 All right. Welcome back, everyone, to our Open Education Week celebration, our Tour to Force of OER Degree and Adoption Showcases. This is our seventh in ten sessions today, and I'm very pleased to introduce Gaylyn Scott, Dr. Gaylyn Scott, who is the Associate Vice President of Academic Programs at Austin Community College. She is also the lead for the OER Degree Initiative that is being run out of the Texas Consortium of Five Colleges, and I know that she will share more about that right now. All right. Thank you very much, Euna. I wasn't entirely sure what y'all might want to know. I can certainly answer questions about the Texas Consortium, but I thought I would start just letting you know a little bit about ACC, who we are, and so you get a feel for Austin Community College. We currently have 11 campuses come the summer. We will be opening our 12th campus. We are organized around the one college concept, so while we may have a dozen campuses, we have a single instructional administrative structure. So that has, you know, positives and negatives, but more positives than negatives. It allows us to really be consistent across all of our campuses in some of the things that we do. We have a robust early college high school program. We have 10 early college high schools. We also have a robust dual credit program in which we take college courses and teach them at high school campuses for dual credit students, and I think I'm probably low balling the number of dual credit students, but it's between seven and eight thousand, I think. Every college in Texas has a defined service area, and so you'll see that we have a six county service area that's in green, and then the teal color is our taxing district within that service area, and you'll see highlighted are 11 campuses. The 12th one will be in Leander up there in the north side of our taxing district. Our service area covers about 7,000 square miles. We used to say we have a service area the size of New Jersey, so it's quite an interesting undertaking to provide community college coursework and opportunities to folks across that area. We opened for business in September of 1973, and these days we partner across that service area with approximately 30 school districts. We have about 40,000 credit students each semester. Like many community colleges, the vast majority of our students are part-time. We have a solid Hispanic student population, more of our students than our female than male. We have other minority students, Asian American, African American, and our average age is 24.5. We're getting a little younger these days because we're getting more dual credit students. That picture you see on the screen is of our accelerator at our Highland campus. That is a huge computer lab, 604 computer stations in a space the size of a football field. We also have learning labs in there. We have academic coaching. We do a lot of math, developmental math courses in the accelerator, but we also do a lot of other courses where faculty just want to take their students in for maybe one class period or maybe for a week to have them engage in those computer mediated learning environments. We are replicating the accelerator on a smaller scale at several of our other campuses. We've had great success with our developmental math approach in there. Now to talk a little bit about the OER Degree Initiative. I find it, here at ACC, it's important to help people understand why we do what we do. A lot of the things that we're doing really all flow from our strategic plan. Our strategic plan focuses on three things, improved access and enrollment, increased persistence and engagement, and increased completion and transition to employment or transfer. While we may be talking about an early alert system, or maybe it's our guided pathways work, or maybe it's looking at inclusive access, or the OER Degree Initiative, or many of the other things we're doing, it all really is aimed at helping our students come in our door, persist and engage with learning while they're here, and then complete and transition on to their next step, employment or transfer or both. As Eunice said, we partnered with some other colleges in Texas and put in a consortium approach in our grant for the OER Degree Initiative, so we are working with San Jacinto College in Houston with El Paso Community College and with one of the colleges in the Alamo District in San Antonio to build our OER degrees. And let me tell you just a little bit about how this looks here at ACC. We decided in the consortium approach that we would divvy up the course development work and that we would select courses that could support general studies degrees, either at El Paso or at San Jac, or Alamo, or at ACC. Here at ACC we have three general studies degrees. We have an AS in Pre-Health Sciences, an AS in General Studies, which is very similar to the AS in Pre-Health Sciences, just not quite so specifically directed at supporting students who want to get their prereqs before they apply to our health sciences programs. And then we also have an AA in General Studies. Across those three general studies degrees, as you can see, we have approximately 11,000 declared majors. So it's obvious that if we can build an OER-based pathway around our general studies degrees, we can serve thousands of our students. We can help them move forward from one semester to the next. We can help them get started on the very first day by having available and accessible course materials. We can steer some of their course taking to, you know, more intentional course progression based on the OER courses that we're developing. So it really does reflect that strategic plan that I mentioned around access, persistency, and completion. As with all of these presentations, I'm sure that are from colleges working on the OER Degree Initiative, it's a very fast timeline to meet the deliverables of the grant. The grant kickoff was in the summer of 2016. In the Texas Consortium, we had to figure out how we