 Hello and welcome. My name's Ellie Swaboda. I'm Dr. Teresa Connolly and we are both from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and we're going to be presenting on collecting nursing OER on a health sciences campus. So the core of what we'll be covering for the next 10 minutes is to share the challenges of finding and sharing OER on a health sciences campus and also to share the process of creating a centralized site for OER on a particular topic. The topic that we're going to be focusing on is nursing. However, we think that the process that we're going to be sharing could be replicated for any topic whatever is relevant for your campus. Also when it comes to the centralized site, we used Merlot. So we're going to share some reflections that we have on using Merlot to build a site. So a little bit of background of open educational resources on the Anschutz Medical Campus. We've had an initiative going since 2019. So for the past two years, the University of Colorado system has received a state grant from the state of Colorado to promote open educational resources. And right off the bat, there was a lot of enthusiasm amongst faculty to learn about and adopt OER in their classes and throughout our campus. However, we quickly realized that there is a dearth of health sciences and specifically nursing OER. So there's just not a lot out there. And then what is out there is either focused towards undergraduate education or is perhaps old or is perhaps just not quite the right format that people need. Additionally, we learned that searching for OER, if you are not a librarian or someone who does searching all the time, can be a frustrating experience. So there are so many different sites to search. You could search something like Merlot or you could search something like LibreTexts or OER Commons. And so the need to bounce around from site to site can be a frustrating experience for faculty. Additionally, we've learned that some of these sites aren't necessarily intuitive. So with something like Merlot, if you were to just do a search for nursing, you would receive about 1700 results. However, only 207 of those have Creative Commons licenses. So if a faculty member doesn't know that they have to scroll down on the left to get to the bottom of other filters and activate the Creative Commons filters, they'll be sifting through about 1500 fully copyrighted materials, which can be a frustrating experience. So to rectify that. So looking at nursing OER with the mini grant that I was provided from the state funding, I was able to create a website called Teaching Future Nurses. And this was created through the Merlot website. This was supposed to be to help faculty, specifically nurse educators, have a place to be able to both submit OER within nursing and then also to be able to use it for the classroom. These are supposed to be learning activities that nurse educators could use. It could be for undergraduate or graduate nursing, and then also specific to various courses. Within Teaching Future Nurses, just sort of started off by trying to collect some learning activities that many of the faculty at the college were already doing. So this could be something that was really short activity from like two minutes long to something that could take an entire class period. The point was to not have faculty necessarily have to create something new, but just to submit something that they already were using in the classroom. And then these materials would be organized by discipline, so undergraduate or graduate, and then further delineated into the type of class that it could be, whether it be pathophysiology or a nurse practitioner program or informatics. The other thing because Merlot is open to a much wider community than just the College of Nursing at CU was that on the site itself, there's ability for people to submit their activities. So if any nurse educator went to the site and thought, hey, I have something that I could submit, they could quickly put in those materials as well. And then I also had a mechanism for feedback in hopes that people who were visiting the site might be able to say, hey, I was looking for this type of material. I was really hoping you guys had it, but you didn't, to try and make the site a little bit more geared to what nurse educators were looking for. Looking at the reflections on Merlot itself, there are some really great things about it. They have these like pre-populated templates that you're able to use. And these templates are pretty rudimentary, but that's like a good and a bad thing. So they're not super complex, but they're able to do some of the basics. You can always put videos or word documents and other things, pictures. But if you're looking for a really complex website, you're certainly not going to get it through these templates. The one thing that's kind of unique to Merlot is that they also have a review process just for this site. And so as an administrator, I didn't necessarily see these reviews or know what they were like. And so it was hard for me to know what I was supposed to do with that review for myself on how to make the site a little bit better or where some of that feedback could be. You can also add Google Analytics into your site, which I ended up using. And something that I learned from Google Analytics, besides being tricky, I'm trying to figure out how to use, is that the traffic to the site that I created was pretty low. So when you look at this, this is what the Google Analytics sort of look like. And the site has been open since June of this year. And we've only had 19 new users. And let's also just note that Ellie and I are part of those 19 new users. And so it really isn't getting a lot of traffic, which means that it's not getting to the wider audience that it really needs to. So after creating something like the Teaching Future Nurses site and other projects and in the course of just sharing and promoting OER on our campus, we've encountered a lot of different reactions to OER and we've noticed some trends. So when it comes to sharing the Teaching Future Nurses site, Dr. Connolly has shared it with in several different faculty meetings in the College of Nursing. And in each of those meetings, she has encountered positive reactions. People have vocalized enthusiasm for the idea of a centralized nursing OER site. However, there's been very little follow through. People will say, oh, I have something I think I could add, but then there's not necessarily the action afterwards. Additionally, we've encountered that there are some widespread fears and misconceptions about copyright amongst faculty from all schools and departments. At our campus, all faculty are able to retain the copyright of the materials that they create during the regular course of their work, meaning that if you create a learning activity or an assignment or a syllabus, you get to be the copyright holder of that work. And as such, you could add a Creative Commons license. You could share it on an OER site. However, many faculty are afraid that if they were to do that, they would somehow be violating a policy or getting in trouble with the university, which isn't the case. This is something that I think many of you at this conference may have encountered, that when you are promoting open materials, there are often fears about quality. And so we always have to kind of assuade those fears. And then lastly, there's a misunderstanding as to what OER is. So because many OERs are born digital, there's an assumption that that means that there's no books in the classroom. And that's not necessarily the case. It just means that there are openly licensed and freely available, and perhaps ebook versions of things in the classroom. So as we look towards the future, we've done a lot of work. We've been able to share a lot of great OER resources. We have some ideas about the future. First, we think that there needs to be more education and awareness of OER for the health sciences. So this is both on a faculty level, faculty being more aware that OER is available for them in the health sciences, and also just more awareness that there's a need for people to create more OER for the health sciences. We've also noticed that there's a trend in nursing, nursing education to prioritize diversity in our student bodies. And we really believe that OER is an underutilized resource that could really help in diversifying the students that are destined to become nurses. Lastly, we recognize and appreciate that nursing OER is growing. So just in the last two years between 2019 and 2021, we've been able to observe an explosion of new and updated learning materials and textbooks related to nursing. And we want to give a special shout out to OpenRN that has been creating some really great textbooks for Bachelor of Nursing programs. So we're excited that there's more and we hope that that trend continues to grow. So thank you so much for listening to our presentation. We look forward to answering your questions. Have a phenomenal day.