 Let me just get, okay, there we go. All right, good. Oh, and I will need some screen sharing ability. I'm not sure if that's you, Paul, who can give that to me. I can press the wrong button. Technology, escape. Okay, can everyone see this? Yes. Great. Okay, whoops. Okay, so the group here, the title of the panel is Open Education, Race and Diversity, Promise versus Reality. And it's really about this question of, are we doing, what is it that OER could do and what is it actually doing around these questions of race, education and diversity? And I have a really wonderful panel here. The format of this is going to be a question that I pose each of the panelists on a specific theme. And you'll see that as we go through dealing with questions of this question of promise versus reality. And my colleagues today, Kristen Landstown from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where Kristen is an OER librarian. Susan Menutawabi, Laurentian University who's faculty member at Laurentian University in Canada and is an author of an OER about indigenous cultural heritage within a particular geographic region. Shauna Brandel who is a faculty member and OER implementer in the CUNY system, the City University of New York system in the U.S. Elaine Thornton who is OER lead at University of Arkansas. Suzanne Kusegulu who's at Goldsmiths University of London. And Susanna's Invent invited Serpil and I didn't get a chance to write your name here, the family name Serpil, but who has experience in Turkey which I think brings a really interesting perspective on the discussion today. And finally Elaine Ferrele Plourd who has previously run OER programs in both CUNY and the CUNY system. So that is the group here. And I want to start first by talking about the promise. What is the promise of OER? And I posed the first question to Kristen Lansdown. And Kristen has been the national advisor for a group called the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Great Stories Club. So she's been an advisor on something that really treats with some of these issues that we're grappling with. And she's currently an OER librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison which has long had a very active OER program. And I would ask Kristen to talk about the promise. So on your most optimistic days when you think about the possibilities of OER, how do you think that OER can help bring Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation to the world? And over to Kristen. And I will, if you want to just give me a nudge to forward to the slides, I hope then you'll be able to. All right, hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Kristen Lansdown. My pronouns are she, her, hers and I'm the Diversity Resident Librarian for Open Educational Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can go to the next slide, Hugh. Okay, so first I wanna read this quote from Nora Almeida in her article, Open Educational Resources and Rhetorical Paradox in the Neoliberal University. She writes, OER do have value but OER can also lead to the exploitation of knowledge producers, can reinforce a Western-centric perspective and lead to forms of educational colonialism, can confuse autonomy for liberty and can privilege a neoliberal formulation of education that precludes real social change. I wanted to start with that because in thinking about the possibilities of OER, this is one such possibility. It's obviously not one that we should strive for and of course one that we should actively work against but the key word there is work. Next slide, Hugh. So I'll begin here by talking a little bit about the Kellogg Foundation's Troop Racial Healing and Transformation, TRHT for short. It launched in 2016 and it's a comprehensive national and community-based process to plan for and bring about transformational and sustainable change and to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism. Next slide. So the TRHT framework has five areas. The key area that my focus for OERs on is narrative change which they define as examining how to create and distribute new narratives. At times this may mean that we need to tell necessary and uncomfortable truths and this can be restorative because it can acknowledge the pain and suffering of racism and the resistance and resilience of those impacted. Narrative change and racial healing and relationship building are the two foundational pillars of their framework with law separation and economy being the other three areas. Next slide. So this leads me to a project that I'm working on at UW Madison which has been interrupted by COVID but not denied. It's still going. So I received an innovation grant from the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement in the amount of $5,000. And with these funds, my goal is to create a reader authored by students who are Black, Indigenous and people of color about their experiences, their hopes for the future and how their experiences are informed by their identities as people of color and any other intersecting identities that they may have. And so through a peer review process, submissions will be published in the UW Press Book under a license chosen in collaboration with our student content creators. And hopefully we'll go on to be used in first year student courses like the Wisconsin Experience Seminar of different professional development workshops for faculty and staff, multicultural student affairs and any of their social justice workshops that they do and honestly any opportunity for learning at the university and beyond the university. I've also had discussions with our Writing Center to host a narrative storytelling workshop for our writers and in thinking about how to care for our writers exploring an optional racial healing circle. Next