 Hello everyone and welcome to this four o'clock question of OER 22. I'm delighted to be joined by Clint Lalonde and Amanda Coolidge, who are joining us from BC campus very early in the morning for them. So thank you for joining us at this time. And Clint and Amanda are here to talk to us about how it started, how it's going, celebrating 10 years of open textbooks in British Columbia. So I'll hand over to you Clint and please enjoy the rest of the session. Thank you Caroline. Hi everyone and thank you so much for spending some time with us here on what is a beautiful day here in Victoria British Columbia. Nice early morning. Well it's not super early but it's eight o'clock in the morning here. I'm really happy to have you along for this session. My name is Clint Lalonde. I'm a project manager for open education with an organization called BC campus and we'll tell you a little bit about that in just a moment. I'm also an associate faculty member with the School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University and today we want to have a little bit of a celebration to talk about a project that we have worked on for the last 10 years now which is our open textbook collection here in the province of British Columbia. We want to tell you a little bit about how it started, how it's going and some of the lessons that we have learned over the past 10 years. And I'm being joined today by my colleague Amanda Coolidge. Hi everyone. I have really nice to be here this morning or your afternoon. My name is Amanda Coolidge. I am the director of open education at BC campus. So what you're seeing on the screen here is just a little bit of a visual representation of our journey from the for the past 10 years represented in the the websites that we have had for the collection starting in 2012 and a couple of various iterations as we go along here and a new collection which we have just launched and and we'll be launching formally in June for our open textbook collection. So we wanted to kind of visually represent that in this this opening slide here. Great thanks. So one of the things Clinton I would like to do is start by acknowledging and recognizing that we are currently on the Slewa Tooth Squamish with Sonic and Esquimalt Songhees Nations of the Lagunquan peoples. These peoples have walked gently on the unceded territories where we are grateful to live, work and play and we're committed to building relationships with the first peoples here based in honor and respect and we thank them for their hospitality. So I thought we'd start off with a little bit about BC campus. So BC campus we are innovators, implementers, leaders and learners and our primary focus is to support the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia as they adopt, adapt and evolve their teaching and learning practices to create a better experience for students. We achieve this through a supportive approach to advanced pedagogies, a focus on impactful practice and a collaboration with partners in British Columbia and around the world. Our mandate is to provide teaching and learning educational technology and open education support to the post-secondary institutions and we're funded primarily through our ministry of advanced education skills training. We provide collaborative leadership that brings innovative resources and effective expertise together to create awareness, understanding and adoption of available curricular resources. So ultimately our goal is to improve student learning. Okay so we thought we'd take you on a little bit of a journey here and tell you a little bit about our our collection and and how our project actually started because we've been doing this now for 10 years hosting a fairly large open textbook repository that is focused on for educators in British Columbia and we thought we'd take you a little bit about how it started. So and I want to go back to 2012 here and what the situation was like here in Canada and in North America especially where we were seeing issues where where students were were not purchasing their textbook because of cost and this was some of the research that was done early on by the student public interest research group that showed 65% of students had not purchased a textbook for a course because because of the cost of textbooks. So the costs were becoming a barrier for students and it's not just a you know an economic you know of course that's an economic issue as well but there were also pedagogical implications to high textbook costs in 2012 and this actually still continues today where we're seeing students that do not purchase the textbook because of cost. Students take fewer courses because of the cost. They opt to go without textbooks because of the the high costs of textbooks. So this was the issue that we were trying to deal with in 2012 when we started our open textbook collection and it started with some funding that was announced at the open education conference in 2012 in Vancouver British Columbia when our Minister of Advanced Education at the time John Yapp announced that you would provide some funding to BC campus to create a repository of 40 open textbooks that that aligned with the highest enrolled first and second year subject areas in British Columbia post-secondary institutions. So we got to work on that in 2012 and the first thing that we decided to do we we have a long history in open education so we know that there are tons of great resources that were already out there so we didn't want to just start creating textbooks. We wanted to be sure to go out and find out what was out there. There were other projects at the time like open stacks, the open textbook library at the University of Minnesota, lots of projects out there that were creating open textbooks. So the first thing that we did is we we found out what the top 40 subject areas were based in enrollment here in British Columbia and we went out and we kind of surveyed what was already out there to try to to find resources to put in our repository. So that was sort of the the first step and then what we did is when we found gaps for things that were maybe a little bit more specialized we we decided to fund some some creations so we released some grant funding brought some some subject matter experts on and and created some sorry I can't stop those notifications for some reason. We can't