 Thank you and we are very pleased to have so many people here today and very excited to introduce you to the students in Massachusetts who have been working hard for the past three years to advocate for OER across Massachusetts and I'm sure you guys will learn a lot from them and welcome and if you could go ahead and introduce yourself in the chat just type your name and where you're from. We'd love to see who is with us today. All right so let's get started. The agenda for today will be introductions and then we'll have the student panel where we'll address several issues around open education and then talk a little bit about some of the upcoming events that we have in the spring as part of CCCOER and open ed week. All right so let's get started with the introductions. So we have our student panelists here and I'd like each of the student panelists to introduce themselves and also talk about the highest amount of money you've ever spent on a textbook in one semester or how much money you've saved over a semester by using OER and let's get started with Nikki. Thank you Sue. Hi everybody my name is Nikki. I'm the Vice Chair of the Student Advisor Council and I'm also the head of our subcommittee and I'm from Bunker Community College. My majors are biology and government and to answer Sue's question I've spent about like the most money I've spent on books is about $600 for one semester. All right thank you Nikki. Andrew. Hi my name is Andrew. I'm a student OER ambassador with Middlesex Community College and I'm also the head of the Public Information OER subcommittee. I've saved a significant amount most biology textbooks over between $100 and $150 and over my winter intercession course that was completely OER so I was able to save $100 that I was able to use on a plane ticket to see my partner. Oh that's great. Andrew and Yorga. Hi everybody my name is Yorga. I'm the chair of the Student Advisory Council and also Community Colleges Segmental Advisor to the Massachusetts Board of Fire Education. I've been with the Statewide OER Advisory Council since March 2020 and I'm pretty honored to be serving on this council and helping implement OER on a wider scale here in Massachusetts. I am majoring in electrical engineering so you can imagine that my books are quite expensive and I've spent about six to seven hundred dollars per semester. I could say the least and yeah it's good to be here. All right thank you Yorga and Cody. Hi everybody my name is Cody Nathanson. I am a student at Mountain Chesa Community College. I am the OER Ambassador and I am a co-chair of the Social Media Subcommittee and unlike the rest of my student panelists I've been fortunate enough that I haven't had to pay for my own books because I came from the adult education program so adult education program but the classes if I worked to pay for them the biggest book I had to spend money on would have been my biology book which would have ran me $250. I don't know about you guys I think it could be hard to justify spending that much money on a book and the online version wasn't much cheaper 45 and I'm happy to be here and get the talk to everybody. Thank you Cody. All right and my name is Sue Tajin and I am the co-president of the CCC OER panel executive council along with Lisa Young from Scottsdale Community College. I'm also the coordinator of instructional technology at Northern Essex Community College and serve as co-chair of the Massachusetts OER advisory council and I'd like to introduce to you my colleague Dr. Robert Awkford and Bob Robert go ahead introduce yourself. Well hello everybody I'm glad to be here today and for those of you because there are a lot of folks on here we know but for those of you who are not yes my last name really is Awkford and no I'm not or at least I try not and I'm just delighted to be here with our student leaders to both share and learn from them. I'm the assistant commissioner for academic effectiveness at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education and I get the pleasure in that role to work with these fabulous students here and with Sue and others as the statewide OER coordinator in Massachusetts for our public higher education system so I'm just just just just a delight to to be here and to hear their their lived experiences and what they've learned and more importantly the role they've played in advocacy in our state to help push this this movement forward so looking forward to the session ahead. Thank you Bob just a little bit about CCCOER for those who are not familiar with it. CCCOER is the community college consortium for open education. They are part of a of the open education global and their mission is to expand awareness and access to high quality OER and support faculty development, foster regional and OER leadership and most importantly improve student equity and success and Northern Essex became a member of CCCOER about five years ago when we started an open ed initiative and I will say that it was the best move that we made in the greatest community that we became involved in and we have really networked and learned so much from members from all over the country which leads me to the next slide and this is our membership in 2021. We have 90 members in 34 states from as you can see just first all through the country and we also have 16 system-wide memberships so if you're interested in CCCOER if you're not a member take a look at the website and you can read all the wonderful benefits of becoming a member of CCCOER. All right and so now I'm going to turn it over to Bob and he's going to give you a little history about OER in Massachusetts. Thank you Sue. Well as I said it's so great for me to be here with students because our students have both been the are both the beneficiaries of this work that we're doing in open educational resources and have been the progenitors of this work in large part and I'm saying that because the student advisory council resolution