER. I think that this is a community-based effort, it's a lot of collaboration. We want to do the best we can to support faculty and that's why we exist as a consortium is to be there to do what we can to help you as members in whatever kind of open education goals you have. So it was really especially, it's kind of a privilege to be able to help when possible. And of course, improving student success is always the ultimate goal for those things. And our membership is, we have membership in a number of different places, 30 different states, 70 members total. And so you can see that we've got a lot spread out across the country, but obviously there's still room for expansion. So let's just get to our discussion for today. The roundtable we have, we have some pretty distinguished speakers today, well maybe two out of three. The first one's me, but the, so yeah, that's me. I'm the OER coordinator, faculty and residence coordinator for the Maricopa County Colleges in Arizona. We also have Bill West, who is the open education project manager and OER degree director at Pierce College District in Washington. And she is the president of the CCC OER Executive Council. And then we have Nathan Smith, who is also the OER coordinator of faculty and residence and philosophy faculty at Houston Community Colleges in Texas. And so without further ado, I think that we can just go ahead and start. I think that the initial idea was to kind of premise the entire discussion with the definition of sustainability that really focused it kind of comes from the ecological understanding of sustainability, which is, as it says here, the ability of a system to remain diverse and produce indefinitely. And in a sense, I think I'm going to be paraphrasing what, what I heard Quill say yesterday when we were speaking is the idea that, you know, we're leaving the system there for whoever is going to take over after us. And so it is very, very much about thinking forward, thinking about the future, not just successes in the moment, but also successes in the future and trying to keep that going. So how do we do it? Because, you know, we work really hard and we try to build this stuff, but, you know, if there aren't certain maybe policies or infrastructural things in place or financial decisions in place, and it might be difficult to keep it going. So I'm going to not talk a lot. What I want to do is, like I said, kind of just open this up. And so this first one here, there's three categories and after each of the three topics we'll open up for a little bit of discussion from the community. The first topic is the financial aspect of sustainability. And so Quill and Nathan, whichever one of you is interested in starting, maybe we'll just go with Quill since you were the next one in the list there. So the first question is what financial models have you implemented for sustaining OER at your institution? Hi, everyone. Thank you. And I apologize if my voice is quiet. I have a bit of a cold. So financial models, I think you have to start with the discussion of what budget models can be reallocated to support what you're currently doing. So, for example, at my institution, the leadership role, meaning my role, is really important to the ongoing use of OER at our institution and the integration of OER into our institutional core culture. So we have reallocated some of the fees we already collect from the student e-learning fee to pay my salary, which I'm very grateful for. But beyond that, it gives us a little bit of flexibility in how OER work gets done because the leadership for OER is not tied to specific grants that we might be seeking and those kinds of things that we might go seeking for to pay faculty stipends. So that was one of our first big kind of institutional changes in budgeting to support OER at our institution. All right, well, thank you very much, Quill. And Nathan, did you want to add anything? Yeah, sure. So our financial model, basically, we started with a grant. But as part of that grant process, we had to demonstrate that we were matching the external funds with internal funds. And so what that forced us to do was to actually create budget line items that supported the OER effort. So these are coming out of the general funds for academic instruction. And we currently have a budget for an OER, an OER budget line. And that budget includes the full release, the release time for my position, which is a faculty position that, and I get a full release for that. I have a part-time administrative assistant. And I've also just added a single course release for an additional faculty member to assist me with some things. We have a small budget for faculty training stipends, a small budget for travel, supplies, and marketing. So the grand total on that is not a big budget, but there are lines for each of these things. And one of the things that's useful is if you can create a line for the OER in your budget, that sort of thing kind of tends to roll over. And it has a kind of institutional inertia. It's harder to get rid of existing budget lines than it is to create new ones. I think that's a very important point is that once you've got it in there, then you can hopefully rely on that being there for a while. I just wanted to ask you, Nathan, to what extent do you feel confident that the support from your institution is going to continue indefinitely? Now that you have the line in the budget, if grant funding starts to run out and things like that, then what does that look like in your situation? Yeah, so that's an ongoing conversation that we're having. I think the current leadership that we have in place, the person I report to is really supportive of OER and as is the vice chancellor of instruction who's kind of the head chief academic officer. And so I have confidence that that'll continue. But yeah, the conversation we're having right now is sort of how to transition some of the things that are coming out of the grant to other revenue streams. So we're going to be talking about things like potentially a fee or reallocating resources from other areas to support things like faculty stipends, things like