 Welcome all, we will be starting in approximately 60 seconds. Welcome everybody, we will be starting in about 20 seconds. All right, I think it's time to get started. Welcome everyone, you are at the project briefing on organizing for open educational resource action, recommendations for statewide OER initiative governance structures. This is a project briefing within the spring 2020 CNI virtual meeting and I'm delighted that you are all here to join us. Our speaker today will be Steven Bell from Temple University and basically he will give his talk and then we will open it up for questions. Diane Goldenberg Hart will moderate the questions and if you have questions, you can ask them using the Q&A button on the bottom of your screen at any point during the talk and we'll just queue them up until the question and answer period comes round. And with that, I welcome you to what I think is going to be a very interesting presentation. We know that one of the essences of OER strategies is sharing and collaboration and for a number of reasons, collaboration on a state level is one of the very effective mechanisms here. So I think this will be quite timely. Steven, welcome and over to you. Thank you Cliff and hi everyone. Thanks for joining in today. Really appreciate you being here. When the CNI spring meeting was originally planned, the presentation from the colleagues from Central Washington University in my session were going to be together on the same platform. So I wanted to make sure that I was able to follow their presentation because I think their presentation and my presentation are certainly complimentary. Many libraries are leaders at their institutions in getting these, what I will call textbook affordability project you may have a different name for. But what I think is happening more widespread now than a couple of years ago is that even though many of us started at our own institution it's sort of that old saying if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. So what many of us have been doing is seeing how we can join together with others with leadership from our states to be more sustainable. And that could refer to funding, support, training, education and many other things. And what I'm going to be talking about today is some research that I did into statewide OER initiatives particularly looking at how are they structured? How are they being governed? Who's doing it? How are they doing it? Why are people doing it? So there's basically three things I'll mention today. First, how is this coming together? What's happening in general in statewide OER initiatives but looking primarily at what's happening in my own state of Pennsylvania? I'll tell you more about the survey I did of the participants and the leaders from the different statewide initiatives. Although since I conducted my research those initiatives have grown a bit. So it certainly didn't cover every single one that's out there. And then I'll finish up by giving some recommendations. And I thought this was the most salient part of the research I did. It's one of the things I wanted to do is not have every single new statewide initiative replicate the process that my own one went through trying to figure out what was a good governance model. If we can come up with some recommendations, best practices, what works best, that could save everybody a lot of time and effort. So just to share a little bit about my own state of Pennsylvania and how we got started. So we have a huge number of academic institutions in the state of Pennsylvania. Just in the Philadelphia area alone where my institution temple is we have something like 60 to probably more like 70 colleges and universities at a very dense area. And what I discovered, even though my institution started its own textbook affordability project in 2011 and there were just a few like Penn State was another example in our state. There was very little happening as far as collaboration among the different institutions that were offering these textbook affordability projects who really weren't learning from one another or working together for advocacy, state funding, those kinds of things. So back in 2016, I worked with our statewide academic library consortium Palsy and I asked them if they could help us get started and if they were interested in doing something like this. And they did have experience managing statewide projects because they do the DPLA hub for the state of Pennsylvania. So they seem like a good partner and they were very interested. And we went through a number of steps to try to get the board members and directors of the libraries interested to see if they wanted to do some kind of statewide textbook affordability OER project. Once we got the buy-in and people were interested, we needed to get some funding. So the first thing we did through our small steering committee was to apply for an LSTA grant, which was successful. And that really helped us get started with a couple of very basic initiatives. One of the first things was to join OTN because they had several other consortium members. As far as figuring out what our next steps were, how should we organize ourselves? What were the best practices? What did we need to know? We decided to reach out to the leaders of a couple of those other consortia that already OTN members to find out how they were structuring and how they were being governed. And we thought, okay, what can we learn from that? So we did go through a process to contact and have conversations with several of those statewide leaders. And I really found something very interesting. We