see them Clint. Oh okay good so we we funded some new creations when needed when we needed to create some some textbooks and we ended up with a collection that had 40 textbooks fairly quickly for the first year of the project something we also did we recognize that instructors wanted to we wanted to allay some of the issues around quality of textbooks which was a big issue in 2012-2013 when the project first began and you know are these good quality resources so we instituted a a peer review system for the textbooks in our collection which continues to this day and has become a huge factor in in in educators deciding to adopt these resources and we didn't do sort of crowdsourced reviews we actually we worked with instructors who were local here in British Columbia at the institutions and we have 25 public post-secondary institutions that we work with here in British Columbia and we worked with educators in discipline areas within our local institutions to do the reviews of the textbooks in the collection so that you know it's a fairly small community here in British Columbia when educators came to when educators came to to see the the textbooks they would see reviews from educators that they knew and have probably worked with in the past so that was an important consideration for us so our first year we actually felt like we had some pretty good success you know we spent 2012 and the early part of 2013 getting this up to date and getting it up and running and and you know we saw some adoptions in that first year and we had realized about $60,000 in student savings by the end of that first year. Fast forward to how it's going in 2022 we now have a collection of close to 400 open textbooks and as well as a variety of publishing guides and other content within our our collection we have been tracking savings all along for the 10 years we've just passed the $30 million mark in student savings on textbooks which is a significant number and still kind of blows me away that you know we have managed to do this with open educational resources and open textbooks to make that kind of a massive impact on student savings. We've got close to 6,000 adoptions of the open textbooks in the province which you know in 2012 if somebody would have said you know we would have 6,000 adoptions throughout the province I don't know if I would have you know it's what we'd hope for but I don't know if we actually thought that we could could achieve it so very happy to see these kind of results in in in 10 years and we have funded about 200 different projects some of these are open textbook creation projects but we've also done things like adaptations of existing resources in there and we've funded projects like a recent project that I worked on which is the H5P and open homework systems project which is to build out the textbooks that we have and add some additional functionality in into the textbooks in terms of student self-assessments and and kind of more interactive elements so so certainly you know from that original project of creating the repository of of 40 uh 40 textbooks we now have have done a ton of other projects and the collection has grown and grown and grown well I'll hand this over to Amanda now she can start some of the lessons we have learned awesome thanks Clint um so lessons learned so we're gonna talk a little bit about I think we have five uh different lessons learned that we have um we thought we would highlight for all of you at we are 2022 so the first one is um can you go to the next slide uh community building so one of the things we learned right away is that a community of open education advocates makes a huge difference so we started off by going to libraries um going to teaching and learning centers and really engaging the support uh systems at the institutions we also engaged in a content creation sprint where we brought together faculty for uh the creation of a geography a regionalized geography open textbooks and communities are really at the heart of what we do and Clint wrote a blog post a couple of years ago which I love to reference um because he said ultimately for a project to succeed and be sustainable it has to be about developing a community and so one of the things I'll just be a little bit more specific about in particular is librarians so at the start of the project in 2012 we gathered librarians together to create the very first open education librarians community in British Columbia and the bc open education librarians they're a supportive community um to help learn about open education practices and they build support for librarians and faculty in advocating for the use of oer in their home institutions by sharing knowledge and practices that can impact um higher education and the librarians who uh make up this community have worked together to create lib guides across the institutions shared best practices presented at multiple conferences and um most importantly they've worked together to ensure that access to educational resources is unencumbered by ownership and cost next slide another area that we wanted to focus on as a lesson learned is the importance of research and the importance of efficacy and tracking metrics so in um we've been very focused on building a research community in British Columbia in particular because we noticed that a lot of the open education research was very us centric and in order to really make an impact across uh faculty as well as administration and institutions we wanted to be able to gather our own metrics so in 2014 we started what is called the faculty fellows program and that brings instructors together to engage in research that determines the efficacy of open textbook use in bc institutions this is really a branch out not just for the efficacy of open textbook but really looking at open education pedagogical practice and the fellows also provide mentorship to faculty who are new to open resources they do presentations and consultation and also conduct outreach um outreach work and we've been fortunate to partner also with the oer research hub um out of the uk and we have all of these other partnerships as well that have really helped us with this further research next slide clint i think this one's for you yeah this is a little bit about paying attention to the technology and and you know when we started the the project we