 Welcome, everybody. This is James Glap of Gross Colleges with College of the Canyons and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. Welcome you to our November webinar dedicated to the topic of opening up pedagogy in communication and history classes. We are very pleased today to be joined by a couple of faculty members practicing what we often preach or what I often preach at least. I think a lot of us here are engaged in advocacy, strategy, and policy work. And it's going to be very refreshing for myself at least to hear from some practitioners in the classroom, specifically Kristi Fierro from Tacoma Community College in Washington, and Brett Riffle, a colleague of mine in the history department at College of the Canyons in Southern California. And I'll provide further introductions in a second. Just a quick overview for those of you who may be unfamiliar with our interface here, which is supported by the California Community College system under the rubric of CCC confer. On the left-hand side of the screen, you see the audio and video controls for yourself if you're on a mic. You can see a list of the participants through which you can scroll up and down to see who else might be here. And then down in the bottom left, you can see the chat. Feel free to participate in the chat. We encourage you to share resources, links, URLs in the chat. And if there are particular questions about what our speakers are sharing, feel free to post those questions in the chat. Perhaps preface your question with a question mark or a cue or something so it's easy for us to find. Una, my close colleague here in CCC OER and our usual moderator is providing moral and technical support behind the scenes today. She'll be monitoring the chat. So she and or I will catch those questions, we hope. And real quick, if you wouldn't mind taking a minute to identify where you are from. If you look at the map of the globe here on the left-hand side between the globe and the list of participants, there's a little toolbar you can control. And you can put a little star next to where you come from. So we have a colleague from China with us today, which is pretty exciting for us. I think you win the prize for the participant who's come to far this today. So it would be great if you could put a star on China for us. Yes. And great, thank you. Yes, Jenny Peel. Thank you, great. Thank you. And an overview of our agenda here, we'll ask, I'll introduce our speakers. We'll all provide a short overview of the community college consortium for OER. Then we'll dive into our first presentation on open pedagogy and communication classes. We'll have a brief audience discussion about what Christie shared with us and finding out what you are doing. Then we'll talk about adopting OER in history classes. And then we'll have some time for questions and answers at the end. So if you have not already done so, please take a moment to introduce yourself in the chat window. And then we'll talk about your name, what institution you're with, or organization, and where you're from. That would be terrific. If you also want to share a little bit, stress little, a little bit about your OER project or initiative, that would be fun to learn about as well. So let me begin by introducing our first speaker, Christie Fierro from Tacoma Community College in Washington State. She's using OER when a large group of students confessed in week three of a class that they couldn't afford the traditional textbook that had been selected by the department. And she saw this as an educational emergency. After seeing a vast increase in student engagement with the adoption of OER, Christie has become a zealot for OER. And I'm sure you'll sense that in the energy she brings to her presentation. As an adjunct in the past two years, she has saved students $60,000 in textbook costs. And she invites you to join the cause. And before Christie takes it away, I will introduce my close colleague and friend, Brent Riffle from College of Canyons. He's a professor in history here at the college teaching a wide range of history classes. He is also a leader in faculty development on our campus and a leader in addressing the needs of basic skills students across disciplines at the college. And those leadership roles are reasons why I'm particularly pleased that Brent has decided to adopt OER, sending a positive message to fellow faculty members that if he can do it, others can do it as well. So without further ado, I'm going to turn this over. Oh, no, I'm not going to turn it over to Christie. Sorry. I'm going to give you the high level overview of CCC OER. As most of you know, the Community College Consortium for OER is the voice of community and technical colleges within the larger global OER movement. Our specific purposes are to expand access to high quality materials, focusing on the needs of community and technical college students, supporting faculty choice and development, because of course our institutions are primarily teaching institutions. And finally, I think what we are all engaged in is improving student success. You'll see that in CCC OER we have member colleges from over 250 member colleges from 18 states and provinces, including provinces in Canada, of course. And now we'll dive into Open Pedagogy. The Open Pedagogy discussion I'll share with some of you. You might be new information, some of you know, from the work of David Wiley, the term Open Pedagogy, as an idea of integrating openness into your teaching that addresses both faculty and student roles in learning. It's a way of providing or promoting student ownership over the learning process. It supports the faculty role as facilitator, not just disseminator of information. And of course, it's a terrific way to promote collaboration. And we'll see that with both Kristi and Blaine. Without further ado, I'll turn it over to Kristi. Greetings. I am so thankful for you taking the time out of your busy schedule today. I'm especially excited to see Quill West and Phil Vendetti because they held my hand through this whole process and got me started on this journey when I had that educational emergency. Quill connected me with Phil who gave me a tremendous amount of resources to get me started since I had to jump in in week three as an emergency situation. So really glad you're here. I want to give credit where credit's due and do proper attribution. Quill invited me a year ago to go to an open education conference in Utah. I had the opportunity to listen to David Wiley talking about doing these really innovative projects with his students. It sounded like so