 As Una said, and as appeared in the chat, please introduce yourself in the chat window, let us know who you are, and what your interest is in today's webinar. We're going to do kind of a different kind of webinar today, so we are going to hear from our wonderful featured speaker, Nicole Finer, on OER and supporting platforms, but then we are also going to have a community discussion as we come out of the webinar. So please think about that as you're listening, think of questions you might have, or comments you want to make about OER and supporting platforms, but also about the care framework, which we will talk about. So that's kind of your mission as you're listening today. Think of questions, comments, and ideas you would like to share. I also should probably start by introducing myself. I am Chloe West, I'm the Open Education Project Manager at Pierce College in Washington State. I am also the CCCOER president, and I'm really excited to do this webinar. It came from a general community interest in talking about how to build partnerships with support entities who are contacting a lot of us and asking to be a part of our open education solutions. So I am really, really excited to get to talk with Nicole about this today. This is just as a quick reminder for everybody, CCCOER is a community of people who are working in a community of practice to meet our mission, which you can see on the board in front of you. And then I just want to keep this thought in mind today, which is the concept of building partnerships to grow open education and OER. So I will come back to this in a few minutes, but rather than taking all of your time, I am going to turn this over to Nicole, thinkviner. And Nicole, I'm going to stop my share and let you start sharing your screen. Okay. Hold on, let me get out of, otherwise it's just your face, really big quill, which is fun. It's just great fun. I don't think you want that. Okay. All right, share screen. There we go. I'm going to stop my video for, there we go. All right. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me today. So who am I? I'm Nicole, thinkviner. I have a really fun, long educational title. It's associate director of institutional relations for Rice University OpenStacks. And you can see my email and Twitter down below. So OpenStacks is Rice University. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. So what we're going to start with today is quill asked me to do an overview of the OpenStacks ecosystem model and philosophy, because I know that's something that gets a lot of questions. And also people are very curious, like, are we a non-profit, are we a sustainable nonprofit, things like that? Let me check the chat, just one question. Okay. Just wanted to make sure there's no tech issues. Okay. So what is OpenStacks? Well, first and foremost, we are Rice University. So you noticed I had a Rice.edu web address. We report to the president's office at Rice. We are a 501c3 non-profit. What we do with any money that we don't spend on is to put it back into the content. That's what we do, is we regularly update the content. We were founded by Dr. Richard Berenick, who is a computer science professor here at Rice University. And we're up to 31 books. And we've published all of those open educational resource books since 2012. So I hate when the clicking doesn't work to advance my slides. Okay. So what are we trying to do? We're trying to increase access to the high quality open educational content, which leads to providing students with financial relief. But it also, what we think is the true power of open, especially being at a university ourselves, is the level of academic freedom and flexibility that is gained through using open educational resources. And the long-term goal of all of this by empowering students, empowering faculty with open source content is to improve student success metrics completion, reduce time to graduation, all of that fun stuff. Okay. So I think one of the biggest questions that I get is, how does our funding model work here at Rice University as a non-profit and all of that? And I can empathize with that question because when I interviewed at Rice four and a half years ago, that was one of my first questions was like, Hey, I want to see your business model because I know I'm going to have a job in a couple years. Okay. So we use grant funding to fund the basic development of the books. We spend somewhere between half a million and a million dollars per textbook that we publish to create that textbook. What is that? How are we spending that money? It's primarily paid to the faculty who write the book for us. We usually have about 50 peer reviewers per books. So it's paying for that. It's paying for editors. Most of the time we're not able to find high-quality open source images. Like, you know, we're getting really specific about microbiology diagrams we need and things like that. So most of that content we are also creating from scratch. And so you'll see the various grant funders on the screen here. You'll see some big names, the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, Google, the Kulit Foundation and all of those. Beyond just the content, Rice and Open Stocks also work on doing a lot of teaching and learning academic research around the books and utilizing the content. Rich Dr. Baronix, one of his big things is machine learning and cognitive science. So we spend a lot of time thinking about that. And that includes one of our new initiatives, which is a cognitive science research project and beta format called Tudor. And I'll explain a little bit more what that is in a minute. However, the open stocks books themselves are completely sustainable. So how are we able to do that? Well, number one, we partner with a wide variety of independent, as well as publish or homework partners, courseware partners, clicker technology partners, all of that. And they provide their services around our textbooks and faculty don't have to use them. But a lot of the faculty members do choose to use them. So they typically range between $10 and $40. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. If a faculty member chooses to use one of those with the books, part of that student fee comes back to open stacks is what's called a mission support fee. Now, why would the technology partners agree to do something like that? Well, quite frankly, if we don't keep our content up to date, they don't have something to sell their books around or their courseware and things around. So they do that. So that's a big source of revenue for us, as well as we make a couple dollars off each print copy we sell. Now we sell our print copies, essentially at our cost, they're hardcover, full color books, they run anywhere from $29 to the thickest one we have is astronomy, it's a beast, and it's $65. And we make a couple dollars off those. Only 10% of students opt to buy those, but that is a source of revenue. But then on the expense side, we've been able to eliminate a lot of expenses as well. So number one, we don't have any sales reps here at open stacks. And it's funny, actually, some faculty call me or call someone else at the open stacks office, and they'll be like, Hey, I'm at, you know, Maricopa Community Colleges, can you stop by my office tomorrow? And we're like, Oh, we're in Houston. Or I'm in New Orleans. So no, but I can get on the phone with you. So we don't have those sales reps, which is a huge cost for the publishers. We also don't send out the comp copies. So every time a publisher walks into a faculty member's office and hands them a free copy of a book, it's not free, right? It costs that publisher around $50 just in printing and distributing those books. But if then somehow those comp copies get into the distribution system, like is use books and things that can cost the publishers up to $200. So that's a huge expense they have that we don't have. And of course, there's no fancy parties or free food. We don't really have the money to do that. We often joke and our editor in chief, David Harris often jokes actually that if they're bringing you donuts, it's probably not free. Oh, we are because now of us can afford to do that. So what do we use that money for the sustainability? Well, obviously sustain our organization, but also do major errata updates and industry updates to the books. So once a year, unless we've received no errata, we do a major errata update to every single textbook. We do it during the summer. And this is really important because a lot of people think we should be updating them all the time. But what we heard from faculty is, I don't want the book changing in the middle of the semester when I'm teaching from it. So we do those updates once a summer, usually around June 30th, July 1st. And then we send all the faculty an email saying the update the books and here's what's changed. We also can do new additions. We have the funding to be able to do revisions and new additions of our books as well through this sustainability model. So a big question I guess, why did we go the route of the technology partners? And this was really based on a significant amount of faculty feedback that we got. And you can see some of the kind of general quotes, they're not exact quotes, but they encapsulate what I hear continually. Number one, faculty were really, really concerned that the OER they would adopt an OER and it would get out of date. And I will say that there are people in the market who are perpetuating this, right? Oh, if you switch to an open stacks book, you can't be sure they're going to be around in a couple years. So don't switch to them because otherwise you'll have to rework your whole course again. I've heard that used. So we needed to figure out a way to make sure that that wasn't a reality. And a lot of faculty said realistically, and we see this particularly at the large schools, if you're teaching 2000 students a semester and you're teaching math, hand grading, even with TAs, not an option. They do need that technology partner. This one was a big one that we heard is a lot of the faculty said switching both book and platform at the exact same time is too much to ask. It's just way too much to ask for them. It's too much change at once. So one of the big things our faculty advisory board said to us is, can you go out and partner with WebAssign, with Cengage, with all of these ones that we're already using, McMillan, McGraw Hill, whomever it is, can you partner with them so that we can do the baby step and make sure that faculty can only switch one at a time. Another big one that we heard regularly Leo was, I want choice. We heard this so much. I don't like being forced into a particular platform or system. And they felt like I'm forced between choosing from a publisher that I like that has a book I like or platform that I like where I don't like the book because you can't combine those. And then they said technology is expensive. You know, we realize that can't be free because technology is a decent amount of upkeep, but can't you figure out some way to help drive down that cost too? Because we know that in a lot of cases the technology is what's really driving up the prices. So for example, one of the major publishers has come out and said, we really haven't raised our textbook prices in a couple of years. And that's actually true if you look at it. But what they did do is they took their very popular math homework system. And a couple three years ago it was $60 a student and now it's going for $120 to $180 a student. So yes they held the book very, very steady in terms of price, but they just kept amping up the homework system. So our solution to all of that was to create what we call an open market system. So you'll see on the screen right now all the different platforms and technology partners that are partnered with Rice University on the OpenStacks project. And you can see it really runs the gamut of independent as well as publisher, a couple of really high quality startups. We do vet them for quality and use and things like that before we put them out there. So the deal is that faculty can choose to use any of these with the book or none of these. So at this point I'm just going to quickly go out to the website because I do want to show you it does the number of technology partners varies depending on the book because some of the books are more predisposition to technology anyway. But for example, college physics, how many do we have now? 12. You can choose from any of these or none of these to go with the book. That is entirely the faculty member choice. So it gives them that choice. Hopefully they see some ones they're familiar with, which again makes that adoption easier. But this also forces all of these to compete for their business. So while platforms like Pearson's My Math Lab are going from somewhere again up to $180, these started around 10 and probably the maximum is 40. So not only is the student getting the book for free but now they're spending a lot less on homework. Now you will notice that one of these is an OpenStacks project. It is our tutor project which is available with only three books. Let me see if I can do