 All right welcome back everybody to our Open Education Week celebration with 10 OER degree and adoption showcases at community colleges. We are in the last hour of our five hour webinar and I'm very pleased to introduce Ron Oxford who is the head librarian at West Hills Community College Lamour in California and I'd like to just mention a little bit about the work that West Hills has been doing. They are an Achieving the Dream OER degree school so they are working on a degree with Achieving the Dream. They're also involved in the California Zero Textbook Cost Degree as a grantee developing a degree through that program but also West Hills College Lamour also is one of the technical assistance providers to the other 23 colleges in California who are participating in the California Zero Textbook Cost Degree program which we of course abbreviate ZTZ. So thank you so much Ron for taking the time to join us today and tell us more about that. Okay well thank you and hello everybody. As I said I'm Ron Oxford the librarian here at West Hills College in Lamour and I'm with Kelsey Smith is also joining us. She's our adjunct OER librarian and just a little bit about West Hills College is we're a very rural college we're in Central California in the Central San Joaquin Valley very small only about 1700 FTES and because of that we were able to really reach out when we started our OER initiatives and I was able to speak individually with each faculty member and I know that that's not always possible at a lot of the larger schools and I think that's that really helped with our success is that we were able to sit down and individually speak with every faculty member and I was able to show them an OER textbook if one was available show them the cost savings and after we did that kind of a scan of the environment before we started launching into our degrees that we had a hundred percent buy-in with our faculty that this is something that we really wanted to do here. So we are small we are centrally located we're pretty much almost in the center of California a Hispanic serving institution and one of the things though is that even though we are in Central California there are sections of this area that we don't have broadband so that's something that we had to take into consideration when we were looking at OER with a different, especially when it comes to different things that couldn't be printed in things like that was because we don't have broadband in all of the areas. I can come in on a weekend sometimes and there'll be students that have driven in from some of the agricultural towns out and about and they'll be outside of the library just so that they can get access to the internet and that's really interesting because we are agriculturally based and I was just at a meeting not long ago when they were talking about the fact that we could be so much more productive if we use drones in our fields but we don't have the internet access to do that so I always found that rather interesting. So this is some of the things I'm gonna go into a little more detail on each one of these but we as ONA had said we're a zero textbook cost degree we completed that for the state chancellor's office grant here we're in achieving this dream school we're participating in AB 798 which is a textbook affordability grant here in California as well and then we're a technical assistance provider with one other college here to help the new ZTC grantees move forward in their work. So as that overall impact it doesn't seem like a lot when you compare it to some of the other colleges that are doing this work but for our size that the $283,000 really does have an impact on our students and for us one of the things too that we're really excited about is how it's changed the way that our instructors are teaching and the students are learning and of course the immediate textbook access. We've got our courses here that you can see we're continuing to add more courses all of the time we've finished our ZTC degree in psychology and we're implementing that now and then we'll be moving forward with our ATV achieving the dream one coming up soon we've created a subcommittee and I'll talk more about all of these things here in a little bit but this is just kind of an overview of where we are right now and what we're doing. Let's see here so the first one is the AB 798 and AB 798 is an assembly bill and it was designed as textbook affordability and this one is ran by our California State University system. The Chancellor's Office here it's not a community college one but we work in conjunction with them the UCs where I believe we're also invited but they're not the universities of California Berkeley and the UCs they weren't they're not really participating as much as the CSUs in the community colleges it's about 45 colleges I believe about 50-50 between the universities and the community colleges and one of the things about this act is is that it would create an area where a cool for Ed here where and if you go in and take a look it's an area where they have faculty showcases where they talk about their adoptions and there's also a lot of peer-reviewed OER resources in there so when you're looking for these peer-reviewed resources you can go in there and see that who's reviewed them and what they had to say about the different resources so I'd recommend taking a look at that if you're still looking for different resources and it's not this one is more about affordability rather than anything this one is 30% cost-saving so for each section so for every section where you reduce cost by 30% then you could get a thousand dollars up to 50 sections and they're getting ready to launch a second round of this it's really a good way for newer colleges or colleges that aren't really ready to dive in to creating a zero textbook cost degree to start filling the water basically to see how OER would work at their institution so that's the first one the 8798 that we've been working on the next one here is our ZTC degree and that's a zero textbook cost degree and the way those work is that you have to have one section of every course including general education so you have to have one section at least and then everything will have to be shared at the professional learning network here so when we're done creating each these sections of these courses for these degrees we're placing them on the professional learning network for everybody to have access to so we could start scaling it up around the state we were one of the initial five implementation grants and as Eunice said there's a new round of 23 more right now and you have one year to create a that pathway that has one section of every course needed so it's one year it's a very short turnaround to create these degrees it can be either a degree or a certificate to meet the grant requirements this is the colleges that are around the state right there there's a wide range of degrees and certificates here at West