 Hello and welcome to our lightning talk titled Sowing Seeds for Sustainability – How a Small Grant Helped a Library Let OER Initiative Grow. My name is Sarah Tabay and along with Kirk Snyder and Tim Ballenta today, we will talk about a grant we received from the Network of the National Library of Medicine that we used to boost our OER initiative with. We will share our experience in creating the Faculty Fellowship Program, train the Trainer Library Workshop and the OER Committee. We will talk about our successes and challenges during the grant period, hoping to share valuable lessons for those of you who are interested to take a similar route towards sustainability and growth of your OER projects. I will start and then Kirk and Tim will follow. Open Tour is our Library's OER initiative that we started in 2018 at one of the tourist campuses in Manhattan. Right from the start we had some success with the number of our undergraduate departments, including psychology, speech and communication, business and a few others. We started our OER project without any kind of financial support and as such we couldn't offer our interest at faculty any incentives. Still, as of Spring 2020 we saved our students over $103,000. This is before we got the grant. So with the grant we were hoping to build momentum and like every other OER initiative we wanted to expand our project but more importantly we were concerned about the sustainability of it. This we tried to achieve through educating our Health Sciences faculty and training our Library staff across tour campuses. Health Sciences programs have grown at tour in recent years. At the same time we all know that Open Educational Resources are not abundant when it comes to the Health Sciences disciplines. By getting a grant we were also hoping to be able to provide an incentive for the Health Sciences faculty to create or adapt or adopt OER. Now historically Tourer College encourages service to the under-resourced communities. So aiming to support our under-represented students by helping to reduce money they spend on course materials and route to a career in Health Sciences which have become popular fills it remain expensive was a no-brainer. Obviously the pandemic was the biggest challenge we had to deal with. Many faculty members were overwhelmed with preparing and transitioning to remote teaching. Recruiting therefore became the biggest challenge. We had to do targeted outreach, extend the deadline for applications and even expand our pool of applicants and reach out to a wider range of disciplines. For example it was only in the second round of announcing the Faculty Fellowship that reached out to the MBA in healthcare management program. In other words we needed to become a bit creative. Another challenge was that none of us on the team had any grant experiences. Grants in general complex and involved reporting and manoeuvring financial systems that we didn't have much understanding of. If possible add an experienced grant person to your team. Knowledge of the culture of an institution and access to senior management are important and were in fact essential in moving our project forward. Budget for time, lots of it. Documenting every step and every conversation throughout the grant process is essential. In our case it helped to mitigate the effects of losing a key team member in the middle of our grant project. If we apply for a grant again we will allocate a more generous stipend for faculty. And finally though we had the courage, optimism and support to apply for a grant we also had to learn quite a lot on this bumpy road. All of which makes us feel that we are ready for another grant and this time we will have a much smoother ride. Kirk will continue now with more details. Thank you Sarah. I'm Kirk Snyder OER and Instruction Librarian. Through the grant we created the OER Health Sciences and Allied Health Faculty Fellowship. The fellowship supported the work of five faculty members in the health sciences to adopt, adapt or create OER for use in their courses. Over six months the library trained the fellows on the basics of OER through monthly Zoom meetings where we presented on topics like OER platforms, repositories, creative commons licenses and accessibility and interactivity. Between meetings we worked with fellows one on one as needed sharing resources and guiding them through the process of selecting, adapting and creating OER. Now a few words about and from the fellows. The work of our fellows has increased access to education and the health sciences across our institution and particularly for the underserved. Their projects are diverse. Some are designed for high enrollment courses which is great for student savings. Some were motivated by equity and serving the underserved. Some were focused on not only the education of their students but impacting the surrounding community outside our institution. The projects include adopting textbooks, courseware and modules from a variety of sources and some original OER creation. The fellowship has given a big boost and a lot of traction to our OER initiative. Our fellows saved Turo students more than $100,000 so far in just the one year period of the fellowship. This has nearly doubled the impact of our entire OER program. When the fellowship period began our students had saved a little over $100,000 on textbooks since we began promoting OER in 2018. And today total savings at our institution are up to nearly $240,000. The fellowship has aided the sustainability of our OER initiative having the effect of scaling up our entire OER program. The increased impact that the fellows bring will keep the growth of our program on its upward trajectory into the future. One aspect that will help with sustainability and growth is that faculty potentially have more influence over each other than we as librarians do in advocating for OER. As a part of the fellowship we created OER ambassador plaques for our fellows to aid in outreach and promotion. Having faculty as OER ambassadors makes librarians no longer the gatekeepers of OER. And in cooperation with the Office of the Provost our fellows have the opportunity this fall to present a webinar on their OER fellowship project. We expect our work with the fellows to continue well beyond the fellowship period and that it will prove to be a great thing for the sustainability of our OER initiative at Turo. And now my colleague Tim Valente will talk about our OER library committee and workshop. Thanks Kirk. I'm Tim Valente talking today about the OER committee established as an ongoing supporting component of our grant. The institution wide OER committee was conceptualized in our grant proposal as a vehicle to engage in conversations related to OER across our institution but especially among our library colleagues at different locations serving different communities. Charged with advocating for OER at Turo and planning and executing system wide educational and outreach OER events the committee is chaired by our OER librarian. This was the direct grant funded support for the committee but other members and their activities represented an in kind donation of time. Eight members all library staff served one year terms meeting monthly or bi-monthly on zoom across time zones. Our immediate goal was planning the train the trainer workshop for our library colleagues to help increase their knowledge and comfort when supporting faculty using OER in the Allied Health and Health Sciences fields but longer term the committee is charged with embedding OER advocacy at our institution and is a bedrock for the sustainability of OER activities at the system wide scale. This workshop involved significant time and energy. We developed a logistics time checklist timetables and agreed on responsibilities. We sent promotional save the day emails and invited a highly qualified external speaker Lily Todoronova who graciously and promptly agreed to contribute a keynote address. Such work went into the committee members developing sessions for our colleagues practicing these sessions and proving them based on feedback. Of course the devil was in the details including proper settings on our zoom meeting, IT support, contingency plans and recording for reuse. Ultimately we convened a successful workshop titled building bridges tools for open educational resources advocacy and collaboration at T.C.U.S. libraries on April 13th, 2021. The key theme of the workshop also underscored in Lily's keynote was that the capacities to support and advocate for OER was already largely built into library staff's day to day interactions and need not be thought of as a separate activity. Discussing this empowering theme either directly or indirectly, sessions covered OER 101 copy rate creative commons, finding and evaluating OER and teaching with and publishing OER. Based on pre and post survey of our audience of close to 50 participants, you can see that confidence increased in explaining creative commons licenses and OER generally. But another clear outcome was the community building this workshop spurred. Our library colleagues recognized their capacity to support OER and felt connected and empowered. Our committee certainly felt more connected despite remote work and geographical distance. We plan to expand the committee, revolving faculty and updating our charge in October. Already we have plans to focus on a new event, present at events across the system and incorporate OER into other aspects of our library services, including collection, development and information literacy. Thank you for listening to our talk today. Please use the QR code to access resources links. And do reach out to us if we can be of any help to you.