partnerships with third parties that provide courseware support, that kind of stuff. But yeah, so but I think that the current, my current budget will probably continue. I mean, I'm pretty confident in that. Excellent. So and Quill, I really wanted to touch on something that you had said about, you know, kind of the core idea is that the position that you have and the OER support that you have is kind of the result of the repurposing of existing fees. And I think that that fits also into a discussion that we're going to have in a moment here about how to embed the open education work into the existing infrastructure or the institutional structure that exists. So we'll touch back on that. But I was wondering if there was anybody in the community who had any questions related specifically to the financial aspect of sustainability at this point that we might be able to address anyone. OK, well, what we can do if you do have those questions go ahead and pop them into the chat window and we will see if we have time at the end. We should have time at the end to address them. So I'll just go ahead and move on to the next thing. So after the financial sustainability, the idea is that we have, like I said, there there is this kind of infrastructural sustainability, which is related to a lot of the work that you do in terms of policy. So the next question that I have is, you know, what policy considerations are necessary to support OER sustainability? So either Nathan or Quill, whoever is interested in addressing that, there's some suggested kind of some topics there. But go ahead. Oh, I'll go first. So I think probably most importantly and maybe at my institution, most difficult to talk about is intellectual property policies in terms of faculty generated work, but also in terms of just institutionally created work and ownership of it and changing a traditional model around what intellectual property means at the institution. For us, that was a contract negotiation as well as an ongoing conversation with kind of our risk management folks around what does it mean when we share our intellectual property and what are the challenges to our institutions if we do. So I'd like to start with that conversation because I think for us, that started all of our policy conversations. When we started with intellectual property, it kind of led to some conversations around what OER means at our institution. Excellent. Nathan, did you have any experiences with intellectual property policy at Houston? Yeah. So we're working on changing our intellectual property policy right now. We actually had a really good intellectual property policy that was written, I think, around 2011, 2012 by a couple of people who had been involved in the OER effort. So there was like it was OER was listed in the intellectual property policy. And then in 2015, 2014, 2015, we adopted a statewide whole policy that we redid all of our policies. It's called TASB, but I think it's Texas State School Boards. And it has now put a policy in place that is extremely limiting. It views all faculty products as works for hire. Essentially anything you produce using any kind of support from the college, and that could be your computer, it could be on-campus, Wi-Fi, if you use any of that stuff, anything that you create is property of the college, according to the policy. So I'm talking to some people, I think it's a barrier to innovation as well as certainly OER. And so we're trying to get that change, and that's kind of a slow process, but that's a big thing for us. Yeah, and I think that that is an issue that everyone potentially will face at some point. When we're talking about an initiative that is, whether it's something that comes from the top down or it's something that swells from the ground or both, the truth is that a change in leadership or a change in a major change in policy like that can have an enormous impact and you can't always plan for that. And that brings to my attention something that I had spoken with, you know, Quill, you had mentioned in a previous conversation, you had mentioned the importance of that supporting documentation. So I was wondering if you would be willing to kind of stress or go into some detail on what you see as the need, what you mean by supporting documentation, and kind of why you see that as so important. So I think so much of the OER effort at the institutions that I've worked for is really rested in, you know, it's a ground up process where the faculty kind of take ownership of it. But without leadership, meaning administrative support at the top, it can fall apart or become very easily something that happens in specialized places within the institution. So like the institution I work at right now has been doing OER for over 10 years in the math department, but not beyond the math department or in very small pockets beyond the math department until leadership said, this is something we do want to support the faculty and we're going to build an infrastructure to support it. And as part of building that infrastructure, it's partially capturing the reason why we made the decisions we made to do the things we did. And so decisions around why did this, I mentioned that our intellectual property policy is in our faculty negotiated contract. So that contract gets renegotiated periodically. In fact, we're in negotiations right now. So if somebody in the administration isn't capturing the reason why we put the language we put in the policy, the way we put it in there, it'll be forgotten in a couple of years and it could disappear on us because it could easily just get negotiated out. Or if we don't have a reasoning behind the stipends we pay or the reason why the administration put it into a strategic plan, it could easily get taken out. And that has happened at the institution I worked at previously. They've been through two executive vice presidents of instruction, which is where a lot of the initial support for the project started. And it changed the faith of their OER project not in negative ways all the time, but it helps if your champions can tell why they're champions and share that