talked to four fairly significant of the consortia, the statewide OER groups, and they were all organized completely differently. They all had variations on a governance structure. They all had different roles and different peoples. Okay, this is all over the map. So that got me asking a lot of questions about what should we be doing? Now, just to give you an idea, this is where we ended up. It's sort of a best of both breeds approach based on what we've learned from the other members of OTN where most of them do have some sort of steering committee or advisory group that's making the key policy decisions and guiding the direction of the statewide initiative. Then we have other roles. For example, OER specialists are librarians who go to open textbook network summer institute and then they become specialists who can go out and do education and training. And they also organize regional conferences on OER and textbook affordability. We also decided to have, we wanted representation widely from academic libraries across the state. So we created this idea of a campus partner who would be one individual or it could be two from an institution that would be the link between our initiative and the institution. And that gave us people that we could then organize into working groups and not every statewide initiative that we contacted actually was making use of these kinds of working groups to do the work of the steering committee. And there are other groups that we wanna bring into our initiative and into our governance structure. And I list some of those in the bottom box there like faculty, students and others. And we're just starting to work on that. These initiatives take time to organize and develop. So we're just getting into year three. We had just had our first statewide summit back in 2019 and already planning our 2020. But it's already had tremendous impact. And one of the main reasons I wanted to see this happening in our state is because, yes, there are some institutions that can go it alone and have the resources but there are many others that do not have those resources and they don't have the capacity to get that textbook affordability project going on their campus or they don't have funding. So we really wanna bring all those folks into the fold and help them get started as well. That's all part of us achieving sustainability together as a state rather than just a couple of leaders going on their own and making progress. We really wanna try to do this together. So these were some of the basic questions that I came up with that I got curious about. What are some of the models that are out there? What are the experiences of the people who are participating? Could you come up with a recommended structure for a statewide OER initiative that would help someone else get started pretty quickly without having to figure it all out all over again for themselves? So I'm gonna ask you to participate in a chat activity. So if you're not familiar with the chat area you may have that on the bottom of your screen or maybe on the top depending on how you're viewing this. And then if you just click on the button that says chat you'll see the box pop up. So these are certain simple questions that just have yes, no, I don't know. So the first one is are you aware if your state has a state OER initiative? And you can do, I like what Maureen Valentina just did if you can put, because I have a couple of questions. So if you do one, why? One and two why that kind of thing then we can see, just get a sense of how many of you who are participating today are even aware if your state has an initiative. And right now it looks like we're leaning more towards no and I don't know. I see a couple of isolated yeses coming up but if you don't know, if you're not aware this might be something that you might wanna find out more about and see what your statewide OER initiative could be doing for you. We may actually see fewer or more ends here. Are you a participant in your state's OER initiative? And you can continue responding to the first one if you hadn't gotten a chance to do that. Now I do see a couple of yeses and it makes perfect sense why you'd be attending this session if you already are a member of the initiative. Looks like we've got a bit of a split there with a couple more saying no. And here's just the third question if some of you wanna answer that and that's do you know who your state OER leaders are? I think that's really important if you wanna get involved at the statewide level then it's good to know who are the individuals who are your state leaders. And admittedly this can be kind of tough to find out if you don't even know where to get started because it might be your consortia that's helping to lead it or it might be your State Department of Education. It's varying from state to state. You can feel free to continue to add to the chat. I'm gonna move on to the next section which is very quickly. I'm gonna go over some survey findings. I'm not gonna go into great detail much of this because I wanna get to the recommendations. I think that's the more important part. And I will mention that I have an article on this topic coming out in a library trends issue. It's a special issue in open educational resources and it will come out in the fall I believe and I'll have lots more detail about the survey and all the findings in that article. But I basically had on three different surveys. The first survey was just for the project directors at the consortia or it could have been a state run initiative. And then there was a second survey that was for the librarian