 So, hi everyone. Thank you for coming to our presentation today. My name is Elizabeth Nelson, and I'm a reference and instruction librarian at Penn State Lehigh Valley campus, and I'm joined by Jen Jarsson. Jen, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure. Hi everybody. My name is Jen Jarsson, and I'm the head librarian at the Penn State Lehigh Valley campus. Perfect. So today we're going to be talking about showcasing OER as professional development and community building, and we're going to be sharing an adaptable campus event model that we've developed for that. So, in today's session, we're going to share some background about OER at our campus and at our institution. We're going to walk you through how we developed our open and affordable showcase event. We'll go over the implementation and adaptation of this event. We'll discuss our takeaways, the lessons that we learned along the way, and some feedback from our presenters and our attendees at the event. And at the end, we'll also provide you with some openly licensed resources for your own showcase planning that came out of the planning for our own version of this event. So we'll start by sharing some of the context of OER both at our campus, Penn State Lehigh Valley, and at Penn State in general. Penn State as a whole is very pro OER and has built OER and open education related goals into the strategic plans for both the entire university and for the university libraries as well. OER is also very excited about and receptive to OER, likely because the campus has a strong focus on student success and retention, and OER ties in really well with those areas. In the past few years we've created a number of OER supporting structures that have helped more of our faculty explore and adopt OER at our campus. For instance, we have a campus OER working group which discusses ideas for OER advocacy, as well as ongoing work that's being done by faculty in different disciplines. The group is also open to staff and we're hoping to expand it to student membership as well soon. Recently we also created a community of practice specifically for our math instructors to work with open education within their shared curriculum, which has led to both adoption and authorship of OER by members of that COP. Across all of our disciplines, more than 10 faculty adopted OER for their courses with assistance from us at the library and finding and choosing those materials during the last year alone. There are many courses across the campus that are using OER and library licensed materials in different ways, but one continuing issue we face is that these courses and instructors are generally siloed from each other. They aren't often aware of what their peers are doing with OER in different courses or in different disciplines. Even with our campus working group and our efforts to share information from the library, it's still very difficult to get into folks inboxes and to fit learning about OER across the campus into everyone's workloads and schedules. So this issue is one of the concerns that our showcase event was actually created to address. But the primary catalyst for the creation of the open and affordable showcase was that the Penn State University Libraries recently introduced a pilot of a new OER Champion Award, which celebrates champions of open education at each campus. And they invited the campus libraries to explore ways to support this award within each of our unique contexts. I want to make one quick note at Penn State OER is our acronym to mean open and affordable educational resources. For us, the affordable portion of that includes both materials that cost less than $50 total per student, as well as library licensed materials. So in fall 2021 the pilot period for this new award began with four different campuses, trying the pilot in different ways with their unique populations. Each campus was free to define exactly what an OER Champion would be under their instance of the award and how they were going to choose their winners. In spring 2022 we had put together an awarding committee to discuss how this award was going to be given at our campus. However, in our discussions we realized that our faculty were very uncomfortable with any parameters that we might assign to the award. We were concerned that the award would automatically go to instructors with large courses who could always show large cost savings from switching to OER. And that it would shut out instructors, both instructors who have always had small class sizes and instructors who traditionally avoided expensive course materials in the past. In light of these feelings we decided that we really needed to design a different system to house this award. Something that would involve the campus in a more collaborative open way than traditional award judging might. So to address this need Jen and I developed the open and affordable showcase event for our campus. The showcase that we ran was an internal half day conference that included opportunities for presentations on ongoing OER work. Discussions with campus colleagues on what open education could be at our campus and statements from librarians and campus administrators on the importance and value of OER at Penn State Lehigh Valley. Jen is going to take us through the showcase model in much more detail shortly, but we wanted to give you some context for what this event looked like in order to help frame the rest of our discussion. You can see a quick overview of the conference schedule on this slide. We're hoping that our present today our presentation today might help you all think about how you could run a similar event for your campuses. So this schedule is not meant to be a one size fits all solution that everyone would need to follow. Instead, we're hoping that showing this schedule will help give you an idea of what this event was trying to prioritize. For example, you can see that we included some social time with a provided breakfast and lunch, and that the majority of the time during the event was spent in activities that focused on sharing ongoing OER work, and created a space for discussions around OER. So we set ourselves a number of goals when creating the showcase event. First, as mentioned, we needed to create a collaborative crowd sourced awarding process for the OER champion award pilot or campus, something that would allow our campus to select and recognize a champion based on a variety of subjective factors, and not just by cost savings calculations. Secondly, we wanted an event that would not just recognize one awardee, but would literally showcase multiple different examples of OER work being done on our campus. We also wanted to provide some space to connect with our faculty and staff and try to increase everyone's familiarity with various facets of open education. We decided that it would be important for these discussions to go beyond just OER adoption, and also include the hows and whys of advocacy for open education, ways to implement open educational strategies, and opportunities and challenges specific to our campus for each of these areas. We really wanted to create an event that would also move beyond faculty and staff, something that would pull