 look at my slides there. Can you hear me? Oh yeah. That's loud. Perfect. The clicker works. All right. Welcome everyone. We're so glad that you decided to spend the next hour with us. We're community college champions here and we're going to be talking about how community colleges lead the way with open education. So hope you're in the right session. How many of you are from community colleges? Okay. So we don't have to do too much education about what a community college is. All right. Well, it is my pleasure to be here with this amazing panel. I'm Una Daly, the director of the Community College Consortium for OER. We're part of OE Global and I'm going to let my panelists just say hello real quick and we'll get into more in-depth introductions in a moment. Hello and good morning everyone. I'm Shinta Hernandez. Good morning. I'm Kimberly Carter. I'm Robert Lawson. I'm from Northwest College and I'm an instructional designer here. Great. Wonderful. And Marina Amini is the executive director of the California Virtual Campus and unfortunately she can't join us today but she sent some pre-recorded videos so you're going to hear from her as we proceed through the panel. All right. So for those of you who aren't familiar with CCCOER, we have members across Canada and the United States. We're a community of practice supporting open education, encouraging colleges to develop collaborative and sustainable programs to ensure equitable access and success for our students. So pretty much aligned with the goals of community colleges in general and we were founded in 2007 and we joined OE Global in 2011 so and have been very happy as part of OE Global. And if you want to find out more information about becoming a member, please take a look at that link there that's posted. It's our website, cccoer.org and then become a member with dashes in between. All right. So what are community colleges and what's our mission? So you know, I think at the center of our work is equity, diversity and inclusion and your institution may word that slightly differently but we, community colleges were really created to provide education to those who didn't have access to university. So these were the brown and the black people and females, students with disabilities and today still the larger proportion of our students fall into those communities and we're publicly funded providing affordable access to pathways. And what we are going to talk about here is how OER and open pedagogy can help our students to be successful and move into successful careers. And as you know, community colleges focus on three major areas. One is, you know, we call it open access but you might call it open enrollment. So we accept all students. You don't have to have a high school certificate to come. You don't have to be English language proficient. We offer many services around getting to college ready. We also do a lot of workforce development. So that is a big part of the mission of community colleges and so many students come to us for certificates and then also completion and transfer. So that is moving on to a four-year college or university to get a bachelor's and affordability is a big part of that work. All right. Now I'm going to let my panelists introduce themselves and share a little bit about themselves and their colleges. Hi again. Good morning everybody. My name is Shinta Hernandez and I am the Dean of the virtual campus at Montgomery College which is located in Maryland in the United States. And just for a frame of reference we are located right outside of Washington D.C., the nation's capital. And so here the other role that I have is I'm President of the CCCOER Executive Council and Montgomery College is a member of Maryland online and Maryland online is a member of CCCOER. So you have all those connections. I want to share with you a little bit about Montgomery College. I've got, thank you, Una. We are the largest community college in the state of Maryland and we are also one of the, the most diverse community college in the continental United States. We were recently recognized as that a couple years ago and part of that is because we're located in one of the most diverse counties in America. And as you see the statistics up there we've got about 43,000 students both credit and non-credit from 155 countries and so just those statistics alone can tell you why open education, open pedagogy is so important for us because we have so many students from all walks of life. And so while Montgomery County is an affluent county we have a lot of pockets of poverty as well. So from an affordability standpoint and accessibility standpoint open education is important but also from the inclusivity standpoint and equity standpoint it is important. Many of us in this room know that representation matters and open educational resources can help with that to showcase contributors in our disciplines from marginalized populations and so this is why we have done so much work in these, in this area over the last several years and our faculty and staff have really, truly embraced open education at our institution. And then in the next slide I just want to share with you just very quickly how open education has evolved at Montgomery College. So again I mentioned affordability we talked about that at this conference last yesterday that that's the initial selling point because that's what makes most sense to students at the start how can they save money right because $40 here and there adds up because it adds up and they can save money from textbooks if we offer Z degrees. So that was our initial start but over time we recognize though that we want to take it up a notch and so we started looking at as a result of being a part of the Achieving the Dream grant we started looking at student success rates and how are students doing in these Z courses compared to students who are not in Z courses Z standing for zero cost textbooks and so we realized or we saw through the data from being a part of the Achieving the Dream grant that these students are doing as well as or better and then we wanted to take that up a notch again and I won't go too far into this piece yet because we're going to talk about it in the panel but we began looking at professional development opportunities for our faculty and and so with that came some fellowships that I will share with you in a second or later on but these fellowships are what