that Yorga who's currently the president of that's really what prompted the board of higher education to get actively engaged in this work. The student advisory council came made a presentation to the board and had indicated by vote of 19 to 0 that basically called the board out and said you guys need to get on board with this with this movement you need to really take leadership because this is an issue of huge concern for students and would be of huge benefit and that was the spring of 2018 by the fall. I working with the deputy commissioner for academic affairs and student success Patricia Marshall of CREATE we put together a working group the commissioner asked a group of people to serve on it and among those people who served on that working group included Sue Taschan from Northern Essex who was the co-chair of the working group and is also co-chair of the advisory council which I'll talk about in a few minutes and Marilyn Billings who I know is on this call and from UMass Amherst who was also co-chair of the working group and now the advisory council so that working group worked feverishly to put together a final report and they included 10 recommendations for change to to to expand this effort across our public higher education system. The report was accepted by the academic affairs committee of the board in October and the board of higher education both accepted report unanimously and urged us to move forward aggressively in this space. Next slide please oh I have it oh thank you these were the final recommendations in that report that were as you can see set up in a time horizon short-term mid-term long-term and the green items on here are ones that we have done the blue ones are ones that are in progress and the two red ones are ones that we have yet to begin working on so as you can see in about what 15 months we've actually come a long long way both in adapting an OER definition setting up a statewide advisory council which is basically one representative from each of our 29 public institutions and that's kind of a big deal because not 28 of those 29 are undergraduate serving but the 29th is our medical school who is also a part of this group in addition among the advisory council members four of the advisory council members are student members in fact Nikki and Yorgo are two of those student members on that advisory council because as you can see one of our one of the recommendations to continue to encourage student advocacy so we have absolutely done that both by having four students on the council as well as coordinating very closely with the student advisory council in all of their endeavors and working very closely with them the designation of my role as the statewide coordinator of professional development we have been doing even before we began to create an advisory council we've continued to do working on a statewide repository and right now one of the issues we're really focused on is the course management system or course marking to get that spread across the Commonwealth this week we put out a press release to well to the into the social social media and media we're in traditional media world as part of an open education week and the big news was that since 2014 we have saved students in Massachusetts about seven million dollars in textbook costs by this effort of pushing this movement towards open education and which is huge I mean that's just huge however I would add to that and then conclude with this which is to say that although obviously saving students money is huge and is very important and it's certainly one of primary drivers of this work it is not the only objective of this work in addition to that I think equally for us we are equally concerned we equally concerned and value that OER provides faculty additional tools to for teaching and learning that they did not have before and through open pedagogy it provides them opportunities to make those tools more culturally responsive reflecting on the student populations that we service and engaging students as co-creators of knowledge as well so the so this OER work is not just again about cost savings but it's a critical element of the equity agenda that we are driving in Massachusetts because open education enables students to get access to their learning materials on day one at a cost they can afford preferably zero if they're using free OER resources and as you as you know if students get the materials on day one are able to get engaged in the course at the beginning the course they're more likely to to get traction persist complete and to graduate which is what we're all about and this is particularly true for a minoritized student population so this is a huge huge tool to help our equity agenda so um so that's kind of what we've been doing in Massachusetts we I mean there's other things going on but that gives you a good highlight of where we are and our continued efforts to move forward in this work because it's just so critical to all that we value in Massachusetts and that I think this goes to Yorgo yes Yorgo we will turn this over to you thank you so thank you Bob for the wonderful presentation so I will start my part of the presentation with an anonymous quote that says in all of my work in education there has never been a more motivating or driving force than student voice and as Bob mentioned um the the OER initiative here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would not be as advanced as it is now if it wasn't for the strong student voice and student advocacy we've been experiencing throughout the years so the the whole process started in April 2018 when the student advisory council unanimously approved and presented a resolution regarding open educational resources to the board of higher education so the student advisory council committed to support OER and work towards its statewide implementation and that's what we've been doing since 2018 in January through March 2019 the student