 Welcome to the first of all happy International Women's Day to everyone and happy open ed week. My name is Laurie Beth Larson. I'm going to host this webinar. We're going to talk about open course design and welcome. Our agenda today is a quick CCC OER overview. We will hear from our two presenters about open course design showcases. If you stay tuned we'll talk a little bit about upcoming events and how you can stay in the loop. We are CCC OER 103 members from 37 states and our mission is to expand the adoption of high quality OER. We support faculty choice and development, hope to foster OER regional leadership and improve student equity and success. As I said, happy OE week. Everybody's got fun things planned for this week and we have this has some of those events on our website. Today our speakers are Jessica Parsons. She's the OER Instructional Service Specialist from Paradise Valley Community College and Dr. Marini Smith is Associate Professor of Child Development and Education and the Title V STEM Teacher Prep Coordinator from West Los Angeles College. We're going to first hear from Jessica Parsons. Thanks Jessica. Take it away. Thank you. Hi everybody. So today I'm going to be talking to you about the OER Specialist Program and how we use that to help supplement our open course design at Paradise Valley Community College. Go ahead and go to the next slide please. Thank you. So if you haven't heard of the OER Specialist Program, an OER specialist is a student at our community colleges who helps faculty to develop our open materials. They are experts in everything from copyright to understanding the student's perspective of what works and what doesn't work in classes, especially as we start to transition into the Gen C learner. This program is based on the College of the Canyon student model and we launched in March of 2019. So we've had a couple of years in the program. I was lucky enough to be brought on to the development side of this. I'm actually a student at Paradise Valley Community College and at Northern Arizona University and it has been an amazing experience for me to be able to help to influence course design at our college, help to educate our faculty about open education and also as a student to be able to see an impact and see lots of open courses suddenly appearing on our campus. Next slide please. So our course design development process falls into really four different phases. First we meet with the faculty and we identify the key resources that they have. We determine if there are, if there's a need to transition an entire course or an entire textbook or if we just want to start supplementing. After that we begin to do some exploratory research, which is one of my favorite things, and we go out and we find what exists. What can we use that we can remix and what are we going to need to build ourselves. After that we come back to the faculty member and present the resources. We do some evaluation and probably we'll go back and do more research and probably do more research. And then we're going to come back and once we identify all of our resources we go into the development process where we sit down with our faculty member and either use our version of press books or canvas, our LMS system to develop our materials. After we've done that we enter sort of a review phase where we help the faculty that first semester to identify what's working, what's not, and if they need any additional resources that maybe we didn't catch when we were first developing. And then after that we have our materials. Next slide please. So we have developed over 32 different projects since March of 2019. And we've estimated that we have saved students almost $350,000 just through those projects alone. There are of course other initiatives on our campus as well to push OER and to help get OER into our classrooms. But this is the development work that we've been able to do. There's been four OER specialists during this time period who have all contributed to these projects as well as some students as well. Next slide please. So the power of the OER specialist program is really in its scalability. We have a dedicated full-time OER specialist which is myself. We also have some part-time OER specialists as well. But the OER specialist program in this sort of collaborative student course design does not have to be the same on your campus. You can start in just your classroom with a build as we go model. Ask students to contribute papers and make it part of an assignment model to build OER resources. Another option is to tap honors, graduate, or peer mentors to do a project. Ask them to build what they know or build a resource that will help others in their courses or the courses that they've finished. There's also the ability to build what we show which is working with a learning success center or a tutoring led development where they understand what students are coming into and have questions on or maybe things that generally aren't covered in a course that might be helpful. That's a great opportunity to use students to help develop course materials. And then of course you have what we have which is the dedicated OER department with student specialists. Ultimately the goal is to build OER materials and to help students to influence what their peers are learning and to enrich the learning model themselves. So however you choose to scale it or whatever scaling model works for you, it's a wonderful opportunity for students. Next slide please. I decided to include some examples of scalable projects that you might be able to do on your own campus maybe even this semester. So in your class maybe you could have students write a paper or write some sort of a supplement to your textbook. Maybe there was something that the textbook didn't quite explain in a way that you wanted it to that one of the students might be able to help you with. You could ask them to build a study guide for the class or have the diagram or come up with a case study that you can use in the future. You can also work with your tutoring department to perhaps develop a one-page