helps our faculty better understand the importance of open education and open pedagogy and they really we provide that support and those resources for our faculty to grow collectively and learn collectively so that they are in the best position to help our students and increase accessibility and equity in education so with that I'm going to hand this over to my panelists colleague. Hi as I mentioned my name is Kimberly Carter I'm an OER resource consultant at Conestoga College in Kitchener Ontario and before I get started I just want to acknowledge that we I am a settler who lives and works on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe the Hadonsini and Neutral Peoples and I take responsibility for being a good ally and learning and taking meaningful actions with my indigenous communities. Conestoga College is one of the fastest growing colleges in Ontario Canada southern Ontario Canada with campuses in eight cities uh in Ontario representing 10 academic schools. We deliver a full range of career focused education training and applied research programs and as one of the country's top research colleges Conestoga's applied research activities support student learning while helping area businesses grow innovate and improve productivity. Part of my role is to oversee the open learning area in library and learning services where we support faculty faculty partnerships some with industry and learners in the adoption adaptation and collaborative new creation of open projects by advocating for release time wraparound supports and subsequently providing free resources and development opportunities for those that might not otherwise have an opportunity to do so that can include students and faculty who may have not traditionally had that opportunity. I can tell you that we're fairly new and emerging sometimes I liken it to running a startup so we have 26 OER projects published in our gallery and 25 of those have been since 2020. We take an agile project manage approach as we sort of figure out how we're going to continue to offer the supports as it's gaining in popularity. Those types of projects are arranged from digital textbooks simulations game simulations instructional resources and our open access teaching case journal. I'm just going to put a shameless plug in at two thirty we have we're showcasing industry partnership with us as well as our open access teaching case journal at three forty five. But how I came to open was through the campus Ontario extend program and from there I had taught for many years in a health office administration program where some of our textbooks were amongst most expensive because we were a bit health and we were a bit business and nothing ever really worked and so all the stars aligned and I heard about open and a student was out there and she was talking about deciding between textbooks in her children's sports and I was like I'm going to do something about this and so it's just been so exciting to see how many people have been come interested in this since we were able to advocate and have the support of our senior leadership so we have a top down and a bottom up approach and currently we have 15 active projects with 25 awaiting in the pipeline. Great I'm actually from the Kitchener Waterloo area so I know Conestoga College well and yeah my name is Robert Lawson and I'm an instructional designer at Northwest. I would say about seven years ago I started to get more and more interested in open education and the possibilities that it had to support our students. So at Northwest College a lot of our students probably more than 50 percent are new Canadians. I would say we have students from over a hundred countries speaking over 70 languages so it's a very very diverse group. We also have a very large indigenous student population and so really equity diversity and inclusion are really a part of our DNA. It's extremely important at our college and we offer a wide breadth of different programs. We have over 12,000 full-time students. We offer programs in you know healthcare aid, nursing, we have a business program so a pharmacy tech program, ESL and LINC, language instruction for newcomers to Canada is very important. We also have upgrading for students who need to upgrade their high school credentials. So it's really a diversity of programs designed to support students who are new Canadians or perhaps coming back to the education system after after leaving it for a few years. So I'm not sure if we have the yeah I just wanted to briefly review these two documents so you can see our strategic plan on the left. The title of it is We Are Who We Include. So this really is what NorQuest is all about. It's all about inclusion. We recognize the diversity of our students. We recognize the importance of developing materials that meet the needs of our diverse student population and so we are who we include. I don't think there could be a better name for a strategic plan for NorQuest. And if you look on the right there it says reimagine higher education and this was an initiative that we started about four years ago three or four years ago and it was designed to envision where NorQuest would be in 10 years. So I guess that's about seven years now but it was a very ambitious plan included in this plan was our open educational resource plan. We wanted to begin by publishing three books a year through the open educational Alberta textbook publishing platform press books and we're meeting this target and we also wanted to experiment with open pedagogy and there have been some initiatives around that and we also planned you know we won't believe this but we plan to host OE Global. This was something that we envisioned in 2020 but we didn't envision that that happening until like 2027 or 2028 and here we are so that's pretty amazing so yeah that's that's just sort of an overview of our strategic plans and this image here represents the skills of distinction and this is the new approach that we're taking to college-wide learning outcomes so prior to this we had a series of statements that were written like you know well written learning outcomes with a measurable verb and something about context and possibly performance as well and we decided we wanted to do something a little different so we adopted the medicine wheel and this circle of courage which was developed by Dr. Martin Brokenleg and we've adapted this to reflect what it is