 Thank you so much for joining us this morning in Alaska I should say this morning Alaska I know that the time is different elsewhere. We are going to be presenting today on the development of a student led textbook affordability advocacy program at a small open enrollment institution in the Pacific Northwest. My name is Veronica Howard I use they them pronouns I'm a faculty member at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia. I'm joined today with my co authors Jeffrey Cruz, Emily Cohen and DRC Hutchings all of the University of Alaska Anchorage. One of our co authors Hannah Bissette could not be here with us today. I do want to, before we begin recognize that we are joining you from Alaska Anchorage Alaska. The University of Alaska Anchorage is located on Denina El Nenia, the unseated ancestral homelands the Denina people. We recognize and are grateful for the indigenous people who have stewarded this beautiful land for thousands of years and we're honored and privileged to be settlers in this place. Together this morning will be beginning DRC and I with an overview of the program itself, we're going to highly emphasize that student focused work, and to describe the major curricular elements of the textbook affordability student ambassador program. Before we transition to letting our student leaders lead the presentation with highlights of many of the campus focused projects that were conducted as part of this multi stage program. And we're going to conclude today with time for questions and answers with our student presenters and textbook affordability student ambassador leaders. If you have questions for students, I would invite you to pop them into the chat box and I'm going to help moderate at the end. Those questions for our leaders. We'd like to begin though first with thanks sincere gratitude first to the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Alaska native serving and native Hawaiian serving institutions education competitive grant program. The funding most of this work would not have been possible. We're also indebted to many mentors and leaders in the field of student involvement, particularly folks like Keelan Nagel Andrea Scott Tiffany to arena, and many more. We could not have done this work without our amazing student ambassadors, or our tassas, as well as the UA a faculty who mentored many of those students. I would also like to thank sincerely UA a student clubs and Greek life program, especially gene master was a strong advocate for students and student involvement on campus. The US UA a student government, the UA a club council, and many more who made this possible. I'm going to defer now to my colleague DRC to give us an overview of the Alaska open education initiative. Thank you. So our grant funded program, which ran from October 2019 to summer 2022 is officially called the Alaska Open Education Initiative, and it focused on four key elements. First, faculty, the bulk of our grant work focused on promoting adoption of OER and zero cost course materials through faculty development and support. Our textbook affordability student ambassador program that we're discussing today, empowered students to advocate for themselves within the context of textbook portability and beyond partnerships, so developing key partnerships to leverage resources, and further culture change at our institution and impact data. So collecting data on textbook adoptions cost savings students reached impact of the materials on student performance and more. So returning to that student element, Dr Howard and I developed and ran the textbook affordability student ambassador program, which we will abbreviate to TASA throughout the rest of the program. This raised awareness of textbook affordability options, fostered advocacy advocacy skills and taught institutional knowledge for the purpose of facilitating student advocacy on campus. And beyond that we sought to empower student leaders to transform campus culture. Thank you. So a quick overview of the TASA program we had originally envisioned this of being a three stage iterative training process for students in stage one, all students were very welcome. We focused in stage one on building knowledge and confidence in students specific folk I that we had were questions like what are open educational resources since most students had never heard of them, presenting information on how open educational to influence and help improve the experience of higher education on highlighting many of the major motivators of different stakeholder groups on campus, as well as introducing those different groups like administration and faculty and staff and how are they different, and what control do they have in the textbook and education process. Stage one did require between eight and 12 hours of semi flexible hybrid training, and every student who completed stage one of the program was also awarded $250 upon completion. We really wanted to make sure to be able to incentivize students time and contribution, particularly during the pandemic when we know it was especially difficult for students. So in stage one stage two was designed to be more in depth and focused. Our aim here was really to help leverage student interest to focus on the issues and challenges that they saw and the projects that they wanted to conduct in order to make sure that we could be speaking to those values, helping students and supporting them and making those changes. So in stage two when our textbook affordability student ambassadors were doing this work, it took a variety of different paths and it required different contributions in terms of time and effort. And as a result we tried to compensate students with gift cards of varying value based on the effort and the contribution and the scope of their project. Stage three had planned to be specific targeted outreach to legislators in our state to help raise awareness of the student experience the challenges that students experience in higher education and the role that legislation could play in mitigating some of the barriers and working with the university system to address that and really giving students voice and confidence to reach out and make direct change. Unfortunately due to some organizational barriers which we do highlight in other presentations you may be interested in checking those out. We lacked the institutional support to make stage three possible. And so we're not going to spend much time on stage three because we were not able to implement it. The full curriculum for TASA especially the stage one program will be made available soon and it will be hosted on our UAA textbook affordability