much fun. And then I was sitting there skeptical going, yeah, well, those are graduate students. I remember getting to do fun stuff in graduate school. But I teach 100 and 200 level courses. And I thought, so what? Why can't we do the fun stuff at that level, too? So I started to dive into open pedagogy. So when I first looked at OER resources, I looked at the way you would a traditional textbook. Does it fit or does it not? Because I didn't understand the licenses and the adaptability. David Wiley explains, when you look at OER from that way, it's like trying to drive an airplane down the road. Of course, it'll do it. The plane has wheels, and hopefully the road is wide enough. But the plane was really designed to soar higher and faster. The goal is to engage the student by moving away from disposable assignments and empower the student to create work that's going to matter beyond the quarter or beyond the semester. Moving into the how, the first thing really is to establish trust. The student might not have been ever asked to do a project-based active learning assignment in a 100 and 200 level class. One of the ways I develop trust is by explaining to them what this movement is on day one. I think it's really important to explain what OER is, not just guess what? You don't have to buy a book. Explain to them how we were able to get to a place where they won't have to buy a book. I'm seeing John can't hear. Can other people hear? Are we doing okay on noise? Yes, I can hear you. Okay, great, great. I just wanted to check. Great, I just wanted to check. When possible, you want to provide examples. You may not always have examples when you move into it early on, but it's critical to explain the licenses. We do a lot to talk with students about plagiarism, but we don't do enough to talk with students about copyright. We need to explain to them the ownership of their copyright. I find when I explain to students at the beginning of the class what we're a part of, they are more ready than you would realize to contribute their voice and their work, and we really need their voice to help the movement grow. Don't feel like you have to start at the beginning. I have, if you're new to this, I have a video put together that helps explain the licenses. This one is from the teacher point of view, and in Creative Commons you can also get one from the student point of view that you can just plug into your class. I suggest starting with having the students write a proposal. What's realistic from the time frame? Is it an eight week course, ten week course, sixteen week course? How will this project demonstrate that they've met the learning objectives? This is another great instructional design point where instead of the student coming into the course thinking we need to learn what's in the book, having a conversation from the beginning about the learning objectives helps keep them focused on what the outcomes are. I suggest you let the student write the rubric. Then at each level, the proposal, the rubric, provide them feedback, giving them time for some revision on the plan. This is not the only assessment I'm doing in the course. I'm still assessing the other outcomes separately. But if you're a devoted follower of universal design for learning, these projects can really hit all levels. The student is demonstrating the learning in an alternative format and a format that they choose. The students more engaged because they got to design the product. And then the product often becomes content for future courses and now you're delivering content in multiple formats. Show off the student's work in any way you can and celebrate their learning. Another great thing Quill helped start at TCC is a party we throw at the end of the quarter called Celebrate Learning. It has become such a vibrant part of the campus when classes come to show off student work. And the students have a lot of pride in getting to show off what they've been doing in the quarter. I want to share Sandy's story with you. Sandy first signed up for a 100 level introduction to communication class. One of our other TCC instructors, Mary Fox, has started a nonprofit right at 2530 that does a lot of great stuff in the community. I started this summer with explaining the project and then had visitors from different places on campus and off campus to just spark some ideas for the students about their project. And they had the choice in designing what their project was going to be. Many of the students decided to teach and Falla Shane is one of our vibrant communities in Tacoma that has a lot of diversity and low resources. Some of the students were teaching. It's a Tuesday, Thursday educational program that provides free lunch. Sandy's group decided to be in the background helping as others taught. And then they decided to do a school supply drive at Walmart. They were really surprised by how much was donated, but they were also really surprised in how much they learned from it. Instead of just doing a paper or taking a quiz on the learning objectives, we had objectives in the course that talked about perception, stereotypes, discrimination, and nonverbal communication. The students at the end of their project did a video. All of the children in Falla Shane got a backpack with their school supplies and $250 additional given to the school for when supplies ran out. Then they used TCC's multimedia department to center around and talk about how this meant the learning objectives and what they got out of it. And started talking about those concepts. Like they had prejudged people based on nonverbal perceptions on who was going to donate what and who was going to get excited about their project. And then what actually happened broke through those stereotypes. And they were able to have a lot of pride in the project because they designed it. And it gave something back to the community beyond a disposable assignment that wouldn't be used again. The video turned out really great and we don't have time to watch the whole thing. So I wanted to post the URL for you. Then Sandy signed up for the 200 level public speaking course. And she's given me permission to share her story. I had Sandy in the 100 level class. I knew she was a strong student. But when she got up to introduce herself in the public speaking class, she had extreme amount of anxiety. She broke out in hives. She was hyperventilating. She had to leave the room. And I thought, how am I going to help her through this past the... We tried all the traditional things I do in class to overcome the anxiety. At the same time, I was working on an oral