slide. So that brings me back around to the other end of the spectrum for promise and possibilities of OER. For me, one step on the pathway to equity is centering students in OER. So this combats the banking concept of education that Paulo Freire described, which positions students as receiving, filling and storing deposits from teachers. And with open pedagogy, students are given more agency and autonomy to become knowledge creators themselves. Also as Nora Almyda discusses, instructors have a unique opportunity to use OER to examine relationships among authority, knowledge and power to help students understand how these structures exist in academia, but also in society as a whole and how they can be confronted. I think it's important not to use OER in a vacuum but contextualizing and localizing to ask what voices are missing and why. I think another area that open pedagogy can collaborate with is service learning. And so thinking about this reader, what happens next once the reader is created, once it's being used in courses, how are people using the reader to impact those other five areas of the truth, racial healing and transformation framework? So at predominantly white institutions, many voices and experiences of students are missing and more often than not outright silence. So OER can be a good opportunity to amplify these voices and using open pedagogy deeply engaged with that content. Next slide here. So I'll end with this quote from Audrey Waters, open con 14 talk, which was titled from open to justice. Audrey says we need an ethics of care of justice, not simply to assume that open does the work of those for us. So that goes back to what I said earlier where we have to actively work to make sure we're moving toward the justice end of the spectrum and away from replicating existing oppressive practices. And I am all done. Excellent, thanks Elaine. And I will just a note to, well, the group here as well as the panelists that we are on a tight schedule to get through everyone and to hear all these different voices. So, and Kristen, you did that bang on the nose. So very well done, appreciate that. Okay, next up. So this is, next we'll hear from Susan Minnetawabi, Laurentian University, and Susan's background is in Indigenous studies and she's written a really extraordinary or helped Ed and put together an extraordinary OER historical and contemporary realities movement towards reconciliation, which is about the Indigenous communities and cultural heritage around Sudbury in Northern Ontario. As mentioned, Susan is a faculty member at Laurentian University. And what I'd like to hear about from Susan is the origins of the project and what benefits that you think publishing OER particularly has brought or might bring to projects that do what your project has done, which is to better represent traditionally underrepresented voices in academia or education. So over to you, Susan. All right. Next slide. Hello, my name is Susan Minnetawabi, I'm from the Bair clan. And so that always go back to that to remind me of where I come from. This book, historical contemporary realities movements towards reconciliation, the origins of this book. I've had a relationship, an longtime standing relationship was sent for academic excellence at Laurentian University. And we've got an extensive online program. And the Center for Academic Excellence received a call from Ecampus, Ontario. And Ecampus was looking at development of some open education resources. And we responded to the call where we're talking about development of Indigenous content, Indigenous study content. Working at Laurentian University, I've been there for such a long time since 2003. And what we do is we deliver two programs. One is an Indigenous social work program. And the other is a master of Indigenous relations. And so what happens there is that the Indigenous content isn't always available for us. And so we have to adapt content from textbooks, mainstream textbooks and add our own information to that. So when this opportunity came up, I jumped at it. And so we developed a working group of librarians and tech support and students. And we used a couple of students in this development to help with the research for this. And that led to the creation of this book, the OER. So next slide. So the aim of the OER is twofold. One is to create a resource that focused on Indigenous perspective on history. So a lot of the history that we have and available to us is not an accurate depiction. It's depicted a history from Western academic or Western perspectives and doesn't really take into account Indigenous perspectives as we took this as an opportunity to rewrite history. The second aim of this OER was to develop a guidebook for how to replicate this in other instances. And so we thought that was really important because if we can encourage other people to write about this, then we'll have more resources out there and more resources written from that Indigenous perspective. Next slide. So the benefits of OER and as I mentioned earlier, it's really about rewriting history. So until recently, all of the resources that we had available to us were written from within Western academic institutions and schools, written from that Western perspective and rarely did these resources accurately depict history from an Indigenous perspective. So growing up, I was bombarded with all kinds of messages about Indigenous people not being human, being savage. They were stereotypical images of Indigenous peoples, lazy alcoholic drug abusers, living in poor conditions, no education and possibly no desire to better themselves. So this was all feeding into that colonial deficit lens which aimed to pathologize Indigenous people and aim to eventually erase Indigenous people from society. So