website. So we're just popping in there just getting into stage one a little bit deeper 34 students applied for the program 29 started the program and 27 students completed the program. The program itself included a mix of pre session review of recorded or written material, then we would meet together for in program in vivo discussion at a distance via zoom. We would start those sessions with students contributing to share documents doing drafting of project ideas, and then submitting those for review. Those deliverables for the stage one program were reviewed and scored and tracked across time just to make sure that everyone was contributing and staying on target. We discussed those deliverables and subsequent meetings so it became a kind of iterative drafting process where we fleshed out campus plans and we talked about different stakeholders. Those items that were submitted after training sessions or after community sessions received extensive one on one feedback. Now because we had lots of different availability and of course we're always trying to hit a moving target. We did have three cohorts of TASA ambassadors, but we tried three different delivery schedules, one group met once per week for a couple of hours across four weeks. Another group had an intensive training experience where we met for four hours per day on two consecutive days that was a heck of a weekend. And a third group met once per week across two weeks for four hours in week one and we to all groups received approximately eight hours of one on one time with us. So we were very interested in ensuring the quality of this program and at every stage we were requesting feedback and guidance from our students to know what was working well, and what we could improve for the future. So we're going to share just a little bit of that feedback data with you. We asked students to rate the quality of their experience upon completion of the program. How was the program for them. We asked them to rate these questions on a scale of one to five Likert type scale one being strongly disagree if I being strongly agree. Questions like the TASA program helped me understand the impact of textbook costs on student success were strongly endorsed. Other questions like the TASA program was easy. It was endorsed but a little bit more conservatively. So we can see that overall student feedback was incredibly favorable for the program. We think, however, that there are some really wonderful qualitative comments that we'd like to share with you about the value of this programming. Another student said the data on the impact of textbook unaffordability illuminated that many students share difficulties in paying for textbooks. This helped legitimize personal issues. So students are seeing that they're not alone in having some of these access barriers. Another student said amazing execution on the project, the amount of planning and effort put forth made this experience high quality. The presentations were clear and relevant and I found myself at the end of the hour wishing for more time breakout rooms were an amazing way to talk to other students one on one with fewer people listening. Another student said the most effective part was the creation of a safe space where no opinions were discouraged, the gentle and accepting nature of the meetings made it easy to speak up without fear of judgment or failure. I was so fired up to pursue change at UAA, the informal atmosphere and approach, in my opinion made this program shine, and it's safe to say, I leave this program inspired to make a positive impact in some way. And some of our students even use these skills in the moment in other ways. Another student for instance said I was skeptical at first, but this program exceeded my expectations and taught me valuable skills. It's given me a voice at the university. I spoke up for myself about an unfair situation with an exam and convinced the professor to allow me to retest. This is something I would not have been comfortable doing before this program. It teaches you so much more than textbook affordability. I'm really gratified to hear these comments and to see the amazing projects that students had proposed everything from, you know, guidance and information awareness raising directly with students to speaking with leaders on campus to make those changes. In this context we moved into stage two, where we worked with students we selected and synthesize some of their projects into our planned initiatives for the grants program, which we mentioned before this is grant funded work designed to change the institutional program. Now as a result of stage one, we selected 17 of the 20 students interested in moving on to stage two so 20 students were interested 17 were selected, and they were selected based on their participation, the quality of their program their draft how they were interested in incorporated feedback, as well as many other factors. Now unfortunately as we mentioned scheduling conflicts and competing requirements do make it difficult to participate and follow along with the group meaningfully so even though 17 students were invited only eight of our ambassadors were available regularly to join the stage two working groups and six went on to make very large and meaningful contributions. So stage two working time was managed by textbook affordability student leaders through our student club which our president will be describing in just a moment, and DRC and I were on hand to help support the students where they needed it to help make sure we were making progress forward. So the program just to wrap up our portion of it, student feedback, drove program revision so as I mentioned we recruited that feedback we use that information to make changes to the schedule how often how intense the meetings were. We also switched formatting switched hosting from a Google doc into the university LMS that was something that was more intuitive for students to track it was a place where they were already and it was easier for them to follow along with the program expectations and the delivery modality. We also note and receive feedback that there was wide variability and access to technology, which then we use that feedback to be very clear and unambiguous with our expectations regarding participation in the program. So availability was a barrier, as I mentioned not everybody can have the same consistent schedule to participate. And while we could be more flexible in the participation, perhaps including more asynchronous opportunities that may lead to other issues. Our program was predominantly face to face with some high flex or hybrid elements. And