 Welcome, everyone, to the zero textbook cost degree webinar during open education week. This is Uda Daly from the open education consortium. I am happy to have three experts here with me today to tell you about the zero textbook cost degree initiative that is spreading throughout our colleges and universities. Before we get into the details, I just wanted to go over a few technical logistics with you. We are using Blackboard Collaborate this morning and we thank the California Community College System for providing us with this access. If you are new to Blackboard, you will see a window on the left side of your screen which has participants in it. If you scroll down, you should see yourself in there. Directly underneath you should see a chat window. You can make comments and ask questions as we go along in that chat window. At the end of the webinar, we will have time for Q&A and you can get on the microphone as well. Once again, I want to welcome everyone to open education week. It is going on all week. It is a global celebration to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities that exist for everyone throughout the world. Of course, open education is something that is beyond formal education as well. It really applies to people who are trying to develop new skills for their jobs and for personal learning as well. This morning, of course, our focus will be more on formal studies and the expansion of teaching resources. If you have not been to the open education week site, please go there and see what all the activities are this week. It is simply openeducationweek.org. We want to ask you where you are from. If you can, you can pick up an icon from the toolbar that is in the middle of your screen. You can see where there is a little star. You can pick up one of those icons and then drop it on the globe to show us where you are located. It is always interesting to look at somebody in the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps that is Hawaii. Yesterday on our webinar, we had folks from Europe who were joining us. I am going to show you what we have in North America. Looks like we have great folks from all around North America. Very exciting. If you cannot get the toolbar to work, please do introduce yourself in the chat window. I will let us know what institution you are with and any interest you have in OER. Please do introduce yourself in the chat window as well. First off, I would like to give TJ Bliss. He is the education officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Hello, everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you and look forward to chatting a bit about some really exciting things going on in the world of higher education. I am excited to talk about what we have been doing at the OER initiative at NOVA. I am excited to talk about some really exciting ideas and models that Kim and Linda will talk about in detail. Now I would like to introduce Kim. She is a counselor and instructor at NOVA Community College. I would like to introduce Linda Williams. She is an executive at NOVA, specifically our extended learning institute, and to share some specific examples of what I have been working on with our SDP 100 college success skills course. Thank you, Kim. Finally, I want to introduce Linda Williams, who is a business faculty at Tidewater Community College. Hi, good afternoon. I appreciate you all giving me the opportunity to share the experience that Tidewater has had over the past two years as we have migrated an entire associate of science degree from publisher textbooks to open educational resources. Great. Thanks so much, Linda. I just want to give you a brief overview of open ed, very brief, for those who might be new to this area before we get directly into our presentations. So the open education consortium, which I am on staff with, was there really at the beginning of open educational resources and the current movement. So this started back at MIT and then very quickly became a worldwide consortium. We now represent 280 organizations in 40 countries around the world. And over 30,000 courses have been put online for free and have been translated into 29 languages. So we are now in North America by any means. The community college consortium that I work directly with has a very similar mission. We are an associate consortium of the open ed consortium and work very closely there. And it is all about expanding access to high quality materials, supporting faculty in choice and development of materials. And the community college consortium represents over 250 community and technical colleges in 19 states and provinces. So very basic definitions here. UNESCO and the Hewlett Foundation have a very similar definition of open educational resources. Those two organizations have been the primary initial movers and shakers in OER and have been supporting this movement for over 10 years. So they are teaching learning or research materials that are in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that allows their free use adoption and distribution. And primarily today that intellectual property license is the Creative Commons license. But what that means is often people, when they're first getting started with this, they get confused between the difference between open and free. So free may not mean that you can reuse it. You may be able to access something. But an open license actually gives you as a faculty member and also as students a great deal more permission to share materials. And the Lumen Learning Organization breaks this down into the five Rs. that's retaining the content, reusing it, revising it, remixing and redistributing. Sorry, redistribution of open content. So this open license sits on top of copyright and makes sharing easier. It doesn't get rid of the copyright, but it allows the copyright holder to share easily with others. And the zero textbook cost degree program is all about taking these open educational resources, institutions, primarily faculty of course as the content experts, but working often