participants because I wanted to get the perspective of the project directors and I wanted to get the perspective of the librarians who are participating. Initially I just focused on the consortial members of the open textbook network. But then a little bit later on that actually that first one took place I would say in 2018 or so, spring of 2018. Then I found out that someone had put together a list of state OER leaders and I surveyed all of those people in fall of 2019 to find out what they had to say. And then I wanted to compare the first group, the people that were already involved in OTN officially with other state groups. So this is just an example of what that spreadsheet looked like and basically people just added themselves to the spreadsheet or someone added them if they knew who the state leaders actually were. So there actually is a spreadsheet out there that tells you who all the state leaders are if you're interested in that feel free to get in touch with me and I could send you the link to that state leaders spreadsheet. This just gives you an idea of the range of individuals who reported what their position is. And as you might expect, scholarly communications folks, OER librarians were the ones who more frequently responded to my survey, although there was a range of other individuals reference librarians collections. And we got a few administrators in there as well as well. Some government officials, but definitely more the scholarly communications group were more prominent in there. And the top institution type was when I did the first survey of the OTN groups and that was mostly the doctoral degree craning institutions. I was surprised. Well, I'm not so much surprised. I didn't have as many four years or community colleges and that may be owing more to who was joining the open textbook network. When I did the state leaders, there were still were a lot of doctoral institutions, but I definitely saw an increase from the community college sector as well as the four year liberal arts sector. I asked people how they came to join their statewide OER initiative and you can see the different kinds of reasons for that mostly because of their job responsibilities and that would get back to them being the scholarly communications person or OER librarian. I think there was also a little bit that came out of the comments about more of an intrinsic or internal desire to be a part of these textbook affordability projects because of wanting to be part of a social justice initiative, wanting to make higher education more affordable for students. So that's where some people got involved. And then also came through in the why did you join? Some folks were very much wanting to advance OER in their state, but clearly many people feel very strongly about textbook affordability and their students ability to have an affordable higher education. So I think those came up more frequently as far as why do librarians join these statewide initiatives? And why did they become a part of the governance as well? One thing that was really interesting is that when I asked people what was their knowledge level when they joined the statewide initiative is that there were very few that said that they felt like they were expert or even experienced. The vast majority didn't have that much experience. But when I asked them what their experience was in terms of learning more, a large percentage, 88 said that joining their OER state initiative actually enabled them to become more expert. And I'll refer back to that in just a bit. And this just shows you some of the different kinds of tasks. By far, the main thing that people are doing in these initiatives is training, education, outreach and promotion, trying to get the word out there, trying to get people involved. And I identified several different kinds of governance models. I think it's everything across the board from a consortia staff member and a librarian being a leadership team, having steering committees. Some people call them affordable learning ambassadors. We called ours OER specialists. I think the key thing I wanna point to is that third bullet there, that's more like what we did in our affordable learning Pennsylvania where you have a mix of a steering committee, people that are your training and education specialists and then you have people out in the field at their institutions helping out with all of the different activities and things that we're trying to accomplish. So there are a number of different models out there. There isn't any one that emerged as this is what most people are doing. But I think if you're just getting started here, you can learn a lot from what others have done. So I just have this question for you, another chat question, which you can do as one. And I'm asking what model do you think would be best from your perspective, would it be a consortia model where it's a consortia that's leading the effort or helping out the effort or a government model where it's a department of education within the state or an independent model? Perhaps it's something where it's just the librarians working together. And there are no governmental or consortia folks. So I got Christopher Cox consortia model best. So that's thanks. And so I like that people are not too many government there but I see quite a few consortia. And most of us do work with our consortia already. So that makes a lot of sense. I think the independent is something that is emerging or will emerge. And that's one of the recommendations. And again, you can continue. I'm gonna move on as time's running out. And I'll just say, if