that we want learners to come away with at the end of their time at Norquest. We want them to be inclusive we want them to be resilient and we want them to practice new ways of thinking and within that circle there's there's some other characteristics or some other words inside of the medicine circle so we want them to reflect on you know how they're being inclusive with respect to belonging generosity etc so it's it's really a new approach and I think it it emphasizes the importance of indigenization at the college so thank you to all our panelists that was very thoughtful and I learned some new things I hope that you all did too and I love the idea of the medicine wheel what an interesting approach to take and that may be more approachable also for students than some of our other statements that we make so at this point we do want to share with you a few words from Dr. Marina Amini who is the thank you she's the executive director I know her quite well of the California virtual campus but of course when you get up here you forget everything so so Reese if we could play her video please thank you hi everyone my name is Marina Amini I'm the executive director for the California virtual campus and I apologize for not being there in person at what looks to be an amazing conference this week so I hope you enjoy it so a little bit about the state of california and what I do the california community colleges are the world's largest educational system we're comprised of about 115 colleges in 72 districts so some are multi colleges and some are single college districts and we serve between 1.8 to 2.2 million students annually and so the role of community colleges in the state of california is tremendous we have one in every region and every city virtually and pretty much every citizen in the state has taken a class either as an undergraduate as a continuing education student or maybe as a senior as a lifelong learner in our emeritus programs but the community colleges are truly a part of the community that's in their name and so when we have an initiative that touches our students and touches the california community colleges it's tremendously impactful and one policy or one initiative can really have rippling effects for student success and student support and so the OER initiative and project in our state has been tremendous and it has made some tremendous headway through the community colleges for me personally when I was a college student I didn't always purchase my textbook because I couldn't afford it so there were times when I took entire classes as an undergraduate without buying a textbook sometimes I would buy the book but copy select chapters based on what was in the syllabus and then return the book so that I didn't have to pay for it and other times I would team up with my classmates to split the cost of a book and I know that our students are doing the same things when they cannot afford textbooks and so for me it's not only a professional passion but a personal passion as well because I remember those days and I remember what it's like for our students and I'm looking forward to this conversation today to talk a bit about the California virtual campus as well we my organization the California virtual campus we essentially allow for cross enrollment between 115 colleges so imagine being a student at one of those colleges and not having the courses that you need or maybe the courses that you need are offered by your institution but they're very expensive in terms of the textbook costs you can now use the California virtual campus the exchange to go and find a course at any of the other colleges and within a matter of minutes add those classes and furthermore we mark those classes for zero textbook costs so really it's a matter of putting the decisions and the selection at the hands of our students the consumer and the more information and education that we put in the hands of our students what we have found is the more successful they are so with that I will hand it back to you thank you another perspective from a statewide community college system and these are some slides from marina but we're going to skip past those at this point and we're going to go to our panel now for just some questions and so tell us about what unique strategies your college utilizes to support equitable outcomes for diverse students through open ed and who would like to start thank you shinta absolutely thank you for that question unna um so earlier in my in one of my slides I had talked about affordability is that initial starting point for our students I wanted to also share that through the achieving the dream grant we had saved more than 13 million dollars since we started it and we have course marking which allows us to capture that data but one and so we have several unique strategies that we employ at Montgomery College to help diverse student populations by way of open education but the one that I would like to focus here are the fellowships night that was on the the right hand side of my slide the interestingly enough dr. cable green our keynote speaker talked about the un sdgs and that if we want to solve the world's biggest problems that we have to make the information and the culture and the knowledge open and so my colleague dr. mike mills was in the audience he's vice president of e-learning innovation and teaching excellence at Montgomery College he and I were attending the open ed conference in anaheim 2017 I believe it was and we went to dr. greens session on un sdgs had a conversation thought about some of the the things that he had said in his session and we thought about how can we couple the idea of the un sdgs with open education and so we after a lot of conversations we went back to Montgomery College and before you know it this united nations sustainable development goals open pedagogy faculty fellowship was born and so that's one of the unique strategies that I will really discuss because in just these past six years this international partnership has spanned across 12 institutional partners across north america central america and now asia we just opened up an asia chapter and we're we're looking and and people are interested in being a part of this collaboration and in fact just a shameless plug tomorrow at morning 11 30 we're several of us on the leadership team are going to present on how to lead and sustain an international collaboration