 Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information. And I'm here with you today to chat about the what we heard at our recent executive roundtables that were part of our spring 2020 virtual meeting around new models for acquiring teaching and learning materials. And I'll say a little bit about the sessions broadly. I want to note a couple of things before I go any farther though. First off, we have published the report on this and I'm going to spend probably about 30-35 minutes going through what I consider to be the highlights of that report and some of the more significant takeaways. But I'm not going to make any attempt to summarize it comprehensively. I also have decided not to go with PowerPoints for this because I find them very awkward and you do have the printed report, the formal report to refer to. So I also want to just note that while we are recording my presentation, we will turn off the recording at the conclusion of my presentation so that we can have a somewhat more open conversation without worrying about it necessarily being recorded. I direct your attention to the chat on the side of your screen and Diane Goldenberg Hart is putting out a couple of URLs that might be useful for you and feel free to make comments or pose questions as we go along. There's also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen and you can also use that to enter questions as they occur to you. I'll deal with all the questions after I finish going through the report and I also am able to unmute people when we get to Q&A who want to just indicate that they want to ask a question verbally by raising their hands. So with that, let me get on to the heart of the matter. So we have been doing executive roundtables for many years as part of our CNI spring and fall member meetings and I'm sure many of the people represented here have participated in them. Typically what we do is we bring together somewhere between say 12 and 20 interested institutions to discuss a topic of interest. The participants from the institution vary a little bit depending on topic so often it's the head of the library and the CIO. Sometimes rather than the CIO it might be a head of instructional technology as was relevant here. In other cases it might be something like a director of the university press or a scholarly publishing or communication. It varies a good deal from session to session. Now this particular topic there was quite a bit of interest in so we had scheduled two convenings of each one of about 15 institutions. That was all done before we decided to take this meeting virtual as part of the COVID-19 crisis. The topic had been identified as one of the importance in that it came up frequently in conversations that were part of a refreshing the collaboration effort that we did last program year to try and better understand emerging priorities among our member institutions. The original idea was that we were going to look at how content was being acquired. In particular we were going to take a close look at the so-called inclusive access programs that some institutions were employing and how they interacted with complemented or competed with open educational resource-based programs. We have had looked in some depth at OERs in the past but that was a few years ago and we also wanted to get a better understanding of how OERs were playing out as they became more mature. With the transition to the virtual meeting and you should note that we held these sessions, the executive roundtable sessions virtually on March 30th and March 31st of 2020. This was within a matter of weeks after many institutions, most institutions who were represented, transitioned rather abruptly to entirely remote instruction. So we expanded the scope of the conversation to also explicitly reflect on what they learned through that process, where the particular challenges were, and also to reflect on how that may change the landscape going forward as we look at practices for acquiring instructional materials. So that was the backdrop and the kind of timeline against which this set of conversations took place. So let me move on to some of the key takeaways. So one of the things that really has driven the emphasis on new models and new strategies for acquiring instructional materials has been a set of high level institutional commitments to affordability and student success and these are closely related certainly having affordable access to instructional materials and being sure all students have that access in a timely way is an important factor in student success and it's also important for affordability in higher education. So this was something that was strategically consistent with top level, you know, presidential board of trustees or regental level strategic initiatives at our institutions. The other thing that was significant here is that unlike a number of other initiatives which are really hard to demonstrate and to measure like, you know, what's the library information literacy programs contributions to student success? I mean that is a tough thing to measure and to track year over year other than anecdotally. On the other hand it's pretty easy to quantify savings to students to say over the last two years we saved our students $400,000 or $2 million. That's significant, it's clear, it's easy to communicate, it's easy to measure progress and that makes it a very attractive area to try and make some tangible progress quickly. Let me make a few comments about open educational resources and where we are now and I guess one of the things I want to say here is that I felt there was a certain sense of reality setting in. OERs are a wonderful kind of an aspirational idea. The world would be a good place in many ways if everything was open educational resources for many, many reasons that the OER advocates have done a fabulous job of addressing. These are a very comfortable fit with the kind of values that drive open scholarship and that are very core to library goals and values of widespread broad information, access, sharing, reuse. At the same time there are a lot of very pragmatic reasons why OERs are not necessarily going