with librarians and instructional designers are finding high quality materials, adapting them and using them to replace expensive textbooks. There's been a number of very interesting case studies, pilot programs that have happened over the last two years. We're going to hear from Tidewater College and NOVA who are several of the leaders in this area. What they have seen of course is that there's a huge savings for students. Usually, in particular, those are two year colleges, so students who are able to participate in the zero textbook cost degrees are eliminating two years worth of textbook costs, which generally runs into several thousand dollars. It's giving faculty more choices around the materials they bring into the classroom. And early research is showing that it's having a positive impact on student retention and student learning. And so now we are going to hear from several people who have actually led these efforts. And they're going to tell you in more detail what's going on. And our first speaker this morning is Kim Berkel, who is a counselor and instructor at the Extended Learning Institute at Northern Virginia Community College. Hello again everybody. I'm going to talk to you about NOVA's OER program. NOVA is the largest institution in Virginia and one of 23 colleges making up the Virginia Community College system. We launched our OER program in 2013 and continue to grow and improve on our OER course offerings. Dr. Preston Davis created and leads the OER initiative at NOVA. The program is a real team effort with librarians, instructional designers, and faculty leaders all working together to create high quality and sustainable OER courses for NOVA students. These courses increase student access and are more affordable without fees or textbooks and have led to increase student success and retention. Right now students can earn the associate of science and social sciences using all OER based courses. So far also over 5,000 NOVA students have saved over $800,000 in textbook costs since fall 2013. So you can see it's quite a cost savings for our students. The Eli librarian was the first to start gathering OER resources for instructor use in developing OER courses. The NOVA library webpage now provides a wealth of resources for use across all the NOVA campuses. So from this screenshot here you can see just an example of what was developed through the NOVA library webpage, the repositories, access to open textbooks, open courseware, eBooks, journals, videos, information about OER at NOVA. And then a little screenshot in the bottom right hand corner just shows how these resources are used in the or can be used in an OER course. These are the variety of resources that I use in our SDV 100 college success skills course. I wanted to use a consistent textbook and was able to find a wonderful textbook through sailor.org which is one of the free textbook repositories. I also utilize a lot of websites such as student lingo, YouTube, PED, Films on Demand. We also utilize a variety of websites through NOVA. We have college resources, career exploration. The SDV is a college success skills course. Students do a lot of self-assessment and I was able to find a wealth of assessments available for students to use such as smarter measure, Virginia education wizard, bar, human metrics, mind tools, and the product everfi.com which covers financial literacy. We also offer free in-house webinars that our counselors, me and some of the other counselors offer for our students and we utilize them in the course as well. So for example, we use our exploring career options and getting ready for your next semester. So all of these resources are free for the student to access. So here's a screenshot of the example of one of the topics in the course. This is the learning styles topic and you can see by the screenshot the number of free resources that we utilize just for this topic alone. Students utilize the college success e-book. They watch a short video from YouTube on multiple intelligences. They also access our career services website to take some personality and learning style assessments such as the young typology and the bark. And they do this so that they can complete the what's your style assignment and then post in the blog. I was excited to take part in the OER initiative having served as the lead to redesign the campus-based SDV 100 to become hybrid. As part of this redesign process, I formed a SDV redesign team and together we met with several publishers in order to select a common textbook for the course. The team agreed that the cost of the textbook was high for a one credit course. It was $50 was the cheapest that we could get the book down to and that was for a new book. If we wanted to resell the book and have it be a used textbook, it was $37.50. We were also discouraged at how the publishers seemed to push the newest editions. We piloted a version of the hybrid course using a publisher's textbook and online resource. And we weren't even through the first year of using the book and the publishers were trying to get us to go with a new edition. And the problem with that is if you go through to a new edition, you can't use the books for resale from that first edition that we used. We are also at the mercy of the technology of the publisher and their updates through online resources. And that seemed to happen rather frequently. Again, within the first year of piloting the course, we were dealing with their updates to their online resources and it didn't coincide with when our sessions began. So it became a logistical problem when we were piloting a common hybrid course across five campuses and the Eli division. So we were dealing with over 200 sections and we would be dealing with over 200 sections if we were using it across the whole college. So even when we started with a pilot section, we were running the problems right away. So shortly after I was working with creating the hybrid course, the OER initiative came about at Eli. And I jumped at the chance because I felt like I could