our campus administrators focus to OER, help familiarize them with the benefits supporting OER could have for our campus, and give them an opportunity to connect with faculty about how they'd like to see open education grow in our environment. We wanted to make sure that throughout the event we were finding productive opportunities to include ways that the library can help with OER adoption and other open education initiatives. We hoped that by focusing on the OER work already being done around campus. We could find opportunities to share how the library had been involved in those that ongoing work, and help put our offers of assistance into a relatable context for other faculty who might be participating and considering OER for their courses. So now I will hand the discussion over to Jen who's going to walk us through the open and affordable showcase model in more detail. Jen. Thanks Elizabeth. So I'd like to continue with the bird's eye view of our timeline for the showcase. As Elizabeth mentioned planning and discussions for the OER champion award came first in our process and was beyond the bounds of the timeline you can see here. We had very initial conversations about the award with others in that pilot group started as far back as July of last year 2021. But our showcase specific work started in earnest in February of this year 2022. So here we've tried to illustrate the phases of work leading up to implementation when we held the event on May 12 of this year, as well as the follow up and reflective work after the event. Moving back over our planning work, I think Elizabeth and I would both agree that this was not an ideal timeline for launching a new event from the ground up so please don't take this slide as a recommendation for a planning timeline. In an ideal world, we would have given ourselves more lead time to better space this workout in light of our other responsibilities. But once we started to see that our original ideas about how to implement the award were not optimal and maybe we're even a bit problematic. And we recognize that a wholly different approach would be more effective for both the award and all of our other goals that Elizabeth outlined it was already February so we worked from where we were in that moment. So now let's walk through some of the details in each phase that we hope will provide a useful behind the scenes look. So our initial phase focused on brainstorming and defining what our goals were and what the event would look like. We talked through a lot of different ideas related to what the focus and the scope of the event would be the parameters with respect to content. We talked through what types of sessions and formats would help us meet those parameters and our goals and I'll show you in just a moment where we landed on that. So the best whether we wanted to hold this as an in person event or a virtual event. We were grappling with what was the best choice in light of changing COVID circumstances as well as what the preferences of our community would be what modes were they willing to participate in. And we actually surveyed them about their preferences to inform our decision making. As a result we landed on a hybrid mode. So we gathered on campus and offered virtual participation options via zoom at the same time. And so our final phase was also thinking in detail about how the award aligned with the choices we were making about the event, what work would be eligible for the award and how that would fit into the event. Eventually we decided that presenters who shared their related work during the lightning talk segment would be eligible for the award. Elizabeth mentioned earlier that we decided to harness our campuses community oriented culture and use a more collaborative open approach to judging. Everyone who attended the event was invited to vote on the lightning talk work in order to select our award winner. And we worked with our stakeholders at our specific campus Lehigh Valley and in our library system across Penn State. We spent some time thinking about when the event should happen and took the temperature of some faculty on this to inform our planning. We landed on the week after finals week in the hope that faculty would have more time and attention to participate once they were done with classes and grading, but not yet be focused on their summer plans or summer goals. We consulted with the administrators at our campus to ensure that they would be available for the date we picked in order to participate in that the date we picked didn't conflict with other campus events. We also kept the folks involved in the pilot group in the libraries and up through our organizational structure in the loop as well. And aside for context, you may not know that all library locations at Penn State are organized centrally so we reside quote unquote reside at our campuses and have a dotted line relationship to the campus administration. But we report to the central libraries organization so working with stakeholders at our campus and across our library system is always important for us. So March through May involved a lot of preparations. We did things like developing a call to invite faculty to submit proposals to present at the event, and we did a lot of outreach to encourage submissions. So that outreach included general announcements via email and at campus by beatings targeted outreach to selected faculty, and we also recruited campus administrators to help us send out those kinds of announcements and encouragement and reminders. We reviewed those proposals that we received and put together the program for the event and we planned for the flow of how the program would go and what our day of needs would be to manage that flow. We did a lot of liaising with other campus stakeholders at this time as well, again with campus administrators providing them for example with talking points for their segments in the event, but also with folks like relations staff and other units related to PR to help photograph and otherwise promote the event. We created other messaging to advertise the event and get folks to register and we did multiple rounds of promotion and that included creating and managing a registration form. We handled all the technical arrangements related to scheduling rooms for the in person components technology details to support our presenters needs in person and virtually, and to support attendees needs in person and virtually due to our hybrid format, and then other technical arrangements related to catering for example. Finally, another significant aspect of this phase was preparing all the materials to support the way that we decided to structure the award. As we've mentioned, we decided on a peer to peer voting process for all the lightning talks. So that meant that we needed to create the evaluation form as well as the process that we would follow to determine the winner. Earlier, Elizabeth shared a snapshot of the program for the event and here we're going to take just a slightly more detailed look at each segment. We started the event with some opening remarks about the value and impact of we are to frame the day. The largest chunk of the day was devoted to lightning talks again that's