Hills we were able to adopt much of what we needed in psychology there was a lot of things out there that we were able to adopt but like at College of the Canyons in their water systems technologies there wasn't a lot of it to adopt so they had to create a lot of their own OER materials so there's a 114 colleges in California community colleges so we're just now you know we're not even you know that quarter basically getting there so we've got a lot of work still to do there's no we're still working on a system of communication and collaboration so that we're not all reinventing the wheel as you can see there's a couple of colleges that are working on similar things and we're really trying to figure out a way to get those colleges to work together rather than everybody working in silos they're very different you know what works for the folks down in Southern California might not work for us in our campus culture here at the Central Valley or in St. Lake Tahoe at some of the smaller institutions so a lot of this stuff is on the Chancellor's Office website here if you'd like to you could just Google that and and take a look at the different focus areas here and there's also a list on the that page that lists the different courses that have been developed and the contact information if you'd like to contact the individuals and get more information we also have something called a it's a Senate Bill 1359 in beginning in January we had to have this logo up here of that book with the no dollar sign in it and that has to be placed in all of the different catalogs and schedules around so that students are aware of what courses are OER and it's going to be really interesting to see how students start voting with their feet so if you have three sections of one course and one's OER and two aren't you know and you've got that designation next to the one that is it it's going to be watch those registration patterns it's going to be pretty interesting let's see here we're also one of 38 colleges and 13 states that's achieving the dream school and there's two of us in California Santa Ana and then us here in a LeMore we're really excited about this degree we think you know elementary teacher education that what better way for us to foster the adoption of OER than teaching future teachers how to use OER so the elementary teacher education courses use OER in the hopes that they will then pay it forward and use it as they go out into their careers one of the things about achieving the dream was it really helped us develop our infrastructure our infrastructure was pretty much non-existent before and we were able to use their expertise when it came to getting a grasp of how licensing creative commons attributions course mapping all of that stuff that set us up a pretty good foundation to move forward with these other initiatives and working with Lumen and again with all of the expertise that they were able to share with us so and we also as a said we're a zero a technical assistance provider along with College of the Canyons College of the Canyons is a large well somewhat large school compared to Southern California they're they're near Magic Mountain and they're they're a large school from our point of view that in Southern California not really rather a fluid and we are very small low literacy rates high poverty so we split this contract in order to get a little bit of more diversity when we go about helping the other colleges move forward with their degrees so what College of the Canyons does is they hold two large OER summits each year and they cover a broad range of topics and then what we do is we take a look at some of those topics and work with College of Canyons to target those areas that need more attention and then we have regional workshops we just had one at San Jose City College and we'll be having another in Southern California that target some of the things that come out of those summits the College of the Canyons holds we also have monthly webinars on different topics that the CCC OER helps us with and those are also archived on the Chancellor's Office website if you'd like to take a look at those and no one really has oversight right now of how OER works in California there is the Chancellor's Office in the academic affairs division that has kind of the overall administrative oversight but maintaining the communication between the 114 differing colleges the state academic citate the council of chief librarians our online education initiative and all of this other folks is a real challenge for us and so what that mechanism moving forward will be used we're still looking at you know as the grants wind down you know what's going to be the next step for California as we move forward so we're still looking at all that trying to figure out how that's going to work let's see here and as for our motivation for doing this at West Hills you know it really was just the dedication that we are serving low end to come and underserved students equal access we've all heard about the various pros of using OER as opposed to traditional textbooks it can be a textbooks can really be just crippling to the point of being a real barrier to college attendance and I've seen I'm sure most of you watching have seen the benefits of using OER and having day one access and all this you know I was a student here at West Hills College of Lamar and I still remember that that feeling of dread when I had to choose classes by textbook cost as opposed to academic need that's still vivid in my memory and I can honestly say that my education was drawn out longer specifically because of textbook costs so it's really great to be a part of all of this and working towards helping students avoid that these are all positive reasons for OER and that's the motivation for our work and it moves us with our vision statement of being committed to a relentless pursuit of student success so of course the challenges are just almost as many as the benefits and that some of the things that we saw early on as a lot of people do are those is the lack of the ancillary materials but it just keeps getting better it just keeps getting better all the time almost on a daily basis there's something new that comes across so that's a very positive thing and the homework systems you have those folks that have decided that they can't live without the various homework systems that are out there and some of the OER is there's not a lot out there yet that you can adopt our sister college at Kalinga West Hills College Kalinga they're working on precision agriculture and kinesiology you know there's not a lot on precision agriculture out there speaking of which if anyone has any leads you can email me at Ron Oxford up at whcc.edu we're really looking for some stuff on precision ag and kinesiology the ability to replace the literature requirements English courses that's tough how do you get some of the stuff printed the budget sustainability past the grants but for us