so feel free to to stop by if if your schedule permits but we what's really essential about this this collaboration this fellowship is that the faculty who are selected to be a part of this fellowship across the partners they become a part of a faculty team that is cross institutional and multidisciplinary so if you're a sociology professor at Montgomery College for example you might be paired up with someone who's from quantlin polytechnic university in in british columbia in biology and so they come up with this team would come up with these interdisciplinary renewable assignments that put their students at the center of change their students become change agents in their communities by way of these un sdgs and so in the last six years we have seen some remarkable assignments that these faculty teams have developed and even more remarkable student projects that truly have made an impact on our societies our global societies and so we in fact actually a couple years ago 2020 i believe it was open education global awarded us with the open education award of excellence and so we're certainly very grateful for that and it just continues to grow and from that another unique strategy is that we continue to consider other additional professional development opportunities for our faculty centered around open pedagogy and the most recent one was just launched this summer e-faculty fellowship for dual enrollment and so there's a couple facets of that fellowship one is open pedagogy another one is virtual environments but this touches on dual enrollment students and so we're really excited about having launched that and we'll see where that goes in the years to come but we're very just like many of you in this room very big on improving relevance of our faculty and creating more and more robust professional development opportunities thank you shinta at conestoga and open learning at conestoga we have a really interesting co-op and work study program and so in open learning we encourage students and many of them are from our international we have a very diverse international student population and these students are compensated through work study and paid co-op terms so we provide a practical opportunity for them to co-construct and work with our faculty members in developing oer now not every project but a couple examples in one we put a call out to our students to act in our game simulation videos so that within their the game simulations the student population is is pretty well represented and then they also gain some really practical work experience that they can then apply to their CVs and sometimes have opportunity to industry partners to demonstrate their skills and build those relationships and those communities learners also have for some of our open projects evaluated the material so i'll give you one example that always sticks with me because when we first start doing that they're not too sure right like you really want us to peer review this from the student view i'm like yes i want to imagine you're a brand new student you're looking at this material for this first time what's what's wrong with it what's what's not speaking to and one student very said well if you're sure there's way too many words and i said of course we're educators we talk way too much um but that was such a like an enlightening moment that we took time to build that trust with her and so i think that that's a very important strategy and we try to bring that when we're speaking to our faculty developers that co-construction with students and how important that is uh to make sure their voices and their images are represented in our open projects i love the idea of co-creating with students because i think that does promote equity diversity and inclusion if they can see themselves in the the works that they're co-creating so that's great and we'd love to initiate some open pedagogy projects that's that's coming it's being done on a small scale but hopefully there will come a day in the next year or so where somebody decides to enlist the the help of their students to help develop or maybe even redevelop an existing textbook that can actually reflect who our students are and what their needs are so at at norquest everything that we've done in terms of open education has kind of been guided by the overall strategic plan that i mentioned we are who we include in which there is a statement that mentions that norquest is dedicated to becoming an anti-racist institution one that emphasizes decolonization and one that will support the unique needs of our our student population so if you look at the textbooks that we've published so far they they do align with the unique needs of our our students we do have a very popular textbook in settlement studies and settlement studies is a a bit of a unique program at norquest and this textbook also traces the history of oppression in canada the oppression of minorities and indigenous peoples so i think that's a very important thing for canadiens and particularly new canadians to understand as they adjust to a life in this country we've also developed some some resources for our our english learners for example we have a textbook on digital literacy for the the newcomers to canada for the ones in the link program so our textbooks really reflect our attempt to be more inclusive and once the the textbooks are developed they undergo a pretty rigorous peer review and that's not only a peer review that looks at the content and the academic merit but it also investigates you know the extent to which the the textbook is meeting the needs of in terms of accessibility of people who may not for example people who may be colorblind or facing other challenges people with disabilities so that that disability checklist is a very important component of ensuring that we're meeting the needs of all students we also have an edi rubric that we use to assess all of our textbooks and make sure that it's inclusive as possible we encourage authors to think about the images that they're using the language that they're using etc it's a pretty comprehensive rubric so those are some of the the most prominent initiatives that we're taking in terms of edi right now thank you for that yeah particularly for sharing about the edi rubrics and i know that pretty much all of our developers of oer have edi rubrics i let's go ahead and play the video number two from arena but i want