the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that comedians move towards the reconciliation of colonial history. And this involves learning about the history of Canada, not just the history that has been recorded in history books, but about rewriting the history from an Indigenous perspective for me. And it's about creating a new beginning in Indigenous, non-Indigenous relations and restoring that colonial history as a step towards reconciliation. So the last chapter of this book, it talks about exploring what reconciliation looks like and how Indigenous and non-Indigenous can contribute to the reconciliation process. So I think we're moving a little fast in here. Sorry. Sorry. OK, yeah. So it was about creating content specific to Indigenous social work. That's the reason that I took this up. So OK, I'm going to move on to the accountability. The affordability is that every time we held a course, the textbooks were so costly for our students. And so reliance on mainstream textbooks is very expensive. And the expenses increased when students have to access additional research articles that focus on Indigenous content. And so what we were doing is we were taking those resources available to us and supplementing with additional content. This OER project, it had the ability, it had a capacity building built right into it. And so we were able to use two students, one from the undergraduate student in the Bachelor of Indigenous Social Work and the other one in the Master of Indigenous Relations, were hired onto this project. And they were tasked with finding sources of information of the local Indigenous groups, their history, their organization mandates. A challenge was that a lot of the pre-colonial history of Indigenous peoples had not been documented in the written form that was accessible. And we had to reach out to Indigenous communities and work together to create this knowledge. For example, the student gathering information in the community, this meant getting in touch with individuals in the community and seeking permission from chief and councils and health directors to create this information for the open education resource. And the last was the development of the open education resource. And so we have a chapter in the book that talks about what our process was and some of the challenges that we encountered and some of the ways that we address those. And hopefully that this would help for others who are developing a similar resource. And so the next slide. This year, I've included this year, is what's not recorded in history, the relationship between the Nishnabek and the land. And it's a quote from Art Pataragu, it's one of the elders that we interviewed. And he says, when we take a look at gift-giving and go out to harvest the moose, go out to harvest the bear, go out to harvest the berries, and go out to harvest the fish, the animal and the berry in being harvested, one must not view it as one being more important than the other. And that is what you see in the living Nishnabek people. If you're going to go out to harvest berries, there is a need to give tobacco. There is a need to give medicine in return for taking that life. When you are looking at the land as being a form of life and look at concepts of death, we really don't see death, we see life giving life. If life is coming from my fish, my life is coming from that plant, my life is coming from that water. So the object of carrying life within it is to be able to nurture me. And so it really talks to the relationship that people have between themselves and the land. And I think the previous site said something about land back. And so this, when you see other books being created, you don't see this kind of information in there. This comes directly from people living in the community. Okay, next slide. I guess that's it. And I guess all I just wanted to say was that this was an excellent opportunity for us to take information that we knew and put it into a format that was easily accessible to a lot of our students. And what was beautiful about this process is that we were able to use our own teachings and philosophies and show a different way. And I think as people went through or read, what our expectation is that as people read through this book, they get a different perspective of what life is like for Indigenous peoples and maybe gain a more appreciation of what that is. And I think the last thing that we, or one of the things that we did in here is that we traced the development of the history, how we went from pre-colonial to colonial to current day and moving forward and how those Indigenous people have still remained here and how they've adapted to it and that a lot of the culture has still remained intact, although it's now taking on a different form and how we're sharing it is a different way. So thank you, Gwetch. Thank you for listening. It's wonderful to do that, Susan. I think when we think of the promise of OER, it's exactly this kind of project that a lot of us imagine. And so I thank you, both Kristin and Susan, for putting that promise as the starting point. And we are now going to go to, I don't know exactly the flip side, but talking about the reality of what's actually happening in OER. Obviously that promise is there and it's being realized in some cases, but not always. And so I'd like to start with Shauna, who is at the City University of New York and Shauna is a faculty lead for OER at her institution within the CUNY system. And she's also a teacher and active instructor at a community college in Brooklyn that has a diverse student body. And I'd like to ask Shauna, where you feel that OER is succeeding with your students, but where is it failing and why do you think it's failing? Thanks so much for that