if that is an approach that you would choose to use and that would be a direct replication. So I recommend planning for about 30 to 40% of your pool to be leaving before they get to making a large meaningful contribution. And as I mentioned before due to some institutional challenges, we were not able to make stage three a reality for our students which was discouraging, sometimes this will happen in the course of large campus projects. So something to bear in mind is something we wish we could address for the future. Now at this point, I do want to transition to really focusing on those campus projects and we are going to begin with our president of the student textbook affordability club Emily Cohen, presenting on our first campus initiative. Thank you. So we realized that we wanted an avenue for the textbook affordability student ambassador program to continue even after our grant funding ended. And the way that we wanted to do that was student club on campus that could exist in perfect accessibility within textbook affordability goals. We mean that the textbook affordability club or staff, however, we are not only open to students that we decided we wanted anyone who is interested to be able to participate, including faculty, staff and community members. And anyone is welcome to attend meetings and propose goals that they would like to see happen be implemented on campus to promote textbook affordability. If you are interested in creating a similar club on your campus, be prepared for some front loaded work at the beginning. It did take us quite a bit of time and energy to get the club registered and particularly with recruiting members or something we're still actively attempting to do. However, even though that takes some time, it is very rewarding work to have member driven community member driven work on campus. And we even received acknowledgement for that rewarding work and that we received the best new club award at our university club council awards earlier this spring. And we were nominated for most active club as well. I will turn it over now to Jeffrey to discuss the further program for me. When I might slip in here just very quickly to speak to Danelle and Hannah and Mariah's work on the student textbook survey. This is a replication of a 2017 survey where we were trying to assess student textbook barriers. In this iteration, Danelle and Mariah and Hannah led the ref refinement of the survey questions making them relevant and contemporary to the student experience and work to get this through the IRB to distribute it to the student listserv. Their survey fantastic the results indicated that many of the students who completed the survey actually had used or were at least familiar with open educational resources or other zero cost force resources. Many of the students reported benefits they could perceive benefits of having zero cost resources like having less debt at graduation being able to graduate faster and so on. And many of the students who took their survey believe that the quality of these resources was similar to or better than commercial resources. Some of the challenges here of course we did have some unexpected delays, and as a result, this survey was distributed only about a week before finals. This may have contributed to a relatively low participation rate 156 completed and analyzable surveys compared to the 2017 survey which was distributed earlier in the semester and yielded 547 results. And this is where we'll turn over to Jeffrey. Hopefully everybody can hear me. Another project that that textbook affordability student ambassadors led was the creation of various resources for a new low cost, zero cost course marking initiative on campus. Evelyn one of our tassas took the lead in developing a script for course marking video and she partnered with the university registrar, our student government. Professor Hutchings and and Dr Howard, as well as other student ambassadors and the video shown on the screen in the little graphic was recorded by videographers at university advancement. The finished video was uploaded by the ua textbook affordability initiative and posted to YouTube, and then all of the students had were notified, and it was disseminated via email to the entire student body by student government. Evelyn also worked to create walkthrough videos step by step guides showing people how to find the the row cost or low cost resources in the course calendar when registering. And that created a good foundation, which the university lib guide was developed. The lib guide is available for review. If you scan the QR code on the screen. You can see sections specifically dedicated for students as well as for faculty in an overview for all students and interested parties. And so this whole section of outreach. Kind of came out of the whole student textbook affordability club and the student driven. I guess set of outreach that we developed ourselves. Some of the more interesting projects that we developed just kind of came out of nowhere. One of the things that we decided while we were having our meetings is that the people that are developing these resources. We didn't get enough recognition from other students. And while there is recognition from the university, a lot of times it's just, oh, thanks for doing this. And it's not really coming from the people that are using these resources. So working with the way we grant people who some of whom are here. So we, we identified the university faculty and staff that utilize ZTC materials and their classes, and we started an email to make sure that folks got recognition for that directly from the stack. So that we were able to basically think 364 faculty and staff members that developed all of this course material for us. And on top of that, we ended up getting opportunity to do some legislative outreach and talk to the Board of Regents these projects kind of fell into our lap. In 2022 that Alaska Senate advanced a bill that required the University of Alaska to mark all of its courses that especially the ones that offer zero or low cost textbooks and materials for students to be able to make a informed assessment of what the classes they're taking the bill, which was Senate bill 146 had several hearings. There was a lot of public testimony, some staff members are like, like myself, participated either in right ends or Collins, and, and gave public testimony about why this was such an important legislation. Ultimately, it did fail in committee and we're keeping an eye on it. Because hopefully this legislation will be it's very important legislation it has backers and hopefully it will be forwarded