guide on a topic. Little small projects can be just as important as big entire courses. And before you know it, you're going to have a whole course worth of material. All right, next slide please. So that's all I have for you today. We have a podcast here on our Paradise Valley Community College campus. It's called Toast EDU and I was able to sit down with one of our CTL leads to talk about different OER tactics that we have and it's kind of an expansion of what I just talked about. And then if you'll see that QR code that is our OER specialist portfolio that shows some of the materials that we've been able to develop. All right, thank you so much. Thank you, Jessica. And I'd like to introduce Dr. Marini Smith. Sure. Thank you so much, Jessica, for sharing. That was wonderful and I particularly loved how front and center the students were with your model. I think that is really awesome and empowering and amazing that students are the forefront of OER. So you'll see a little bit of that in my presentation as well. Let me get you to the beginning. Here we go. So I teach both child development and education courses at West Los Angeles College. I'm also the Title V STEM teacher prep coordinator. So essentially I work with a wonderful program that helps guide students along a teacher pathway. So because I'm working with pre-service teachers, I'm always kind of thinking about how what I'm doing, not just pedagogically or andro-androgically, how what I'm doing is modeling for my students what they might try or how they think when they themselves have their own classrooms. So I was very fortunate in the 2021-2022 school year to be a part of the OFAR, Open for Anti-Racism Project. So myself and four of my colleagues at West LA College applied for and were selected to be a part of this two semester journey. So the culminating project for this OFAR course was an anti-racism action plan. So again, thinking about through the lens of pre-service teachers, what do I want my students to take away from, you know, taking these education and child development courses, what should be at the forefront of their thinking as they are designing equitable and engaging lesson plans for their students. So the plan was to integrate open educational resources and or open pedagogical approaches to create more anti-racist curriculum, course content, and learning experiences for our students. You'll find at the end, I'll share a video from my whole team, you'll find that what made our team, I think really, really unique and therefore amazing was that we were very diverse and we came from a lot from various different disciplines. So I'm from education and child development. We have we had someone on our team who was from theater, someone from biology, someone from basic skills and someone for political science. So that was really a nice way to cover a lot of ground and reach a lot of different students. So for my OFAR project, I chose to focus on my education one course, which is an introduction to teaching class. And this class students are required to do 45 hours of field work in a public K through six class. So it's a lot of extra work that they have to do. The class that I use for the project was, as you can see, 16 weeks online asynchronous. I had 22 students in the course. And so my action plan initially was to add a module. So as Jessica had mentioned, you can kind of start small, you can do a whole course. So I chose to choose a specific module. There's a chapter in the textbook where we talk about the history of schooling in America. It can be a little dry, to be honest. And so I chose this module initially that I wanted to kind of crack it open and have students look at it through a different, more analytical lens. I wanted them to think of education in a more diverse and culturally relevant way, particularly to see more representation of Black women over the past 50 to 100 years who have made transformative contributions to education. So I chose to highlight Anna Julia Cooper, Geneva Gay, Gloria Ladson Billings, and Zoretta Hammond. So I wanted to share excerpts of readings by and about each of these contributors and have students select to complete what's called a golden line activity. This is a reading apprenticeship strategy where students pull out a line that resonates with them in the text. I also plan to have discussion assignments where students had to research another non-white contributor to education and share that, along with responding to reflection questions about why these contributors might have been omitted in many academics texts. Then I also had students view a video from Black female educator, Dina Simmons. She had a video six ways to be an anti-racist educator. And I prompted my students to share a reflection on Flipgrid where they could select and explain two strategies that they will try in their own classrooms. So that was my plan. Most of it was carried out, but I did make some modifications. So in my Canvas module, Canvas is the LMS that we use as well, I included a page titled, Why Are All The Theorists White Males? Which encourages my students to think critically about the male Eurocentric lens through which the textbook describes educational history. I want students to think about the sociopolitical context of why the textbook skews that way. So in both child development and education classes, students learn about notable theorists like Bogotsky and Dewey and Piaget, but they don't learn about some of the people that I added to the module. And I felt that it was important to give them that more diverse lens for education. So I will be transparent that I, myself, had only recently learned about this amazing person, Anna Julia Cooper, who as you can see lived for over 100 years. I was an education major. I have a doctorate in educational psychology, but yet I only recently learned about this person. And I think that is very telling, and I wanted to be transparent with my students and include this person. Anna Julia Cooper was a writer, teacher, activist, who championed education for African Americans and women. She became the fourth African American woman to obtain a doctorate of philosophy. She also established and co-founded several organizations to promote Black civil rights causes. So if you didn't know of her, I strongly encourage you to look up information about her. These are just a few little tidbits about all of the amazing things that she did in her lifetime. I also focus on Gloria Ladson Billings. I know that text is really small. I just wanted to show a snippet of what it looks like in my can, Michelle. Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings, first Black woman to become a tenured professor at UW Madison School of Education in 1995. She's known for her work in the field of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory. So I included all of this additional OER content and also referred my students to additional OER content in the module so they could access more information about these notable female educators. I did also offer another assignment. I chose to make it extra credit where they had to research and write about another non-white person who contributed to education because the class, as I mentioned, requires 45 hours of observation and fieldwork. I needed to kind of pare down some of the required assignments. So for this, students had to, along with reflection questions, explain why these Black female contributors might have been omitted in many academic texts. And then also, as I mentioned, research and other non-white contributors that can be Latinx, Black, Asian, Native American, and share at least five sentences for their contribution, et cetera, et cetera. So something else that I embedded that I wanted to kind of spark my students thinking about the topic was there's a webinar featuring three transforms. So sorry about that. I thought I muted my email tabs featuring three very transformative Black women in the field of education. I highly recommend that you watch this webinar. This came out at the beginning of the pandemic. I was fortunate enough to watch it live. It's called Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our School. So we see here there's Patina Love, Dina Simmons, Goldie Mohamed. One of the most powerful webinars I have ever seen. I was like texting everyone in real time. You have to tune into this. And everyone who's watched it has been equally blown away and transformed. So I had my students watch the webinar. They had to give very specific reflections about it, three interesting things that they learned. They had to include timestamps who said it, connections that they made from the course or their own experience. And then I always want students to kind of apply their learning. So I also asked them what's one question that you might still have. And then Dina Simmons worked with Edutopia and she provided a list of six ways to be an anti-racist educator. So I also had my students watch that video, reflect on it, and then choose two different elements that they would try to incorporate into their own classrooms. So here is a student sample. Are you seeing my Zoom screen pop up hopefully? No. Okay. So I'm going to do a new share. So this is one of my students. Can you see it now? Perfect. Yes. Hi class. The two suggestions from Ms. Simmons that stood out to me after watching the how to be an anti-racist educator video were to ask students what they need and to hold each other accountable. I think it's important to encourage student voice and to empower students to speak out when school is not serving them how they need. One way I would implement this in my classroom would be to have surveys periodically throughout the year from students and families and and community members to gauge if I as their educator am meeting their needs. Another way would be to hold classroom check-ins and individual one-on-one check-ins with students to see what their unique needs are. The other suggestion, holding each other accountable could be pretty awkward and tough and requires some brave conversations, some tough conversations. But I think it's important to make sure that we do those things because a part of the role as an educator in the classroom setting is to be an advocate for students. And those tough conversations will be a way for us to advocate on our students' behalf to make sure that they're getting what they need. Okay. So that was one student's interpretation of those six ways to be anti-racist and how she would implement those in her own classroom and I thought she did a really, really great job with that. So I wanted to end with a summary of our group presentations so that you can kind of see what other folks in in our OFAR group did because they were amazing and I definitely want to showcase them as well. Keep in mind that we were asked to keep our presentation under eight minutes. So we had to use a little technical wizardry and speed it up a little bit so you're going to notice some of us are seem to be speaking a little quickly. We got a little bit over eight minutes. You will see a repeat of my students video embedded in it too but you will also get to take a look at what some of my wonderful colleagues did as well. Greetings everyone and welcome to our West Los Angeles OFAR college team presentation. Our team consists of Jason who teaches anatomy and kenseology, Marina who teaches education, Arnidra who teaches political science, Elise who teaches theater arts, and Andrea who teaches basic skills. Today we will present about our OFAR trainings, learnings, takeaways, and next steps. Our goals were to challenge erosantrism by including racial content in our syllabi, course materials, and course activities. Also implementation of non-disposal assignments and creating anti-racist OFAR. Who is West Los Angeles college? We are a Hispanic servant institution with 43 of our students identifying as Hispanic, 24 as African-American, 33 Asian, white, multi-ethnic, or the client to say. Approximately 20% of our students are first-generation college students, over 60% are women, and just half of our students are under the age of 25. Hi, I'm Marina Smith and what I did for my OFAR project was I added