to say while you're listening to that you might be thinking about what strategies your college utilizes because we're going to turn to you after we hear from arena and ask you to share if you'd like to well let's talk about unique strategies when it comes to implementing and growing oer for our diverse students i would say that have always been some fledgling initiatives and projects at the california community colleges but that work became very serious in 2015 when assembly bill 798 was passed called the college textbook affordability act and later in 2018 assembly bill 1809 which put aside about six million dollars for faculty and staff and colleges to really utilize grant money to grow their initiatives around oer adoption several years ago we had a law that required california community colleges to clearly highlight using a symbol or logo in our course schedule whether a class uses exclusively digital course materials so we had to tell students what at the point of the course schedule whether a course was zero textbook costs and oer or whether there was actually a physical book that required money this was a major game changer and what colleges immediately noticed was that those courses that were marked for zero textbook costs those courses filled more quickly they had fewer canceled sections and over time they were able to see that the outcomes for those courses were significantly better than the outcomes for like courses that required paid textbooks and physical materials so there were some very exciting findings that led to a number of additional initiatives through the california chancellor's office the california community colleges chancellor's office that included grant programs that allowed colleges to really lay out their vision for increasing oer adoption that really allowed people to move it when i was a dean at one of those colleges because of these grant programs we were able to move our college from about five percent oer ztc to about 60 percent over five years and we're talking of thousands of courses and sections hundreds of faculty that moved their courses and it was really through a stipend program and many many colleges ended up using this strategy um and additionally there were other ed codes that really appropriated money for not just zero textbook classes but then pathways and entire degrees so then you had colleges like my former college also utilizing these grant monies to create entire degrees and certificates and transfer patterns that were zero textbook costs and really focusing on sustainability of those programs after the grant funding was exhausted so those are some strategies that we've used in our system at the california community colleges virtual campus which is where i work we have also through that cross enrollment process marked our ztc courses very clearly for students students can now go in and search for and take courses that are badged with zero textbook costs and again what we're finding is that there's tremendous demand and interest and students now recognize what that means and they eagerly and excitedly seek out those courses as options for completing their educational goals so i'll stop here and hand it back to you now all right and so she mentioned funding which is uh yeah kind of the elephant in the room uh this this uh even though open educational resources are free to use i think somebody on the first day said they're not free to develop so really important part and also of letting students know how they can find the courses that use that okay now it's um it's it's your turn if you'd like to um share strategies that your college is using would anyone like to share okay yeah sorry it's hard to see out there please uh and and maybe tell us what college you're at as well okay i'm super loud so i'm gonna tone it down for this um i'm actually from arkansas in the us uh we're down in the southern part and we lead arkansas in oer usage um i i work at a community college and we're a part of the university of arkansas system there's 22 community colleges but we're very innovative so we're 71 percent we are uh which which is quite remarkable where we're at um and the way the way we started was in 2015 previous to my current role i had worked in the college bookstore and in 2015 the chancellor approached me and said hey our lease is up with our bookstore relenda can you develop a textbook program you know an internal program and i said i don't know but i'm gonna i'm gonna give it a shot um i did i spent four months ordering books from places like amazon for any courses that adopted a book you know there might be a hundred books they needed well i would order them one at a time two at a time however i could get them until i bought up the market because of that we were able to rent these textbooks to our students for 30 dollars a semester um and then at the same time we were pushing oer an oer initiative so today we saved our students 3.2 million dollars now we're a small college about 1500 students um so you know we're pretty proud of that uh but what we're running into now and this is what i really wanted to ask someone here that the best way uh i think a lot of people here are very experienced with this and there are some states in the us where we're not supposed to say diversity equity or inclusion yes and that is what our oer is founded upon in fact we're the only hsi institute in the state of arkansas um so you know we're very based in diversity but the state funds us so if we have any kind of programs that are centered on diversity equity or inclusion we can lose our state funding so i'm kind of wondering if anyone has any innovative ways on how to handle that thank you for that question and certainly you're not unique there's other states in the us where um there's been recent legislation um where you're not allowed to use those terms um all right we've got someone over here would you like to help um her out with that or did you have a separate question or separate i'm liz piercim from um oregon in the united states a community college and i was going to answer your question if that's still all right yeah yeah just just hold on yeah we i know that we we are looking for alternative um terminology and i don't know if you're specifically can't say diversity equity inclusion together sometimes you're allowed to use one of those terms but not all of them together that all together seems to be it's it's