to on kind of a random, well let's make a coalition of the willing and try and persuade professors that OER is a good thing. That kind of a strategy is going to take decades to make a difference other than around the margin in terms of affordability. Now having said that I want to note a couple of other things. A well targeted OER program that looks at courses with a lot of students and expensive textbooks and figures out how to substitute an OER resource or a set of OER resources for that textbook can be a really big win. It also can be a big pedagogical win if it's a better fit for what the faculty wants to achieve. So that's really important and we heard from a number of institutions who were trying to do that strategically where it made sense. Now I also want to note that in the early days of OER there seemed to be a lot of interest in how do we get our faculty to author OER resources. People have figured out that not every faculty member is a textbook author, not every faculty member wants to be a textbook author and actually it's probably kind of silly to have every faculty member authoring their own introductory textbook in whatever large introductory class they teach from time to time. So now there is a much greater focus on coming up with funds and motivations to help faculty to adopt rather than author OERs. That's a very different kind of commitment but it is still a genuine time commitment. Changing the instructional materials you use and of course you teach repeatedly semester after semester is a significant cost and a significant barrier to change an adoption. And institutions have gotten much smarter about recognizing and supporting that I think in a strategic and systematic way and also recognizing that the scale of investment to underwrite that as opposed to creating a large-scale OER resource is very very different. I also want to note and we didn't talk about this a whole lot but it's an easy mistake to make. There is a vast outpouring of things on the internet that are basically faculty OERs in the form of lecture notes, teaching materials that are more adapted typically to you know upper division undergraduate or graduate courses. Often they don't really replicate easily directly other learning materials that are available but rather start bridging from the research literature into learning materials. These are often distributed as OERs and these have a huge impact in the flow of knowledge and the building of scholarly reputation and indeed the teaching of students but they don't seem to be making a vast difference in the affordability in student success equations. The last thing, two points I want to make about OERs is that when you couple the move towards OER with the move towards rethinking how classroom time is used and this is in the days before COVID where people were experimenting with flipped courses where they pre-record their lectures and then use class time for discussion and projects and conversation. Faculty were already starting to ask the question do we really need a textbook or is really the right thing to do to use those recorded video lectures in conjunction with some lecture note material or a increased portfolio of E-reserves. The growth of teaching and learning materials being delivered under the guise of E-reserves and the willingness of libraries to use library funds to acquire and license those E-reserves is really significant and an important development that has not been sufficiently recognized. Indeed it was very interesting to me to hear a number of institutions when they were speaking of OER saying the way we define OER at our institution is not really the traditional definition of OER as you know works that are being distributed under a Creative Commons license but is taken to include material that is freely available to our university community under licenses negotiated and paid for by the institution's research library. That's a really major difference. It's a major expansion of how people are thinking about teaching and learning material. That's significant and I think it points the way towards a number of developments that I'll have more to say about later. So those are a few observations on OER and we can talk more about those in the discussion. I want to switch over to so-called inclusive action programs and these are programs where fundamentally rather than a faculty member saying we're going to use Textbook X and you can either buy the textbook or you can in part copy or you can license it as a e-textbook or you know you can rent it and leaving the students to essentially fend for themselves and in the case where they use the e-textbook have to use it on whatever platform the publisher of the textbook is offering it on and in addition have to basically be locked into the often horrendous shrink-wrapped terms that come with the license for that material. Instead of doing that basically the institution tries to negotiate a license for a certain number of copies of the digital textbook and negotiates a discounted price and then passes that price on to the students as essentially a lab fee if you will that goes or a materials fee that goes with the course. Now the whole point here is that the publisher makes more sales or is guaranteed more sales because they know everybody in the course gets it. The students get a discount but the faculty and the students also know that every student registering for the course has access to the text as of day one. There are also sometimes some advantages in terms of financial aid related issues for the ability to package that as a lab fee rather than as you know additional costs of one's education. So that's how these started and there are a lot of nuances here and I just want to hit some of the key nuances that came up. Before going there though I want to say that this may be where they started but it's not clear it's where they're stopping. We are seeing a number of the major textbook publishers now offer deals where essentially for a couple hundred dollars per student they get access to the publisher's entire portfolio of textbooks for the semester. Now the plus side there is that if almost all