history project and I needed content to help explain the project. So I approached Sandy as an option and said, one thing you could do for the demonstration speech is to demonstrate how to use the resources at TCC to do the project. It was an option that gave her a different format that wound up helping her build a lot of confidence. So Sandy and Yuki put together a video with their multimedia team where they first explained the length that students need. Then they show what building, what room of the building you need to go to, what equipment you need to get when you get there, the fact that you can reserve a room. And I have tips that you could put a sign on the door so that people don't knock on the door while you're recording. And then where to take the product when you're done. Before this video, this was six pages of heavy text in my class that was kind of boring and I don't think everyone was reading it. After this, I had new content and they had a lot of fun. The video turned out really cute. There's some surprise endings. This started building Sandy's confidence. So then she moved into doing video vignettes, talking to teachers on what to expect in a 200 level history course. Those videos are now being used as content in multiple courses including our college success seminars. And that led to Sandy winning an information literacy award from our library. All of this put together brought Sandy to a place that she could confidently give speeches in front of the class and even did a speech outside of class in front of hundreds of people and felt good about it. Now you might be thinking there's a lot of fancy editing in those videos. We are lucky to have a vibrant multimedia crew. There's Johnny and Igor in the multimedia lab. But I don't want you to feel like that you have to have that to move into open pedagogy. I do give students the choice. One of them does a video. Some of them do the video on their own. Some of them use the resources at the college. But as an example, an amazing project put together by Phil Vendetti at Clover Park. 50-wide speakers is a CC byproduct. It's a wonderful resource for my public speaking students that feel students put together showing off examples from great speeches of people around the Pacific Northwest. I did this project with a $200 camera and about a $30 tripod. So you don't have to have a lot of resources available. But it is great when the school makes that investment so your students have that support. Another student's success story I want to share with you is Joanne. Joanne wasn't able to be here with us live. So she gave us some moments she wanted to share. Another student I came to learn from others. I assumed that my voice was not part of my education process. I assumed that what I read from my textbooks was and is the definitive word. OER taught me that my perception was incomplete. Joanne is another example of someone that is creating content in the public speaking classes. She did some great speeches on video that are now content for future classes to see as example speeches. Because when we stop using the traditional publisher resources, we also lose those instructor resources. One of the great things for the student and the teacher about open pedagogy is when they are creating those resources, you gain them back and they've helped you in the work. And you'll be surprised how inspired they are to get to become part of the movement and help out future classes. As explained by Joanne, OER changed how I view myself as a student. Now I'm more engaged in my education. I feel empowered. Being part of the process increases my desire to learn. And that really is what energizes me when I'm up late at not grading papers, seeing how much the students are getting out of this too. Washington has a new great website, openwall.org. And if you look at the OER story section of that website, you can see a full video of Joanne sharing her experience and hear more about that education emergency and how I got over it, how we pushed through the emergency. So my first challenge to you today was to involve your students in the process as teaching them about copyright and the Creative Commons licenses and adding their voice to the movement. My second challenge is for you to think about just one alternative option assignment that you might try this out in. Thank you so much for your time. I want to hear from you. Does anyone have any questions? Yeah, I think I need to put up. Put up in the hand. Yes. This is Oona. I didn't see any questions in the chat window. I saw a lot of great comments. But here's your first question, Kathy, from Monica. Monica, these are courses. Well, solo as in I still consult Quill and Phil and other OER gurus on a regular basis. But collaborating with other faculty is one of my favorite pieces of OER. As far as my college, I am designing the courses solo, but we have the same outcomes that we meet, and we match the quality-wise because we're working on the same outcomes. Yeah, and so, Chris, if you could just read the questions. Oh, Monica is asking, when planning curriculum, are these courses that I'm developing solo or with a team? We are given the outcomes and then have freedom to design the course around those outcomes. Quill is asking how I integrated my work on UDL and open education into the open pedagogy lessons. I definitely think UDL and OER work together hand in hand by, again, giving the student the choice, allowing them to design the project. They're more engaged because they're working on something that they designed that they want to do. They're forced to go work in Salish and they might be doing a completely different project. And then, obviously, the course, the content later becomes, instead of the course just being text heavy, there are videos and PowerPoints in different formats that the students have designed. They feel as, can you talk about how your students advocate for OER after they complete their classes with you? That's actually really exciting how students stay in touch. One of the first quarters I taught the introduction to communication course, I had this student that really disliked one of the readings. We talked about it in class and I invited them to share alternatives and that helped completely reshape the course. And that's one easy way to jump into open pedagogy, is to throw up a discussion forum and I call it the current events discussion and I ask them to take the learning objectives and relate it to something that's going on currently. And then those resources become content for me. It also helps with diversity. I have the privilege, some