develop an OER online SDV 100 college success sales course that could be designed to allow more academic freedom, provide a richer experience for the student, engage students with a variety of resources and activities and assignments. You could see from the example previous and all those resources that I was able to find for this one credit course. And what I find is the best point is that it gives students immediate access to the course materials. If you're an instructor, you probably have your students at the beginning of your class telling you they don't have the textbook yet. Maybe their financial aid didn't come through. Maybe they haven't received their paycheck yet to go out and buy the book or the bookstore is out of the textbook and they can't get started. So students end up starting late. They're catching up. They're missing assignments. They're missing deadlines. And that can affect their grades. So with OER, it gives immediate access to the course materials. So students can get started on day one and they can get started with reading the book. They can get started with the learning activities. And so far it's been a great experience. I haven't had any students say, I haven't been able to start the course because I don't have access to my materials. It's all there in the course for them. So with the online OER course, I took the lead and designed most of the course. I provided the instructor training on the new course. And I started small by piloting a handful of online sections in fall 2013. So the course was redesigned in summer 2013. And this is the online version. And I started small with the online one in the fall 2013. And then I planned to expand the pilot in spring 2014. But the instructors enjoyed the OER course so much, either with piloting or in the training, that they all wanted to go OER. So in spring 2014, the online SBB 100 course became all OER format, open educational research. And later that spring, we started working on the hybrid course and designed an OER template for that and started piloting that one in the spring 2014, our second eight-week sessions. And then we've been piloting in the summer, fall 2014, and the spring 2015 with the goal of this fall 2015, all SBB 100, both online and hybrid, will be OER courses across the college. And the reason this is an easier process for us is because our course is common. So through the online, we have a common template. And the hybrid, we have a common online template. And then for the campus, face-to-face meetings, the instructors can utilize the resources that we provide as options in the course. They can use resources that they've found on their own and used throughout the years. And it's interesting to see how many instructors actually have been using OER resources all along in their campus face-to-face sections. So it's exciting to provide that academic freedom to them where they can continue to use that and find more resources and contribute to a quality OER course. So when I ran the pilot, I wanted to get feedback from the students. I wanted to see, you know, what did they think about OER? So I created a survey and piloted it first in the online OER. And you can see the feedback is extremely positive. Students were all in the 90, 93, 100, 97 percent, as far as feeling that they like not having to purchase a textbook. They felt the college success e-book was informative and addressed the topics well. The videos were informative and addressed the topics well. And they thought that the assignments and activities related well to the assigned readings and videos. So that it felt like, you know, the course was just a good packaged course. It was engaging. The resources were good. The assignments and activities matched the video and the resources. So it gave us confidence that we created a good online course. So when we piloted the hybrid, we've been asking for feedback from the students. And so far, the feedback has been very similar, very, very positive. They like not having to buy the textbook. And because of the campus face-to-face version, students are more inclined to have something in their hands, a book in their hands. But we find that a very small percent actually chose to print the e-book. And they can do that if they want. We provide a PDF and an RTF file. So students could do that or print sections of the book if they wanted to. But the same thing in the hybrid version, which is similar to our online version and content instructor structure, that they felt the book was informative, the videos are informative, the assignments and activities relate, the directions are clear and easy to follow. And the most positive is 93% would take more OER courses. And SCV100 is a gateway course at NOVA. Students take it in their first 15 credits. So they're getting exposed to both an online format and OER. And so we're looking forward to having more of those students take the OER courses. And we're hoping that not just we don't just have the bulk of our courses that are OER online, but that across the college we start seeing more hybrid and face-to-face adopt the OER courses as well. It's just a quick slide. I'm not going to read all of these quotes. But these are some of the quotes from the surveys of how students feel about OER courses. Since my experience with OER courses has been great so far, I've been enrolled in four classes during summer in this modality. So we know that there are other courses and they're taking advantage of it. The open educational resources provided was a great way of saving time and money. Everything was accessible and handy in use, which benefited me in many ways regarding my education in college. Some say I like not having to carry the book around. But there's just such great feedback. And I see this over and over again students saying that this is a good experience and they really enjoy the OER format. Some of the concerns we had was that teachers wanted to know, you know, how do we know if the OER course is a quality course? So through ELI we use Quality Matters. It's a