advisory council appointed two student members to the newly created OER working group that Bob mentioned previously SOC launched the OER photo campaign where students would post the amount they spend on a semester on books using the hashtag MA poly or MA hashtag mass OER and it was a quite successful photo campaign we would tag our legislators our school administrators and let them know that this situation is urgent we need help on this on October 2019 the student advisory council created the OER statement of support to identify students and faculty supporters of OER we created a digital format of it and we would distribute it to students digitally or through flyers with a QR code where they will scan the QR code fill the questions and express their support of the open educational resources and we collected 1932 statements in total which is an exemplary number next slide please um then we continued as as we said our efforts would not stop there we we worked we are working and we will always work towards implementing OER so in in March 2020 I was asked by the commissioner Carlos Santiago to appoint three members to the newly created OER advisory council each of them representing the segment and since then we've been working with that statewide OER advisory council towards implementing those short and long-term measures we previously saw from March 2019 until now the student advisory council created the internal OER subcommittee which Nikki is chairing and we identified an OER student ambassador for each of the campuses and this student ambassador would collaborate with the school's administration the faculty student government association or fellow students of his or her institution to further implement OER and advance its goals and also the student would collaborate with the assigned members of his or her institution to the statewide OER advisory council then from April 2018 till the present the student advisory council advocated on behalf of OER at the Fiendham advocacy day and community colleges advocacy day to the Massachusetts state house and also the board of higher education also when we were meeting with legislators so our students student advisory council students or um student OER ambassadors wherever they they have a chance to speak about OER its importance and its implementation we we don't let the chance go away we talk to the legislators we'll let them know this is the work we're doing this is the part where you need to weigh in and show the support if you're really interested and want to help your constituents this is where you should go and Bob knows soon knows that we've been very vocal about it and we will never stop being vocal about it so go OER now let's turn it over to my vice chair Nikki Nikki the floor is yours thanks Yoriko so what we've been doing for advocacy for you know for for the past two weeks now is that we so as Yoriko mentioned we each have uh we have an assigned OER student ambassador from our respective campuses and we have a total of 25 student leaders overall from the Commonwealth of Mass which is the most student leader participation we've ever had and from their um every every couple weeks we've we've gathered together to talk about OER what you know the benefits of it the challenges of it and also we came together to um where we came together to have this project called 10 Days of OER where um where where we would share student statements uh whether it's written or video and our goal of that was to increase student awareness and advocacy using social media and from from our from our committee we were able to have subcommittees under that with um the OER um in the the OER information committee the um the the OER video so it's in a cinema photography committee and also the OER social media committee where um Cody is the co-head of it and Andrew in um Andrew is also the um the committee leader for for the OER information so we we've gathered OER information facts and student voices from all over Commonwealth and each day um each day starting last Monday we've shared either a video or or a student statement of why OER is essential and why it's important to us and we've shared that on our Facebook student advisory council page in our Instagram and each day we've had like different stories um trying to attract more attention to OER and we've also tagged our legislators to get their attention as well on why OER is essential for for us as students as part of like the equity agenda and everything um Cody or Andrew um did you do you guys want to jump in on about the project or anything I think that's an excellent summary great thank you um so the the next slide please all right so now we are going to start thank you Nikki and Yorgo for sharing that information you guys have done some amazing work and I've become a chop fan this week of the student advisory council page um so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to stop sharing so you can um see the students and Bob is going to moderate a discussion about different topics around OER so I'm going to stop my share and I do ask that um while the students are speaking if you have any questions or comments you can type them into the chat we'll try to address the questions um Liz and I will be monitoring the chat and we'll address them after but um we're happy to have you um you know drop some questions into the chat all right ready to get going Bob all right so um well why don't I I'll start off and I'll direct the question to a person because we have panel four people so we want to make sure everyone gets a chance to answer questions but then of course if somebody wants to add in then certainly feel free to add in because again this is all about student voice um so Nikki since is your role as vice chair of OER for the student advisory council um certainly one of the ongoing challenges in this work of increasing the utilization of OER is getting faculty members to be willing to try it and check it out