this. College Physics, I think Biology and Sociology and it is a cognitive science-based platform. But as you can see, it plays within the same ecosystem. You won't hear me talk about OpenStacks tutor a lot because I don't show it any favor. We so heavily believe in this open market that I do not show that any favor or present on that one because I think it's important that it competes along with everybody else. So kind of just to visualize this feedback loop, you'll see that the ecosystem partner leverages the OpenStacks content because a lot of them aren't even developing content anymore. They would rather just take content that's already developed and move forward from there. And then they're going out and marketing. And this is something that's been really interesting to us is beyond all you all and faculty word of mouth about marketing the OpenStacks books, one of the reasons that we've been able to get up to two million students a year using our books is because all of these partners are going out and actively marketing OpenStacks with their solutions. So even though we don't have a sales force, their sales force starts to work with us. And it's been amazing. I mean, I get regular calls from their sales reps asking me questions. And then the community provides that feedback to the ecosystem and partner to improve the products or services. And I'll say even the partner does this. And I don't know if you all saw a post I did a while ago about the care framework, but for example, WebAssign, they have a gentleman there in the physics department, Matthew Kolmeier, who regularly will email us and say, Hey, I would take a look at this piece of content. I think pedagogically, we need to revise it. And having that type of feedback is really helpful. And then again, they provide those mission support fees, which allow us to not only maintain but improve the library and do those full revisions. So what has been the results of this model? Well, we're up to over 12,000 adoptions. We're impacting about two million students a year. The mission support fees have proven enough for us to be able to fund revisions. So we've done a second editions of our sociology book, our biology book, our microeconomics book, and our macroeconomics book, all just based on that, the donations back from those groups. And we're planning on doing up to three reviews of books a year to see if we need to do another edition of them. Again, we do those major title and Arata updates based on this. And this is the big thing in 2018, OpenStacks, the library books that we have reached a milestone of doing this model makes it entirely self sustaining. So what that means is if we want to develop a new book, like right now, we're developing a series of six business books that we still need grant funding for. But if we need to revise our astronomy book or American government book or publish new editions of those, do the Arata updates every year, all of that is self sustaining. We are able to do that without any additional grant funding. So Quill, at this point, I'm done. So I will turn it back over to you to start the discussion. Thanks, there's a question here. And actually, it's about, I think the wider question that folks are asking on the chat is how do you, how does OpenStacks to plan on what future books they're working on? So you're doing business now, but how are those choices made? So there's a lot that goes into that decision. So far, we've been really doing the freshman and sophomore core, right? And the reason that we have done that, there are a lot of reasons that we choose specific books, you know, in terms of like ability to do it as an open source content and things like that. But there are two main reasons. Number one, how many students are taking the course nationwide? I'm looking for something really high enrollment, right? So for example, US history and psychology have a million students a year in them right now. The second thing is how expensive are the textbooks? So for example, there are some markets that are high enrollment like college success. But the average textbook cost is $40. So that's decent, right? Especially when you're comparing it to the fact that I walked into a major university bookstore the other day, and a microbiology book was going for $425. That's the one I'm concerned about. So we primarily look at those two factors. But then from there, we look at degree completion, right? We know that especially at the community college level, there is a push towards doing the Z degrees. So we're looking at that. And since we right now, we kind of have one book in each subject area. And so now with the math and some of the others, we're looking at, okay, what about doing verticals from there? What about taking to the next level of it? So for example, with our math books, we now have all the way from developmental math all the way to calculus three. What are those other subjects that we should be doing that next? So it's all kind of a combination of that. And looking at all of that, it looked the business books were the next ones to come out. So there'll be six business books in the next two years. Okay. So and that's there's like three or four questions in the chat about and that's a great answer. I think everybody as we're thinking as open education advocates and as people who are working on developing courses, I think if we think in terms of open stacks and understanding that the real work is around getting those high enrolled undergraduate courses handled, then there's a good answer there for why like college success isn't done or why we're not working any ESL at open stacks. There's other projects that are working in those areas. And I think we need to recognize those two. Oh yeah, absolutely. That's definitely another thing that we look at is, is there something else that's being developed somewhere else? Because, you know, one of the big things that we don't want to do is replicate efforts. Yeah. There's another and I'm going to stop looking at the chat in just a second. So Una, would you mind monitoring the chat because I'm going to put my slides up. But there's a question here about accessibility and the PDFs and things. You wouldn't mind taking that one. Sure. So accessibility, our web view is the one that we recommend for accessibility. So that's the one where we're able to achieve that level double A section 508. So we are continually looking at working on increasing the accessibility of our PDFs. But in terms of accessibility, I would highly recommend the web view. Okay. Yeah. And then so and actually I'm going to launch off of