faculty-centered nationally recognized peer review process that focuses on continuous quality improvement of online and hybrid course design. ELI strived to use the standard of measurement to meet QM standards in the course design and revision process. So we started with the online OER SBB 100 course submitted that for review in 2014. And this process focuses on quality course design that focuses on eight essential standards. So at least I know in the structure of the course and the design of the course, the SBB 100 course meets the standard. So we had a standard of 97 out of 99 points, which lets me know, okay, as far as the course is designed with course overview and introduction, learning objectives, assessment and measurement, instructional materials and so on, that that part is quality. And I serve as the subject matter expert during the review. So if the reviewers had any questions and maybe they weren't a subject matter expert in SD, they could contact me. But it comes across that they didn't ask me any questions that they felt the content was clear as well. So that was really positive. And in the future, I'd like to see the hybrid go through this review process if possible. And that's it for me. If you want to get more information, you can either contact me regarding the SBB 100 course. If you have questions about our OER initiative at NOVA, you can contact Dr. Preston Davis. And here's both of our contact information. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Kim, for sharing the OER based associate degree with us this morning. And in particular, the development of that college readiness course for students, which is part of that OER degree. There's a couple of questions in the chat window, which I'll let Kim answer if she can in the chat. Sure. Because we have so many speakers, we'll come back to those at the end if we don't get a chance to answer them in the chat window. And now I would like to move to hear from Linda Williams, who is a professor of business management and administration at Tidewater Community College. And she's been the faculty lead on the business administration Z degree. Linda? All right. Thank you. So what Tidewater did was in the fall of 2013, we launched our associate of science in business administration. As an entire degree, a student can start and finish and expend $0 on textbooks. We put together a team, faculty team of 13 faculty members across all disciplines because our AS in business admin covers accounting and history and English and SDV and stats and PE. And all of those courses were built out using open educational resources. And I focus on the word built out because we did not adopt as heavily as we should have. And part of that was a function of the content that was available then versus what's available now. Moving forward, our mantra is adopt and adapt and only build if you have to. And we are coming to the end of our second year as pilot. So we run two fall, we're in our last spring semester, had about 2,500 students come through. So ultimately our motivation was in a lot of ways this graph. The idea that textbook costs have grown at a rate, you know, two and a half times that of the rate of the consumer price index and inflation. And what we knew was every semester we had students who couldn't afford textbooks, who dropped classes because they didn't have course materials or did not succeed because they fell behind. And although they hoped to get caught up, we just know that they don't. So a lot of our motivation was to address this high cost textbook industry. The other thing that we looked at was this concept of in this frightening fact that in the fourth quarter of 2014, student loan debt surpassed credit card debt in the United States. The United States has approximately $661 billion in credit card debt. However, student loan debt is now $1.1 trillion. So this incredible burden of financial aid debt on student loan debt after students leave school coupled with the access issues of textbook and college affordability were really our motivating factors. And they were motivated and spurred on by Dr. DeMarc, our Chief Academic Officer, who was inspired by David Wiley of Lumen Learning and the 5R fame to see if Todd Water could build an entire degree based solely on open educational resources. So that was our motivation. And what we realized is that once we removed the textbook costs for our students, we had reduced the cost of their associate of science and business admin degree by 25%. We're using the figure from the College Board Association in terms of what the textbook costs are in order to estimate these savings. But we've literally shaved 25% off of the cost of an AS in business administration for a student at Todd Water. And especially for a community college student. I can't even tell you how huge it is talking to my students who are enrolled in these classes. For some of them, it really is life changing. So we've run the pilot now for four semesters. And this is what we're looking at in terms of enrollment. We estimate that we will have 892 completers this spring semester put about 2,500 students through. We've run 115 sections. And we estimate that we've saved them about a quarter of a million dollars in textbook costs. And that's a quarter of a million dollars that either doesn't get transferred into student loan debt or gets transferred into things like gas money and food and day care for our students. So it's hard to see any way that saving students a quarter of a million dollars in four semesters isn't good for the student and the economy. What I wanted to really focus on was a little bit of how we went about creating the courses and then some of the outcomes that we've seen. So working with Lumen Learning, Kim, Phanis, and David Wiley, we made a decision to take and rebuild our courses. We stripped them down to the course learning outcomes. And then from there built to the module level objectives and leverage the power of the properly licensed OER content in order to directly support and align our content with