and see it as a as any viable and quality alternative to traditional tools what advice would you have or what advice would you give a faculty member considering whether to shift to an OER course material um thanks thank you mr awkward um honestly I would really suggest a faculty to try to adopt more OER into their course content or into their syllabi just because like I remember working with um with with a classmate of mine last last fall semester and we were we were taking a STEM course in physics and I remember asking him like hey you know how are you doing with your course and everything especially being student trusty for Bunker Hill like it's you know it's it's my job to make sure that students and their well-being and you know them doing well in their classes is essential making sure that they're successful I remember the student telling me that you know I'm not doing well I'm not doing too well I still haven't gotten my book yet and mind you this is November and we were supposed to get our books in September and the reason why he didn't have the book because he didn't have enough money to buy access codes because he was taking care of his mom during that and he was paying all these different bills and the even though the professor and the student they were they were accommodating him to make sure that he continues to pass to pass he was still unable to reach his potential and learn because of that roadblock of like like money to to get their course and everything so as a suggestion for a faculty is to not only try to do some research into adopt more OER materials into their syllabus also having a conversation with their colleagues with other different professors about OER trying to increase the OER conversation just because even though we as students we can talk to our professors as much as we can it's not as it would be more impactful when professors and faculty members discuss with each other the the conversation about OER and just getting that momentum going and just increasing awareness no matter where we go also talking with your administration finding like finding more resources about OER just just educating yourself as a faculty member while also listening to students um yeah that's so basically adopting more OER but also increasing the OER conversations with their colleagues wow excellent excellent Nikki um and your colleagues want to add anything more to that professionally from your personal perspective because I think it's so impactful when people hear that I've had experiences with professors who've said I can't adopt OER because my course is to advance I don't have anything existing out there and I think that's less a point towards OER isn't accessible and more a point towards communicate with faculty where their opportunities are to create or build their own open educational resources within their college because they're funding avenues that exist within the higher education innovation fund at the state level and grants all across the country that that's that's a great point you make Andrew about um about the importance of faculty both sharing their experiences with other faculty members because that always helps because you know if I'm doing the same work as you're doing and I say here's what I've gone through then that will help someone else the second important point I think you're raising that is there are resources at your campus your librarians the instructional designers and many librarians are have many of these institutions have librarians whose specific expertise is around OER so that's another great resource that they could go to to help them find the material because that's certainly something I hear faculty say well there's not any material there are disciplines where there really is isn't much or any um OER material so that's something we have to look at in terms of uh creation of new material but oftentimes there's material but people don't know where to go find it so there are resources to go and help you both within your faculty there meta finders that will help people find resources so those are great points you all brought up in fact Andrew while I've got you uh let me ask you a kind of a connected question to this which is really more from the student in um course marking you know do you know what course marking is right yes what are your thoughts about course marking and should institutions do course marking is that helpful to this work of increasing the use of OER on our campuses absolutely I believe especially from a student perspective that OER course markings should be adopted because it gives students the agency to make their own economic decisions they know which courses going in are going to be more affordable they can plan their degrees they can plan their semesters they can plan around the bills that they expect um and those course markings can appear as little notes underneath courses once you when you're scrolling through a digital catalog they can appear as details of the course just like the course time and dates um when you select a particular course and they can just be markings that are accessible to the advisors when they're speaking with students as they register so those aspects together create uh they create the option of seeing what's happening knowing what you're getting into but that's not the only aspect of course marking that's important it's important at a faculty level because these faculty can see what are my colleagues doing are OER courses getting higher enrollment are OER courses getting more engagement what do the GPAs look like between different sections of courses without infringing on academic freedom of course but looking in terms of the numbers that we do get back how can we improve the courses that are open are there improvements from courses that aren't open and that can increase knowledge within the group of faculty at an administrative level you can map which courses are adopting OER and which departments to