 Hi, my name is Art Brownlow, I'm a professor of music and also faculty fellow for academic innovation at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. One of my duties in the latter role is to oversee our OER initiatives from the academic side. In this way, I work closely with our OER librarian and our scholarly communications librarian to coordinate our affordability program. And hi, my name is Gabby Hernandez, I'm the open education librarian and I oversee things from the research side. My main role is to coordinate the project's grants and professional development opportunities related to open education and textbook affordability. I work with all types of stakeholders across campus including administrators, faculty members, librarians, instructional designers, bookstore managers, and students. Together we work to ensure faculty have the support they need to adopt, adapt, or create OER so students can have access to their course content at little to no cost. So thank you for viewing our presentation about how we collect course marking information for our zero and low cost courses and what we do with that data. But first we'd like to introduce you to our institution. The University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley is located in Deep South Texas. We have two main campuses that are 70 miles apart, plus seven satellite campuses spread over 100 miles or so along the Rio Grande River. Our enrollment is just over 32,000 students. UTRGV is one of the country's largest Hispanic serving institutions with a 90% Hispanic population. Many of our students are first generation college students and 61% of our students are Pell eligible. With this very unique set of demographics, the affordability of higher education is one of our campuses main concerns. The UTRGV's textbook affordability project is working hard to ensure our students have access to their course materials at little to no cost and we'll be talking about one of those initiatives next. Texas Senate Bill 810 was passed into law in 2017. Among other things, this law requires universities to mark OER course materials in their course schedules. In marking our courses, we've taken a broad interpretation of OER to include library licensed materials, instructor created materials, and even no course materials at all. So instead of OER, we have adopted the use of the terms zero cost and low cost in our course markings. Now we add statements with these designations to the course listings in our course schedule. You see here the ZC statement which reads, all materials for this course including textbooks and any software slash courseware will be available at no cost to the student. And here is the LC statement which is similar. And as you can see, our threshold for low cost is $40 or less. Before 2021, we really had no systematic approach to this process. We kept a growing database of known affordability advocates and friends. Each semester then we sent them email requests for their ZC and LC courses and then we sent that data to the registrar for marking. In this way, we IDed around 100 courses per semester, but it was inefficient and time consuming. So this past spring, we developed our course material reporting form. This is a short form that we have front loaded to our traditional textbook adoption process. And it has resulted in over a 300% increase in courses that we've been able to ID as zero and low cost. Here is the landing page of the form. We've used this for two sessions now, summer and fall. And the way we distributed it to the faculty was through a link to this page sent via listserv announcement from our provost. So next, I'm going to take you through the form so you can see the flow and what kind of data we're collecting. Okay, so here again is the landing page of the form. And you'll first see an explanation of what types of information we are collecting. And then next, you see that there is contact information there for any needed help. So now I'll select the term. And as you see, there's only one option now, but in the spring, when we send out the form for summer, it will show both summer sessions. So let's click on fall. Now the first thing we ask is if all your courses use only course materials that cost more than $40. If the answer is yes, then it's fairly obvious you are a traditional textbook user. And the form will take you straight to a link that takes you to the bookstore where you can then submit your textbook order. But if the answer is no, then you are presented with a list of all your courses for that term. Now, as you can see, I'm only teaching one course this semester, but there it is. It's listed here. So I'll click on the green plus sign. Now there is a description of course materials here. You know what is and what is not considered a course material, just so the person who's taking the form will be clear about it. And then it asks if the course is zero cost. If yes, then you're asked to choose one or more of these options. Say you use OER and library licensed. Then you click submit and you're then directed to the same ending page as before. And you're done. But we now have data about what kinds of zero cost materials you're using. However, if you choose no, and I think I'll have to go back for that. There we go. Say you choose no, then you're asked if the course is low cost. Let's say your answer to that is yes. Now you see this answer is open-ended. But you can see some of the suggested responses, you know, homework, systems, apps, etc. Once you've entered your responses, you can click submit and you're done. But again, we have our data. Now by the way, back when you chose yes to the low cost query, if you had chosen no to that question, you would have been sent ahead to the ending page. And at that point there would be no reason to answer no, we know that. But we provided that escape for anyone who found themselves there by mistake. And so that's our form. It's simple and yet it has provided us with some very powerful data. And more information about how many instructors are using zero and low cost course materials than we've ever had before. The faculty