wanted to being that we were at open education project we wanted to kind of sort of walk the walk and and and use open source technologies as much as possible uh because we felt it was just a you know part of the ethos of working in open education and so when we started we we did some research and looked around for different publishing platforms because we knew at some point we would have to do some of our own publishing and we we stumbled upon press books and did some early work in going back to 2012-2013 when press books was just a bit of a a startup not quite the the you know the force that they are today which i'm so happy to see that it has become a publishing platform that is being used quite extensively and widely and much credit to huma guire and press books for for starting off open source and realizing that there was a niche there that needed to be filled in open textbook publishing so and so we really wanted to to focus and and have a an emphasis on on using open technologies but one of the lessons we learned about open technologies and anybody who's worked with open source technologies would know is that not only do do you you know benefit from from getting access to open source software but there is a commitment that you you need to make in order to give something back to that open source community and so one of the ways that we gave back to press books even though we weren't financially using them because it was an open source plugin at the time is we gave back developer time so we had a developer named Brad Payne and we continue to do this we submit code back to press books for use cases that that work for both press books and bc campus so if you are going to do an open textbook project in the future and you or any project and you do use open source software consider the ways in which you can give back to the open source software that you are using because you are driving benefit from that software so whether it's a financial contribution back to support them to inform of a donation or a fund or if you can develop provide back some developer resources to that open source project it is important to give back and not just use the open source software so another area that we also would say is a lesson learned is the importance of involving students in the advocacy of open resources one of the things we realized early on is that the advocacy work that was happening was really missing that integral piece of the audience member and the audience being the student and so we started working with student unions across the province to talk to them about the why of open resources and the how one of the things that we articulated to the students is especially those students who were in the leadership team of student unions is that you can have you may not be able to impact tuition rates and you may not be able to impact housing costs which are the two biggest cost costs for students here in British Columbia but you can have an impact on the course materials and so together with the BC Federation of Students which is a larger organization body that works with all of the student unions across the province we started helping them out with campaigns so things like you know this one I just spent censored on textbooks and just sort of being able to help them and and learn more about outreach and how to start having the conversation with faculty so that it's not something where they're being turned away from opening adopting uh or sorry using open uh resources but something that they want to engage in to to really work with their um work alongside the students next slide so finally another area that we wanted to highlight um that we actually didn't think um we would be doing is actually policy so one of the lessons learned is the importance of really working with institutions on policy creation so one of the things uh that we started to do in particular was reaching out to some of the open education advocates at their institutions to find out how one would be able to um put open education policy within a strategic plan in an e-learning plan in some sort of administrative level way of doing that and there's a couple things that we did one of the things that I always recommend to people when they're looking at um possibly putting an open education policy into their institutions is to take a look at your institution's mission or mandate there's often a lot of wording involved in the mission vision or mandate of a university or institution that says words like access or affordability or inclusion or equity um and all of these words really culminate what is open education so that's really important and another thing was also to start looking at ways in which um policy can influence tenure and promotion so one of the number one reasons that uh faculty were not adopting open education resources is because they said it didn't affect their tenure and promotion and so actually alongside with the students at the University of British Columbia um they were able to implement a or put in policy the the acceptance of open educational resources development and creation um as part of the tenure and promotion package which is actually one of the first tenure and promotion policies in North America that uh highlights open resources so the so it's really important I think at the end of the day to really think about what is the holistic view of open education so we've talked about community research open education technology students and policy and so at the end of the day the major lesson learned is you in order to really advance open resources at your institution it's not going to be a one stream um endeavor it's something that's going to take the entire ecosystem of your institution and there we go some lessons learned and uh a little bit of uh a celebration for for making it to this 10-year milestone for the open textbook collection here in British Columbia um open to any questions that you might have and I know there's a bit of a delay in getting the questions back to us from uh from from the YouTube channel but oh hi Caroline any questions rolling in uh not so far just praise uh praise some Catherine saying yay for policy um hi definitely agree with that um it's it's been fantastic to hear about what you've managed to achieve in 10 years um so many big changes and not just you know in the textbooks themselves