the course learning outcomes. So this is an example of something that I did. I teach the business stats class where I literally took a broad course level objective, looked at this module level objective of identifying the types of data, and then went to, in this case, an open stacks, enter that free statistics book, CC by license, so just attribution. And I said, all I need is section one dash four. I don't need this massive quantity of broadly written, you know, overly verbose content in order to teach my students this module level objective so that they can successfully achieve the course objectives and move on to the next adventure in business stats. And so this was really the narrative model that we used. This idea of course rebuild and redesign, very closely associated and mirrors what Kim was talking about in terms of quality matters. And this idea of aligning content with objectives in a way that leads the student to success. After the courses were rebuilt and launched, we began to collect data from the very beginning. And one of the pieces that we looked at is enrollment figures. We know that the students based on the surveys that we have taken from them these four semesters, that students, 97% of them would enroll in a Z course if they fit into their schedule. So what we're seeing is that students kind of vote with their feet. So we've got, you know, about 80 some at 82% of capacity compared to about 64% capacity in terms of enrollment seats for students. So we knew that they were signing up. And so then the question became what happens when they get there? Well, we have, and I think most community colleges have a drop date. That drop date is that point at the beginning of the semester at which a student can drop the course for a tuition refund. And so we began to compare the courses against their non-Z counterparts across the college. And then we found that we were retaining significantly more of our students than our non-Z counterparts. If we think about a drop rate, we dropped about 1.25% fewer students than our non-Z counterparts. And that may not seem like a lot of a drop when you think, well, gosh, it's less than 1.5%. But if we look at nationwide having about 5.5 million students enrolled in community colleges, what we're looking at is saving about 68,000 students from dropping F in the first two weeks of class. So we're encouraged, and the numbers are holding pretty steady as we move through the pilot. So then we said, well, where's the next point where we lose students? We lose the withdrawal date. The withdrawal date is that point in the semester where a student can withdraw from the class and receive a grade of W. And we call it the no academic penalty withdrawal. And we know that once the students get to that withdrawal date that we are retaining about 2.21% more of our students. We have less than 4.5% of our students who then later withdraw from classes. And again, when you look at this over the life cycle of a student's path through college, we are retaining more of our students and hopefully helping them on that path to completion and to obtaining that credential. So when we looked at, you know, drop and withdrawal, we said, OK, well, that's great. They're not dropping. They're not withdrawing. So how are they doing in the course? We define success as a student who completes a course with a grade of C or better. And where we have made the most strides is in student success. As the faculty lead looking at all of the courses and as an instructor teaching the courses, I believe that one of the factors in student success is because students have access to 100% of their content on day one, they don't fall behind and they don't get left behind. I think that because they get to start all from the same common ground that the careful selection and alignment of OER content to learning objectives allows the student to be more successful. So when we started the project, our goal was to increase student success, increase instructor effectiveness while at the same time removing textbook costs. We never said that OER was going to be better. We said we just need to be as good or better. And what we're finding in terms of student success is in many cases we are much better. These are just some numbers pulled from three of the Z courses. The first one are the student success rates for Math 163, which is a pre-calculus course. And what we saw was in the non-Z sections, college-wide about 62% of the students were finishing the course with a grade of C or better. We found that after three semesters in the Z courses, about 94% of the students were completing with a grade of C or better. And this is a course that was completely stripped down and rebuilt from scratch. It's a beautiful course and utilizes My Open Math as a platform to assist students with algorithmic homework and testing and assessment. The next course is a Business 100, which is just the traditional introduction to business course. College-wide, we've got about a 58% success rate. This course is a gatekeeper course. We get a lot of students that this is their very first course that they've taken coming out of high school. A lot of them are not necessarily business majors. So many have been struggle with this idea of learning business terms and technologies. And so we've been able to bring about 73% of the students through successfully in the introduction to business course. And then lastly is ACC 211, which is accounting to a level 11, which is that very first semester foundation fundamental of accounting. Accounting has been a real challenge for many of us in the OER community. And it's just a matter of the amount of high quality content and support that's out there. But even as hard as it has been sometimes to make this one work, we've still seen almost a 10% increase in student success in accounting 211. The important thing to note about that is accounting 211 is the first class of a two-course sequence. And so if they don't make it through 211, they don't go to 212. And so even being able to bring almost 