when faculty shared their own work and attendees evaluated that work for the champion award. We offered three roundtable discussion options during lunch, two options were provided in person one on getting started with OER, another on teaching with sustainable assignments, and then a zoom option that focused on student involvement in open education. And some on campus folks did choose to participate in that zoom option from their offices. While others participated from offsite. We created some reflection questions that we posted to whiteboards in the library, as folks moved out of the roundtables and lunchrooms we invited them to stop by the library and respond to those reflection questions on the whiteboards on their way back to the event space for the brainstorming session. Those questions had to do with their thoughts on opportunities and challenges for the future of OER in their own work and for our campus community. We also put together a display of books related to open education in that area of the library to highlight some of our resources. And then we use the responses that folks posted to the whiteboards in order to jumpstart the brainstorming discussion that came next in the agenda. We also use that brainstorming session time to finalize the award details so Elizabeth facilitated the brainstorming session while I tallied the votes and prepared the announcement of the winner. So then we closed the event by presenting the award to our winner and recognizing the accomplishments of all of our presenters and our campus administrators also offered some closing remarks on the importance of OER. So here we just want to give you a quick sense of the kinds of work we did following the event. We created and distributed an assessment form to all participants and evaluated the data that we gathered to help inform our planning for the future. We edited and captioned all the recordings of the day and distributed those recordings along with the materials the lightning talk presenters used. We made a concerted effort to not only thank our presenters and folks who pitched in with some facilitation, but also to promote the work that was shared, as well as our champion award winner. We also wanted to promote those folks to the campus more broadly and then report back on our successes to the library's administration as well. And of course there was plenty of follow up regarding budget related documentation that we had to prepare and submit. In case you're curious about the kinds of feedback that we solicited from presenters and attendees here's a snapshot of some of the key questions that we asked. They were having to do with their motivation for participating, what they felt like they got out of participating, their perspectives on the value of each segment in the showcase program, and their thoughts or suggestions on changes for the future. The feedback that we received was quite positive overall. The lightning talks were uniformly rated as a very valuable part of the day so folks really valued learning about their colleagues work through those talks. Other elements were also generally highly rated. And from the samples on the screen here you can see the kinds of comments that we received in the general tone of feedback. Essentially folks really valued the exchange of ideas and experiences that this forum offered. We consider our first iteration of this event to have been quite successful, but of course we also identified opportunities for improvement and evolution. So we are intending to hold this event again in spring 2023. And as we gear up to plan that event. We intend to give ourselves more lead time in order to manage the workload more effectively we plan to rethink the participation modes. We felt that the virtual experience was somewhat inferior to the in person experience despite our best efforts, not that the folks who participated virtually reported that to us but that was just our perception. Now that we've seen the whole process through we have a better sense of all the details that we want to communicate to presenters and facilitators in order to support their experience so we will be able to streamline communication with them from the start and improve their experience. We felt like the brainstorming session where we reflected on the participants contributions to the whiteboard reflection questions was our least engaging component so we're thinking about removing that from the program and future and adding something like a workshop component instead. We have a lot of ideas also about how to improve the day of experience, both from our side so something like how many people we need to help manage the details of the day, as well as just small ways to enhance the program and polishing the way we managed the flow of the program and the segues between segments. So with those lessons learned in future plans, I'll pass it back to Elizabeth. Perfect, thank you Jen. So I'm going to close us out with the sharing of those resources that we promised at the beginning of the session. You can visit our shared folder at the bit.ly link listed on this slide in order to download some of these materials. The other includes editable templates of our proposal submission form, the registration form we used for attendees, the assessment survey that we used after the event, as well as printable versions of our lightning talk evaluation forms, and some we are advocacy button designs that we had created for our button maker. So one of the couple things about some of these materials one is that the folder also contains a read me first file, which gives you more information on our CC by 4.0 license, the attribution statement we're suggesting you could use, as well as our contact information so we would absolutely welcome any further input inquiries that you would like to make any questions any suggestions, or if you are interested in an event like this and you'd like to know if we have other materials that might be useful. So that we use to create this event that wouldn't fit well in, in terms of sharing the presentation like this. So we'd be happy to talk to you about what you're thinking and see if there's anything else that we can share. And one other technical aspect I want to share the forms that are in the folder, particularly the proposal submission form and the registration form are Google forms so we would ask if you'd like to use those please make sure that you make a copy to your own Google form. If you edit the one that's in the form you will change it for anyone for everyone who uses the folder but unfortunately the only way we can share it is to give everyone editing access so please be careful not to change that form and make sure you make a copy for your own use but again we would really welcome any thoughts that you have about other materials that you can use. And we also want to take a moment to thank everybody for listening to our presentation and again invite you to reach out if you have any additional questions. You can contact us at the email addresses listed below. So thank you everyone for coming to our presentation and please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any further questions or ideas that you'd like to share.