introduction and for asking me to be a part of this incredible panel. I'm gonna turn on my timer. So hopefully I finish early and we can hear more from everybody else, but Kingsborough is the only community college in Brooklyn, New York. We have a student population that is pretty diverse on most counts. As of 2019, we're 29% black students, 17% Latinx and 16% Asian American Pacific Islander. About 44% of our students were born outside of the US and we have a range of abilities and genders and sexualities in every classroom. But there is one area where we are pretty homogenous, income level, okay? Across CUNY community colleges, 52% of students have household incomes of less than $20,000 per year. And that's in New York City. And that data is from before COVID-19 which has reached and continues to wreak havoc on the physical and financial wellbeing of so many New Yorkers. So as a faculty lead for OER, my best work is supporting instructors on campus in lowering access costs which is tremendously important while also finding and revising materials to make them appropriate and reflective of our students and adaptable for as many instructors as possible so that the work that instructors at Kingsborough do can be shared and adapted in the way that they share and adapt from other people's work. I'm really excited about two projects this year. I'll just shout out Professor Jose Nanine's forthcoming COVID-19 resource where he is a community health professor and he is collating a bunch of resources that will be really easy to use for anyone in CUNY or outside of CUNY and Professor Midori Yamamori's Art 3700. She's converting that. She really wanted to bring down the cost so it's accessible for all students, not just the ones who can afford the $140 textbook especially since it's non-Western art. She thinks that students should have access to this course and she knows a lot of students don't take it because of the textbook barrier. So that's extra challenging. So she also wants to improve the way the course is typically taught. I'm gonna quote her proposal. Non-Western art tends to be treated as historical and timeless but not contemporary and there are a lack of displays on the arts related to slavery, Chinese Exclusion Actor, Japanese American internment experience in major museums. So OER has definitely been a game changer for students on our campus in terms of access to the required texts and that has been totally huge but because that has been and continues to be so helpful for my own classes I sort of assumed that OER would be better in terms of representation too, right? So they're good, they're great, they're gonna be better. And I should have known better about that since the first American government OER textbook I used actually taught the doctrine of interposition like it's a real and valid thing still. So if you look up interposition you'll see that it's only ever been used to defend segregation. So that in 2016 it was being published. Well, anyway, sorry, I gotta keep on my time. So I was inspired at a political science conference by Dr. Arantali's study of Indigenous immigrant Indigenous and immigrant peoples in Canadian political science textbooks. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, she didn't look at any OER, OER would totally be better. So I decided to do it on American government books and to see how they cover historically marginalized groups. I assume the OER would be better and it turns out OER about as terrible on this count as traditionally published textbooks. Not better, not worse, just equally uninclusive. If you Google it, you can find the study pretty easily. And there's a lot more to it. There's a lot of guts in the appendix if you wanna see actually the terms. So the other big takeaway, so besides the fact that the OER are not better, not worse and that political science as a discipline is really not doing a great job here is that the only book that really did a good job is this first one in the top column is McLean and Taubers American government in black and white. And the only reason it did better than everyone else is because it has a specific explicit focus. So without intention, these resources do not cover. They just as a discipline, we overlook so many groups in America, which that says that we don't think these groups are important. If you have to take American government as many students do that it's not important for you to learn about these groups or their place in America. So I've been trying to be more mindful of including the missing perspective in my courses. In my international relations course, I use open textbooks from E international relations which are great, but I am now starting the course off with Svoboda and Locan's foreign policy article, racist critical to the field of international relations which is not open. So right, it's not open. It's not all the good things we think have opened but the students can access it through our library database and it's been so useful to explicitly ground our class in IR, introduction IR. Another approach I'm trying is trying to co-create better materials with my students. One of the assignment options for my American government class is to rewrite or translate a chapter of our textbook. But so far no one has taken me up on this. I had this idea, I stole this idea from other people in spring of 2020. So we're all still very much underwater. We're fully online and remote and students don't have bandwidth or access. So nobody's taken that up yet. I'm really excited for OpenStacks to release the Google Doc versions of their textbooks that they promised that would be coming out in fall 2020. And I know that 2020 has been a dumpster fire of a year for everyone. So if they can get it out early in 2021, I would really appreciate