again for the Senate and then the full assembly up here. This also dovetailed into an opportunity for public testimony at a spring Board of Regents meeting for the university. And during this testimony we also were able to testify there and emphasize the importance of zero textbook cost materials, the need for classes to be clearly marked so students could make an informed choice and allow students the opportunity to make that decision for themselves and that was well received. And the question that most people probably have on their mind is, can can my students do this and let me tell you that they can. The TASA program offered, sure it offered incentives for students getting them to turn out and yeah there was some financial reward and that in the term of like gift cards and that sort of thing but those weren't really the motivators that we saw the students responding to. There was some response to financial incentive, but a lot of it was developing social connections, learning more about the university about how to organize how to advocate for yourself. A lot of work was put into social justice and making things fair and equitable for other students. A lot of it, you know, students want to feel like they've accomplished something that doesn't have a great attached to it. Some folks wanted some something to pad their CV or resume. You know those those incentives can also be something as simple as aren't my textbooks just cost too damn much and I need to eat this year, and you know that $40 textbook may not mean anything to somebody but to somebody else if you can make that choice and not pay $40 for a textbook that's a big incentive. So, you don't really have to go looking for that motivation you just need to support the motivation that's there and that's what test it did. Student participation or participants who did deliverables, they got incentives, but the weekly meetings gave us a chance to connect to other people. The meetings are an opportunity to develop new skills, work with different systems and do different things. The whole project, let us just get interested in social justice and work towards a common goal. And TASA taught us this institutional knowledge, you know, like that that secretary or administrative assistant that's in there that's been in the university for 45 years and has never taken a vacation. You know that person is the person that you want to talk to. And, and so that that information that stuff is that organizational knowledge is often better for everybody. It taught us how to talk to professors and organize and utilize group documents and work independently. And most importantly, and this is something that your students are begging for it taught us how to take care of ourselves. There were definitely low energy nights times where we were just feeling let down or overrun or worn out and it gave us an opportunity to like check in and have a self care night talk about self care and what that means and and exercise that so. Students come to the table with some of these skills. They don't necessarily come with all of these skills, but they absolutely can learn these skills from a program like this so. Thank you. When as I mentioned at the top we will be at this point transitioning into our Q&A. And I know that it can sometimes be a little bit difficult to kind of spin up those questions as quickly as you'd like so if you would permit me the opportunity to begin with the first question. So we design the program very strategically like if you look at it it's it's got a very by God's key scaffolding approach of like we do you help and then as we move into stage two, you do and then we help. Could you speak a little bit to what you perceive to be the real strengths of this program like the elements that were the most essential that if other folks were to replicate this in their setting, you would really encourage them to adopt. For me the real strength was having advocacy model to me so well through Dr. Howard and Professor Hutchings. They presented with a very genuine and warm in the area that had that human connection also gave us those hard core skills that students need to advocate themselves. So, having your, your instructors do that work both on paper but also in person demonstrating those people skills but for me. For me. Oh man there's so many different things gosh. I thought that that learning those advocacy skills really was the most important thing for students. A lot of students come to university with this different learning history that doesn't involve speaking up for yourself doesn't involve advocating for what you need. And doesn't involve the proper process of working through the right people and the right structures to get the results that they need and I think that the quote earlier with the student that was like able to and exam that they they felt was given unfairly and able to retest is a perfect example of that because that should be where the baseline for all students is they should be able to advocate for themselves, but they don't get that kind of reassurance and and education in those aspects of their life and I think that's probably the most useful thing to take forward well outside of this program and outside of any university setting. I think that's a wonderful way of looking at that because you, you're definitely seeing that many of the tasks as reported being really uncomfortable or unsure about how to approach their professors and in my new institution. We're seeing some of those barriers of students aren't making that connection and so what are those prerequisite skills for building confidence and having a student be able to speak to you. There's a lot of really wonderful questions now happening in the chat which is wonderful to see. This is an opportunity of folks had questions and wanted to unmute themselves in fact I lean your question was fantastic so I'd like to give that opportunity. If anyone wanted to unmute themselves and ask a question directly. Oh, my video isn't my video isn't working but I'll ask for each of you it seems like there was something that surprised you. And, and I was just curious what the most surprising thing is is I think Veronica you and I are both qualitative qualities of the stories of the things that make us I think that's what we're talking about no previous one. So, so tell me your stories tell me what what some of the most surprising things were. I'm a PhD student I've been going to school for a long time. I was surprised that open education resources and zero text because resources existed. I didn't know I've been going to school for a long time I didn't know that my professors potentially