luckily we've got full faculty administrative staff and student support you know I've heard a lot of horror stories of where one area or another is not buying in and it really hamstrings entire initiatives you really have to have that entire buy-in from your college to move forward and we are lucky in some ways in California we have large equity funds but that money has to be used in multiple aspects and besides OER and a lot of this is requires funding there's got to be some kind of sustainability and that's something that I think after these grants start winding down that we're going to really have to turn to Sacramento and look for a further funding to continue in because of all of the colleges being so strapped as it is now for the various programs that they're trying to implement so OER implementation the faculty engagement we have an online education initiative here in California there's a a rubric on how to develop an exemplary online course and so what we did is we took that rubric and we developed a stipend structure based on that rubric because they're very similar a lot of the things that you would need for an online exemplary course we're the same things that you would want to go through and steps to create a good OER course we have a three-day innovation OER boot camp each summer where we delve down deeply into a variety of aspects related to OER this year in conjunction with the TAP work that we're doing we'll be inviting the others ETCD grantees to join us here at West Hills as well where we'll spend three days and then hopefully walk out of that innovation time with some products we integrated our OER commission committee initially it was a task force kind of led by here at the library but it is since morphed and become part of our government structure as a standing committee it's cross-functional group with the vice president of instruction and a faculty member our co-chairs the vice president reports to our integrated student success committee and the faculty member reports to the Academic Senate and we found that very successful because it really gets the voice of what we're doing spread throughout all of the different areas of the campus we've got a board policy and a strategic plan that address OER our strategic plan calls for OER adoption and our general education courses by 2020 so we have full support of our board and our executive administration to move forward with this it's actually in our strategic plan and board policy which we can always turn back to when we need funds and things like that of course we have marketing bookstore our disability programs and a title five grant all geared towards moving forward with OER as well and our student awareness of course that's the the most important thing and our students we didn't announce a lot of our work as we were moving forward because our vice president felt that might not be the best idea of you know just announcing what we were going to do we kind of waited until we pretty much had a lot of this stuff gelled and then we started advertising now so what else do we have here or successes we've got a 75 of our course sections in the fall it's moved up to 96 and I think we're getting ready to add several more teaching and learning engagement is really the big one that the instructors really like they teach to the content now they don't teach to the chapters it's really allowed them to flip their classrooms and as a librarian I personally like the idea of OER because of how well it fits with information competency and when I started first lurking looking at a OER it's only been a couple of years ago now that one of the first things that sprang out at me it was how well it aligns with the things that we try to teach with information competency and information literacy we're able to contextualize the information and make it relevant to what the students are learning we're able to model the ethical usage of information with a licensing attribution and we follow ethical and legal guidelines when we do that so we're actually modeling that behavior and we're showing them how to use resources and gather resources and put resources together in a way that makes more sense than a traditional textbook because that's how students will work when they go into the workforce they're gonna be gathering information and using multiple resources rather than I mean none of us were really given a textbook when we first got our jobs and information creation is a process you know they see that and they see that information has value and can be shared and that scholarship is a conversation so I really like to me that's one of the main things about OER is how well it fits in the thing everything that we do in the library so that's really pretty much it we really believe that OER helps us attain our vision statement of that relentless pursuit of student success and helps put our students first so hopefully that gives an overview of us and thanks for listening well thank you so much Ron for sharing what's happening at West Hills College Lamour around OER adoption and OER degrees and also what's happening in California and I think you know in particular what was interesting is that Ron shared with you the focus areas of these degrees in California and many of them are what we would call career technical education you know such as precision out agriculture and kinesiology and some of the other ones are respiratory studies and there's so there's actually quite a lot in that area and that's really something that hasn't been addressed before in the other OER degree program so it's kind of an exciting place for California to be in doing some of that career technical ed degree work yeah thank you Anna so we are open for questions for Ron and Ron I or Kelsey who is a who is with Ron and I don't know Kelsey if you want to share anything about the the work you do to support the OER degree and the California ZTZ degree at West Hills unprepared but mostly I'm just assisting Ron I do a lot of the data collection on course sections how many are going OER I work on our our Lib guide which is our OER information hub right now and yeah we also have a canvas site for our faculty with just a bunch of OER resources I also meet with faculty as needed to get you know course mapping done and to look over the resources up there thinking about using I'm also I've been doing we're working with this company called Lulu some of you may have heard of it for printing out our OER so I do a lot of book formatting if they're not in the proper PDF type format and that takes up a lot of time so well wonderful that was at least five different duties that not very much and I know that you work part-time there so it sounds like you're pretty busy Kelsey great work so thank you thank you to both of you Ron and Kelsey for joining us this afternoon and we'll hang around for some questions if there are any I'll probably start stop the recording now and thank you everybody for participating today