quarters last summer and next quarter, of teaching a joint class. We have students visiting from Japan, from University of Kikichu. When I ask them to relate the learning objectives, they're going into different chat rooms and different domains than I'm what I'm used to and finding resources that I probably never would have come across. So it also helps me add diversity and multiple voice to the classes. Great. And then we have another question from Deborah asking, can you talk about some of the assessment challenges that you may have had? I've been really pleasantly surprised how ready the students are to design the rubric and then they know from the beginning the points they're trying to reach. It's possible that it's just been luck but so far they've exceeded my expectations as far as what they design in their projects. Also remembering it's not the only assessment in the course. Again, this is James and I would say there's an awful lot of research out there that tells us, you know, independent of OER, that students are more engaged when they're involved in or given the opportunity to be involved in forming their own objectives and assessments. So this is just an example of open pedagogy and, you know, the use of openness in proving pedagogy generally. It helps us as teachers too and we have to give up those instructor resources. When I was a brand new teacher, I was too reliant on the publisher suggestions for assignments versus when I started moving into open pedagogy and I had to, you know, assess nonverbal communication. Instead of a paper, I had a student go to a dance studio and do a video on how dancers communicate nonverbally and it was a lot more exciting to grade. Great. Great. One more question from Jan. How do you convince other faculty who are bound to traditional methods to consider the OER approach? Even with such successful results, do you still have those who don't buy into it? It is a process. It's, you know, some people are going to get there faster than others. I share these examples because one of the beauty of the Creative Commons license is then we have permission to share a student's work because they've freely given that permission. Two years since I've moved into OER has definitely been the most fun I've had teaching. The students are so much more engaged that I definitely could not go back. And then Alan asks, what other forms of assessment do you integrate in the course? It depends on the course. Of course, in the public speaking class, they are working with fields, 50-wide speakers as a discussion forum where they point out, eat those pathos logos and interact with each other. There are live speeches, there are speeches outside the class. I try to use a wide variety going back to the universal design for learning so that there's not just one form of assessment throughout the course. Okay. And then our colleague from China, I'm so sorry. I'm going to butcher your name. So what kind of work done by the students would fail in your assessment? Well, if you do the proper work on the front end with the student in the rubric so that they know from the beginning what your expectations are, the only way they're going to fail is if they fail to show up. Really. Because we've talked about from the beginning what the expectations are. So usually they haven't, there hasn't been someone, you know, in two years so far that turned into Project Halfway Done. And Quill has all the data on, we have a really high success rate. So students get so excited about the movement and excited about what they've become a part of that it's very rare to have someone drop out. Okay. And then Kathy James asks a really important question. I really appreciate your question, Kathy. Is OER an all or nothing? Meaning that there is no use of publishers materials at all. I'm thinking about the professor who is interested in OER but needs transition time. Oh, no, that's a fantastic. That's where my challenge comes in. I'll just try this once this, you know, if you're in a quarter of a semester, throw it out there as an option and see what students do. My situation was unique in having to move over on emergency basis. You can definitely move gradually. And in fact, I still teach for a university where I don't have permission yet to go full OER and it's definitely a blend of using a traditional textbook with great OER projects. Yeah, and I would just echo that. You can speak with, we can speak with a lot of colleagues across the country and even around the world and certainly a lot of folks who are on the webinar today would say that they know of many, many, many instances of faculty using bits and pieces of material in the classroom, one piece at a time trying to replace the traditional publisher material. But it's a big, a big request or a tall order to say, let's replace that publisher textbook overnight. I think it's few and far between that we would find faculty who just overnight throw out the publisher material altogether. So that's a great question, Kathy. I think the answer is certainly there are lots of people who do things one little step at a time. And then Monica has a question. What process do you use to help students define their project? Do most follow the same project idea or are they all individual? Well, there's a big variety. I wouldn't say individual because they usually work as a group. We have this fun day where I have guests come as I was saying from on-campus and off-campus just to promote ideas so the students don't have to completely start at the beginning. So then some of the ideas I'll tape up on the wall like a gallery walk and let's, and then students will sit, you know, a student may say, well, I want to do blah, blah, blah, but I want others to join me. And then we'll kind of spread around the room and gravitate to the project that they want to work on. So they designed the project from the beginning and often work in groups. And the, really the key is keeping them focused on the learning objectives and how the project will relate to the learning objectives. And then our colleague from China again, Yuli, our apologies for the pronunciation, asks about the pass rate. How is the pass rate in China? Many tutors and students as well are worrying about the quality of OER. And that's certainly a topic that we all have to address. The pass rates have been extremely high. I think a lot of that has to do with the student being more engaged and involved as we've talked about. But really the quality question, we've come so far. A lot of the OER content is now peer reviewed. And I'm not having a problem finding high quality