that for just a second and talk a little bit about the comments and what the purpose of the comments is. And I'm hoping everybody's looking at my screen again because I think part of what we need to recognize around any open project is that it's a part of hopefully things that are openly licensed become a part of the commons, which this concept of the comments comes from creative comments. But it also comes from a lot of writers in open education that talk about the comments being the collection of resources that we're all developing and growing that are openly licensed that are managed and created by a community and it is a system of resources. And the community is a big part of that. So when we talk about OER stewards in a minute, they're a part of the commons. And the reason why I want to point that out is because that question about accessibility of the open stacks PowerPoints, for example, is a really good question. But I think it's important to note that the California community college system, the OEI initiative has been working on updating those PowerPoint slides. So they are available as accessible tools through California. And that's a part of the commons. That's the California system being a steward of the open movement. So that's a great example of open stacks has created something wonderful that supports all of us. And then that somebody adding to the openness of that resource and the usability of that resource. So I just that's an example of the commons in action. So I want to make sure as we go into this conversation that everybody has an understanding of when we talk about the care framework, what we're talking about. So I will send out to our email lists links to all of the people I'm referencing right now. But the care framework was published earlier this year. And Nicole, I don't remember the date, maybe you do. But I was like, was it January? But the care framework sets up this a framework for understanding how all partners who are part of the commons work together. It kind of is a set of values for our field. And so it rests on these four ideas, which is contribute, which means share your resources, share things to the commons, not just by putting an open license on them, but by actually making them available. Because just because something has an open license and it's sitting on my desktop, which somebody noted earlier is very messy, does not mean it's a part of the commons because it's openly licensed, but it's not really openly licensed if I don't share it. It's about attribution, which means giving people credit, releasing work really and often, and then empowering other people to be a part of the community. And so if we are stewards, meaning those of us who work in open education and who are trying to build this commons in the center of that movement, think about all of those four things when we're acting in our open education space, we can support the commons. And part of supporting that commons is growing the number of OER stewards that are out there. And I want to pause right now and ask if anybody has any questions about, and please feel free to jump in the chat. This is the kind of community question thing. I'm not, I don't want to lecture you, I want to hear from you what questions you have about the framework and how you might apply the framework. Una says the Care Framework was published March 4th. Thank you, January. That was way off on dates. Okay, March. And there is links available to it, but if you just Google the Care Framework and OER, it comes right up. It's one of the most interesting, I will say, you know, I've been a part of a lot of professional organizations in my life. And this reads a lot like a set of values like, you know, I trained as a librarian and there are, you know, guiding principles to that profession. And this reads a lot like guiding principles for a profession. And I find that really, really supportive to think in terms of what are the values of OER? And how do we interact with them? So I have some questions, of course, I'm hoping you'll all chime in on answering them. Because as I think about the Care Framework, I came up with some things that I want to talk about. So the Care Framework, I don't want to read this question to you, but I have some, I think there was a, when it was first published, there was some controversy and some different applications of it. Is it a rubric for assessing partnerships? Is it values that support the field? Really, I think it was a call for practices that we can use to maintain our movement. But how can we apply it? How can you apply it personally? Or how can it be applied as we make decisions? Like the ones that opens, like Nicole described, OpenStacks makes partnerships with platforms and commercial entities, which help to support not only OpenStacks, but our overall mission in terms of serving students with lower cost, but the best possible learning resources. So how can we apply the framework to realize those best intentions? Nicole, you talked a little bit about how OpenStacks bets your partners. Is it the, does OpenStacks reach out to people, to different organizations, or do they reach out to OpenStacks? It's kind of a mix. It really depends. Oh, my camera's weird. Hold on. There we go. That's why. It's kind of a mix of what we do, and it really depends. Like for example, we're working on an accounting book right now, and accounting is something where you really, really, really do need a software to go with that these days. It's not like the old days when I took accounting and you get that paper book and it's like crazy and pencils and oh my gosh. So there we actively went out and looked at who was the accounting software in the field, and if they would be willing to partner with us. But then sometimes it's someone who comes up with a really, really interesting product or a software that's something that we're like, yeah, this could be really helpful. So a good example of a new partner that we have that I think is just really cool, and it's a small startup, but I just think it has so much potential is GraphLock. And what this is is it takes the cell phone and you can download a completely free graphing calculator on your cell phone. So eliminating that $100 graphing calculator cost. And the faculty, students can pay $5 to join a class, and the faculty can lock this down during tests so that the student can use this as their graphing calculator, but they can't cheat. So I mean, I think that's fantastic. I think that's a really interesting startup that partners in terms of mission of being able to offer something at a very