reasoning. And that's just a sustainability thing. So the next person to come along understands why it's so culturally important at your institution. Absolutely, and I think that I also think of this as in our situation here, if we have someone come in a place of leadership or if we get new members to our governing board or if we have maybe just somebody, for example, very recently we found out we're gonna have a new director of IT and that's a big deal because we're trying to, we have a commitment from the previous leadership to spend a pretty decent chunk of money hosting our Maricopa OER platform. And so now we have to kind of prepare materials to go and present and try to make the case again. And so having that stuff kind of packaged and ready to go with the, all the numbers that you would need to make the sell and things like that, I think is really super important. And I would like to touch on one of the questions that came into the chat in over the last few minutes. One of them said, so when do faculty stipends, when do those no longer become necessary? And Nathan, you had said that there's a small, a relatively small budget for those kinds of things and it's always kind of tricky to see where we can do that. So I'm just wondering what Nathan, you think or Quill, you can chime in too if you want, but how is it that we can start thinking about the OER work outside of special stipends and maybe kind of building it into some of those existing infrastructures already. And that kind of thing goes into our next slide. So what do you think about that, Nathan? Yeah, I think this is a great question. So I see faculty stipends performing two functions. On the one hand, they're kind of carrots or sweeteners to get people to get on board with the initiative. And insofar as that's the case, I do think at some point they do end. And I think there's a logic to that end. So for instance, right now we're giving, we've actually decreased our stipends pretty dramatically from the very beginning, but we still offer $300 for the completion of an OER certificate, which is a training program. Maybe that'll continue, but that's not a whole lot of the budget. The second thing though, that I think faculty stipends do and I don't think that we should see an end to this, is that if we're asking faculty to create resources, that I think in some sense that needs to be compensated. So if it's not through some tenure and promotion process where a faculty member can receive the benefits of having actually contributed scholarly work to developing OER, then I think it does make sense to have some stipend procedure that sort of at least acknowledges that labor has been spent on these products and that there should be some kind of a grant or program system. I think that's actually something that we wouldn't, that I wouldn't want to see end. Yeah, okay. To get, you did ask a question about the sort of integrating with other things and on the same topic, so when I developed our OER certificate training program, I intentionally aligned this with existing training programs that are in our CTLE, our Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence. So faculty complete a number of courses that are already in that program and then they just do a couple of courses in OER and that's the certificate. So from my perspective, like OER becomes stronger the more it's sort of embedded in other systems that already exist in the institution. Absolutely. So Quill, I will ask you directly. I mean, when do you think faculty stipends will become no longer necessary or do you think that they should stick around? So I'm very conflicted on this issue, so I'll be honest because I think the faculty stipends don't cover the amount of effort and work that faculty put into designing OER or even into adopting OER into existing classes. I just don't think that they cover enough. On the other hand, they are a very useful tool for the institution recognizing that this is a special effort and I'm a big fan of noticing special efforts. So I think this plays into embedding OER into existing structures, for example, and there's a couple of ways I talk about it. So part of it is how does OER play into tenure and promotion and can that be one of the kind of sweeteners to encourage people to think about OER? How do we think about part-time faculty who have or are using OER in our current classes and the longevity of their employment? How can we ensure that the people who commit to lower costs for students and commit to better learning experiences for students, assuming we can prove that? How do we commit to those people always getting the classes that we have committed to them so they don't get bumped? Those kinds of institutional practices are things that we can shift to help make the stipend less necessary. So I think that that's one of the things that we should be talking about at our institutions and I think it's an institutional question around, you know, how do our policies support OER that makes it possible for us to kind of rethink the purpose of a stipend? And I think I'm not sure that I know the full answer to that. I don't, I still find stipends incredibly useful as a tool. The other thing I wanted to say about stipends though is that they can be detrimental in other cases. So for example, I have full-time faculty at our institution have an opportunity to take, to request sabbaticals to work on specific special projects. And if I'm setting a stipend amount at a dollar amount that's way less than a faculty release time, then when they ask for sabbaticals to do OER, we have to turn them down because we have a stipend in place that makes it, like, well, we can pay you the stipend instead, which means that it just incentivizes some faculty who believe that they need more time and they would like a full, you know, to create OER. I think that that is very interesting, the idea that you have almost competing incentives and trying to balance those. And we've had ongoing discussions for years actually at Maricopa about, you know, what is the appropriate amount of money or the appropriate amount of release time to give somebody to create