resources. Thank you. Yeah, and I appreciate you pointing it out. There once was a time when, let's say, the medium quality material outweighed the high quality material. I think thanks to the support of a lot of institutions and foundations and governments, indeed, we have many, many, many more high quality collections available today than we did just a few years ago. And really high OER. So for instance, in the public speaking class, students, I used to have access as a teacher to a DVD of example speeches because of the students paying for the really expensive text. Now that students are creating those examples and then Phil's 50-wide speaker resource is far better than those DVDs that I would never use again. So sometimes they're even much higher quality has been my experience. Very good. And let's see. Jonathan Coons asked, what are and where can you find some of those OER resources? Well, what a timely question, Jonathan. I think first of all, we would point you to the CCC OER website, which is OERconsortium.org. And there you find a listing of many of the larger and more useful repositories and referratories with high quality OER material. We would also encourage you to look back at the archives of our past webinars. I'm trying to find the specific date we had back in September. On September 10th, we had an entire webinar devoted to open textbook collections and adoption with speakers from open stacks, for example. I know we have somebody from open stacks with us today. So open stacks college has terrific, very high quality, complete textbooks along with BC campus and the California Open Education Resources Project. So take a look at some of those resources. And I'll post the link to the resources I'm currently using in the public speaking class, which is a lot of also Phil Vendetti's resources. There's such a large number of resources available these days. I was recently preparing a series of presentations. And once upon a time, I know I would have pointed to, let's say, there was one repository of OER material I always used to point to as an example. And today, gosh, there are so many that it's almost difficult to limit oneself or to fit all the names on one slide. So with that, I'm going to say thank you so much, Christie. I hope you can stay with us through the end of the session. I know there will be questions that come up in the chat again regarding your practice. And I appreciate it if you would be available to address those. But we're going to switch to our next presentation now. Brent, are you there? I am here. I'm with us. Excellent. So as I mentioned before, Brent Riffle, Professor of History at College of Canyon, a leader in faculty development as well as institution-wide efforts to address the needs of basic skills students across all disciplines. So it's very good news that a faculty leader like Brent is adopting OER. It's a positive example for other faculty. If Brent can do it, it must be OK. Thanks, thanks. I'm really pleased to be here. I'm quite interested in the discussion that's been going on this morning as I set in on the early part of this webinar and really enjoyed Christie's presentation. A lot of the questions that have come up this morning already are things that I've been wrestling with. I'm newer at this process than Christie is. I've been working on this for about a year and have been implementing it in the classroom. This will be my second semester to really implement it in the classroom. This is sort of a pilot course and then trying to expand from there. And then my hope is within the next year to have all of my courses using OER, if not entirely, a great deal. So I want to talk about a few things. And again, I'm newer at this than a lot of the people that are probably in this session. So I'm interested in hearing your thoughts along the way. But I come at this with great skepticism about OER. And that's changed a lot. As a history instructor, we're more traditional in our approach. And I think there's value in tradition. But for me, there were a number of pros and cons of OER that I had to address. And I want to just speak briefly about my thoughts on what's good about OER and what I have problems with. Mostly I have good things to say. I also want to talk about why I think OER has really helped enhance my student engagement. That's really important to me as a community college instructor because we have a lot of students, a lot of returning students who may be very uneasy about the process of the classroom. And so it's very important to me that we engage them as effectively as we can. And then I want to talk about my process of how I identified OER texts for my history courses. And I'll talk about some lessons that I've learned along the way. And then as we wind it up in our brief talk today, I'd certainly like to hear your thoughts. And maybe we can look ahead as to what the future holds for OER. I think it's a pretty bright future in many respects. So for me, I have a lot of things that I think are great about OER for history instructors in particular, but just for colleges and classrooms in general. For me, expanded access is so vital. But I would point out that my most important value for OER for me is cost. Because again, as a community college instructor, I teach general education courses. I teach students who frankly have to be in my history course. It's a lot of general courses, survey courses. And they may enjoy the course, but they have to be there regardless. And so for me, cost is important. When you have, especially in the recent economy, we've been dealing with students who literally cannot afford a textbook in chemistry or biology. It's important to me to try to offer a free alternative. It has to be an alternative that is still adding value to the course. And that's where I think OER has really worked for me. I don't think that's new to anybody here, but the costs of OER are very appealing to students. There are some students who don't like the OER approach, but we'll get into that as well. My con, so to speak, the things I've had concerns about with OER, just in my own experience, is fatigue. I've been lucky in my role on campus to have the opportunity to work with people like James, and James has found resources and found incentives for faculty to develop OER. And I know a lot of my colleagues are not so fortunate, but we have a real international leader in that regard on our campus, and I'm grateful for that. But at the same time, it's really hard for me to develop OER on top of all the other commitments that I have on campus. And so if we think of OER as, if we think of