 We're going to continue with a final project briefing, which kind of continues the themes around curricular intervention. This is going to be a discussion of open educational resource program development, contrasting a view from two different universities. We're going to hear from Lisa Martin, Danny Cook, and Allegra Swift from UC San Diego, and Regina Gong from Michigan State University. Thank you all for joining us, and I'm going to just hand it directly off to you and be quiet. Okay. Thanks so much, Cliff. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so that you all can see the slides. And I'm going to start us off today. So first of all, thank you for having us here today. We're here to talk with you about two different OER-related programs at two different stages of development. So my name is Danny Brecker Cook. I'm one of the associate university librarians at UC San Diego, and I'm very happy to be joined here today by my two San Diego colleagues, Lisa Martin and Allegra Swift, as well as our colleague, Regina Gong, from MSU Libraries. So we got together through the AACNU Institute on Open Educational Resources, which was the first time that the cohort was held this past year. This was a good choice for us at UC San Diego as we started to think about how we wanted to approach our OER and Affordable Course Materials initiative, and we were fortunate enough to be paired with Regina as our faculty mentor. And we really liked Regina's perspective. We really appreciated that her program was centered in a library, and she's been a wonderful coach to us. And I think that we've learned a lot from each other, and we want to share some of that with you today. So next, I want to say a little bit about why we're showing you this today. So our program at UC San Diego is in the beginning stages, and it's part of a constellation of a bunch of initiatives campus-wide to lower the cost of course materials. While MSU's program has had three successful years so far that they can speak to, and they serve as one of the primary efforts on their campus to lower course material costs. We believe that a focus on sustainable program development around OER is especially relevant right now, as there is an increasing focus on access and affordability across higher education. So with higher education costs continuing to outpace inflation and student debt continues to grow, the question of course material affordability also continues to grow in significance. There's a growing literature that shows that access to course materials directly impacts student success, retention, and feelings of belonging. And especially with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of these issues became increasingly exacerbated. Students facing new financial pressures and physical distance from their traditional student support services. So we hope that this presentation today can give you all ideas for various types of approaches to supporting OER as well as other types of affordable learning material initiatives. And with that introduction, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Allegra Swift, to share a little bit about the UC San Diego program. Hi. So while the UCSD project update is focused on work that began in 2021, there was already foundational work being done by student advocacy groups, librarians, and educational specialists who had come together to strategize how to increase OER use and creation. The partnerships that have evolved from this group are ongoing. So librarians have partnered with the teaching and learning common staff to produce OER and ACM workshops for faculty and the TLC staff refer faculty interested in publishing OER to the librarians. We've been collaborating for years with the UCSD student public interest research group or PERG on their affordable textbook initiative. And these students shared lists of interested faculty and departments, created student advocacy and testimonial videos, and we've even presented together at local and national conferences. We're working with our associated student clubs, Students for Open Access, who have taken the initiative to make course material cost more transparent for students with a course marking initiative. These grassroots partnerships continue to be mutually beneficial as we progress through the working groups and committees charged at the highest levels of our campus administrations. Next slide, please. So this project that we're talking about today came together as part of one of the collective impact frames envisioned by the UC San Diego's Executive Vice Chancellor. Collective impact is a collaborative approach to tackling complex challenges by bringing people together in a structured way to achieve major change. Under the affordable learning frame, the University Librarian Eric Mitchell and Director of the Teaching Learning Commons David Reuter have convened an affordable and open course material steering committee, which includes representatives from the library, the bookstore, teaching and learning commons, student government, academic senate faculty, the campus EDI office and more. Our project is a subgroup of the steering committee and is charged with gathering data to inform recommendations for how to address the challenges of course material costs and access on our campus. We anticipate having these recommendations to share with the campus by May. We have collected data via two methods, a population survey of undergraduate students and a series of course instructor focus groups and now it's over to Lisa to impact the data. Great, thank you so much. So at UC San Diego, we decided to build upon those existing efforts from student groups and others by gathering data from a representative sample of current students and we particularly wanted to do so because we had an eye on the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and how it impacted our students. We wanted to find out more. So we've worked with multiple units across campus to distribute a survey in November of last year, so November 2021. We ended up with a good number of respondents about a six and a half percent response rate and since we distributed the survey to the entire undergraduate body, we quickly found that with that response rate our demographics from our respondents were happily a close match to key campus demographics. So we took that data and in particular we coded qualitative and quantitative questions from the survey and as you might imagine the responses may not surprise you but we will share that students experience disparate and unequal impacts as a result of their socioeconomic backgrounds and what they could afford in terms of course materials. Surprisingly to some of us, homework codes were a much bigger problem for students than textbook themselves. Third, students resent or feel frustration about purchasing textbooks that aren't actually mandatory. Sometimes instructors would say this is a required textbook and then use a chapter or two or even not use the text at all. Fourth, students appreciate ownership and reuse of materials. They find