or to remix OER. And we've kind of eventually kind of come to a set of policies that we said we haven't really made official across the district, but we've kind of implemented at least at Scottsdale Community College for reassign time to differentiate between, you know, workloads. So like if it's just maintaining a template course versus, you know, building a new course, but using, you know, remixing OER that already exists or if it's just authoring from scratch, you know. So we kind of have those tiers. But I wanted to kind of just kind of bring together a few different threads here because, you know, we were talking about the financial aspect and I think it's clear based on this discussion that, you know, infrastructure and financial sustainability, obviously there's a lot of overlap, you know. And one of the other questions that came up in the chat window earlier had to do with, you know, is there a way to demonstrate the return on investment, right? Because, you know, we wanna be able to show, I think, that, you know, there is, you know, it's worthwhile to invest in, you know, faculty development or invest in the development of the OER. And it's when you have that prepared that you can actually make the case easily. When you have that documentation prepared, you can really demonstrate that return on investment. So if there is somebody who is skeptical of a stipend or a skeptical of the benefit of having that funding available, then you can try to make the case. And I think that has a lot to do with kind of the other idea of strategic planning. And I believe actually the next slide specifically addresses another connection that I think is important to note. So there was another question in the chat a few minutes ago about, yeah. If I just, can I just address that previous question that you highlighted, which I think on the return on investment. So I put an article in there in the chat from the EPAA, which is an article by David Wiley and some others on the Tidewater program. And they propose a model for return on investment. They call it the intro model. Basically, it says that there's evidence to suggest that when students take an OER course, they actually take, they have a higher enrollment intensity during the term in which they take OER courses. So that means that there are additional tuition dollars that actually come back to the college university. And similarly, because students drop at lower rates typically with OER courses, the lower withdrawal rates actually also increases tuition dollars. And so the argument is that actually this increased tuition revenue from having an OER project pays for any loss of revenue you'd see from the bookstore or anything else. And then the other thing I just point to is I also shared a little aluminum learning and analytics. So David basically took the research that he did and like built it into a cool handy little web tool where you can enter in different parameters and it returns like a result. So it tells you sort of how much more money you might expect to get from an OER program and how much you would be saving students and kind of all these really cool like financial metrics that come out at the end. So play with that and I would really encourage people to think along those lines when talking to administrators. Well, thank you very much. I think that that's a great tool and it really does give us a way. Trying to make it easy to tell the story is always a challenge. And if you want people to do something, you wanna try to make it easy. So when there is a tool like that available for people like me who have studied literature and aren't necessarily good at crunching the numbers I think that that's very helpful, I think. So thank you for that. And Nathan, I did wanna actually ask you this but definitely Quilla wanna hear from you as well. So going back to the connections between a general strategic plan and the idea that any change in leadership or a change in not necessarily OER leadership because Nathan, you're an OER coordinator. Obviously, you're not gonna do it forever. I know that my job as the OER coordinator is limited to two to three years so that there is some consistency, there's time to develop a project, but at the same time there is at some point the baton's gonna be passed on to somebody else. So how is it, Nathan, that you are looking ahead in terms of succession basically? So the first thing we're gonna do is try to, we are going through a strategic planning process right now. So we're trying to get OER into the strategic plan and the ways I'm thinking about that right now is trying to not make OER kind of a primary pillar of the strategic plan, but actually to embed it into student success and institutional efficiency and lowering barriers and costs to students. So there may be other headings that sort of the OER projects fit into. And what's nice about that, and this kind of goes to the sustainability and succession issue is that once you have items in your strategic plan, often your budgeting process is gonna be aligned with the strategic planning process or at least hopefully that's something like that is going on at your institution. So if you have OER embedded in that way, then you are gonna see dollars come through. As far as people are concerned, I think it's a huge issue. I mean, I think in academia, everybody has had the experience of losing a champion at the vice president or dean level or something like that. And then getting someone else in place that may not share the objectives that you've had previously. I think it's a major issue. So I think the important, the thing that I'm doing is trying to build like as broad a team of people as I can that are all knowledgeable about OER. So I'm trying to get a group of faculty, a whole set of deans, people from student services, all sorts of people. So we have a pretty broad cross-disciplinary team as part of OER steering committee. And then like at open ed week last week, I mean, open ed, sorry, open ed conference last week, we brought I think nine people to the conference. So when faculty go to that conference or go to a big conference like that, they