but changing that policy in the institutions um so thank you for for sharing that um boss got a comment from Martin um he said that was really comprehensive and so thanks for that um if anyone does have any questions pop them in the chat um I follow up from Catherine uh about your wonderful lessons learned so I think lots of praise coming in for for the work that you've done uh so I've got two questions now they're all flooding in first one from Martin you set out a lot of lessons but in order to get started what would you say is the most important first step clean um you know there were a lot of important first steps and you know Mary Burgess who's our executive director at BC campus was there right from the from the very start um who could probably speak to some important first steps but I know one of the first important steps that I was involved in was was was trying to be focused um that really did help us having the constraints um for for putting the collection together of 40 textbooks and 40 subject areas uh and you know that really helped but then also reaching out to tap into people who had already done this one of the first events that we had um probably three or four months after the announcement was made from the ministry here is we had our first open textbooks summit and we brought together in a room in Vancouver uh a bunch of people who who had worked on open education and who are working on open textbook initiatives uh and we just did a big brainstorming and the original intent for that was really about sharing it was kind of like you bring lists of the resources that you have we'll bring lists of the resources that we have let's see how we can share and collaborate and I think that was that was a really early lesson making those connections and those relationships early on with people who are already doing same kind of work and similar work which you know in in 2022 doesn't sound all that radical but you know in 2012 uh you know the open education conferences were we're still quite small and insular didn't have like a thousand people like they do now so we actually had a bunch of people that sat in a table in a room I think there was about 20 or 25 of us representing you know some of the major open education projects that were happening in North America at that time and so we started collaborating early on and connecting with people early on and I think that was a really important piece into the success of the project. We have a question from Catherine. What is in store for the next 10 years? That's a great question. I don't know about the next 10 years but I can tell you that in the next year we will be we are officially launching a new collection. This will be based on open course collections so the opportunity to not just share out open textbooks but also to share out course materials from lesson plans to power points to instructor guides, H5P, all of the resources needed for one to either mirror a course or perhaps take a look at something that we would say is an exemplary. We've really worked hard to include equity diversity and inclusion within the development of these courses, indigenization and decolonization and looking at alternative forms of assessment so we're really looking forward to that. I think on our twitter page you can actually see like a teaser video which is super fun about that. In the future for the next 10 years you know I really think one of the things we've actually seen within the first 10 years that I think well I hope will continue to happen is that open education practice has really been infused throughout our organization to the point where every single department at our institution is implementing open practice and so what I'm hoping is that that will then sort of filter out to as examples for other organizations and or our ministry to also continually improve practice so that we see more open work. Great thank you for that we've got one time for one more question one from Jenny Heyman. Likely you have achieved good support and buy in from early adopters what are strategies for encouraging the majority especially college faculty for 10 years not on the table? Yeah you know one thing that I think has worked for us in that regard is and first I should say that I don't think there's any education strategy that is ever going to be adopted by a majority of educators or you know education is pretty specialized in niche but that being said I think one of the things that we have done has been able to leverage a lot of those early adopters and have them become advocates and being able to sort of seed advocates at the institutions who are early adopters and really having those peer developing those peer to peer connections educator to educator discipline to discipline having people within those departments and within those disciplines speak to why they adopted open educational resources and open textbooks and why they are involved and invested in the open education community and you know slowly it builds and slowly it builds and and I think that has been you know one of the the keys to to kind of breaking through and and you know taking a long-term approach for it too I mean you know the open textbook project has been running for 10 years in British Columbia but you know open education in British Columbia helped happen way before that a whole bunch of of early people who have you know since the open courseware initiative was announced at MIT I think that kind of spurred things on so we've had people involved in open education for for 20 years now and certainly having that long view has helped as well. Okay so I'll just finish with this comment saying Amanda that sounds wonderful your lessons learned show how adaptable you've been responding to the evolving needs of students educators and society. Well Catherine you're just the sweetest ever um yeah Catherine and Martin nice to see your questions and comments and Jenny too it's nice to feel the support from our crew. So I'll just finish by saying thank you so much Clint and Amanda for that really interesting presentation it's been really great to hear about all the good work that you're doing and so thank you for sharing that with us and look forward to seeing you and hear more about it in the future. Thank you we'll see you at oh we are 32. Oh we are 32 next 10 years thank you everyone. Okay bye.