would divvy up the coursework. We essentially came up with an approach that we would ask faculty to apply to be course developers. And we would ask faculty to apply to be course reviewers. And so ACC is developing nine courses. And then the other courses in the general studies pathways are being developed by the other colleges. And so we have course developers here, but we also have faculty who are reviewing courses that are developed by their colleagues at San Jacinto or El Paso or in the LMO system. So we have to figure out communications and connections across colleges and within these disciplines. How can we share courses? How can we provide feedback to the faculty developers to make those courses even better? So we did all of that in the summer and fall of 2016. And then a year ago, in the spring semester of 2017, we rolled out 29 sections of 11 courses under the grant. We had a total of 936 students registered for those first grant funded courses. Now, one of the things I discovered as the director of this grant, both at the consortium level and then here at ACC, is that we're also running other OER sections that aren't grant funded and aren't technically part of the OER degree initiative, but are still supporting the pathway through some of these general studies programs. So I did a better job of tracking OER sections in the fall of 2017. We had 21 different courses that were being offered with some OER sections, and we had an enrollment of almost 3,200 students. Now, I should tell you that we don't have a single course where every single section is being taught with OER. OER is a faculty level decision. We are encouraging faculty to look at open educational resources, to consider their merit, to try them out and see if they think they're appropriate for their classes, but it is still a faculty decision. So the numbers are going to change each semester. But in the fall across both grant funded and non-grant funded courses, we had almost 3,200 students in our OER classes around our campuses. And then this spring, we're running 24 courses that are OER. And the last head count I had, which was about a month ago, we had slightly more than 5,200 students in those OER sections. We've done some early data gathering just on our own. I'm still waiting on data from the fall classes. But from last spring, what we saw with those 936 students was that they did as well, and in some cases slightly better on success metrics as students in sections taught with proprietary textbooks. So in terms of course completion rates, course grades, students are doing just as well and occasionally a little bit better. And I should also tell you that as part of this OER degree initiative, we are a research partner looking at the student impact of an OER pathway. A lot of the OER research, as you all know, is course based. How do students do in an OER section versus a non-OER section? We're trying to get at something more interesting, which is do OER opportunities help students persist? Do perhaps they help students take another class? As you recall, more than three-fourths of our students are part-time. If we offer enough OER sections, maybe students can take three classes instead of two because they're saving money on textbook costs. So we're trying to look at that. And our partner in the student impact research is SRI. We're also a cost research partner. Our PK group is running that cost research. And we're trying to dig into the costs that are associated with developing an OER degree. Cost savings, cost obligations. So that's really going to be interesting research as well. And I'm looking at my watch. So let me talk just very briefly about I have to preach the gospel of open pedagogy just really quickly. Persistence and completion are really impacted by the kind of learning that takes place. And learning reflects the teaching that takes place. And what I tell our faculty is that OER is not just about saving students money. It's not just about having materials available on the first day. It's also really about how you can teach differently, how you can enhance student learning and persistence and completion. You all know David Wiley and his focus on open pedagogy. He really talks about how learning can be built around revising and remixing. How learning can be built around renewable assignments rather than disposable assignments. And he offers examples that faculty can use. But that's really an opportunity, I think, to support our mission as community colleges. If we can not only use OER for the availability and the cost savings and the engagement with the course materials, but if we can also use OER in a way that results in what he says there are artifacts that provide unique student-centric views of topics, then I think we're really doing some interesting and creative work to the benefit of our students and the missions that we have as community colleges. Very quickly, let me tell you a little bit about lessons learned. Engaging faculty in this work really does improve pedagogy. So one of the lessons we've learned is that you have to offer regular opportunities for professional development. Just as soon as you think faculty know what OER might mean, you talk about it and you have faculty who are asking what on earth OER stands for. So you have to sort of preach that gospel all the time. You have to really weave librarians and instructional designers into this work so that they're available and accessible to faculty. And I would say you should encourage faculty to adopt and adapt wherever possible. We've decided at ACC we really don't want to be in the publishing business. So outside of a couple of courses where you're not going to see a lot of available resources, we really want faculty to adopt and adapt and curate rather than starting from scratch. As you're doing this work you really have to think about systems and processes. How are you going to track OER sections? How are you going to designate them in your course schedule? How are you going to