10% of our students successfully through 211, again, supports that completion agenda, keeps that student on track, keeps that student focused, and hopefully will continue to build additional success as they move through their career. So if you need more information or you're interested in things that we did and what worked and what didn't work, you can reach me at lswayms at tcc.edu. And I will be happy to either help you, hook you up with a resource that we have. We are today launching a link from our academic services for the Z degree. So we will have a website that we can direct you to that will give you more information. So we're always happy to help and really hope that this inspires you to do the same thing. So thank you for giving me your ear for a bit. I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Linda, and for sharing those outcome numbers with us. It sounds very promising. And I know that you mentioned that you're likely to expand into different areas as well. So into different degree programs. And yeah, thank you. Now I'd like to turn this over to TJ Bliss who is the Education Officer at the Hewlett Foundation who has been a longtime supporter and proponent of OER and is also very interested in the zero textbook cost degree. TJ? Thank you, Linda. Hello everyone again. So I want to start briefly by talking about and perhaps reminding some of you of just about Hewlett's role in the OER field starting back in 2001 when we made the first grants really in OER to MIT and to Rice and to Creative Commons and the Internet Archive and those sorts of entities that really got the ball moving forward and has led to where we are today in terms of the OER landscape. So we as a foundation highly value OER and we see it as a critical component to solving some of the biggest problems in higher education and K-12 and international education. And we were not involved at all really in what Tidewater and Nova have done around the Z-degree idea and the zero textbook cost degree. But when I learned about it I was so impressed that I immediately made it a top priority to figure out how Hewlett and other foundations could help. It supports institutions that are trying to do similar things and also incentivize institutions to perhaps consider something like a zero textbook cost degree. And so I just wanted to speak quickly about why we see value in the zero textbook cost degree. The first is what you've seen today is that there's real impact on college access and success for the most disadvantaged students. That's really important to the Hewlett Foundation because helping decrease equity gap is one of the problems that we see OER can help solve. Another reason that the zero textbook cost degree is appealing to philanthropy particularly and to several other foundations that we're working with is that it can lead to OER adoption at scale. So Hewlett has invested for a long time in developing and helping institutions and organizations develop OER. But we've struggled to get that OER adopted at scale and the Z-degree provides a way to do that that is attractive to faculty and administrators and potentially even policymakers. A third reason I was thinking about as we were talking about this and I was listening to Linda and Kim was that the Z-degree could actually help leverage the materials that are being created out of the Department of Labor's tax grant program. That's the T-A-A-C-C-C-T which I'm sure OER can put up some information or a link to that. And when I think about this and I think about the impact of OER specifically and potentially within the context of a degree program, I'm reminded of a really fascinating account of one young man. This is an African American young man in Kansas who was working at Taco Bell and his friend who worked with him decided that he wanted to improve his life and so he enrolled at a community college in their town. And was successful in completing a degree and getting a better paying job. And so this young man who was still working at Taco Bell decided well I'm going to follow my friend's example. And so he went to his college and that college was actually one of the tax members. And they had developed a course program that is fully openly licensed and will be eventually available probably within this year. But he took a course on mechanics and schematics. So how to read blueprints and diagrams for whatever, microwaves, appliances, all sorts of things. And it was kind of a gaming material so it was a very, very high quality resource. It was very advanced but very, very, very useful. And this student related how after taking this course one day he got a call from his dad who lived several hundred miles away. And his dad was saying that they weren't going to be able to have their family vacation that year because the refrigerator had just broken. And it was going to be very expensive to fix the refrigerator because it required bringing a mechanic out. They were in a rural area and all of that. And the young man said well hold on dad, I'll come home and take a look at it. And so the young man traveled out to his parents home and dismantled the fridge. Knew where to get the schematics online. That was something he'd learned in that course that he took was actually where to find schematics and then how to read them. And identified the problem pretty quickly and found that it was a very small minor thing and they were able to fix it. And then they were able to save that money and have that family vacation. And the take home message that this student said, he said I don't know. He was still in the program. He said I don't know if my degree will get me a job. But at least now I know that whatever happens I can always start a small appliance repair business. And this story of it has this OER connection because these kinds of materials when they're in students hands can have really powerful effects. And that's the reason why Hewlett is very interested in seeing OER adopted at scale. And the Z degree is an approach for that. The last one, the last reason why we see