that so that we can really work on that. I think that might be our purpose and the thing that we do and make that sort of the central focus of my class next semester. And that I'm gonna stop now so that we can go on to other people. All right, well, thank you, Shauna. And I think that these stats here show a good, do a good job of what we were hoping here, which was put a bit of cold water on the enthusiasm or happiness that maybe Kristen and Susan reflected and forced us to pose some harder questions. So I'm gonna turn next. So thanks, Shauna, for that. I'm gonna turn next to Elaine Thornton who's been running an OER program at University of Arkansas for the past five years. So she's been building this program and my guess is that not everything has been as impactful or effective as Elaine might have hoped in the OER world. And I'm just curious about why do you think it's harder than some people might have expected? I think we think OER is going to solve all these problems. And I'm curious about if you can talk about where the areas where we're beginning to see OER make an impact in race and diversity, but why has it been harder or in what ways has it been more difficult than we expected? Okay, thank you. So my name is Elaine Thornton and I am the Open Education and Distance Learning Librarian at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I think that I'll start with why it's been so hard because when you start doing this work, we started this here about almost five years ago. It's so hard to even get the faculty, the administrators to even listen and then to learn about OER, what it is and then to get them to convert and adopt OER. So you focus first on the large enrollment classes which would provide immediate equity to all students as far as access to textbooks and materials. So I work at a mid-sized public university with limited faculty diversity. And this impacts black and brown faculty's availability to participate in the OER adoption and creation process. This situation plays out in the classrooms as well. The population of our campus is probably very opposite of what Shauna just mentioned at her campus. Few students ever have a black instructor in the classroom and this also plays out among the student body. In 2019-20, only 36 of the 1,400 members of the faculty were black, nine were Native American, 1,200 of the 27,000 students were black and 259 were Native American. These students are not just suffering from the lack of interaction with diverse professors and content. White students also miss out on opportunities to grow, think and learn from someone who might have a different cultural or experiential perspective than they have been exposed to before. And they need this in their education just as students of color need to see faculty teaching who look like them. So over the summer, black students at the University of Arkansas took to Twitter using the hashtag black at UART to share stories of negative racial experiences that have impacted their lives at the university. They also began to demand change and question issues like the lack of punishment for white fraternities who perpetrate racist and bigoted actions year after year and white faculty they've encountered who questioned their classroom success. They also demanded that campus leaders look critically at the past. They raised their voices to protest the memorialization of segregationists and lynch mob leaders whose names, campus buildings and colleges bear. So I hope that OER can be used to incorporate more diverse voices, images and content into higher education. We need this on our campus and I'm sure most do. I hope we can continue to increase the involvement of diverse faculty in OER development. I hope that open resources adopted and created on our campus help students feel like they belong and allow them to see people who look like them in the text and that they address issues that are important to them and serve as tools to educate all students and encourage them to think critically and question their beliefs and past actions. We're not there yet and we have a long way to go but I'm encouraged by some recent activity on my campus. So let me quickly share a few brief examples. So there's a place for OER in large core classes, moving pictures, this introduction to cinema created by Dr. Russell Sharman. Sharman included a section entitled Representations in Cinema to incorporate content he covers in his class that was not present in a traditionally published expensive textbook he used to assign. He's teaching with this textbook for the first time this fall and it's making an impact on our students. Additionally, we've received feedback and notices of adoption from all over the country including from several community colleges and a tribal college responses have been very positive. And as is the benefit of OER if others want to clone the book and add more content to include representations they want to cover in their own classes, they can easily do that. Next slide, please. Yes. There's also a place for this in specialized area studies content and kind of piggybacking off of what Susan mentioned about her book. We've also just had a faculty member apply for funding to write a textbook for a course she created called Native American Languages and Cultures. It's cross-listed in our Indigenous Studies and World Languages program. And there's no viable textbook for this course. This work will be important not only for our campus but also for our regional community. Arkansas is a traditional home of the Cato, Kwa Pa and Osage people. And our part of the state also is closely connected to the post removal lands of the Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Potawatomi people in bordering Oklahoma. She will draw from her