those resources as ongoing, as living, breathing things, we have to resuscitate them. And it's difficult for me to do that on top of all my other commitments. And so for me, it's not the desire to enhance my classes with OER that's lacking. It's the time, and it's the energy. And so it's constantly a struggle for me. And then another thing I thought I would address in terms of problems I've seen is just some access barriers, some antipathy towards OER among returning students, for instance, who frankly don't always appreciate technology and don't always appreciate OER. What they would like is a book, and I understand that. And I'm kind of one of those people in some ways myself. But that's always been a big concern as well in my classes and in my development of OER. Another problem that I always try to think about whenever I'm thinking about my courses is how do we engage our students? How do we engage students in traditional lecture? How do we engage students in discussion? How do we do that with OER? And if you look at this chart, you see the battle that we face. And this is why I think OER has such a vital role to play. Because if it's effectively designed and if it's effectively implemented in our classes, we can really engage our students. At the same time, we have to recognize that we're competing with all kinds of other obligations that our students have. And this chart is a bit daunting to me when I realize that if students in a recent poll of community college students say that they spend about three plus hours on education, that also includes the time they're in the classroom. And so I think OER can supplant the traditional text by, again, offering really appealing materials, readings, videos, other opportunities to learn. So I think for me, this battle is one we can overcome. And I think OER is the way to do it. Another thing that I always talk about with my students is that we're failing at multi-tasking. And I think here again for me in my classes, OER, texts and videos and podcasts and interviews and things we'll talk about in just a minute, have to be engaging. And when they are, I think students truly focus on them. I wish it were the case that students would, like I like to do, sit down at night and read a book from front to back. That'd be fun. But they're not. Every time I'm asking them to read something, maybe a primary source or look at a video, I know they're doing something on their phone as well. So it's essential that we really effectively design and implement these OER. And that's something that I struggle with every single day. I think the OER stuff that I'm doing now is so different than what I was doing six months ago. And I'm sure it'll be different in another few months. The next thing I want to talk about is how I've identified useful texts. That's where I started. And I like the question I heard earlier this morning. Is this an all or none thing? It has not been an all or none thing for me. I have been trying to piecemeal this, cobble this together. And I started by still offering a traditional hard copy textbook and then adding to that certain OER materials. And so it's not all or none for me. It's something that I'm, again, trying to put together piece by piece. I always want to make sure, again, that the cost is, if not free, close to it. I always want to make sure that it aligns with what my college and my course expectations and outcomes and objectives are. I also have to think about reading level. There's a lot of really clever smart OER out there that frankly doesn't work for community college students, many of whom in my classes are in basic skills reading levels. And so I have to always recognize that. At the same time, I have students in my class. I'm having a class that starts in 20 minutes. And there are students in there that are outstanding. And I have to challenge them. And so just as you think about a traditional text, you have to think about OER in that way, too. Is it really flexible? Does it really add value to the course? And does it reach a number of different intelligences and reading levels and comprehension levels? And again, this is just an ongoing struggle for me. And I'm certainly enjoying the process, but it's tricky. The first text I started with was one I know that a lot of you are familiar with. And it's really useful. It's this one right here put out by the University Press of North Georgia. And I will be frank. I thought this was just going to be something that I could kind of plug and play and adopt with very little change. I would say that as much as I like this text, because I have to tailor it to the students that I teach every day, I have probably altered or modified this text at least 75%, 80% of it. Now the open pedagogy part of this is my students are helping lead the way in that. We have students that break out into groups and we start to pick apart the text and put together primary sources, put together videos, put together podcasts that will then supplement the core of the text. And so when I say that it's a living, breathing thing, this is kind of what I'm starting with. The idea is here's my framework and then from that we're building and then my students are, again, leading the way. And they have been as valuable assistants and collaborators as I could imagine. In fact, they've exceeded my expectations. The more I challenge them, the more they really do respond. And it's been amazing and surprising. Another thing I do is it's still important for me to read or my students to read in a history course. So they always are being asked to read primary source materials. And this is also where they would traditionally just analyze this in class or as an assignment. But now we're analyzing it in terms of not only what is the content of the primary source but then how does this fit with the text. In the very first days of the class, we talk about what is this text trying to address? What are the key issues of this course? And then all along the way we're trying to identify sources that will supplement this. And we can do that by in-class assignments, in-class exercises. And we can also do that by posting these are all open source so we can post these to a blog that's running throughout the semester. So that's something that I really have enjoyed as well. A few lessons learned and then we'll kind of wind it down and love to hear your thoughts. I really was daunted to be honest by just the amazing wealth of OER out there. And so for me collaborating has been the key. Working with my colleagues, again people like James but also working with people at other institutions