get energized and informed and they become the kind of champions on campus that you need. So my hope is that we get a broad team that's engaged in this. And I definitely have, I don't have a limit on my term on my position like you do Matthew, but I definitely have in mind that a sort of sunset where I'm gonna walk away. And so, and I think it's really helpful to do that because you don't want to be the only OER or go-to person because that puts you in a bad spot. It puts the institution in a bad spot. You want to have, you want that to be a successive sort of position that other people could take on. Yeah, so, and then also, if you create policies and documentations that make all really clear, the next person that comes on board, they're gonna have that in place. So that I think is really another piece of this. Excellent. And Quill, what are your thoughts about leadership succession? I think Nathan said it all pretty well. I think for us, one of the things that kind of thinking about leadership and succession, that also really helps us if we can institutionalize some of that leadership in ways. For example, our steering committee is now an official committee on our institution which was a big process to go through. But that means that it's always staffed and there's specific people. There's like, I always have to have a member of the union on the steering committee. And they select who that member is. So it becomes part of a task that another group is responsible for that kind of builds in some capacity for a complete team. Always, you know, the student government is always nominating somebody. And our student leadership changes all the time. So part of the way I think about leadership succession is thinking in terms of those students who leave regularly and how do they maintain their advocacy? Because, you know, we may have, they usually are in a leadership position for a year before they're moving to another institution. So how do they talk to each other and how can I get their voice to like continue and trickle throughout the generations of students? And I just can't stress the importance of, sometimes I get so caught up in doing the work that I forget to document why we're doing the work and the kind of successes of the work. Absolutely. Just we face, because it's so easy to get caught up in just doing the work. And so I can't stress how important it is to really continue to document why we're making the decisions we're making. Because like Nathan, you know, I don't want to be the only person at my institution who understands all of who we are at our institution. I would like to be a community process where there's lots of people involved in making decisions. And I think that this, you know, thank you both of you for these, I think very wise comments about leadership succession. And I know that in my situation, it's been clear from the beginning when I took the role as the OER coordinator that it wasn't gonna be, and I'm kind of glad. I mean, I don't necessarily, I'm not sure that I would like to stop teaching, you know, forever. So, you know, it's kind of nice that I knew that there was gonna be this, you know, this sunset to that, my participation in that role. But it's also given me the opportunity to immediately start thinking about, you know, who is on the bench? I noticed somebody in the chat went to kind of brought up the metaphor, having a deep bench, you know, and it's totally true. And Nathan, when you said bringing a team to the open education conference and really exposing them having, you know, giving people who are maybe a little bit newer to OER and open education and giving them the opportunity to network and to really get inspired by some of the brilliance that's in this community, I think is what it can be extremely meaningful. Because I had a similar experience last week. We brought a couple of people from our team who had never gone to the open education conference before and they, you know, we'll see what happens, but you know, it seemed to be somewhat transformative in terms of inspiring them to want to be even more involved. And having a team is super important. You know, Maricopa is a district with 10 colleges and so one of my tasks as the coordinator is to kind of get people to work together as much as possible. And it's absolutely vital to have as many representatives from each of those colleges as possible. So if you have multiple campuses or if you have, you know, departments and divisions that are somewhat isolated or siloed from each other, then it's really crucial to kind of get in there and find out where the excitement is or where the OER usage is so that you know who your people are. That you can kind of tap into when you're thinking about moving on. And it's not my intention to just talk all about myself because I want to move on to another question, but I also wanted to add one thing about the succession. The way that our OER coordinator assignment, it's Nathan, it's like yours. It's full reassigned time for faculty. But the way that it works for us is that there's gonna be a one semester overlap. So the sixth semester that I am, you know, in my final semester as OER coordinator, whoever it is that's going to take over after me is going to be working with me that semester so that we can kind of ensure consistency. And that way it's not like I just, you know, drop the baton and let someone pick it up and move on. That way there's kind of the sense that yeah, somebody news coming on, they might have their own kind of unique vision for what the future looks like, but there's still gonna be that sense of consistency there. That's a great idea. I'm taking that one down and bringing it back to my team. Right on. Okay, well, so the next question, I don't know, maybe the question came up in the chat here. Yes, and so Quill said the recognizing efforts. I want to note that one of the third topic, we're still in the second topic. This is pretty weighty, I guess, but the third topic has to do with culture and the question that we're gonna address a little bit later in this discussion, just a few minutes actually, is directly related to