the textbooks that that student needs are being drawn from that publisher's portfolio of textbooks it's probably a good financial deal. On the other hand it kind of encourages lock in and isn't necessarily such a great deal if textbooks are spread across publishers but it's an important development to watch and one that we weren't able to really gauge very effectively was taking hold. It's interesting to note a couple of things about inclusive access and I'm really not crazy about the name about the phrase inclusive access but nobody seemed to have a hugely better one. One is that there was pretty uniform agreement that an inclusive access program widely implemented is the way to get high payoff financial wins large ones relatively quickly. That seemed to be a fairly widespread observation. It was very very tough to get a sense though of how widespread the adoption of this kind of inclusive access is within institutions or across institutions and that's something that it would be very useful to have better insight on. I would note that that there are a number of very important issues implicated in the specifics of the contract that institutions negotiate with the publishers on behalf of students when they're batching up this kind of acquisition ranging from questions about student privacy and data collection all the way through institutional access to various kinds of data that can help them understand the effectiveness of the textbook and how that relates to the effectiveness of the educational experiences that they're delivering. It is not at all clear at this point how effectively those negotiations are being done or by who. It was noted on by a number of institutions that libraries have built up quite a lot of expertise in this area around the last 20 years but they were seldom the organization that was leading the inclusive access conversations on campus and in fact sometimes had difficulty getting the right seat at the table to bring their expertise to bear. It is interesting to reflect that to the extent that instructional materials start finding their way into e-reserves and being subsidized by library collections budgets that gets them an automatic place at the table in those conversations in a very significant way. There was a very important issue that we were not able to resolve but where we found institutions on different sides of the argument. There were some institutions that felt very strongly that the institution should mount a platform for e-textbooks for learning materials that was well integrated with its learning management system and other systems around the campus as appropriate and that importing textbooks from publishers into that environment gave the students a higher quality more uniform experience it ensured that the institution rather than the publisher had control over data collection and redistribution if there was any redistribution and over student privacy and that overall this was really the best way to go. It also in the view of many institutions who were doing it put them in a much better position to deal with issues around accessibility of texts and doing what they needed to do in that area. Other institutions were quite content to leave it in the hands of the various publishers and felt that having the publishers compete to provide the best digital affordances and accessibility on different textbook platforms should be good ultimately for the students. I'm a little skeptical of that because I'm not real convinced that faculty always spend the time to get a good understanding of the publishers digital platform and its affordances its navigability the depth of its accessibility accommodations and things of that nature when making textbook adoption decisions they may have actually selected this textbook years ago back when it was primarily being acquired in print and now they're just looking at the digital as kind of a print substitute and don't necessarily have a very visceral grasp on the realities of that environment. Anyway there were views on both sides of that and I think making a decision there and understanding why you're making a decision is an important strategic choice that institutions that want to pursue um inclusive access at scale need to take. I will note two other things about um in the inclusive access discussion there was a discussion about opting out of inclusive access at some institutions they're legally required to offer opt-outs. At other institutions it was viewed as very desirable because students might choose even if it cost them more to buy the printed text so that they could keep it because they were more comfortable working with printed texts. There was some very interesting conversation that we didn't get into in depth about students wanting to acquire personal libraries in the area of their major and the disconnects between licensing including many inclusive access arrangements and their ability to do that. Another thing we probed briefly was the emergence of adaptive learning platforms and we noted that publishers are spending a lot of resource on adaptive learning platforms right now. This didn't even seem to be on the radar screen at most of the institutions that were represented in these conversations. They weren't even really tracking it much less thinking about an institutional strategy for it and they had very little or no understanding of the extent to which it was on faculty radar screens or whether there was any genuine level of faculty adoption of these kinds of platforms. Now this is important because this is sort of like the discussion about an institutional common platform for instructional materials as opposed to leaving it on the publisher platform but with infinitely higher levels of vendor lock-in data collection and related questions. So those are a few of the key observations and questions that we took away from the inclusive access discussions. Now let's talk about the transition, the abrupt transition to remote access and I just want to make a few comments here. One is that to really understand the range of responses you had to understand how the switch to remote access was reflected against institutional