own research and include community voices and perspectives. She also hopes to include students as researchers and contributors through open pedagogical methods. Next slide, please. And finally, as a result of the hashtag black at UR Tweets and other events of the summer, administrators and faculty seem to finally be paying more attention to racism on our campus. Cultural competency is a new online course that draws from a variety of openly licensed resources. The first semester, 50 students are enrolled. The course creators hope that it will grow to include more sections and that other faculty will begin to teach it. The creator feels strongly about using OER and preserving that this is a no textbook cost course. Is OER and its implementation in the classroom where we want it to be regarding how it addresses, incorporates or includes issues of race and diversity? No, not yet, but it has the potential to get there. As a group of faculty champions grows and more interest grows in creating OER, there is now momentum to increase the push for more diverse participation, diverse content and making efforts to evaluate content for racial and cultural diversity. We can begin to make sure that all faculty, all these issues address and we know that it's the responsibility of all faculty in all disciplines to address these issues. Moreover, it also takes the diverse perspectives from OER advocates who work with faculty. We need to question their content and encourage them to address these kinds of issues in content they want to create. Thank you. All right, thank you, Elaine. Wonderful that even when we're talking about the cold doses of reality, it's coupled with the potential is still there. And I think that that's the exciting thing about OER. I thank both Sean and Elaine for doing the hard work on the ground. I think it's great to see the work happening and the progress being made. I wanna talk now about the future and we've seen what the promise is. We have some ideas of some of the challenges and I think we've clearly just scratched the surface everywhere. This is a pretty dense panel, I would say, with a lot of information. But I would like to turn to, and I make an apology. There is a new addition to this section. So Suzanne Kusegulu is from Goldsmiths at London University. She's gonna be joined by Serpil Mary Elan. I will add the name to the deck afterwards. I apologize that I didn't get that beforehand. But I'm gonna pose this question to Suzanne. And I think Suzanne, you're going to introduce Serpil to talk about some specific experiences out of Turkey. And what I wanna ask about, so you work at Goldsmiths University of London, you're an academic developer and you've done a lot of research around sort of power, technology, learning and the different ways that the platforms that we use or the ways we approach learning can influence people. And I wanna hear more about the pessimism. On the pessimistic days, where are the big fears around OER about the kind of impacts or lack thereof that it might have on diversity and equity? And what we as a community ought to be doing to address these fears. And over to Suzanne. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you for inviting me to this panel. How is my audio? Are you able to hear me well? Absolutely, yes, thank you. Okay, that's great. I wouldn't call myself a pessimist person, but I sure do have concerns. I have a lot of questions about OER. So what a great panel. Thank you so much for having me as part of this panel. So Kristen talked about in her opening, talked about contextualizing OER. She talked about how important it is to question knowledge, authority, power, the relationships between all of these in OERs. And then Susan, she talked about need to engage people to write, right? So that's a crucial thing, isn't it? How do we get people to write about things? And then she also said, there is a need to rewrite the history which I thought is great. And then Elaine also talked about the importance of incorporating more diverse voices in OER. So today, I'm going to approach the issue from the perspective of academic publishing. And I'm going to introduce you to Serpil who is doing fantastic work in Turkey on feminism, which is obviously, well, for us, a difficult contested subject for Turkey. She's working on refugees, refugee education and educational technology. So Serpil and I had a very interesting conversation lately which is very relevant to this panel. We talked about research, we talked about academic publishing. And one thing that came up in the conversation was publishing in open platforms like press books or other platforms. So Serpil kindly agreed to join the panel to talk about her experiences in academic publishing and publishing in Turkey, to talk about publishing or not publishing, having making these decisions. So I'm handing it over to Serpil now. Thank you. Thank you very much, Suzan, for inviting and supporting me to talk here. Also, Huk, thanks very much for accepting me in the last minute. I'm working in a full region of Turkey as a public university with limited resources. I'm trained to do my best with my students not to be affected by the geographical location. I have an academic position as an assistant professor and I'm currently preparing for the Turkish version of a tenure for a permanent professorship, which is a shared professorship. And it has a clearly defined criteria for application. Therefore, what I did this year for publication is to share my research on one side and to be tenured on the other side. Actually, to be honest, before March, I hadn't been aware of the citric criteria to be evaluated as an associate professor. However, this criteria changed in every application term. I learned it very simply. This year, I