 Welcome everyone to nurturing open education through stakeholder surveys. This is a this is a webinar with CCC OER and my executive president of my council. So Una Daly here, director of the community college consortium for OER and I'm here with Dr. Judith Sabesta who I'll let introduce herself. Thank you so much, Una. I'm so glad to be here and have the opportunity to present. I serve as the executive director of the digital higher education consortium of Texas based here in Austin, Austin, Texas. And I also have the privilege of serving as the CCC OER executive council president. Thanks, Una. Wonderful. Thank you, Judith. And so today we're here to talk to you about how using surveys as one tool to increase communication between our members and between us and our members and how that supports and nurtures open education programs. And so that's pillar number four of the UNESCO OER recommendations. And we've decided to split this into two case studies for you. So we have a case study based on CCC OER and its annual survey that we've been doing since 2013 actually with our members. And then Judith will share the biennial surveys that Digitex does for the statewide Texas group. So excited to tell you about both of those survey efforts. So just to really quickly about the community college consortium for OER, we have members across the United States and Canada founded over a decade ago. And our mission is expanding awareness and adoption of high quality OER. We work with faculty and librarians, administrators on this work. It's about fostering OER leadership, but at the heart of it is improving student equity and success. And those things haven't changed over the last decade. Those are still really important, although many underpinnings technology things have changed in the last 10 years. Just a really quick look at our membership. About 20% represent statewide or system memberships, which of course Judith as the executive director of Digitex is one of those statewide membership groups. We also have 20% that are multi-college districts and about 60% of our members are individual colleges that are trying to do this work around open education. And I call out to California, Texas, and Wisconsin, which are the states within our consortium that have the most members. So why conduct an annual survey? Well, our members when they join, we get to know them, but over time they change. And we sometimes we don't have an opportunity to have those one-on-one conversations. So we really hear about what's going on at their institution and what their needs are. And so at least annually, we want to check in and we like to do that more often as well. We want to understand what the value of the membership within CCCOER is. And we want to encourage collaboration between our members because we know that together we are a very powerful group. And finally, we want to understand their member priority. So we always ask about what's coming up in the next year for you and then what do you see two to three years out? And this helps us with planning and promoting collaborations for our upcoming year of activities. But we don't wait until the end of the year to ask these questions. We have quarterly meetings, other opportunities, of course, to interact with folks. But just last March, we did a poll during our quarterly meeting in March and we said, you know, there's so many wonderful things we could do this summer. What would you like to hear about? And we got some great feedback from our members at that point. And that led to the creation of a virtual book club focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion this summer. And also the open pedagogy tutorial series. So wonderful feedback through that as well. So this last year, we shipped out our survey early in May. And we usually give our members about three weeks to respond back and we encourage them multiple times over that time period to please fill that out for us. And so we were very happy to get almost 40%, a little under 40% of our membership responding this year. And what I wanted to tell you about on this particular slide is that the largest role of the respondent to this survey was administrators. So those are often the folks who are running programs, making some decisions around policies at their institutions or organizations. So they're a very important voice. And we were glad to see that we also did have over 40%, almost 50% faculty or librarians who responded. So those are definitely our boots on the ground and very important voices as well. And OER, dedicated OER staffs, continues to be a minority at our institutions and organizations. Most institutions have not established an OER department, but a few have. And who's in charge of open education on campus? Another interesting one. Once again, libraries came out as the top department that's in charge, but e-learning and teaching and learning centers also are a very critical leader in this area for the institution. And once again, dedicated OER open education staff is in a minority at most of our institutions. So we were really pleased to see that 41% of our respondents reported an increased interest in open education for 2021. And part of that was our survey back in 2020 indicated that the pandemic had really shifted priorities and that OER was taking a little bit of a back burner during that time. So we were very happy to see that it had come back really strongly. And 61% reported that student savings was the most successful aspect of their open education program over the last year. And you can see there were other various pieces that were important as well, such as pedagogy, improved pedagogy, equity, etc. So what were their top professional development needs? Measuring the impact of open education, looking at open pedagogy as a tool for student empowerment. And of course, I just mentioned that over the summer we had an open pedagogy tutorial series. Open education as an anti-racism tool, which is another important project, which we won't have time to talk about today, but is a really something that our members are thinking about and very concerned. And once again, OER course design, open education leadership continue to be top needs. Challenges, funding is often at the very top of that. And so