a module to my Education One Introduction to Teaching course. I wanted to provide a more culturally diverse and representative array of notable contributors to education. So what I wanted to focus on was Black women in the past 50 to 100 years who made transformative contributions to education. So my focus was on Ana Julia Cooper, Geneva Gay, Gloria Latsen- Billings, and Zoretta Hammond. I also provided additional assignments for my students. One was reviewing an amazing webinar focused on abolitionist teaching and the future of our schools. They had to do a reflection on that and then they also viewed one of the speakers from that webinar, Dina Simmons, who shared six strategies to be an anti-racist educator and my students had to write a reflection piece and choose two of those strategies that they would incorporate into their own classroom. So for my Theater 100 class, my students interviewed artists of color from all over the United States, a playwright, a set designer, a lighting designer, a costume designer, and a director. Most of the available OER that features interviews with theater artists currently only has white people interviewed and so my students might get the impression that theater is not for them. So I had them interview artists of color and we are currently editing these interviews and we plan to upload them into the cloud to become permanent OER with interviews of theater artists of color. For my OFAR project, I developed an OVR Human Anatomy Lab menu. Anatomy is one of the most popular courses in California community colleges so I think this goes a long way in helping students as a form of textbook replacement. But I wanted to outdo what the publishers were doing by integrating aspects of multiculturalism and anti-racism wherever possible. So what did we do in class? Arneja and Andrea, we took a holistic approach to anti-racism in our classes by adding components of anti-racist pedagogy into our syllabus, our assignments, and discussions. We wanted to make sure that our students utilize their critical thinking skills, that they develop awareness of their social positions, and that we created a sense of community in the classroom through collaborative learning. The goal was to make sure that students were able to freely dialogue in the class and that it was a safe space. So what they said, they felt secure and safe in the space that they were in to discuss racial justice issues. One of the assignments I implemented into my classes, shared by one of my colleagues here in the group, was how diverse is your universe? The purpose of this activity was to have students think about their day-to-day interactions and the level of diversity they surrender themselves with. And the objectives of the activity was to examine the levels of interactions with people, different identities, how to understand and how they might want to enrich their cultural environment by getting to know people who belong to different groups, how to understand the impact of their environment on their beliefs and actions, and challenge them to consider how their interactions take shape on how they view other people and how they view the world. So here is an example of the assignment, how to be an anti-racist educator. As you can see, there were two tasks they needed to post a brief flip-grid video where they would choose at least one of the ways to discuss how they might implement it in their own classrooms and then they also had to respond to two of their own classmates. And here is one student example of how to be an anti-racist educator. Hi, class. The two suggestions from this and is tested out to me and to empower students to speak out would be to have surveys periodically throughout the year from students and families and community members to gauge if I, as their educator, am meeting their needs. Another way would be to hold classroom check-ins and individual one-on-one check-ins with students to see what their unique needs are. The other suggestion, holding each other accountable, those things because a part of my theater arts students and as you can see, they encompass a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds and have distinctive voices. The conversations that we had with the artists were rich and interesting and I am really excited about what my students and I created. Here are my students talking to Valerie Curtis Newton, who is an African-American director about, she's answering the question, what advice do you have for young artists who, young black artists who might be wanting to have careers in the theater? I also think it's important to know that someone like William Henry Brown existed, that Ira Aldrich existed, that Cicero Jones existed. There's a whole lineage that goes back into the 1800s in terms of traditional theater that we can claim, lay claim to. We have produced theater in every era. We've had directors and writers and actors in every era. You are a birth of a lineage of black theater artists and it's incumbent on you to study their history and learn the lessons that they have to teach so that no one can deny who you are and what you bring. As you can see, nothing like it out there. What are our next steps at West? Well, most of us serve on multiple committees such as the Black Student Success Task Force, the Student Success Committee, Equity Task Force, etc. A lot of us are very active in our department meetings and so our goals are to share what we've learned, share our resources with our colleagues and hopefully pique their interest when we share our own projects and offer guidance and assistance with any faculty who are interested in possibly embedding anti-racist and OFAR resources throughout their courses. We all have been transformed as educators by the work we have done to share and all that we've learned. We hope that our students have been transformed by what they have learned and our goal is to make sure that we continue to share what we've learned with other faculty and we want to share it at the annual faculty day at the beginning of the school year in the fall of 2022. We hope to raise awareness