that's been so beneficial and so valuable. So I continue to do that even though time is always a constraint for me. I also think about again a living project here. Process is important as much as product. And so my hope is that my texts and my materials are going to be far, far different next year because of the help of my students and because of the things they're doing. One of the things that they're also doing in my courses is oral history interviews. And so those become embedded into the course. And I'm sure that's going to be something that changes as history changes. We have a lot of interviews with students talking with returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. That may not be an appealing interview for them in 10 years. So again, a constant process here and a constant evolution. And that's, I think, fun for me because as a history teacher, my students sometimes ask me, don't you get tired of talking about the War of 1812 every semester? And I don't. But I especially don't get tired of it when I realize that we're looking at that conflict and that subject in a new way every single semester. So OER has not only, I think, helped my students. It's really helped me kind of refresh and recharge my batteries, too. And I've been really pleased and surprised by that. A couple of quick things. I made a bunch of goofy mistakes that I'm sure we all have. I thought that flipping the classroom was going to be the key to my success in life. And I certainly still use it occasionally. But I made, again, goofy mistakes like assigning 45-minute videos and things like that that weren't that engaging. So as much as I'd like to listen to this guy that you see on the screen here talk about the Civil War and believe me, he's amazing, my students don't want to do that. And that's OER that sounds good, but in practice isn't very good even though the content is top notch. A couple of other things I've had lessons learned with regard to repositories. James is right, Luna is right. There's so many great repositories out there. But I have found that none of them really are tailor-made. None of them are plug and play. I have to pick out bits and pieces. And that's in part related to my role as a community college professor, but also just in terms of what I see as the important issues of my course. And so lots of great stuff out there. But I have to kind of tinker with every single thing that I find out there. These are probably basic lessons learned. But again, I started with really simple OER videos like YouTube stuff and I find that almost nothing on YouTube is really valuable to me. So I've been lucky at my college to have resources that frankly the college has paid for where they're more tailor-made for my students like this one you see here in telecom. Students have been working on podcasts in my course and they seem to really respond to this and what we do is we kind of assign certain podcasts. One of the more engaging and sort of provocative ones out there but we have students identify what's the value of a podcast. Are these really academic? And then have them make their own. And we're just at the beginning of this process but it's a supplement to an ongoing oral history project and a veteran's history project that I've had success with. So I'm really interested in seeing where this goes. We learn a lot more from our mistakes and this is one where I think students are learning a lot on not only how to make this kind of project but also how to provide really useful content. And I'm certainly learning a lot from it too. Another thing that I've tried to do is capture a lot of my lectures in bite-sized chunks and this is something that I know has been around for a while and this is probably where I'm headed more in my online work of course but something that I've also learned a lot from too. I can't just post an hour lecture. It's not the same as a lecture in the face-to-face setting so I've certainly tried to evolve my thinking on that. I always like to hear what people say about fair use and I love Christie's thoughts on the importance of letting students know about Creative Commons and letting students know about copyright. It's essential. It's something that this younger generation of students has a very fuzzy or flexible or problematic relationship with copyright and so I think it's more important than ever and so I'm really pleased that this group that we're talking with today gets that. I know I think it's vital too and I know our students benefit from it. And then a couple other things as we wind it down. I've been really helpful, really helped by my colleagues and so I think it's essential to reach out to the leadership on your campus and you may be some of those leaders but I think if you're in a leadership position, there are colleagues out there. There's faculty out there that want to hear from you and want to learn about this stuff but they don't know where to begin. I was lucky that someone kind of approached me and said, are you interested in this? And I was and I'm thankful for that but I think others are not as lucky so it's something to keep in mind. And then the final thing that I wanted to say was if we read about OER it's easy to be sort of in a closed loop if we're just reading about it from the perspective of those of us who enjoy it and use it and implement it but we also have to realize that most of our colleagues don't really even know what it is. I have had enormous struggles just trying to get the colleagues of mine who I love in my department to buy into this. I'm a long way from convincing them that this is valuable and so I think if we believe that OER is useful we've got to evangelize. We've got to go out there and spread the word to our peers. Not only what it is which seems like self-evident what it is but it isn't if you haven't really thought about it much. Not only what it is but how easy it is to put it together at least in a very rudimentary but valuable way and that you can just build and build and build on that and that's been the biggest lesson for me is that you do not have to build Rome in a day. In fact, it's much more valuable if you build it in pieces, stop, reflect, get students' feedback, get your colleagues' feedback and then keep building. For me it's important to spread that message that this is not only doable it's in some sense the future and it's a really bright future. I think that's one thought I wanted to close out with. In our remaining time, I know we're running short on time but if there are any questions or comments I'd sure love to hear them and again I want to thank you