low cost that's going to impact students and really give faculty back control of their courses 100%. So I think there's a lot of different things that we look at. So it's a mix of people that come to us with really unique ideas and then also looking at who else is in the market. I will tell you that among some of the major publishers, I have a very big reputation of trying to get a hold of them and trying to talk to them about what I think is a reasonable partnership and try to convince them that they should do that. Sometimes successful, sometimes not, but I keep trying. I like that approach to all you can do is ask, right? It's not the worst if they say no. Okay. So other thoughts on this from the community, how are we doing in the chat? Pretty good. Most of them have been around formatting, so not directly on the care framework at this point. Okay. All right. So I might come back to this question because I think it's kind of central to the overall question of how we do our work. And part of it is, so again, if we're not applying the care framework as in, I think David Wiley thinks of it in terms of it's not meant to be a tool for shaming organizations and people because they're not apart doing exactly what we think they should do, but it's a way of asking questions like how much of this helps me give back to the commons when I make this agreement, when I work with a platform, how does it help me behave as an actor in the open education space? And I think that's a really interesting question. So, and that gets to the next question I have. How do we make those decisions for institutional partnerships? And Quill, there was a comment from Nathan Smith regarding the care framework that you might want to look at. Oh, okay. Is it a longer one? Because I It's right at the end. It's the most recent. Okay, let's see. I can read it to you. It seems like the care framework articulates an ideal, but it seems like it could be a tool for naming and shaming. So, and that's actually the exact language that comes out of David's Wiley's post in his blog. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but that's an interesting note, Nathan. And I would love to hear more from you on, because I think it's true, but I think any list of values can be used the same way, right? I value something, and so if you don't value it, you must be wrong and deserve to be shamed in some way. So, and I don't think that's the intention of the care framework. And I think it has to do with application and how we as a community deal with with how we act on what we've see as values. And so I think that's one of the things we can do with the care framework is ask ourselves, is this a hidden habit that we have, naming and shaming, that we should maybe see and bring to light in other ways? I'm reading the quotes here. So, Dave, I want to ask you a question about this because I love that you're saying that you're asking students to share their work. How are they sharing it outside of your course? How does the rest of the commons get access to it? You're using Wikipedia. Oh, that's great. That's very cool. There's a comment from Carrie, too, about contributing your work to the commons. Would you like me to read that to you? Yes, if you wouldn't mind because I'd like another voice in here. So this is from Carrie Gitz at Austin Community College. And Carrie says, how soon do people usually contribute their work to the commons? In other words, sometimes there's hesitation to go prime time right away. When is the right time? Should the work have been piloted and used in a course first before it is shared with the commons? That's a really good question. And I think I'll answer it from my perspective and then I want to open it to other people to answer. Because from my perspective, I think it depends on the nature of the work. And I think it depends on the nature of the, and it depends on your comfort level. So I have a colleague, Christy Fero, and she will be, she might blush a little bit that I'm going to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. She said to me at one time because I was like, I'm not ready to share this. It's not perfect. I taught it in one class and it's not perfect. And Christy said, so you'll share it with students, but not the rest of us. Which her point being that sometimes I think that I can perfect things over the length of a quarter, but she's pointing out that I'm teaching with them, which means they should be as close to perfect as I can get them and why not share it anyway. So that question changed my habit in sharing and I will often put things up that don't feel finished to me. Because if I can get them to the commons earlier, then I can ask the commons to help me make them better. And sometimes that works. And sometimes I'm sharing in dark corners of the web that nobody ever finds. And so in effect, I'm not really sharing them. So, which is why I think it's a great example of being able to use something bigger like wikiver city or wiki books, putting it out there where people are likely to find it, rather than sharing it on like, you know, an unlisted YouTube link is not public. It's, it's unlisted, meaning only people who I give that link to can use it. And there's a lot of places in the web you can do that. So I guess it depends on what you makes you comfortable, but I'm wondering how other people do it, because I know there's also grant projects that really want the teachers to teach with the resource once before they turn it in to the grants. And that's to shake out any really, any sticking points in the class and to fix anything that didn't work well. And I like that kind of sense of there should be a rough draft and that speaking as a writer, there should be a rough draft before there's a finished draft. But I also believe that good writing happens when you share your rough drafts. So what are other people experiencing? Regina, good point. Sometimes, you know, it's hard to release things because we have been trained as academics that, you know, something doesn't get published in an academic journal until it's perfect or near perfect. And there's a really good reason for that. The editorial process serves a, serves a purpose in academia. You know, like you want to make sure you didn't hurt human subjects or you're not going to hurt human subjects. That's why we need that level of investment. But in academic review, however, in educational resources, often that editorial review actually strips out the diverse perspectives, which is another goal of the Care Framework. It's a stated goal of the Care Framework to bring