how we tell our story, how we celebrate our achievements and those kinds of things. And I think that it will be important to keep that in mind as well because, you know, there's a lot of overlap here. I did wanna bring up a kind of a potentially difficult point that some people might, you know, it's always challenging technology. We love it and we rely on it and then things change and, you know, technology invariably, you know, breaks at some point. So I'm just curious to know, maybe Quill, if you wanna start out first on this one, but so how have decisions about technology use contributed to or detracted from the sustainability of OER at your institution? I could write you a book if you won't on this topic. Well, we'll just go with a short set of answers. No, that's all right. Because I'm challenged by this one. For financial sustainability and kind of that, honestly, technology and purchasing technology or investing in platforms is a very time consuming and expensive process in any public institution in my state. So to that end, we've made a series of decisions to use the things that are most easy, like our learning management system and an agreement we have with Luma Learning, which is great in terms of ease of access and getting resources to students and adopting OER as quickly as we can. However, I kind of regret some of those decisions not to go through the difficult process earlier because we were kind of flowing like water and every rock we ran into technology-wise, we just float around it by using something, by finding an existing tool that made it easy for us to make adoptions fast. The problem with that is long-term, our learning management system hosts most of our OER and that is not sharing with the comments. It is not accessible to students when they're not in our classes anymore. It is not accessible to students or to people outside of our institution without a lot of back-channel discussion. It makes it hard for faculty who are teaching at multiple institutions to move things around. So I am thinking sustainability-wise, it was a good decision at the time in terms of we can afford this, let's move forward. And it got us the most adoptions fastest. However, now, thinking of long-term viability and strength of our OER movement, I guess that we had infested some more in technology. So we're looking at that again as an institution. That's excellent. So we've got, if there's somebody that's got your mic on, if it would be great if you could mute that because I hear some typing. But I just wanted to touch on that. It's exactly the same thing that Maricopa's going through. And Nathan, I think that you have some thoughts about this as well. We are dealing with the same situation. We developed a bunch of courses over the course of five years and most of those courses are in Canvas because that was what was most convenient for our faculty. It was our learning management system. It's easy for people to use. It was a good way for us to build kind of a base of people using OER at the institution. But then Quill, like you said, it's not necessarily sharing with the commons. It's not necessarily releasing that R in the care framework, which I think is a really big focus for us. As we move forward, we're trying to think of ways to use the care framework to evaluate our interactions with OER as much as we're using it to evaluate what the vendors may be doing who are coming to us. And that's one of the challenges that we have moving forward is it's kind of balancing what's best for our institution or what's best for our faculty with what is actually gonna be contributing to the global open education movement. And so Nathan, what are your thoughts about this? Yeah, so I just shared the link to the care framework for those who are unfamiliar with it. It's a really useful sort of, well, framework for understanding how to be a good OER steward, how to best serve the community, the commons, the general production of knowledge. So we are definitely, I think in many ways, we're very similar to what Quill was saying, like we wanted to get started. We wanted to get started quickly. So we had a partnership with Lumen Learning. I think there's a lot of options out there. I know Top Hat does institutional partnerships and there are other things. These are, I wanna say that they're very useful for at least two reasons. One is you're gonna have faculty, if you wanna make OER a part of education at your institution, you're gonna have faculty who need the sort of wraparound support in a courseware platform or everything sort of put together for them. And developing that on your own is probably not worth the effort, I'm not sure. If people need that stuff, I think it's probably best to use a third party for that. But then it costs money and then you gotta figure out, well, how are you gonna pay for that? Are you gonna make the students pay for it, which may be okay? I mean, just open doesn't mean free. Or are you gonna create institutional structures to pay for it? That's a difficult choice. We are doing some stuff through the LMS. One of the good things, because we're a Canvas institution, we do have the capacity to share those resources through the Canvas Commons, which is a limited sharing. We have a course certification process that faculty can go through so they get their course reviewed. We make sure it vets on all copyright issues, and then we give it a Creative Commons license and share it into the Canvas Commons. The next step that we really wanna think about doing is getting cartridges and putting them on the open web. So I'm working with a librarian who's kind of got a little bit of a repository for us. For that, we looked into actually getting a, like purchasing a repository that would help us host a bunch of OER materials. And I mean, you can find some that are reasonably priced, but even a reasonably priced repository, you're talking a few tens of thousands of dollars to get for an annual subscription, and that's another cost that you're gonna have to bear. So, yeah, I think those are the main things that I would say as far as technology is concerned. I mean, one other thing