target to increase the implementation of OER and if those institutions can work together on a federal and a state level then you can see which courses have more OER generally you can plan things like transfer programs that have little or no tuition a cost beyond tuition in terms of fees in terms of student materials in terms of textbooks across a state or across a nation and I think that's the broader goal of course marking it it can all come back to student information but it goes all the way up it's useful for everyone helping to inform the consumer this is really what it's about what's available and allow people to have choice and encourage more choice of open material which will hopefully encourage more creation open material more about adoption adapt adaptation and creation of open material exactly thank you Andrew Kody let me swing to you get you into this conversation on a different topic based on your experience with OER what are your thoughts about the need for the use of printed materials and do you feel that the quality OER materials matches that of traditional materials in terms of your access to the material ability to access it to use it to be able to read gather the information from it what's your experience with that and how do you feel OER does or doesn't impact that that is such a good question mainly because everything nowadays is going digital I mean when's the last time you bought a physical CV at a store right everything's going digital and with that this comes into question about the need for physical books and I have talked to a lot of students and heard from a lot of students this semester and while it wasn't the main point a lot a common thread between them was their love for physical books one of the benefits of ebooks is you know that you know you have everything in one place they can bring with you on your iPad computer whatever you don't have to log around like a tote bag to make sure you have all those books with you but that line about physicality makes a ton of sense it goes beyond just sentimental feelings to having and owning a book it's first of all it's easy to keep track of if you've gone through a online document especially one that has like hundreds of pages it is very easy to get disoriented or have trouble finding the notes of information you need a book just open it up everything's right there for you it also is beneficial for students who have trouble accessing internet that happens to a lot of people where they can't either download the PDF file or they require an internet connection to access that information so if a student either like wants to take a walk outside and enjoy a need to get out of the house for once they can't with some with some books so that helps them that way and another big issue is that physical books allow you to keep them so if you have another class most classes build upon each other so for having a physical book the house allows you to keep reference material for your future classes i know that a lot of math classes and science classes have keys and those are those expire so if you spend a a hundred two hundred dollars whether that is a voucher money or out of your own pocket what are you going to do you're going to spend another two hundred dollars for a book you've already bought just to go back and reference material that is really unreasonable for a lot of students so I think when it comes to physicality of books I think that if we're going to advocate for more education having physical copies an addition to digital copies is important to reaching as many people as possible and before I lose myself the second part of your question was the quality of the material from personal experience as I have had class with OER involved in it simple answer yeah it's unimaginably helpful and important but I've also read online multiple professors who have been challenged on their implementation of OER on their classes going on record to state that is not only uh as adequate as as bare name as the higher price tag but it also stacks up to that same way um and it's also important because you know with the internet there's mounds of information out there and it can feel it there's so much of it that it would take lifetimes to ship through to go through any particular subject if you learn about chairs it would take you little lifetimes to learn everything about that and having access to the information especially open-wise allows for like I said before a lot of more students to be in there um and another benefit of having this access is that it allows teachers to modify their schedule and their content to fit what they're trying to teach so it enhances the education in that way too. Excellent thank you for such a comprehensive response Cody appreciate that and and if you noticed in the chat Sue noted he also works at in the bookstore and he holds the views that he has I love it um let's do a little myth busting where's where's Andrew let me swing back over to Andrew here um and this is kind of a contrary question just to explore this issue a little bit what are some of the drawbacks or challenges of or OER you've experienced if you've experienced them and what would you say that would help them address those challenges? I think the main points that are touted as this is what's wrong with OER this is why I can't implement it is the quantity the quality and the aesthetic the quantity being what OERs are available to me the quality being is this quality educationally is this quality in terms of organization is it easy and accessible for a professor to jump into and what does it look like are these boring websites I've seen more petty complaints on that end I haven't experienced any personal downsides with OER but I know students who have said it feels like a mess it feels like everything was just thrown in one place especially with adopted OER from various different sources that it wasn't well organized and the solution to those problems is