kind of a red flag um in some states um you definitely yes definitely you could talk about that we know though that socioeconomic alone does not account for um the discrimination that occurs but yes you do yes it's it's kind of a piece it's definitely a piece of it thank you for that we'll have to talk later i i'd love to hear more are you at southeastern no which one are you at which community college oh casa talk okay yeah well we should talk more thank you for sharing that um yes and please go ahead um yeah so i was going to talk a little bit about a um interdisciplinary project that we're doing at lin benton community college myself i'm teaching human development and a sciences faculty and our both of our classes are focused on um difference power and oppression and we are still allowed to use those words in fact we're encouraged too um but what i wanted to say about that we've developed some open pedagogy assignments and and dr hernan does i'm so interested in and learning more about what you're doing on a larger scale i think than what we're doing but those final projects where students are focused on social justice and environmental justice what's so powerful is the students that have been underrepresented and have lived experience and now have integrated some of the academic terminology around environmental justice and social justice um they really can speak their truth in a more powerful way and so those final assignments which um can go some have gone into a textbook that i had written with students so some are in the textbook now and some are now going into an openly licensed environmental justice um anthology and it's been powerful for all the students but i would say for underrepresented students especially powerful that's wonderful and thank you i know that oregon is doing a lot of work in this area and very impressive um yeah so thank you for sharing that do we have others who would like to share okay well we'll have well the chance at the end if we if we don't run out of time and we don't get overrun with the lunch crowd all right we're this is our final question to our panelists um any lessons learned that at your college about trying to implement these sometimes we do run into barriers and certainly this educator here from arkansas shared with us you know they've been going strong since 2015 but now they're running into some political issues that are making it difficult to to move forward um so panelists would you like to share yeah um so uh the lessons learned yeah so i guess um some of the lessons that we've learned is um you know we can we can really try to be as um stringent as possible in terms of peer reviewing our our books but um it's not always perfect and um we um recently had an audit at um norquests that looked at accessibility in terms of our online courses um and we use the the Moodle uh learning management system and it um it it wasn't overly positive and it really made a lot of people think about how we're designing our online courses you know um we um we took a look at them and from the perspective of someone who is using a screen reader and you know some of the stuff that we had in our courses was not not readable and um it really makes you think when you experience it from that perspective you know actually using a screen reader and experiencing the challenges that somebody else might have using those materials and it really made us think that um we need to to do this the same thing with the open educational resources that we're developing in press books we need to do a much more thorough accessibility audit we need to make sure that the tables are formatted properly so that they can be read by a screen reader uh we need to make sure we have alt tags for all of our images and um we've started to do that we've started to go back based on the findings of this um this audit uh of our online courses we started to use some of the conclusions from that to go back and take a look at our press books and see what what it is that we're missing in terms of accessibility and um yeah we I think we have quite a bit of work to bring those up to standard so I think it's it's something that um in the beginning we were very excited about publishing open textbooks and um I think if we had considered this from the very beginning it would have made the job much easier to create these resources so uh that was a bit of a hard lesson and um I think just uh um I want I want to say something just a little bit different but um I think that uh planning this um conference for the last year at Norquest um has uh really been a wonderful challenge but um there have been some uh lessons learned along the way um so the way that we we approach this uh the the conference development is that we wanted to create something that was a partnership with the Indigenous House of Learning um and we envisioned this as something that could could somehow advance reconciliation in Canada um in you know even in a small way um but there were a lot of uh a lot of hard lessons along the way to being more inclusive in our approach to conference design um some challenges around protocol coming from a Western background uh I didn't uh I didn't have an idea about some of the the protocols that I needed to follow um with our our Cree relatives and that led to a few bumps in the road you know for example if you if you ask somebody to for their knowledge then you need to acknowledge that and that person becomes a part of your your relations a part of your circle um and I sort of moved on and asked another person to check this and this other person uh who uh was Indigenous felt excluded from that and so it really made me reflect and think about what I'm doing in terms of promoting inclusivity and how I'm going about it and it's not always an easy road to follow uh there's going to be moments where you have missteps and there will be bumps in the road but I think ultimately what we came together and developed was pretty special uh because of the the cooperation and collaboration between uh Indigenous and non-Indigenous relatives so and I don't know as a participant of this conference can I just say it feels like you did a really good job you know how everyone's feeling in the audience lessons learned wow there has been tons so from a very practical perspective we didn't know what we didn't know when we started and uh so recently hired uh editor instructional designer slash