diversity to the commons. I think one of the things that I appreciate about the Care Framework is what I was seeing, I read the CC, OER listserv as well as the Spark listserv and you all are so active and I love it because I learned so much. And whenever, so a lot of you know that I run the institutional partner program and that's for all OER, not just for open stacks. And so when someone's trying to find something that's one of the first places I search is both of the listservs. Now I have your fun link and I will use that. But one of the things I kept seeing over and over again is now there's this new entry into a publisher has created this platform and they've approached our leadership about it. And what do I do about this? Is it something that I should even engage them? Is it the leadership is asking me if it's something that they're asking me to investigate and see if it's good? I don't know if it's good or not. And I think there's that big question where I like the five Rs in that the five Rs are really great for judging the openness of a particular like a piece of work, right? Whether it be a photograph or a book or whatever it is. But I really like the Care Framework because I kept hearing over and over again, what about this company they approached our leadership and they're asking me my opinion. Is it open washing? Is it what is it? You know, and I think this is one way that we can kind of have a litmus test for that. But I agree with Nathan that's all something we strive for. I don't think anybody really meets the full Care Framework either. No, I agree. And I think I like your description of it as a litmus test. I use it as I'm starting to use it as a self and institutional reflection tool. Like, you know, reflecting on our past actions and thinking about our future decisions and using it kind of as a personal litmus test for testing our decision making processes against this set of values because I think that's what a set of values is really for a self-reflection in a lot of ways. There's a really good question here about where to share resources and what platforms provide the best visibility. And that's a really, really good question. Regina's response is put in as many platforms as you can. But I think in a lot of places, to bring it back to platforms, part of what has been happening in the past year in particular, year and a half maybe, is there are a growing number of companies and startups and spaces that are providing, that are approaching our institutions and asking to be a part of our OER solution in terms of how we deliver OER to students. And so I have questions for all of you about what are the questions and relationships? How are you answering those those basic sales calls? How are you answering the question of where does our, how does our institution store OER that we're delivering to students? What is our delivery space? How does that work? And how do we operate within organizations that are asking us to be a part of that solution? It's one of the questions I have here. Maybe nobody has an answer to that question, but I guess, so I'll give my own institution as an example. We have to kind of clarify my question. At Pierce College, we have institutional kind of rules and systems around working with software developers or software companies, right? We have, if somebody approaches us and says, do you want to buy our new registration management system? Well, we can say for advising purposes, then we have a set of questions that we ask and a set of contract positions that we take as an institution that are predefined. But when somebody comes to me and says, we want to help you by providing this web tool to help you share your open materials, sometimes we have a process for that and sometimes we don't. Like we have the traditional questions you might ask before you share student data, but we don't necessarily have a system for deciding whether or not the company we're making an agreement with is a part of the commons because we don't ask that. So I'm going to reference the article that was attached to the registration for this, and I don't know how many people got a chance to read it, but Paul Stacy wrote an article about our people, how do we know if platforms are good members of the community? And one of the things he asks is, are they giving more to the community than they're taking from it? How do we deal with that question or how are folks dealing with that question? I don't want to bring up specific companies, but there are organizations that have approached me in the past year that have asked us who want my institution to contract with them specifically to share our OER so that our students are going through their platform, so they go through our learning management system and then into a new platform to look at open materials because it provides things like mobile readability and download tools and tracking. A really, really common one that's current right now is analytics on how students are interacting with the resources. So those kinds of tools, there's a lot of people out there who are offering that now. And the difficult thing is that they want to lock those OER behind a password protection because that's how they verify that somebody's paying for it, right? But that means that if my faculty are creating open materials on a platform, that platform, it's harder for me to get it out of that platform and put it on a platform wherever everybody else can see it. Has anybody else approached that question? And what are you doing to address it? And the Rebus community is a great example of places that are openly licensed, where it's easy for everybody to find those materials. But is anybody finding issues with sharing resources outside of your institution? So, hey, Quill, this is Preston. And I think this is an excellent question that you bring up. And I think it's really something that there may not be a lot of answers to. I hope some folks have some answers. But I think it really merits some real consideration and reflection because I think it's a bit disingenuous for a company or an organization to promote themselves as an OER company when what they're really providing is a technology platform that is really not about sharing and delivering open content, but it's more about personalized learning in some cases or learning analytics or whatever their focus is. And I think institutions need to be very careful about what is it that these companies and organizations are actually providing and weigh very carefully the pros and cons of one platform against another, as well as what an institution may be