designate them in your student information system so you can help students find them and register for them? Let me show you one thing that we've done. This is just a screenshot from our course schedule. We wrote some standard language and for every single section we put the same language on. You'll see it there. This class utilizes free open educational resources materials in lieu of required textbooks. Access to these online materials will be provided on the first day of class. Students have the option to print copies but will be responsible for printing costs. We put that in every single OER section this spring that was 197 sections. So that's a lot of tedious manual work to enter those course notes on every single section but we want students to understand a little bit about what OER means. We also tag our OER section so that students can sort for OER. Again this is just a screenshot. You'll see over on the left under course types standard hybrid dual early college high school honors open educational resources. So we want students to be able to sift and sort once they start to learn more about what it means to to take a class taught with open educational resources. Every discipline is different. You need to really be prepared for different reactions to the idea of OER. I have one discipline that is very clear in their sensibility that there is no we are no OER that's good enough for what they do and how they do it. I have other disciplines where the adoption of OER has spread really quickly. I have one discipline where it's just a couple of adjuncts and they they don't have much traction with full-time faculty so it's not spreading so it really is going to vary by different by discipline and by even by faculty connection within the discipline. You need to think through the institutional supports that are needed to make OER work especially if you're building an OER degree pathway or more than one. What policies and procedures do you need? What kind of institutional supports need to be in place to help faculty adopt or adapt? You need to develop best practices. You need to define your terms so that you can send faculty to you know a kind of what what are OER you know FAQs page that sort of thing. You need to think about sustainability. While faculty may adopt and adapt nonetheless some elements of OER materials really need to be updated periodically. How are you going to do that? How are you going to sustain it? Are you going to impose a section fee, a course fee, just a general technology fee or some other sustainability fee on students? There are costs associated with building OER degree pathways and really trying to encourage adoption of OER so those kinds of questions have to be considered in the context of your institution and what would work there. Ongoing training, some faculty need to understand how to integrate OER within your college LMS. If you're going to add content you have to make sure that it's ADA compliant and that it's appropriately licensed. It has to be updated and revised so you have to support that work. Those are some of the lessons we've learned. We're still thinking through some of the other lessons because of our research study. We haven't pushed OER across every single campus as much as we might have wanted to because we have treatment campuses and control campuses but we will start pushing and helping students and faculty across all campuses learn more about OER. There has to be a marketing plan. You have to help students learn about the OER degrees. Offering an OER degree pathway at ACC doesn't mean that every single campus will have every single course in that degree available as OER because it's a faculty-driven decision so you know sort of navigating those things. One of the things we're rolling out is textbook heroes. I have a couple of samples here. Our libraries have their own marketing team and so they have started marketing these posters with faculty here at ACC. You see Tina Bach who teaches English and there's a little quote from Tina up above. You see Wayne Butler on the left. He teaches business government technical communications a quote from him on the sort of underneath talking about how they are saving students money by teaching with OER. So we've just started doing that and that is the end of my very quick presentation because I wanted to leave time for some questions and so I'm happy to answer questions if people have some. Wonderful thank you so much Galen for sharing your path with the OER degree. It's very interesting being a research partner in particular so it's I think that's really fascinating but we're going to have some great data coming out next year around the efficacy of OER degrees and so forth and cost of course. Exactly. The way our particular research study was designed we are trying to provide students with a treatment of at least four OER courses to see if that sort of level of you know engagement with OER and that cost savings to students to see what kind of impact that might have. So it's a quasi-experimental design. It's been a challenge to navigate that in some ways but it's such important research. I'm really interested to see what we're going to find out on the other end. We were just visited by SRI and RPK group last week and they did some focus groups and they did some interviews so there's some qualitative elements to the research as well that will be really interesting. Wonderful. And if there are no questions I guess I can unshare my screen. All right well thank you so much Galen and for leaving your contact information I suspect that some people may want to contact you and get a little more detail about the the work you're doing. Absolutely I'm happy to answer questions by email or set up a phone call or anything else so feel free to send an email. Alrighty thank you so much and thank you also to our participants today who've been tuning in to hear about the the great work that not only Austin Community College but also our other presenters have been doing.