for all of us faculty when it comes to anti-racism. This was an exciting time for us so here are a few of our testimonies. For our NEJRA, my students were very receptive to learning about OFAR, being able to share their own stories, identities, experiences in a safe space, make them feel included in the classroom. Andreas and students were engaged and did not just ask questions but challenged ideas they disagreed with. Jason said, I hope that my work will convince others to take on anti-racist projects by showing them the possibilities and benefits for our students. We thank you very much for listening to us today and we know that there is still work to do and we will continue the work. Thank you. All right so that was our comprehensive program, a project that we did as a faculty and once again I'm very proud of all the work that we did. You can see that we reached a broad population of students through all of those different disciplines. That's pretty much it. What questions might you have? Let's see. There was one question, Marini, that said, can we have the link to the entire textbook for the education course? I think I was kind of wondering the same thing. And Liz added the OER commons from the OFAR participants. Sure. I can share that the textbook that we use is not an OER textbook itself. So my project was me infusing the OFAR or was infusing OER content into the course but the textbook itself was not OER. It's a low cost textbook but not OER. You can feel free to put questions or comments in the chat. I do believe that my project is located. It is uploaded into the commons. That was one of the requirements for our deliverables for the project. Thank you for the feedback, everyone. Thank you both. Any other questions from anyone? My chat, when we... Yes, excellent session. Shirasegala asks, what was the most rewarding part for you? That's a great question. I think for me it was seeing my students work and being able to provide them with a new way of looking at the curriculum that they've been so used to seeing, kind of giving students permission to question and say, why has it always been this way? Because I think sometimes we get so used to the status quo that we don't... Sometimes we kind of need that space carved out to really look at things more critically. So I think it was just being part of the OFAR project to really think about. It pushed me to further broaden my students' ways of approaching curriculum. Some of the things that I was doing, I kind of was already doing, but OFAR gave me an opportunity to do it in a newer, more explicit way. And then seeing my students respond to that was really rewarding, especially because I know that they're going to be paying this forward to their future students, and that just makes my heart very happy to know that I'm giving my students something to think about, that they will then embed in their own practice, in their own pedagogy, and their own educational philosophies. And then that will manifest itself in the way that they teach their students. I'm anxious to go look at those videos. And Jessica, I don't know if you saw that Sarah said she started her journey as an OER student specialist. I love seeing that. That's so exciting. And at Central Lakes College, we also remixed the student OER specialist. Excited about growing our own program. You see Matthew's comment there. I started my OER journey as a student in an old English lit course printing off hundreds of pages of Project Gutenberg. We're working on an English course right now that is utilizing text from Project Gutenberg. So I understand that. And the angel says, I'm reading a book by Zoretta Hammond for a cohort creating a more equitable classroom. That is wonderful. We also did something last year, summer to fall. We had a community of practice that I was fortunate enough to facilitate. And so we did kind of a deep dive into Zoretta Hammond's book, Culturally Responsive Teaching of the Brain. And we trained about 22 faculty of various different faculty and staff. So yeah, it's great to see that other folks are also utilizing her work as well. Yeah, I have a book sitting on my bookshelf. Not read yet, but getting. Any other questions or comments for Jessica? Marini? Thank you all for your patience with me. I posted you probably noticed a bunch of Brian Joneses because I shared the link for my registration. So there's quite a bit of Odessa College employees here today. And so I pasted in the chat the link for them to mark their attendance. So they were so excited to join you all in your presentation. Thank you all for sharing your wealth of knowledge about open educational resources. Thank you again. Thank you. We're happy that you were able to join us. So we do have several more webinars this coming spring. We have tomorrow the advantages of using OER among the disadvantaged, which is a 30 minute presentation. Our April webinar will be Open Education and Community Impact. Thank you, Matthew. Matthew Bloom is working on that one, right? And then we have the transformative power of OER, ZTC pathways that comes up in May this year. And if you didn't see Liz posted the case study on an OER specialist course that's available on the CCC OER website. And if you'd like to stay in the loop, please feel free to check out the CCC OER community email. It is an incredibly active email. I enjoy it. And our EDI blog posts and our student OER stories. And Liz already posted the link for a quick seminar. A quick survey to give us some feedback on our webinar today. We love it. Before you log off, if you could spend just a minute or two working on that. Thank you very much. Our emails are here. And this webinar is recorded and will be posted on the CCC OER webinar page. Thank you again so much to Jessica Parsons and Dr. Marini Smith for sharing their work. I know I have some work to do to go back and take a look at some of the stuff you shared. Thank you again. And thank you everybody for joining us. Any last words, Liz? No, I don't think so. Just everyone have a good Open Education Week. Yeah, happy Open Education Week. Thank you, everybody.