I wanted to tell you about some of the funding sources. This was the first time this year that we actually asked about funding sources. So federal and state grants were a little over 60% of what was funding the work at our member institutions and organizations. Colleges were also funding that work through innovation grants, faculty stipend grants as well at 73%. So really wonderful to see that. But in terms of having an ongoing open education budget, that still isn't the minority for most of our organizations, looking at about 15% and private donors came in even a little bit less at 6%. So what were your priorities for the next one to three years? Honestly, this hasn't changed much in the last couple of years as we compare between 2020 and 2021, raising OER awareness on campus. And this is not just for faculty, it's also administrators. And over the last few years, really getting students involved. So figuring out how students can also be advocates for open education. As beneficiaries of much of this work, they can be quite articulate. And also faculty OER adoptions, obviously that's a huge one. Improving student success is often the why around the open education work. But increasing equitable education opportunities, that's really moving ahead in terms of which students, I mean, we do want to help all students, but we want to work particularly with those students who can benefit most from open education. And what has changed between 2020 and 2021, just kind of summing that up, in 2020, our member said that their most successful aspect was creating OER awareness on campus in 2021 at student savings. So OER awareness is a little higher this year, which we're so happy to hear. And that student savings is something that they can really claim as a success measure. Back in 2020, lack of time was identified. And of course, you know, we were right in the midst of kind of that really worst part of that early part of the pandemic. And now institutions, organizations are reporting that getting faculty by it is one of their top challenges. So excited to help them work with that with those challenges that they have. So collaboration opportunities, I mentioned a little earlier, collaboration is what our consortium is all about. How can we support our members in collaborating together? And how what activities can we create to encourage that? So what was reported back to us is that networking is the really key piece. And so faculty and librarian came up very much at the top with leadership networks right underneath that and equity focused networks. And so we do have a program this year where we're doing some an intensive program called the Regional Leaders of Open Education, and it is very focused on faculty and librarians. And also, I would say mid level administrators, it's a leadership network. And it has a very heavy equity focus. So we, we encourage our members to join that group. But we will also have activities that will focus on bringing all of these constituents together. And the Student Advocacy Network is new this year. It was a little less than half of our, our respondents, but we're really excited to see that as well. Something for us to work on this year. And so the, we wanted to ask about the benefits of global open education community collaboration, because of course CCCR, CEOER is part of Open Education Global, which is a global organization representing members in 40 countries around the world. So one thing that our members said is that they felt that they could contribute and also have access to more openly licensed materials through this wonderful community. There's a, there's a strong interest in mentoring, both regionally and then across country boundaries. So something that we're working on this year, we hope by that, by mid, mid level of this year, we'll have more plans around what that mentoring work might look like. And our, our folks are very interested in global and multicultural perspectives. And we recently just had a webinar actually last week where we were fortunate to have some open ed education folks from both the Caribbean and from Nigeria. So, and people were very pleased with that and we hope to do more. So we want to take action on these surveys. We don't want to simply hear what our members need. And so what we were very clearly told is they want professional development on OER impact studies, course design, how to get funded, what are the funding opportunities and how to pursue those. Open pedagogy and students and collab collaboration opportunities both regionally and globally. And so we have already started to put plans in place for our professional development this year around those topics. And lessons learned. There's always some great lessons learned. Next year, we're going to ask a little bit more information about the role on campus and what their priorities are and see if that creates a slightly different skew on what the important, the important challenges and professional development needs are. We're going to ask some more open-ended questions this upcoming year. So we can better understand some of the priorities, some of the priorities of our members and dig a little bit deeper. And finally, we're going to clarify the goals of the annual survey in order to make the results more actionable. So this is something that we've been thinking about for a while and next year is the time to do it. And finally, we have chosen a new survey tool that we think will really support us in the analysis of the data. And so I now want to turn this over to my colleague, Dr. Judith Sabesta. So I'm going to stop sharing and let her come in. Thank you so much, Una. I think there's some interesting and not entirely surprising intersections between the CCC OER survey and our own. Let me pull up my slides. So as I mentioned, I serve as executive director of the digital higher education consortium of Texas, also known as Digitex. We serve all 50 Texas public community college districts. We were founded as the virtual college back in 1998 and we facilitate intercollegiate course sharing, among other initiatives, including leading the Texas Quality Matters Consortium, providing free membership in WCET state authorization network. We conduct research and we host free webinars on digital