already able to do by leveraging the technology that they already use and resources that are openly licensed and openly accessible. That's a good point. Yeah. So I guess, so Preston, when you're approached by an organization who is asking to make partnerships with your institution to deliver resources, how do you ask those questions? What's the way? Because I think part of our responsibility has to be to educate organizations that think that they're offering a solution to open around what we mean by open, because I think that there's different definitions throughout the field. So what kinds of conversations have you had around that? One of the things that I do is I look at what is it that these institutions are using as their primary talking points? What is it that they're promoting that sort of sets them apart? Hopefully they are trying to set themselves apart. If they're not, then my conversation is, well, there's a half a dozen other use out there. So why would I contract with you versus A, B, or C? But what I really like to do is look at what it is that they're focusing on as their value added and then have them explain to me how their product or service is going to benefit students at my institution more so than some of the alternatives being either competition from them or alternatives that we may already have in place by leveraging our learning management system and our student information system and CMS and other types of products that we have as well as materials that our faculty are developing or remixing and sharing. And so then it becomes a lot more difficult because the conversation moves away from kind of that talking memo to real scrutiny over what is it that they are trying to deliver and are they able to differentiate themselves and provide real evidence that they're going to be able to provide the outcomes that would really make consideration of their platform, something that we should pursue further. That's a great answer. It's partially looking at what are your institutional goals? What do you need from the resource and does the value added bring that to what you need as an outcome? But it's also really, I think, hard of the conversation also needs to be how many barriers does this put between the goal of creative, of sharing the hidden goal of being a part of an open education project that's not hidden necessarily, but I think can easily get lost, which is contributing back the resources. So Andrew asked a question here and I think it's a really good one. I'm reading it from the chat. How would you describe giving more than take? With an open resource like OAR, every participant is always going to take more than they possibly can contribute back. How much contribution back is enough? And those are really, really good questions. And actually when I read Paul's initial take on definition of the comments, I thought, you know, that's really easy to say if you're thinking of bigger projects where you have a lot to give back. But then I started to think about it and I realized something because part of the original definition of the comments had to deal a lot more with physical commodities like, you know, I started this slideshow with a picture of the Boston Commons, which was the idea of the community manages this green space that's there for everybody, right? And the natural resources that are there are for everybody. And so we all take care of it. We try not to litter on it, things like that. Or we pay taxes so that it's supported by the community who picks up by the federal agency that picks it up or the community agency that picks it up. All of those things that go into managing a green space commons being a traditional example of that. But when we're talking about the intellectual commons, which is basically what we're talking about, we're talking about a digital space that's not a specific space, right? There's a lot of different places where the commons lives that, you know, if I take a piece of an idea or a piece of digital concept and make a copy of it, I haven't diminished the thing that exists originally. I've just taken a piece of it. But when I think about giving back to the commons, I think what I'm actually I'm thinking of is sharing how I've used that resource so other people can or sharing how my colleagues have used that resource so that other people can use it the same way or in different ways or sharing back. Nicole mentioned that one of the things that feeds the open stacks ecosystem as part of the commons is that people contribute ideas for supporting and changing a resource. Like she mentioned, was it physics, Nicole? I think you said a physics person at one of your partners who's constantly coming back with, you know, you might want to change this because a better way to teach it pedagogically is this or that that's giving back to the commons. And it's very, very, I don't know how much effort it takes for that individual, but it can be as simple as I see something here that needs to change. Can you change it? So, yeah, and if I can weigh in on this, I have a really fun story about this. So when I first started working at open stacks, we were really small. There were 12 people in my office was a closet. It was fun. But one of the big barriers that I kept getting when I was out at schools was professors are like, you know, I mean, we've all been taught and I was a business major. There's no such thing as free lunch, right? So when I would go out and I would say to professors, well, this is free. They would look at me and be like, yeah, right, what's the catch, right? And I was like, huh, this is a really big problem. How do I solve this problem? So, but one of the things that our grant funders, and especially I think they I've been really impressed over the years with the Gates Foundation because they're very big on this metrics, metrics, metrics, right? So we are constantly getting asked to open stacks. Okay, we gave you this much money to develop these books. How many students did you impact? And we don't want like, we want faculty reported impact, right? How many students? And so we have to maintain this massive database on how many students we've impacted and what schools are using and all of that for our grant reporting. Well, that gets really fun when everything's completely free. And so no one has to tell us anything, right? So like, what I started saying was, Oh, there is a cost, you have to go on our website and report your adoption to us. There's a form you fill out. It takes two minutes. I need you to do that. Or you can or I didn't say you can't use the books, but I was