had the option resources that were low or no cost. This is a great awareness opening moment for me and now I feel more motivated to advocate for these resources because I know that they're possible, and I want to put some some gentle pressure where needed to make those resources. And, and I was surprised. So I served in a kind of a dual role for this because I was also helping to work on the AOE I grant. But I tell you what what probably surprised me more than anything is you would think the financial incentives would have been like the front and center thing for the students that were doing this. And do you know how hard it was to get the time sheets from people to even get them to like they were there working every single day that we had something there, they were doing the work. And it just seemed like they weren't interested in the financial incentive they wanted to be doing the work. And that was my impression. And to that, you know, like those things that connection the learning the ability to be there was much more important than any, you know, compensation that they may or may not have gotten. And, and that maybe speaks against the cynicism of, well if you pay them of course they're going to show up. No, if you, if you get people that are passionate about something, and you give them the tools to be to do something and some momentum doing it. They're going to keep the project going. That's beautifully stated. Well, and we have a wonderful question here in chat about, you know, the different kinds of resources so we've talked a lot about like open educational resources and those are the ones that have the copyright that's very specific that you've got all these things that you can do with that you can download it and edit it and redistribute it. Those are fantastic, but they are not the only resources that can help make education more affordable more achievable more accessible. Have you two in either of your courses experienced other kinds of resources maybe things that are not openly licensed but by virtue of their qualities make them a really good choice for supporting you. Sorry, could you rephrase the question really briefly. Absolutely so we are is not the BL end all right we love and we are we love that open license, but imagine that there are no we are, you know, behavior analysis. Are there any resources that have been used to help support you. Maybe they're not openly licensed but they were very helpful for you. Absolutely I've had many different forms of textbook resources over my education and, while I would always prefer that the resource be open or free to access. I will continue that sometimes if that is not an option I can still have a really meaningful course experience, but not free text. But it is my preference. And yeah, I mean, I've had a couple of different deliveries of textbooks and materials and open is my preference. As a grad student just that just started now I'm not super happy with the $500 textbook, you know purchase that I had to make the beginning of the semester which is very light, I know for some people but I would prefer it be $0. Sometimes you have to pay for certain materials because they're not replicated in other places, as long as people are doing their best to keep those prices down and and are cognizant of, you know, $40 is one pizza up here in Alaska sometimes depending on where you go. $26 for a median pizza at Domino's that's terrifying. So, you know, that's that's a couple of meals right there. So we work cognizant of that and we see it as students. Well then I do want to be respectful of time we do have another four minutes if there are any additional questions. I'm waiting for possible comments from our audience. Are there any parts of the program that you would recommend against or or any. If it's not our TASA program any professional development experiences or student skill development resources experiences that you would not recommend people use personally none are coming to mind right now I thought it was executed very well I think like with with the students what I would say probably well with with executing a program like this is you have to be very mindful of how you're going to other people and trying to advocate for for this. If you go to the wrong person and you're like, you need to, you know, have zero textbook cost materials and you're a bad person for not doing that and everything else I think you're just going to really deepen the the I would just say no I'm not doing that. There are so many barriers for educators to get this material developed or incorporated into their classes already. Especially when you're switching different learning management systems or doing other things or having to deal with the fact that your department has lost almost all of the administrative personnel that that you normally used to and you don't have money for TAs I'm not talking about any problems that University of Alaska has or anything, but but yeah it's a lot of work. And so if you if you go in there with a you must do this and you're a bad person if you don't and and kind of act like a bad cop. If you're not going to get the results that you want it's it's a flexible come in there and please help us and this is where we're coming from problem and and if you can make it human and relate. Maybe you'll get some change. I love that I love the idea of be human and relate because all of us have challenges right like the adoptions that we make are not driven by personal motivators like I'm going to make so much money if you use this resource often it really this is this is the best resource that I can give to you right now or this is the thing that's going to best support you right now. And that can be applied as well to like the faculty experience students can't perform their best because a variety of different circumstances and administration might seem really opaque and non responsive. And we don't know their circumstances, so the more human that we can be and the more we can connect and try to lift each other up. I think the better off we all will be. Well thank you so much for joining us today and thank you to Emily and Jeffrey for sharing their knowledge their wisdom their experience and being campus leaders. And as Michelle has mentioned we are at the end of our time together, but we will stick around in case anyone has any questions or material that they want to share. We have been so privileged to join together with you today and we hope that you enjoy the rest of the conference. Yes we will leave the room open for a little bit if you'd like to stay if you have any additional questions otherwise the sessions over.