also OER implementation and OER funding uh there was a study released in 2019 by the American Education I always forget the full name of the acronym but the very American Educational Resource Association and they did a meta analysis of 23 different studies on the efficacy of OER and from the 22 studies studying educational outcomes like personal understanding of the course material as self-reflected understanding of the material in terms of grades understanding of material in terms of professorial perspective there was no difference between traditional texts and open texts or OER courses versus traditional heavy courses and in terms of withdrawal rates that was 11 studies it was found that among all the studies withdrawal rates were lower for open educational resource courses so the quality is not an issue here in terms of quantity there are dozens of websites online some of the most notable being lumen learning creative commons and they and open sacks they have searching tools for open ed whether it's homework modules whether it's entire texts or partial texts and the open textbook library alone has over 800 textbooks within their library to search the higher up in the niche you go the more the the greater the need is to create OER and that's something that can be done with additional funding from the federal level from the state level school by school but in terms of your basic english course your basic psychology course your basic biology course there are enough resources to make something that works if it's aesthetically pleasing one of the main benefits of OER is you can retain you can revise you can remix you can edit and shift in whatever way you'd like so if something isn't working for you if it's straining on your eyes just edit it that's part of your permissions as someone using open educational resources excellent excellent and that discussion you had caused me to think about as you're talking about textbooks a lot of the publishers of course have moved into space where they in large part because OER is such a disruptor to the oligopolistic nature of textbooks publishing in this country have gone to these you know you have the textbook and the interactives in a package you come into the course it's already selected for the course and it's certainly a lower course than the traditional textbook that might have been 200 dollars this made me a hundred 125 dollars but it's certainly not free it's certainly not low costs i'm curious nicky what drawbacks have you experienced with traditional textbooks or what these um these uh situation with a publisher does an access code for you to get access to the material and how has that worked for you or not um honestly um the access codes are the main reason why like the the course content when when students get their their materials are so expensive so like with my experience like access codes will be like 200 but then if i want to have an additional text like physical copy of the textbook it would just be like an extra 20 or 30 on top of that but if i just buy the book alone without access codes it's just 20 or 30 dollars like it would just be like 40 dollars by itself so that access code is the prime reason why students like professors and students needed to you know in order to learn and um and and being like a comprehensive work environment to be able to learn the course i feel that like students taking you know course requiring access code is like pretty prohibitive especially for low income students because you have to um there's just a pay wall like you have like that publishing companies do is that like you have to fork over the money for the access code if you don't have that money you would fail so sometimes you know the free trials that they offer like Wiley plus or Pearson they offer like they're two week they're free two week trial they don't cover for a semester um i've had students where like they try to complete their whole entire course work within that two that free two week trial just to pass their course and it's just not equitable like how can students continue to learn and be be part and be engaging with their classmates and have like you know have full long effective discussions with their professors if they're in that time crunch like it's just it's just not equitable so like i feel it with OER you know it's you know it's either low cost or free but it'll level the playing field for disadvantaged students because like knowledge is power and an equitable in an equitable barrier such as like publishing industries holding those educational materials captive like they lock students away from accessing it and like another problem with like access codes is that um after like after you're done with the semester you can't go back to the book or you can't go back to the video to you know to um to re-watch or to relearn whatever it is that you're trying to miss so that's that's the challenge with access codes excellent nicky thank you yorgo i'm coming to you because i got something for you on that study you talked about andrew by the way i think that's a north north dakota state did that study you talked about the meta study looking at um OER materials versus traditional materials and the study basically debunked one of the big myths that OER materials that students people students prefer OER materials because they're easier they're not as good and that study showed that the the in terms of quality the materials were comparable and students the retention in the classes that use the OER materials were higher than the classes that did traditional materials so that's a big study you want to make look that up the north dakota state study given um given the time in which we live the pandemic in which we're living um i'm curious how is cobit 19 this is for you yorgo how is cobit 19 impacted student learning in terms of OER as you mentioned bob this this is uh an unprecedented time we're living in and cobit disrupted every aspect of our