that we do have, which is really cool, we use a Kaltura web video hosting platform. We call it Edge YouTube, and it's on the open web, so anybody can access it, and it also has licensing embedded, so you can Creative Commons license your own instructional videos, and that's super nice. I think the thing that we're missing, and I think it's just gonna be a labor of practice that we get through, is gonna be getting that stuff and then putting it on OER Commons or some other, or sharing with the open text network whatever, you got that next step to get it onto another more public platform that gives other people access to it. I think that's also important. And Nathan, I think one of the things that you just brought up, which is super important too, is, and this fits into the whole discussion basically, but having a process by which the material that you're producing actually is kind of vetted and certified, it's something that we're working on here because we had been funding courses and primarily trying to get faculty to adopt those courses themselves and then maybe have some kind of impact in their department or across the college or between colleges. And we've seen some of that impact, but we wanna be able to go back through now and really ensure that, we're actually taking a four pronged approach moving forward and I'm sure that you have something along these lines embedded, but in your review process, but we're looking at the four different categories for the content review are accessibility, instructional design, licensing and content quality. So we wanna get like content experts and accessibility experts and whatnot and try to hit it from all four of those angles. And once we actually have that review process in place, we're gonna codify it and produce that documentation so that hopefully it will be sustained into the future and something that we can continue to work on. Okay, well, this is good. We're getting close to the end here, but we still have a whole other topic to talk about, but I think there's only one question in that topic. Infrastructure is so important. I mean, you can't sustain anything without that, right? So keep in mind that I am doing my best to try to keep here. See, I think of Canvas as the most sharey LMS. Okay, yeah. So this is a great question from Amy Hoferquill. Do you wanna answer that directly asking why it is that Canvas doesn't really meet those needs? Yeah, I'm gonna use her metaphor. I was just typing up an answer here. Yeah, so Canvas is the most sharey of the LMSs, but like a secret garden is still a secret garden. And so if people don't know it's there or have to go through multiple, if I'm not at a Canvas institution and I want to access the Canvas comments, I have to know that I can use a Canvas for Teacher account. I have to know how to find it. And I have to know then how to search the comments once I'm there, which is always the easiest thing in the world. So it's not exactly the most, it's easier to share on Canvas than it is on a lot of other LMSs, but it's still like you have to know the secret key. You have to be in the right place when the wind blows and looking. Has anybody seen this record in that movie where she's looking and the wind's blowing? Anyway, you have to be in the right place to use the Canvas comments effectively. And then the other reason is really the students do not have access to Canvas comments. They don't know what it is, they don't know how to use it and when they're done with my class, if it's a creative comment, if it's a class that I intend to share with them over time, they don't really have that access because our LMS cuts them off at a certain point because they're no longer our student. So then they don't have access to those materials later. That means they can't use the 5th R. Thank you. Thank you very much, Quill. I think that that definitely does a good job of explaining some of the, you know, just problematic aspects of using any learning management system, but even Canvas. And I agree, Canvas, we shared all of our stuff on Canvas Commons. We have, it's M-M-O-E-R is the tag, Miracle Millions O-E-R. And you'll find like 17 different courses on there that we've developed and, but yeah, it's not, we have to, if you're an O-E-R practitioner as individual faculty, you kind of have to encourage your students to download the content so that they can retain it because it will be difficult for them to access it in the future. And like you said, you have to know that it's there. You have to know to look and to create a free account and everything. So it's not ideal, but it's working at least a little bit for now. So one other thing, we'll move on. If there are any other questions, feel free to put them on there. And I will do my best to try to respond to those, but I wanna address our third topic before we're done here. And the third topic is about the cultural sustainability of O-E-R. And I know that we could talk about this forever, but we've already addressed a lot of these things. And I was hoping that maybe Quill, if you wanted to, or Nathan talk about just really briefly, how do you measure and communicate program impact and supportive sustainability? Now I know this is a huge question and we could probably spend an entire webinar just talking about this, but just very briefly, what do you think are one or two extremely important things to consider when talking about sustaining the culture that's necessary to support O-E-R? Let's say Quill, if you wanna go first. Okay, sure. So I think first it's really important to make connections with an institutional research team. And the reason for that is because they can help me think of ways to measure the impact of the program. So I sometimes have questions I wanna ask, like what is the student success rate and what's their success of pass rate in next classes after they take an O-E-R course. And those are really good questions to ask, but sometimes I need people who are there who can say this is the appropriate way to ask this question. So I lean on my institutional research team a lot and they have this tendency to say, let the data tell the