for joining me today. Great Brent, thank you so much. This is James again. We really appreciate a lot of really positive remarks from the chat window about your observations. Let's take a couple of minutes here. We've got plenty of questions. Let's start off with Paige. Paige asks, what was your process of reaching out to colleagues and finding others in your discipline who are you developing? The process has been in departmental meetings. The process has been one-on-one conversations and it's been again challenging. My colleagues in the history department where I teach are fantastic lecturers. They're fantastic teachers. They're not particularly interested in OER and I'll be blunt. I love them but I have not really broken through to them. It's not my job to convince them of this but I feel like it's worth the effort but I've had trouble with it to be honest. I've had much more success having fruitful conversations with colleagues in sociology, psychology. I don't know what it is about us historians. We're really fun people I promise but we like our traditional approach and there's value in that but I'll be honest it's not been as successful as I would have hoped. Well thank you for that honest response so going back to Paige's question there is a tremendous community of people across the country, throughout North America and around the world who are very passionate about OER so we appreciate you all being part of this community through participating in the webinar and we encourage you to utilize the CCC OER listserv as a way of reaching out to colleagues and finding one another and we're very happy to be able to facilitate that. But it can be lonely when you're the first one on your campus. Right James just to add on that across the country I've had much more response but you're right on campus not as much. So a question from Phil. A similar question to the one for Christie. To what degree do your students act as advocates for OER after they complete your course? Do you see a ripple effect throughout your course? It's a great question. Anecdotally I think that's happening. I think it's happening in terms of what students tell each other about whether they should take a particular course but it's not something I can really get a full handle on only because I'm still at the beginning of the process. Great. Another comment from Tony could we get a link to Brent's slides? We are Tony. All of our webinars are converted to YouTube videos and are posted on the OER Consortium.org website. So defer to Una on what the timing of that is. And James I've already posted the slides and the link is in the window. The archive will be ready early next week. And I'll post the archive page again. Thank you. As usual Una is a couple of weeks ahead of me. Thanks Una. And then Ellen asks would you share types of negative student feedback about OER? Yeah that's a good question. I think that it's sort of lower quality content. It's spoon fed videos that it's not accessing deeper level reading ability or thinking levels that it's not really quality content. I think that's the biggest one. It's not the case in my opinion but it's certainly something. I think colleagues of mine have said are you just designing YouTube videos? Is that what you're talking about? So I think that's a big concern or a big stereotype. I don't want to speak for our colleagues from OpenStacks but I think one of the attractions of the OpenStacks work is that it looks nearly as bright and shiny as publisher produced work. And sometimes I think students and faculty colleagues believe that if it's not bright and shiny and heavy and laden with Ivy League credentials it must not be. I couldn't read more. One final question from Paige. What specific type of faculty development or what type of faculty development specific to OER occurs on your campus? My time is constrained here but I think actually I would honestly point that back in your direction James because I know you've been such a leader on that. And James has really been instrumental in not only motivating me to develop OER but also really providing the real incentives to do that and sort of I hate to say it but kind of holding my hand at the very beginning and it was essential. So James I'm sure you have more to say on that. And again thanks everybody for joining us today. Thank you Brent and I know you've got to run two class. So thank you very much Brent for being here. I appreciate that. I will briefly address Paige's question. Frankly not enough faculty development occurs specific to OER on my campus. Oftentimes it's me or other converts speaking to faculty leaders one on one. We think it's important to approach faculty leaders like Brent because they will provide a positive example to their colleagues and often faculty leaders in whatever shape or form are the ones who are interested in doing interesting things on the negative side. The challenge is as Brent pointed out the fatigue. They're the ones who are usually involved in so much other stuff on campus that it's asking an awful lot for them to do a bit more work to get involved with OER. We do include OER regularly in our faculty training for teaching online. So in all of our modules that faculty are required to take before they teach online there are units covering OER. So that's sort of the easy way to do it. We could do much more. And with that I am conscious of the time. So I will move this along to our final spot while Brent has his sources there. Excellent. And finally I will remind you all that our next webinar will be on December 10th, which time we'll hear about some great research that's going on out there through the OER Research Hub run out of Open University in the UK. Some of us here participated in their work last year, as well as learning more about the open access movement from our colleagues at the SPARC or the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition. Many of us follow the work of Nicole Allen with SPARC with great interest and admiration. So look for terrific up to date information from OER Research Hub and SPARC next time December 10th. And with that we're at the top of the hour. Thank you very much to Brent. Thank you to Christie. Thank you to all of you. And as always thanks to Una for really making this stuff happen. So thanks everybody. All right. And just before we turn off the recording I want to thank everyone who came. We had three countries represented here, Canada, England and the United States and over 16 states and provinces. So a wonderful around the world look at OER. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.