you're familiar with a model in your state, what is it? And you can mention your state as you like to. So just the couple of, I have six recommendations and then I'll be wrapping up with a couple of future research opportunities. So let me just summarize these for you. The first thing I would say is that don't let consortia staff go it alone. Don't just leave it up to the consortia staff to make everything happen. Academic librarians have to be involved and engage. Aim for it as versity in your whatever governance model you're putting together. Go for institutional diversity and geographic diversity. So you have great state representation and also diversity in your level of experience too. It doesn't just have to be everyone that already knows what's going on. And that's why I say prioritize enthusiasm and commitment to textbook affordability and bringing people on board. As I showed in my survey, getting people involved will actually give them experience they need to succeed. And that will actually enable your state to create future leaders and OER advocates by bringing in people that don't have a lot of experience but they will learn from the people that do. And again, what emerges is you bring your librarians and your partners together in your statewide initiative and they're gonna be doing a lot of that training and education that's gonna happen across your state. I advocate for creating working groups to carry out the goals of the steering committee. If you don't have working groups, you don't have to ask who's gonna be doing all the great work that it's gonna take to make your statewide initiative successful. And again, I like what we're doing in affordable learning Pennsylvania. We're trying to position the librarians and the participants of its faculty or whoever to become the leaders and to make it more independent from the consortia so that it's the librarians that are setting the priorities in the direction and that the consortium is primarily our fiscal agent and our partner in obtaining new funding. And I think that may be the best path to ongoing sustainability because if for any reason in the future, the consortium can't help us out, we'll be independent and we can make it continue to work with the structure and the governance group and models that we have set up. So I think that's something important to keep in mind moving forward that it may actually be the independent model that will emerge as the most significant one. And so just to finish up a couple of thoughts for next steps for research, because I couldn't do everything and I had even, you know, whenever you do some research, you start with a couple of basic questions and then you have even more questions that emerge. So I really didn't get to the issue of is there a particular model that gets the most results or impact? And of course that would depend on what the goals were in terms of deciding, did we actually achieve them? Did we have an impact? So obviously one would be, did we get some legislation created in our state? Did we see an increase in faculty adoptions and the savings to students? There's any number of ways we could measure our impact. Again, more research into actually is doing the leadership in statewide initiatives. And then looking more at what are these groups accomplishing? You know, we were organizing them, but how far forward are we moving the OER movement and the open movement in our institutions and in our states? And perhaps even regionally, I see the potential for mega regional initiatives to develop. And more importantly, what are we doing to involve faculty and others? We already know we've got librarians involved. The big challenge is involving faculty members, people from teaching and learning centers, other academic administrators and support personnel. How do we get those other folks involved? Who's doing it and what's working well? And then what comes after these statewide initiatives? If we started off with individual institutions and then we grew into statewide initiatives, what comes after that? And is it something like these, again, larger regional initiatives or something else? I don't know. So thanks very much for joining today. I hope you learned something from the research that I did into the governance structures of OER state initiatives. Again, the most important reason for doing this is that I think going into these larger statewide initiatives will help us to be more sustainable and to achieve much more than we could as individuals and also for our students to get organized, to get statewide legislation passed, to get more funding and to help them to have a more affordable higher education. So again, we're gonna take questions from Diane, but I'll leave you with these two chat activity questions that you can continue to put into the chat. Have I motivated you to get involved in your state's OER initiative if you're not already involved? And a second question, what do you think will be more critical in advancing OER and textbook affordability? Do you think it will be statewide initiatives that are more critical? Or do you think that it's still gonna be individual institutional libraries leading the way on their campuses and getting more done? All right, Diane, thank you so much for your patience and Diane, thanks for having me and I'm happy to take questions now. That was great, thank you. Thanks so much, Stephen. Really inspiring, motivating talk and looking forward, very much looking forward to see how people reply in the chat to your prompts there. Yeah, different opinions for sure. So I like that Christina said that state