calendars. For many institutions on the quarter system it was basically sort of limp through till the end of the quarter, maybe there's only a week or so left, extend spring break a little bit and then we have a little breather to start courses for the spring quarter remotely. There are other institutions that were on the semester system who literally in an unforeseen mid-course transition had to say we need to go from in-person teaching, physical reserves being held at the library, teaching and learning materials that they could bring into class where appropriate to entirely virtual instruction. These were somewhat different challenges because there was at least some opportunity to acquire e-reserves or to digitize reserves into e-reserves for those courses where there was some opportunity for notice much less so for the ones that needed to do mid-course correction. I would say that institutions really rose to the occasion around instructional materials and libraries in particular. They moved very aggressively to use collections budgets to get reserve and instructional material as necessary to support faculty and I would say that that sort of dividing line between e-reserves and we don't generally collect textbooks as part of our library collections got ever vaguer as this crisis hit. It was already getting pretty vague before and it's now clear that it's a really a really porous line. How do you trust was really important but it was important mostly for students who needed to do research papers and things of that nature as opposed to for direct instructional materials as far as we can tell. It was a little harder to assess the impact of the internet archives emergency digital library program. We heard a bit less about that. I do want to note that Hottie Trust and their emergency access program was really critical not just to instructional continuity though but also to research continuity and we have a separate report on that and did a session on that last week. Those are just a few options there. There was a lot of interesting anecdote and it would be more fascinating although perhaps impossible to ever get systematic hard data here. For instance it seemed to be that at most institutions about two-thirds of the material that faculty wanted to put on reserve was readily acquirable in electronic form licensable. That's pretty interesting right there and it would be useful to understand what the things were that weren't in a little more depth. Libraries were fairly aggressive in invoking fair use to digitize things that weren't licensable readily in electronic form for e-reserves purposes where necessary. Some libraries were really worried that they were going to be inundated by both instruction related and also research support related requests to digitize materials. At most of our libraries that participated they were actually reporting that the level of those requests was quite low surprisingly low. There were occasional requests for some bits of special collections material but overall faculty were willing to work with what they could get in digital form and that was a really interesting and important outcome. It'd be really interesting to understand how that shifts going forward. Faculty were forced in this transition to move to digital instructional materials and it will be very interesting to understand going into the fall and farther how that recalibrates faculty's willingness to move away from traditional textbooks. One really important point which came up in both the conversations about OER and inclusive access is that learning materials and particularly organized textbooks now aren't just textbooks. They're actually whole collections of things that include a cartridge for your learning management system. They include questions banks, instruction guides, answers to exercises, a huge mass of material. If you're an instructor in a hurry, if you're an instructor trying to make a very rapid transition to the digital environment, if you are an adjunct trying to pick up a section of an undergraduate introductory course, it's almost impossible to compete with this very attractive pre-packaged collection of instructional materials that let you deliver your course. That is a great weakness of open educational resources and their large-scale adoption at many institutions, particularly those that rely on hurried graduate students and adjuncts to teach the majority of the introductory courses. The last point I want to mention before opening it up for Q&A, and I've already talked a little longer than I really intended to, is that our conversations in these roundtables and indeed our conversations about both OERs and about inclusive access are all very textually focused. It's about text, whether it's text in print or whether it's text in electronic form. There is a growing amount of instruction that relies on audio and particularly video materials. Some of this is shown in class and some of it is assigned as homework in much the same way readings or e-reserves would be assigned as homeworks and then subsequently discussed. The folks who relied on this kind of material often faced horrendous challenges in having to move to remote instruction very rapidly. These were challenges at many, many levels, all the way from to the students necessarily have the bandwidth and the platforms to receive these kinds of materials, all the way through questions about licensing, public performance, could things that they used to be able to show in class be made available digitally. There were a whole array of challenges specialized and specific to this class of material that really I think have been under recognized by people who don't work with it and just sort of underestimated overall because institutions I don't think are sufficiently sensitive to how extensively the visual materials are penetrating into instruction and I think a really close look at these kind of issues is well merited at this point to take away lessons. So those are a few of the things that really stood out to me in these conversations and with that I would really welcome questions and comments from those of you who've joined us today.