 Hi and welcome to OER Plateau, where do we go from here? I'm Dr. Paige Wolfe, faculty development chair at the Teaching, Learning and Educational Technology Center at the College of Lake County and Grayslake, Illinois. And presenting with me is Suzanne Valentine-French, psychology instructor and OER faculty champion. To start, we'll talk a little bit about College of Lake County in general. It is in the most northeastern part of the state of Illinois and it's a comprehensive community college with 48 transfer programs and 112 certificate programs. And we just turned 50 in 2019. Our college has three campuses, the main campus in Grayslake, Illinois and two smaller campuses in Vernon Hills and Walkegan, Illinois. We serve nearly 23,000 students, 72% of which are part-time and we have a ratio of 17 students per instructor. So to begin, I'd like to talk a little bit about how we got off to us a great start with open education resources. In January of 2014, CLC hosted Dr. Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons, who first introduced our faculty to the concept of open education resources, creative commons licenses and data that supported eliminating textbook costs and how it impacts student success. He was very well received by our faculty. So the next step was to come up with an action plan and process, which was easier said than done, but we were up to the challenge. We felt that our Teaching, Learning and Educational Technology Center, otherwise known as Teletzy, was the most appropriate place to spearhead our OER efforts. And we began by offering additional professional learning sessions and by trying to identify the courses that had the highest enrollment and the highest textbook costs and subsequently developed lists of faculty who taught such classes, as well as faculty who expressed interest in OER. We were very fortunate to have administrative support and faculty champions from the beginning. This included support from our foundation office to provide incentives. Also the college bookstore and our library and our educational technology area of Teletzy. The library worked with developing LibGuide and helping faculty understand copyright in our ed tech area, helpful some of the technology such as press books. We then heavily utilized expertise from CCC OER, the Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources and we're the first college in Illinois to join that organization in 2015. In 2016, we then applied for and received an institutional partner grant with OpenStacks Group and we were part of their second cohort. That was a year long grant that allowed us to work with other institutions and really develop our processes in open education. We were strong in attending the open ed conferences throughout those years. And by 2018, we had advanced enough to collaborate with one of our peer colleges in developing an Illinois level OER summit. Other things that we had done is we developed a course registration indication for courses that not necessarily were OER but had low textbook costs and we developed an OER task force and started on our OER strategic plan. So then our momentum came to a halt and the rest of the presentation will identify why we plateaued. The early initiative saw several faculty move to OER for their courses but encouraging new folks to consider OER was becoming more of a challenge. And by 2018, we realized if we wanted to push the needle towards greater OER use at the college we needed to reinvigorate our OER program. One curious part of the problem was a perception many faculty members had that they were being asked to create new materials from scratch rather than tweak an already existing OER for their courses. We're not sure why this notion took hold. It could have been because the more well-known early OER adopters did create new materials or did extensive editing to create the materials but is a perception that we have been working hard to change. Another key reason for our plateau was confusion over which area of the college oversaw funding from one year to the next. This often resulted in division deans trying to find money in their already strapped for cash budgets to support faculty's OER projects in their division. Early OER initiatives were spearheaded by Teletzi, the library and ed tech but such personnel were often not given time to devote to supporting OER projects on top of their already overwhelming job demands. Finally, like many institutions in recent years CLC has had a turnover in executive decision-making. When those who hold the purse strings keep changing it's hard to anticipate what will be their vision for the college and whether your program or initiative will be a priority for them. So what were our solutions? In 2019, we created our current OER task force comprised of faculty from mathematics, English psychology and the library along with the representatives from the bookstore, faculty development chair of Teletzi and an administrative lead, the Dean of Business and Social Sciences. This has since expanded to include faculty from economics and an educational designer. The college already had an OER dedicated librarian but in 2019, an OER faculty champion was added to promote OER at the college and take on the task of offering support to faculty who are adopting, adapting, creating or maintaining OER. In 2021, the college applied and was accepted to the Association of American Colleges and Universities OER Initiative. During the opening sessions, members of the college's OER task force identified a lack of structure to the college's program as a key failing. We needed the information all in one place and we needed a process for providing funding and other support. OER also needed to become a priority for the college such as being placed in the college's strategic plan. That last point was aided by another task force at the college, resources for student success who had recommended to the college that funding for OER was needed. We're happy to say that we managed all of those things in the last academic year and the AACNU initiative really did help us to keep our eye on the prize and stay on task. In the spring of 2022, OER Central became active on the college's SharePoint site. We had an application process in place, a budget to offer grants and OER was part of the college's strategic plan. At this point, we want to show you what OER Central looks like on the college's SharePoint site. Currently we have six areas. What is OER where faculty can learn about the benefits of OER and we are honest about some of the challenges but also how it has helped our students save almost $4 million in the last three years. Where they can find OER for their classes with links to common search sites as well as some specialized sites for some of our career programs. How to adapt or create OER including information about press books, lever texts and other editing tools and resources. How faculty can get started with their project whether it's help in locating materials for their courses or help in getting a stipend or release time. We have a section on workshops both in-house and external along with conferences and other resources for faculty who are interested in OER and open pedagogy. And finally a catalog of faculty use at the college by division and department that showcases the OER that the faculty are using. The college also does have a separate public facing website. Our next steps include mapping out a zero textbook costs for an associate of arts degree at our college. Holding our own OER conference during OER week this upcoming year and the task force which is currently a temporary work group becoming part of the more permanent governance system at the college. So that OER will continue to remain a priority. If you have any questions about our talk and the changes we made to OER at our college please feel free to contact either Dr. Page Wolf or Suzanne Valentine French. Thank you.