initiatives can't go far without the library. So yeah, it definitely has to start in libraries, but as I said, there are some libraries in our own state that nothing's happening. So some of those libraries won't get started unless the state initiative is helping provide the support, like sending someone out to give a OER workshop at their campus. Yeah, I thought it was also interesting that in New Jersey institutions are required to submit a report about textbook affordability. So that's one example of how the government policies can impact and motivate institutions, but absolutely right that doesn't always exist and there's a lot that can be done in the absence of those kinds of policies. Yes, our neighbors in New Jersey are doing some great work and that just shows you a difference. I think they were more organized than we were from the start. And so they were very effective in getting some state legislation approved. Their academic institutions actually have to have a plan for textbook affordability. In Pennsylvania, we haven't actually achieved anything near that yet. We still don't have any statewide legislation that's helping to make an impact and we're just starting to have those conversations with our State Department of Higher Education and developing a relationship with them so that we can be more connected to legislators and the people in the governor's office that can make these things happen. Right, interesting. As Steven mentioned, we have definitely opened up the floor for questions. There's a little Q and A box there at the bottom of your screen. Couple of boxes down from the Q and A, I'm sorry, from the chat box that you clicked on earlier. Excuse me, if you have questions for Steven, please feel free to type those into the Q and A or in the chat as we're monitoring that as well. If you'd like to speak directly with Steven, if you have a comment or a question you wanna chat with him, go ahead and raise your hand. I can move you into an environment where we can turn on your microphone and you can participate directly with him. So please feel free to raise your virtual hand if you're interested in engaging directly. I also wanna just take this opportunity to remind everyone that the CNI Spring Virtual Meeting will continue through May and we have lots of offerings. I'm just pasting in there the direct link to the schedule for all the webinars that are coming up for the next couple of months. At least those are the ones that we have confirmed so far. We'll be adding to that lineup continuously. We've got lots of great stuff coming, including a webinar in about half an hour with CNI's Associate Executive Director Emerita, Joan Lippincott, who'll be speaking on digital scholarship. Just looking here to see if we've got some more questions coming in, I see we've got one. Is there a registry or listing of all state-level OER programs, Steven? I would say no to that. Okay. Actually, the two places I think you can find out the most is if you go to the Open Textbook Network website, you will see who are the current institutional members. So for example, you'll see that Palney is a member, or Palsy's a member, or Viva is a member. But there are other states that are not gonna be represented there, and they may have something going on. And I think that's where that spreadsheet of the OER state leaders could come in handy. That's probably the closest thing we might have to a registry. I've had some conversations with Nicole Allen at Spark and suggested that that might be one of something else they might wanna do. I don't know if people are familiar with it. They have a great directory called Connect OER. That's a great directory to go to if you wanna see individual institutional libraries that are participating and have some sort of OER program going on. But I thought the next level would be if we could have something similar, a directory like OER Connect for statewide initiatives. So we can track who's doing what there as well. And I think you said earlier, you've got that spreadsheet. If folks are interested in getting a copy of that, they can just contact you. Yeah, it's actually just an open Google doc and people can continue to add themselves if they consider themselves to be a state OER leader and they wanna be, that group is currently doing occasional monthly or every other month chats now. Okay. And yeah, so if you're interested, I would suggest get in touch with me and I'll send you that link and then you can learn more about how to get involved in that occasional meeting that takes place. Terrific. Okay, that's great. Well, Steven, barring any more questions, I just wanna take this opportunity to thank you so much for sharing your insights and the lessons that you've learned from this project and how collaboration can really lead towards leveraging so much more of what we want to accomplish. It's really great that you were able to share this with us at CNI, we appreciate your time and to all of our attendees, thank you so much for joining us. We hope you'll come back and hear some more from our CNI lineup this spring. You are welcome Diane, thank you so much. And again, thanks Cliff for the introduction and thanks Beth for your help as well in getting this organized. I do appreciate all your work and thanks everyone for joining in today and again, I'll feel free to get in touch with me. Always glad to talk with colleagues about OER, textbook affordability and all those related things. So thanks so much. Thanks, Steven. I'm seeing applause in our chat. So thank you for a great- You're welcome everyone. Take care, be well. Goodbye.