higher education. And then most remain to my presentation today, we support a variety of open education initiatives across Texas and beyond. These include our biennial statewide survey, which I'm going to focus on more today, a statewide annual conference, and a variety of professional development activities, including our Texas Learn OER course. And of course, not insignificant, is that we provide a 40% discount to Texas community colleges on the CCC OER membership. For my presentation today, let me focus some on this biennial statewide survey in which we have engaged and partnered with several organizations on. So I'd like to do a kind of who, what, why, when, where sort of sort of thing with this. So why are we doing the statewide survey? Well, to collect data to make informed decisions on resource allocation and initiatives to better understand, to get a better, broader understanding of open education across the state and to engage in partnerships and collaborations in order to amplify our reach and impact as an organization. Our primary goal, though, is to help build an open ecosystem in Texas, and thus across the country and the world. So who and when we partner with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which is our state higher education agency, and with the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management and Education. This has been a very productive partnership for us and has enabled us to have, to bring multiple perspectives and various expertise to the survey that we conduct. As I have mentioned and UMA did as well, this is a biennial survey. We first conducted it in 2019, and this year we have conducted the second, and we're just about to wrap up the final report for that second survey. The purpose of the survey is to examine the landscape of OER programs, policies and practices, and higher education institutions across Texas. We administer the survey to all 158 to and for your public and private nonprofit institutions across the state. New for 2021, though, is that we administered also the survey to 11 independent health and medical centers, our health-related institutions across Texas. We send the survey directly via email to campus CAO's chief academic officers and chief instructional officers, and the timeline both years has been roughly 10 months from the initial partner meeting to the final report that we released, and we will soon be releasing for 2021. So we had 111 respondents with two-year colleges interestingly being the highest percentage of those respondents. Findings included some things like the growth of formal OER programs and policies has been certainly something that has been a highlight of the 2021 survey data. We've seen an increase in fully OER-based courses, especially again at two-year institutions. 59% of the institutions report using OER to meet diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines. And interestingly, we've seen a correlation between cross-office engagement on campus and OER leadership in the state. So when there has been cross-collaboration among different divisions, offices, and units across the campus, we see that those often are our OER leaders in the state. Back in 2019, awareness building and professional learning were key priorities. They remain that way, and similar to what Una talked about with the CCC OER member survey, faculty buy-in is very crucial, and that even increased for the 2021 survey. So what are some implications of the survey that we've conducted? Well, we've seen the importance of partnerships, funding availability, collecting impact data, and engaging faculty and students, probably not surprising for these. And what these findings have led to for implications are recommendations for such strategies and initiatives as the creation of a state OER playbook to build capacity and drive systems change around OER, increased support for professional development and creation of OER for career and technical education. There seems to be a need for that across the state. And also, there was a recommendation to create a series of case studies on OER best practices in Texas. And we jumped on that right away. And my organization actually just recently released the first of these, creating and adopting open educational resources across the state. Finally, some tips and takeaways for you if you're considering implementing an OER survey, be it at your organization, your institution within your system, or even across states. Partner network collaborate. And this will very much strengthen the data that you can collect through the survey and also capitalize on the unique strengths of each partner. The coordinating board and ISCME both have just amazing research chops and data analysis chops. To be perfectly honest, Digitech was able to contribute financial resources to this partnership so that we could commission the research from ISCME, the organization ISCME. So that was kind of one of our strengths as Digitech. But we also have research expertise as well. Work to create a strategy for a high response rate. Again, this is where the expertise of the coordinating board came in, because they can send an email to the institutions and as a state higher ed agency, frankly, the institutions listen and they respond. Get the survey into the hands of the right people. That will differ across contexts. For us, we knew that it was getting it into the hands of the CAOs and the CIOs, so that then they could collaborate with OER stakeholders across campus to get the most accurate data. Assure that respondents, assure the respondents that disaggregated data will not be released in order to ensure the integrity of the data. Plan for multiyear surveys if you can for greater impact and understanding as CCCOER has done and as we are doing. And finally, celebrate completion of the survey and the dissemination of your findings. And I'll turn it back over to you. Well, thank you so much, Judith. I learned quite a bit listening to your wonderful sharing about the Texas OER survey. And I think now we want to continue this conversation in OEG Connect. So we'll be posting some resources there. And we hope to hear feedback from you. So thank you so much for joining us for this pre-recorded session. Thank you, everyone.