life and of course it would reach to the student learning and the educational system so especially community colleges around the nation have invested in the development and implementation of free open educational resources as a means of relieving inequitable student financial burdens and also removing barriers to competition and access that surface primarily due to cobit of course these issues um existed a way before cobit surfaced but uh with cobit everything got worse uh we we see students struggling to pay their tuition pay their housing pay for their food so that's where OER comes as a shining sun to to help on on the situation on this dark situation we're living in and uh with the start of the pandemic the the whole U.S. education system shifted its modality from in person to remote finding OER to be extremely useful given its digital format so previously we uh we looked and researched uh how good the digital format is versus the the physical format but now uh given cobit and the the situation we're living in I think that the its digital modality um OER was was really successful and I think it's it's the most equitable choice we can have right now and the most affordable of course. Mm-hmm thank you Yorgo in fact that kind of opens up a good question and I'll put this up to any of the students who want to jump in on it uh which is beyond cost savings which is of course the big thing we always lead with in OER because it's it's it's something that's tangible I mean certainly when we're talking to lead uh educational leaders the legislators that's a big impact for them and and that's good and if that moves them to action that's great but beyond cost savings how does OER create racial and ethnic equity in this era certainly in Massachusetts we're you know in the equity agenda we're very focused on trying to address issues of racial justice and inequity for our students as I mentioned in my in the opening that we see OER is an important tool to help address that as from a student perspective how do you how do you see OER helping to address the issues of racial and ethnic equity. Anybody want to let me let me add something on that most of people in this call know Massachusetts is a is a pioneer of equity we're we're advancing our equity agenda as as the department of higher ed and also as a as a common wealth so talking about the cost of test books especially as a proportion of income for disproportionately impact student groups this is enormous and also on the equity side Massachusetts public higher education system serves the biggest community of the Latinx population of black and brown students of other students of underrepresented populations so OER as I said impacts the the attending cost side of it but also it gives the students a boost to continue their education and also improves the rates of completion. Excellent did you did you want to pick up on that Nicky? No I'm just I'm just talking about everything so beautifully. Anyone else want to talk about OER in terms of its addressing issues of equities for for students with disabilities for example or for our LGBTQ community and Andrew did you have some thoughts? Absolutely I can speak on those points as we all know LGBTQ people are more vulnerable to homelessness in general population most estimates land between one out of every three homeless youth one out of every five homeless youth and that's usually defined as the ages between 15 and 25 a third to a fifth of that entire population identifies as LGBTQ plus and those are the people that need public education especially at the community college level where they're just trying to get a simple two-year degree and lift themselves out of poverty it's essential for those folks and it's still legal in the United States to pay people with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage which is still as we speak 725 an hour that's not enough to pay for a lot of different kinds of educational materials especially extensive textbooks especially STEM textbooks and those students have those cost-saving issues but in addition to that it can be frustrating and isolating to be staring at a textbook and the faces don't look like you the students and the individuals on those pages aren't experiencing what you're experiencing it's a very white centric a very heterocentric a very cis centric a very ableist view because those are the authors that are able to make their way up because they were personally educated so it sort of perpetuates a system in pedagogy that's really whitewash that's really cleansed and sort of an angelic white Christian view and it doesn't really represent all religions it doesn't really represent all walks of life so being able to see yourself on that page is crucial and in addition there's a lot of accessibility issues that can come up with traditional texts texts that are really small access codes where you have to log in again and again people with memory issues can have trouble with forgetting passwords and open educational resources are usually you just click the thing you get in because you are able to retain it you can print it you can redistribute it to other people and you can print it in a size of font in a type of font that's more readable to you you can translate it into a text text-to-speech software for those who are visually impaired for those who are auditorially impaired and have videos those often have captions or they are allowed to have captions because they're open you can edit them you can shift them in any way that you like so it levels the playing field for those students Excellent thank you Andrew and given given the student voice here and one of the strong messages I think has come through here is about the role of student advocacy because as I said students are not only the major beneficiaries of this oh yeah certainly one of the beneficiaries I think the major beneficiary but also they have been the progenitor of pushing this your go let me