like, I need this is the cost. And everybody was like, haha, I got you. And then they started doing it. And I was like, okay, that's really all it took. But so from the content perspective, like a content provider, we really, really, really need to know who's using our books. That's really important to us to have that information so that we can report it back to grant funders, because that determines like they want to see a return on investment. And if we can prove that they'll give us more money to do more books, right? That's the cycle. So that's a big one. Number two, faculty regularly giving us feedback, giving us a rata, you know, even comments like some of the comments in the chat now about like editing the books and things we need that feedback desperately. We send out a survey to every faculty member who we know is adopted our book and asked for that feedback once a year. And that really helps us determine when we need to do revisions of the books. And it also, all of the rata revisions that we do are generated by the community. And I actually heard a faculty member at Troy University say that they they asked him what he thought the cost of using OER was. And he was an American government professor. And he said, I viewed as my responsibility and my cause that I have to report back changes to them that need to be made. And I thought that was great. Also, a lot of faculty develop additional resources around our books. You know, we offer some basic ancillaries, but it started with Cyrus Health in California that he developed a campus course shell around our books. And then California Community Colleges, the online education consortium got together and said, we're going to do that. We're going to develop course shells around the open sex content to make it easier to get them in campus. And then they donated them back. And we've actually created online faculty communities on OER Commons so that you can donate resources for other faculty. And then we send out surveys and things like that. I just sent out a survey because we do want that usage information. We particularly want to know what are students using? What are they like? What are they not like? How is this helping their education? And where are we falling short so that we can continue to improve on the technology side? I think one of the biggest thing is that we do have a link and I'll post it where you can see the list of open sex partners. And these are all the companies who are donating financial resources back to open sex to be able to support that content. And I think that's really important to know is who is doing that. And I think another big thing is conspicuous attribution. I also won't name names, but there are instances where faculty will come to us and say, I'm not using your book. I'm using something in X platform. And what they don't realize is that's actually our book in X platform. Because it's not super obvious in the platform, faculty don't even know where that content comes from. So you'll actually see we created this branding mark called OpenStacks Ally. And if you go to our partner's pages, they will actually say, we're an ally, we are partnered, we contribute back to the community. And I think that's another way that we can do that. And so I'd like to see more of that in the community. And I'm not quite sure how we could do that with other models, but I'd love to see it. And I will shut up. Now, I love that you brought that up. And I know I'm running up against time and I want to give anybody else who wants to talk a chance. But I really appreciate that whole note around giving attribution. It's an ethic that we really need to lean on in terms of it should be really easy for people to find out when they're using OpenStacks or any other piece of content. And I love the idea of the OpenStacks Ally. I hadn't seen it as much. So I'm going to look for the branding now. I'm excited. One of the questions that I think came up here is that, well, actually, I'm going to let everybody go back through the chat really quick and raise, somebody raise a question that's from the chat that I haven't had a chance to participate with yet that you think is really important that we should talk about in the next couple of minutes. And I'm not going to go through all of my slides because, you know, the questions are here. While we do that, I want to make sure to talk about a couple of more things that are coming up for CCCOER and our community in case you're interested. So if you happen to be a part of a member in CCCOER, we're having our all members meeting. Our second all members meeting of the year is tomorrow. So see your members list for the invite. But stay in touch with us through our community email throughout the summer. We know it's summertime and some people are halfway out the door. But we will be around all summer and watching the list. So if you happen to be in your in your office, pay attention. So this is our last webinar for this year. But we do have some new tools for you. And remember that our old webinars are still available. So we have a new link on the CCCOER website that I want people to know about. It's under the learn menu of CCCOER that lists a set of helpful resources for developing OER project and OER. So I want to thank Kiri Dolly, who is amazing at helping to work on our website between she and Liz and Una. Our website for the past year has just grown exponentially. It's a beautiful thing. So please don't forget to use it. Because also our archived webinars are there and we have an entire, I think they go back, Una, help me. At least go back three years. I know they go back further than that. But we have archived every webinar we do. We record them and share them. So please, you know, think about that as a professional development tool in the coming year. Okay, so is there anything? Oh, it's right on noon. So if people want to stick around for a few minutes, I will. At noon, I'm sorry, I'm in the Pacific. We have used our hour, is what I'm trying to say. But I would love to stay and answer more questions. And I want to thank you all for your questions in the chat window. They helped to grow my thought process on what it means to be a part of the OER Commons, but also what it means to be to make partnerships within the Commons. And I want to take the time to thank Nicole right now. Thank you for giving us another inside view of what's happening at OpenStacks and how OpenStacks works with your partners, and how partners support the work at OpenStacks. I think it's really important. Thank you for having me. Have a great day, everyone. Yeah.