published one co-edited book, two book chapters and one journal paper. Just the journal paper was published open access. However, the journal doesn't meet the criteria to be tenured, which I hadn't known before. I also presented my work in two conferences and published them open access. In the meantime, I have become very careful in deciding where to publish since then. Along with these publishing commitments, I have teaching commitments on different courses, not just in my department and also in other departments. I currently have more than 800 students to teach and care remotely. However, being an academic doesn't mean that you are just responsible for your teaching and research here. There are some administrative responsibilities, such as confirming the student's registry or responding to any inquiry of students, et cetera. Last but not least, I have a three and a half year old daughter I need to care for. With all these responsibilities, I need to think carefully about my career for the professorship. The thing about open publishing is that the university I work at has a very rigid criteria for publishing books or book chapters. This is the criteria for inclusion in the evolution of an application for professorship. So I'm going to read these to you. The publisher needs to have four years of publishing history. The material needs to have been catalogued by certain higher education institutions. These institutions must be one of the best 500 universities in the world, which has been decided by the Council of Turkish Higher Education. The publisher has published at least 20 academic books by different authors from the same academic discipline. Yeah. This is all about the publishing, academic publishing in Turkey, a case from Turkey. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Serpil. Yeah. So I think Serpil, your story, the way the criteria works, definitely show us that open publishing is not always an easy decision, right? There are certain academic structures that constrain maybe our motivation to publish openly or perhaps our willingness to publish openly. So I think Serpil and I, we had a conversation around this and I don't know what you think Serpil about this, but we thought the larger academic structure, definitely regulations and also the power held by more established senior academics certainly impact the process of publishing. And also with COVID and everything, if you think about recent changes, the structure of family life, the social life also has definitely has an impact on the process of publishing. So female academics, they work a lot globally. They work most often harder than their male counterparts because they have a lot of other responsibilities in addition to academic work. And this is something we observed in our previous research on open and distance education. So the question you posed me was a very difficult question. That's why I brought Serpil in because we need to tackle this collaboratively. So I guess the thing I'm trying to say in the end is what do we do about power in the institutions of higher education in the society and families and communities and education? Perhaps we need to start from there and we need to really understand how things work socially, how power structures are organized socially and then go from there. So Serpil, maybe you can add some last words. We have a few more minutes, I believe. Is that so you? I agree with you, Suzan. I think the system which is against open access makes researchers or colleagues here are eager to share their work or knowledge openly even with their colleagues in the same institution. As a female academic, I feel that the gap between the academia where Serpil shared open access openly or not and not is getting bigger because of the pandemic situation because we are using the technology a lot compared to other years. And I think despite these challenges, being open to publish open access should be on the point. That's why I'm still publishing in some journals or publishers to share my knowledge and receive feedback from others. That's why thank you very much, Suzan. Thank you. Thank you, Serpil. Thank you, everyone. Yes, Ram. So I think what's interesting, particularly in Serpil's story is just this question of who has the luxury to work in OER or open access? And is it everyone? And I think that really, Serpil's story talks about that. And I think OER is probably even worse in terms of the way that the institutions recognize it than open access publishing. So thank you both for your story and perspective coming from another part of the world which I think is really critical. Good to move on last. So I've made two errors. One is I didn't get Serpil's information on the slide deck which I will correct. And I made a second error. Is that right, Elaine? Have I got an error here on? No, that's right. It's not the first slide. It's wrong, but that's right. Corrected it somewhere. Okay. So Elaine, to close us out, Elaine's been a program director at colleges in both the CUNY, so that's the City University of New York system and the SUNY system which is the State University of New York systems. And she spent a lot of time really on the ground thinking about how to help people adapt, make and use OER. And so I wanted Elaine to close things off as someone who's really been active on the creation side, sort of helping to support the creation side. And the question here is if you had unlimited budget and unlimited, unrivaled persuasion skills, what would or could you do to improve every existing OER and every future OER project to better address the issues of race and diversity? And over to Elaine to finish us off with some happy news, hopefully. I don't know. It's a very simple question, I'm sure are you. So I'm going to be really brief. I'm