toss this question to you I think this is a good one for you and particularly for our audience I think this may be something useful for them to hear about because some of the people I think are on here to say well not only what is the issue for students but how can we expand this work on our campus so as a student advocating for for OER on your campus what strategies have you used to reach students faculty faculty and administrators especially during this pandemic what has or hasn't worked and why So before the COVID era that's how I'm referring to it classes were conducted in person I used to reach out to students and faculty and administrators the whole process was much easier of course so I would usually approach students on campus in the student center or the cafeteria with a flyer and a QR code that contained the information about OER I would explain what OER is and what what its benefits are and I would usually collect students contact information an email or a phone number so I could follow up with them ask their answer their questions or provide them with additional information on how they could support OER on the campus and and beyond during the COVID era well we'll we've been all using Zoom to conduct our classes and all that I would usually ask for permission or an instructor to join the Zoom for let's say five to ten minutes and explain to their students what the OER is what we're doing why is it important for us why do we need to push it forward and also I would reach out to the school newsletter to the newspaper provide this information out there for students so they can see it with bright colors and understand how important is for us because even most of us want to support it they don't know what it is and it's extremely harder to support something that you don't understand so that's what we're trying to do make it easier for them regarding faculty what I've used personally is reaching out to my professors that I had either taken classes with in the past or were taking classes at the at the very time so reaching out to faculty means you need to be very prepared for their questions because they're of course a high caliber population and you know professors are always doubting they want to question whatever you're saying so you need to be really prepared and provide them with a thorough summary of whatever you're going to to present to them a strategy I followed was reaching out to the faculty senate at consignment community college reaching out to the learning council which is responsible for developing the curriculum for the year and also the library department and members of the OER advisory council on on the community college campus and that seemed to be very fruitful when I tell them I'm the chair of sac reaching out to you that's that kind of makes them happy so we've been trying to let's say reach out to faculty members and librarians on different fronts so we can provide them with all the information needed so they can make a really educated decision. Thank you that's very comprehensive. Sue I see me about five minutes of and I know there's some closing material we need to do for triple coer so I probably should kick back to you because we you know I mean this is Grog you sit here and talk with these students for the rest of the afternoon here. We're going to need a follow-up panel so I just typed into the chat if you have any questions you could please type them into the chat and we will try to answer them for you and I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and I want to thank the students who did an amazing job and I feel so inspired and lucky to work with such a great group of students in Massachusetts and I'm so excited that you guys have taken OER to this level. So let's go ahead and we have some oh did I skip a slide no okay um so cccoer has webinars that are free and if you go on their website you can sign up for them um so the spring webinars are listed here we have the rest of open education week which I'll talk about April 14th we're going to talk about K-12 and community colleges collaboration on OER finding professional development resources for adoption and creation which may be very interesting to you we had a lot of great webinars in the fall that were related to equity and racial you know pedagogy and things like that so and they're all recorded and posted on our website and for the rest of open ed week we're already at Wednesday tomorrow we have an asynchronous event on open pedagogy and equity and then on Friday global and cccoer leadership so you can check out more um you know on the like I said on the cccoer website or on the open ed week website and stay in the loop um we list all of the open conferences on um under get involved on our website and I guess well here I'm going to put a little plug in for the northeast OER summit um it is May 24th through 26th and the registration is gone live today and the call for proposals the keynote speaker will be announced later today so I just dropped the registration link into the website and the best part about it is it's free this year so a lot of these virtual conferences are free so go ahead and register I'd love to have um more students attend this year and really open it up to you know the entire country and beyond so um the community email list is open you don't have to be a member of cccoer to join the community email list and it's probably the most vibrant and active listserv that I've ever been involved in and also we have um blog posts and student impact stories on our website so if you are ever interested in submitting a blog or story um you can go ahead and check that out all right and let's see I think that takes us right to 12 59 p.m so thank you so much for joining us today and thank you again to the students and I see a lot of positive comments in the chat so feel free to reach out to any of us um the recording and the slides will be posted on the cccoer website later this afternoon