editor from the publishing world and when she started to look at what we had done in the past it was really apparent that we could have done a better job but we didn't know what we didn't know so uh I think it's like having grace and knowing that you're gonna the first thing isn't going to be perfect and really that's what open is right opens about building upon one thing and then making it better with the next iteration and the next amount of people that repurpose what you have done so there's that piece but recently uh reflecting with colleagues who are sitting in this room one is we don't take time to reflect right always in a rush always trying to get the next project completed and not um and feeling like I can't tell you how many people have said you know Kim you need to slow down it's going to take at least 10 years and I'm like 10 years might be retired then not sure um or rewired as Una says um and so sometimes that can be really discouraging but when you sit back and reflect about where you've been and where you are now it's like okay wow like things are moving even though there's so many more things to do so I think that that's an important piece and we know that's an important piece of learning too it's to take the time to reflect and time there's never enough time to do everything you want to do uh I was in a session yesterday where it was like put the your three most things that are important to you and I thought well energy where will I put my energy that's how I prioritize what's the impact right and what brings me joy and so sometimes when you get burdened under that oh I need to complete all of these projects and all these things in less than 10 years um is just remember is it joyful right and to uh bring that amongst the people working with you great thank you well I appreciate it this question very much when Una first came to us um in preparation for this panel because it allowed me to and I'm going to use Kimberley's words here reflect on what has Montgomery College done and where can we go and so I'm going to approach this question slightly differently but of the same um context uh where are those areas of of growth that are still out there to explore and to dive into and so I have a couple that I'd like to share here um so again kind of referencing back to Dr. Cable Green's um toward the end of his keynote about artificial intelligence so that the United Nations Fellowship that I mentioned earlier one of the things that we would love to explore and really talk about how this is going to pan out is the intersection between artificial intelligence open pedagogy and how that plays out with publicly licensed materials and so as the leadership team continues talking about it um we will come next summer when the next cohort comes through definitely have a good grasp of how that's going to look like what that's going to look like um for that for that cohort and then the other piece where I think there's an opportunity for growth is in the spirit of equity taking a look at our non-credit workforce development side really thinking about how can we offer the space in place and support and resources for non-credit programs degree certificates and courses so that those students and those faculty members also get to benefit from the the work of open education so that we can continue we can see benefits and outcomes similar to what we've been seeing on the credit side and then I meant my colleagues here mentioned students as co-creators a couple years ago we had launched through an internal grant something that we called social justice ambassadors program in which faculty were paired with students in their courses to co-create materials the curriculum and and group assignments and other things that would create that more inclusive and more empowering learning experience for the students and so that's another area of opportunity where we would like to grow at Montgomery College so on that I'm going to hand this back over to Una. Thank you so much to our to our panelists for that and for being really honest about you don't know what you don't know until you get there and thank you Robert specifically about you know the the challenges and and the learning associated with putting together a conference where you are really trying to be too eyed seen yeah and I love the programs that you shared Shinta well we are going to skip Marina much as we love her but we are at the end of this and so I do want to welcome you to join our our free part of our community join our community email we have monthly webinars focused on OER put on by wonderful practitioners like these and we have a lot of other activities throughout the year we've got an equity book club in the summer we've got some summer conversations you join OE global as well you get your conference discounts because we are part of OE global and your membership in CCC OER is with OE global as well all right now we want to open this up for any questions you might want to address to our esteemed panelists so this is your time again is everyone getting hungry for lunch oh yes please it might have been me we yeah so the the books that we've been developing not all of them but some of them are geared towards you know the the realization that a lot of our students are new Canadians and coming to a very different place so we have developed are you familiar with link language instruction for newcomers to Canada it's a government funded program and we've developed some open resources in particular we have one on digital literacy that's available in the open education Alberta catalog because this is really a very important skill for newcomers to Canada and for for language students in particular so yeah yes I also wanted to mention that there's a number of textbooks out there that are on ESL that are produced you might are you familiar with the repositories okay yeah definitely check those out I know there's been work done around the country on that Oregon has some California does but but far other states and I and thank you for sharing yours as well Robert well um we are still open for questions for like another minute is that it I'm looking for yep sorry you have a comment yeah please yes well thank you yeah thank you all so much for joining us I think we are right up on the lunch hour and thanks so much to to the technical team for all the hand-holding through the videos and so forth really appreciate that