just gonna present some documents that you can revisit later if you find them helpful. I think everyone's done a great job establishing the why, but the how is a little bit harder. So in New York State, we were fortunate enough to have a grant program. And the incentives even then weren't enough because as everyone has discussed it's a heavy lift. So what I like to talk about, of course, the solution is always more money. I mean, that's just true for pretty much everything. But I like to talk about if we had the money and the persuasion skills, what would it look like? So first, one of my go-to slides is always the OER dream team. And a lot of people laugh when I present this, but a lot of people are wearing all of these hats at once, but it really does take this village to make an OER happen. I'm an instructional designer by trade. I work with accessibility people who are overworked during PDF remediations and things. Librarians are finding great OER and they are able to find resources in the library that are free to students. And then of course the faculty is the most important piece and they have to be intrinsically motivated to diversify and to review their OER in such a way that they can look at it critically. So this is my ideal, I have this framed, but in a get down to nuts and bolts reality, I am also a project manager, that's my background. So I have a very detailed timeline that I use and the steps along the way. And so this one, I love to demystify and sort of chunk how we're gonna go about the OER. We're gonna initiate it. And when we get to the selection process, this is where we've chunked it down to these, what you can expect with weeks and what kind of stops and starts you may have, but when it gets down to the selection process, this is where you wanna think about how to diversify, include some different things. So I've worked with a lot of people, I'm gonna show you a course map from the wonderful Patricia Hagler later, but I've worked with a lot of people going through these steps. And right here in the selection process and in the design and integration technology piece, you can think about adding things, low hanging fruit. So one of the many things. So if you're talking about unions, add Booker T. Washington. If you're talking about entrepreneurship, add Madam C.J. Walker. If you're talking about economics, why not have an example from a bodega in Brooklyn as a small business, as opposed to the always, blue collar, red state, small business case study. Why not include maps that are more diverse or that are scaled to show inequities or there's so much here. So in lately, I've been really motivated by current affairs. So if you've gone through an OER and you've looked at it, you've wanna decolonize your syllabus, you wanna go through it. If you wanna do what Shauna suggested, have students go through it and see what's happening later in the alternative assessment portion when you finally build those out, you can do that. I mean, they will see better than us what the Eurocentrism or the American exceptionalism is and these texts and they can really work together to create a better OER. So moving on, this is gonna be a course map that again, like I discussed with Patricia Hagler, again, completely motivated because we're very lucky in New York State to have colleges with a civil rights focus with support for this. So this I've actually, I'll link to it, it'll be in the slides. This is just a regular history course but done from an African-American viewpoint. And so it was a real lift to find all of this, all this extra supplemental material but think about how much of it is out there in the 1619th project lesson plan. Eyes on the prize, the documentary. You know, tons of YouTube videos. There was so much out there that just hadn't been used that was free, free to students. So again, keep that in mind when you're kind of demystifying the OER process and you're breaking it down where you can inject some of these diverse race inclusion aspects. So that's about it. I wanna give five minutes left for questions in case anyone has any for any of the presenters and I really appreciate you guys coming to this talk. Thanks, Elaine. And I must say I'm very impressed with everyone. That was a pretty tough job for everyone to stay on time. I feel like we could spend an hour on each section. Yes, go ahead, Elaine. I had one more slide with some examples, I'm sorry. The very last slide had some examples where you can find diverse images or anything else that you can integrate. You know, if you're using stock photos, why not use some better ones? So you guys can look at that, that'd be great. Awesome, nice to finish with such a practical thing. So we do have a couple of minutes here, five minutes that's not nearly enough to get into any interesting or not quite enough to get into any deep questions but would anyone like to pose a question for this wonderful group here? And again, thank you so much for keeping on time. That made my job much easier. Anyone else? All right, I think I feel like there's so much here that probably in four minutes there's not really much we could do to dig into anything. So I think maybe I will just finish off by saying a very huge thank you to all of you. We pulled this together in a little bit of a pretty quick way. And I'm just so happy that we could share all of this from so many diverse points of view and parts of the process. Thank you also to Paul and the OER Global Team for putting this on and accommodating multiple last minute changes to the session makeup. And I think I'll turn over to you, Paul, to close things out. But thanks again to everyone. I really appreciate the work that you've all done in general and the work you've put into making this panel so valuable. We have.