this as very valuable is something that Linda talked about. In terms of the effect on pedagogy and Kim hit on this as well. That faculty become more engaged in their content and their course redesign and that it can have a real impact on student learning. So with that said, I want to note that there are several other institutions around the country right now that are considering or interested in the zero textbook cost degree idea. I can mention a couple by name because I believe that they have publicly noted that they're doing this. And the University of Mississippi, the Washington State Community College System. And then several other community colleges in Oregon and Massachusetts and New Hampshire and California have reached out to us or to others that we know that are interested in the Z degree. So it's really starting to spread rapidly. And Hewlett at the same time is working with other national funders on a philanthropic strategy to support and incentivize the establishment of Z degrees throughout the nation. And this is a work in progress. It's nothing that is available now and there's not grant funding right now available from Hewlett or any other foundation specifically. Because we're working together to develop a strategy to identify the parameters and criteria for how to distribute limited funds in a most effective way to have the largest impact across the nation. And to help build awareness about the Z degree program. In a blue sky world it would be desirable from my standpoint that every single community college in the United States and Canada in the next five years has a Z degree program. And that's a goal that I'm kind of pushing hard on. That is a huge list even if it's if you imagine just say $150,000 per institution just to pay faculty for their time. That's about what Tidewater spent. I believe and Linda you can correct me if that's not the case. That's my understanding. And so you multiply that out and you're looking at, you know, $100 million. But I believe that it's something so the idea is so provocative and so fascinating and the evidence of impact is so large that it's not an unreasonable expectation that we may be able to accomplish that together. So in the meantime, if you or your institution is interested in learning more about the Z degree and on the technical side of course you can contact Linda and Kim. But I also want to recommend that you contact the folks at Lumen Learning. These Lumen Learning folks are working on this with multiple institutions right now. They helped Tidewater and I'm not certain but I think that they worked with you at NOVA, right Kim? And if not, apologies if they didn't. But they're standing ready. It's their work to help people actually implement the Z degree and open educational resources on campuses. I do believe that Kim Phanos is actually on the call. Kim runs Lumen Learning. And so I don't know if you want to put your email address there that can contact you if they're interested in learning more. But that's our recommendation that we would give right now as philanthropy kind of figures out and gets our ducks in a row around how to support institutions that are interested in going forward to incentivize and help them do that monetarily as well as with technical expertise and those sorts of things. So I think I'll stop there and take any questions in the chat box. Thanks, Anna. Great. Thank you, TJ. Also, I know that there is a website being built by the Open Education Consortium to support discussions around the Z degree. I think that's going to be available later this month. So... It's available now. I'm typing it in. Oh, wonderful. Okay. Great. So that's a place for all of us to share information and questions about what's happening and as this process goes forward. So once again, big thanks to TJ for talking with us today and Kim and Linda for sharing those really impressive programs that they have piloted over the last several years. At this point, before we go to Q&A, I just want to let you know that we will have a... Our webinar will be focused on publishing tools for OER. So join us then if you can. And also, I wanted to mention that the Open Education Consortium, our global conference is in lovely Alberta, Canada. It's actually in Banff, which is a beautiful area. And it is coming up in April and we would love to see any of you who are available to hear about the global open education movement. Not strictly North America, but we will have our partners from around the world presenting. All right. So I know there's been a lot of great questions that came in. Going back to just a couple of our early ones, we had a question, Kim, for you early on about feedback from faculty and students. And I think it was Leah who asked, were there any concerns that faculty and students expressed? Yes, I thought I had touched on briefly when I went over the quality matters. I've given presentations on developing an engaging course, focusing on FDV 100 in a few different venues. And I've also shared our course with 10 BCCS colleges over the last year. And sometimes, you know, you get the question, how do you know that it's quality? So I really wanted to put the course design itself through the quality matters review. And again, I served as a subject matter expert so that the quality matters review, the survey feedback from the students, and the instructor feedback when we offered the trainings and discussion about the course has been just positive all around. So any kind of concerns that anybody had asked about it seem to be addressed just based on taking a look at the course and the quality matters and the student feedback and perspective. And also, you know, the OER initiative in general at NOVA. Okay. Great. So it sounds like you have an ongoing feedback process to get feedback from both faculty and students and address that as it comes up. Yeah. All right. Wonderful. Somebody also mentioned that health sciences was an area that they were having some trouble finding OER. And I'll answer this, but I'll also leave it open to if