story. So we look for data and then find the story that it tells. And then I share that story. And I share it in a variety of ways. Sometimes it's in conference presentations, sometimes it's in webinars like these. Sometimes it's just in a quick email to my institutional leadership that says, hey, this cool thing happened. So I think that can be really useful. Sometimes I will, this has been something we've been doing recently and it's part of our ATD work. As an institution, we try to give all of our faculty all the data at all times so they can always be examining their own experiences. So I have been doing small workshops with faculty where we show up with data from their own classes and ask them to measure and discuss with each other what they're doing with OER that may or may not be moving a needle in terms of closing the achievement gap. And it's a really fun workshop. It's really hard because a lot of people find out things about their data that they don't like but it's really good for building this culture of inquiry as an institution. Excellent and weaving that into the message or the narrative that you're going to then present in order to demonstrate the return on investment and demonstrate the work that you're doing for your community. Nathan, I was curious to know in the short time we have left, what would you say would be the number one tip that you have to share with everyone about communicating? How do you communicate that impact and to whom are you communicating it? I wish I knew. I think you've got to have a multi-pronged approach. I mean, I think one form of communication does not work. There's not one form of communication. Communication is a process. So I love Quill's idea of thinking about data as telling a story and then also thinking about personalizing that approach to data. I think that's huge. I would also, so we've done a couple of things. So we have a public facing website. We've developed an internal facing website just for faculty. I can post news items to our news bulletin. I have a huge communication list. Like I set up a database of basically everybody who comes to a workshop or seminar, anything that I interact with, I put them on a spreadsheet and I have their campus location, their contact information and the discipline they teach in. And so anytime I'm getting stuff, I shoot out blast emails to specific groups. Like if I'm going to do a workshop at a campus, I'll send everyone an email. We can advance and say, I'm coming to your campus for this thing. Make sure you're there if you want to learn more. And then, but I think culture shift is a much deeper thing. And I think it comes back to making it fun, celebrating success, understanding that this aligns with our mission and values and building that team of people who can be champions. And hopefully over time, you get to a place where you become like a vibrant OER institution. Right now, HCC, we have some great champions, but we're not there. Like most of my time, I think is trying to figure out where the blockages are. We have, I think people, mainly people in like sort of middle and middle to senior leadership who are sort of discreetly behind the scenes, you know, kind of pushing back on this. And I think it's a sort of this detective work and also sort of persuasive work of just kind of trying to figure out where those problems are and address them and try to slowly sort of try to move it. But that's really, that's kind of where we are now. That's excellent. So the brief answer, I think to the question of like, you know, how do you best communicate into whom? And I think that your answer basically was like all the communication. We want all the communication to everyone all the time. Yeah, and it's true. I mean, and I saw in the chat, somebody mentioned, you know, board of trustees and knowing where the power is and being able to communicate with them. And I'll just say that Maricopa Millions in the fall, I'm sorry, last spring, which was the end of the initial five-year run of Maricopa Millions in the beginning of our transition, you know, they had a huge, they hosted a huge event and we had the chancellor and we had the provost and we had the governing board, at least one member of the governing board there. And it was an opportunity to really publicly and in a big way unveil the student savings and celebrate it. And we gave out gifts, these little power banks, you know, you can charge your cell phones and they say OER hero charging into the future with OER. So there's just like a little kind of a token gift that is actually somewhat meaningful and it really made people feel like, you know, they had been part of meaningful work. And I think that that celebration is vital. And then touching on what Quill said as well, you know, it's sometimes hard to take time to find the time because you're so busy doing the work that finding the time to write up a narrative about it is like, you know, it seems like, it seems like, you know, just an additional layer of task, but it is very vital to tell the story. So this grade, we're pretty much at the end, right here. And I need to basically just tell you that at this point, hold on, what's going on here? Oh, now I'm editing my slide. Okay, that didn't work. I'm gonna just go to get involved to see, you know, what's happening. We have our community email. If you're not part of that, then absolutely get on there because tons of resources are shared on there on a regular basis. And it is a really great resource. Our next webinar is coming up November 14th. It's going to be on Transforming Learning with Open Educational Practices and Pedagogy, which is super interesting. If you aren't real familiar with it, Dr. Michael Mills from Professor Shinta Hernandez from Montgomery College, we're speaking as well as Dr. Karen Cangellosi, Professor of Biology at Keane State College. And so register for that and keep that on your calendar. And that's it. If you have any questions, we have one minute to answer them. Let's see, I don't know. I would just say thank you very much everyone for joining us and for listening to us talk. And please have a wonderful day.