have input all their information in the course materials reporting form. We receive an automated report weekly of all the updated information. The reporting form is always live to allow faculty to make updates as needed. The data is then taken from the Excel spreadsheet and copy and paste it into AirTable. AirTable is a relational database that allows easier utilization of the data sets provided. Here you can see some of the information that is collected from our faculty. This is the data in its raw form and at a glance we can see which courses are marked zero cost or low cost. And if the faculty member is using library-aligned materials, OER, or no textbook for each assigned semester. Between summer 2021 and fall 2021, we collected almost 1,000 data sets representing seven semesters worth of information. I needed a better way to collect and utilize this data. Within AirTable, one can create various views of the data to look at individual data sets. As you can see here, I have created various views of the information using filters and groups to provide easy access to necessary information at a glance. One perk of using AirTable is the ability to have the information updated in real time. I can make a change in one view and have the rest of the data sets reflect that change automatically. Depending on the need, I can see which faculty are using OER only. I can see the zero cost course for fall 2021. Or I can see an overview of how many data sets are in each semester. Or even create a different view to fit the needs of the requester, which so far have included administrators and student government. Using the course materials reporting form and inputting this data into AirTable has been a game changer for our textbook affordability initiatives. Now that we have the data from the form and it's easily manipulated through AirTable, we have been able to really utilize this information. As some examples, we have made reports showing the percentage of affordable course materials that are used at UTRGV. About 50% of those courses said they are not requiring textbooks at all. About 30% reported they're using OER and the remaining said they were using library licensed materials which could include databases or unlimited licensed ebooks. We've also been able to build relationships with our campus bookstore and the Office of the Registrar. We send the course material reporting information to the bookstore to which they have been able to update the information on their side to ensure students know what type of course material. If any needs to be purchased for their classes. We also send the list of zero and low cost courses to the registrar who then uploads this information on their end so it can be reflected on the website when students search and register for classes. Our outreach efforts have even benefited from this data. We were able to cross check outreach lists with this information to create more targeted and individualized outreach efforts and see which colleges really are our OER champions. For the first time we really know who is out there teaching with OER at UTRGV. I was able to perform an outreach using all the faculty members who reported that they were using OER in fall 2021. I reached out individually to each faculty and asked which OER textbook they were using. As you can see on this slide, we got a lot of responses and there was a wide variety of OER being used and represented on campus that represents many different subject areas. Another big win we had from implementing the course material reporting form was the student access to this information. As mentioned earlier, SB 810 requires Texas institutions to have this information accessible to students. We have created a list of every zero cost and low cost course and put this information on our library guide so students can know exactly which classes they can register for that have either zero cost for their course materials or something less than $40. To ensure this information reaches students beyond listing it through the registrar, we performed a mini marketing campaign where we put this information on all of the library's social media platforms as well as on the library's website homepage. We have had more than 500 views for this information since we put it out a few months ago. In summary, I'd like to say that we now have a structure whereby we can find, collect and mark zero and low cost course materials in our course offerings. Is this structure perfect? No, and we will be tweaking our form the next few times we use it. But I think it is a reliable tool for fulfilling the requirements of state legislation and for collecting the data we need to improve affordability at UTRGV. And overall this data has really helped us understand what is happening with OER on campus. Utilizing Airtable has allowed me to create very detailed reports very quickly and easily. One request we had from our student government, they wanted to know which courses were not using zero and low cost course materials to see how they could reach out to them and see if there were OER for those courses and start a conversation. Because of this form, I was able to get that information in their hands at the click of a button and just, and this is just one example of how we were able to utilize this information to go beyond course marking and enhance our OER initiatives on campus. Thank you so much for joining our presentation today and learning about how we have been able to address course marking on our campus. On this slide we have our contact information as well as links to our websites where you can learn more about this and other initiatives we are hosting at UTRGV. The textbook affordability project website has information about our faculty recognition program as well as textbook affordability resources and support for our faculty. The OER and textbook affordability library guide has our list of zero and low cost courses as well as other information regarding OER for our faculty and students. If you have any questions for us, feel free to write them in the chat or contact us after the session. We look forward to hearing from you.