anyone else wants to share about this. As TJ mentioned, the TACG grants, many of those TACG grants were focused on health care and STEM disciplines. And so as those materials become available on the skillscommons.org site, which is the repository for the TACG grants, you'll see more health sciences. Health sciences does tend to be a challenging area, so I certainly understand that comment. Do any of our other presenters want to speak to that issue? I'll just take a stab at it. I think that one of the secrets for faculty who may be in something like health science or maybe some of the more, I don't know, hands-on applied disciplines is this incredible need to connect with the broader community. In other words, reaching out to the consortium, reaching out to the people like Kim at NOVA or Richard Sebastian at the BCCS or us at Tidewater to say, what have you all built and what can you share with us? I think that Lumen is doing a marvelous job now starting to roll out more and more of these complete courses that have been built by some of us who have been working on these initiatives. And then being able to say, okay, well, it's not everything I need, but it's going to get me at least a little way down the road. Don't be discouraged if your first pass through the Commons doesn't find you exactly what you're looking for. My advice is use these resources and start asking, hey, what have you built? What do you have? And what can you share? And I think that you'll find that there may be more out there than you're aware of, but connect. We share. We're open. Yeah, that's a wonderful point, Linda. And of course, Tidewater and NOVA are also members of the Community College Consortium. We are happy to answer questions. And we also take submissions for different webinars. So if there's a specific topic that you'd like to have presented on, let us know, and we'll gather up some thought leaders like Linda and Kim to come in and share what they're doing. I had another question. And Kim, this might be one to direct to you about, it was questions about how do you get faculty across the disciplines involved in producing a pathway program? How do you motivate faculty? So Kim or Linda on that one? Speaking to SDV in particular, I started small with the online version of the course and approached faculty once the template was designed, providing information about what OER is because a lot of people are still learning about it and offering the opportunity to pilot the course and then discuss it and share it with the other instructors. And the perception of the course was very positive. So all the instructors for online decided to jump on. And then as Nova is such a large college, the campus hybrid version is spread across five campuses. So we would talk to the faculty across the college at open forums and things like that and trainings to kind of get the word out about OER and what we're doing with SDV and that we're offering a pilot for the hybrid version. And we're hoping that more and more faculty would join the pilot each semester so that because we're dealing at such a larger scale that it would get shared across the college and where we get out and just letting it be known that we're going to transition everybody into the fall 2015. And we're also hoping that the student feedback will get out and talking about OER and be able to take a course without having to buy textbooks. And that gets out across the college and encourages more and more faculty and divisions to look at OER and developing them. Great. Thank you for that, Kim. So I'm looking for more questions here. Do we have any questions about the philanthropic community and how they're going to support this? I think there was a question about the $150,000 that we spent at Tidewater. Yes, Amy asked, thank you for the specifics about cost. Oh, yes, thank you, Linda. So at Tidewater, was it $150,000 for the faculty plus an additional fee to Lumen for consulting? That $150,000 was split in kind of numerous ways. Part of it, yes, was for Lumen. They provided us the invaluable resource of helping us to curate and clear the copyright on our content. They also helped us physically build our courses out in Blackboard. Of course, now we found a better way, but that was then. The rest of it was travel for the faculty team to attend things like the International Open Ed Conference regional and statewide meetings and places where they could find out more and get more engaged. And then we did have faculty stipends for this initial group. It was a stipend that was paid above and beyond their normal pay. But you also have to remember that we assembled the faculty team in January of 2013 and launched 21 courses in August of 2013. So it was a very aggressive schedule and it took up their whole summer. So we felt like getting them something additional for that. So it really was. It was 150,000 total to take the degree from zero to Z. I think it's a good benchmark to at least start from. And what we did was reallocated existing funds inside of the college that were being underutilized and moved them around for this initiative. And we had the support of the president of our college and our chief academic officer. And they made it happen. Yes. Thank you for that, Linda. And that was very inspiring that that was actually money that you found within your college to really address this need. We're running a little over the hour and I want to give a hand once again to our presenters. I want to thank all of you who joined us today. Thank you, T.J. You didn't have any specific questions that I saw in the chat window. Would you like to make a closing comment or two? Yes. Thank you all for joining. I don't have anything else to say. But I look forward to seeing how things evolve in the future. Wonderful. So thank you, T.J. And we're so happy that the Hewlett Foundation is supportive of this effort and that so many colleges are exploring this and moving forward with it. So thank you very much. We're going to stop the recorder now and we'll be online for a few more minutes.