that they do refer back to texts and that this is particularly true in their area of major and finally we found that material costs outside the major were seen as a particular burden. So when a course was outside their major or path, they were particularly concerned with cost. So in addition to those student focus groups or actually student survey data, we also conducted faculty focus groups to get a sense of our local faculty context. We reached out to a series of identified groups ranging from OER champions who we'd previously worked with all the way to teaching and learning communities who had limited previous experience with OER and we set up focus groups with interested members of these various cohorts recently over this winter and spring. So these focus groups were held for approximately one hour over Zoom and we are actively qualitatively coding them from the recordings in our notes. So what I can share are some emerging themes right now. So as I said, we are actively coding the responses, but some preliminary themes have emerged. So first, we saw unsurprisingly a variety of approaches to textbook selection across departments and units, meaning that some areas are unable to choose OER materials as a result of existing policies. Second, we saw a lack of time to invest in open educational resources and affordable course materials. So this is particularly exacerbated on the quarter system. Third, we heard concern about credit, so promotion and tenure or other forms of credit at the campus level, plus a related concern about websites like CHEG or others, hosting or stealing in some faculty's view, intellectual property from this work. So if someone was creating an open educational resource, was it then being reused or misused in a way that faculty found concerning? Relatedly, there was a lack of clarity about what could be used in terms of copyright licensing, etc. So reuse of existing materials, it was unclear about what was allowed. There was a desire for collaboration so that people would work together within a larger structure, perhaps with some campus directives or power behind it, just an interest in not being the only person doing the work. And also it's worth pointing out some interest in collaborating with local community colleges, of which there are a number here in San Diego. So there's a definitely possibilities for collaboration. Finally, the last theme was about incentives, what would be helpful to create or work with quality open educational resources. And that theme notably included incentives for all types of instructors to do this work. So let's go ahead and talk about next steps for this particular project before we turn it over to Regina. So in terms of immediate next steps, we are actually in the middle of writing a report to provide to our steering committee, the Affordable and Open Course Materials Campus Steering Committee. And from that, we hope to see a pilot program because we are planning to propose a pilot program that is compatible with that collective impact framework that the steering committee is working within. So if all goes well, that pilot program might launch in summer of this year. And we'd also perhaps see some efforts to make connections to other institutions. So with that, I will turn it over to Regina to speak about the MSU program. Thank you, Lisa. And hello, everyone. I'm so glad to share this space with you today. I'm here to talk about our OER program at MSU. So this is a new position for me. I came to MSU in July 2019. But because of my extensive experience in managing and leading an OER program at a community college for four years, I got the program off to a really great start. So we're now on our third year. And I have a really wonderful group of colleagues who are who I work in the OER team. So we have a publishing assistant. We have a copy editor. We have an accessibility coordinator and a student employee who is part of the team. And we have an OER award program as well, where we have a $50,000 annual budget and I will talk about that later in the next slide. We are also an institutional member of the Open Education Network and a participant of the OpenStacks institutional partnership program for 2021 to 2022. Next slide, please. So they need if you can just like press, yeah. So actually our program goals, I can summarize it into what I call four A's. So that's affordability, access, accessibility and agency. So basically we want to provide a wrap around service for our OER awardees. Next slide, please. Yeah, so these are the services we offer. It's a complete suite of services that we provide our faculty as they engage in adoption and creation of OER. And this is the data that I track to illustrate the adoptions that we have at MSU. And as you can see, I apologize, it's a little small because that's from an Excel sheet that I have. I started tracking it from fall 2019 up to this semester, spring 2022. And as you can see, there's an increasing number of courses and faculty and students who are taking our OER courses. And as you can see, we have a running total of over $5 million in terms of taxable cost savings for students. And this is just one way that I present the data. So this is a comparison between academic years for this academic year. It's not yet over. So I don't have that data for you. But as you can see, it is growing. And these are just some of the courses that are using OER for this spring. Some of the courses are unified adoption, meaning all sections are using OER. Some are just some sections, but hopefully we'll have more in the next semester. So as I was talking about, we have the OER program that is also a critical part of the OER program at MSU. So basically, it's an incentive program for our instructors to encourage them and to support them in the ways that they use OER in their courses. And if you want to know more, the link is there in the slide. So the categories of awards, next slide, please. Yeah, so these are the categories of awards for our faculty. So it starts with adoption. And that's the amount that we award for successful application. The last two slides or the last two bullets, the continuous improvement and the scaling of OER are new categories that we added last year because of the need to improve upon the OER that our faculty have been creating. So the scaling up of OER are for those who would like to scale up OER across all courses that they are teaching. And these are the award amount that we have awarded to our successful faculty applicants. So our first year we awarded 26,500. And as you can see, the anticipated savings for one academic year is really staggering. So the return on investment for the award that we have given to our faculty is really very heartening, right? And our last round has just finished where we awarded 28,500 for our faculty. So for our OER publishing program, this is also another critical part of our program at MSU. So we use Pressbooks as our authoring platform. And within Pressbooks are embedded interactive exercises using H5P. And we also have a feature wherein we have an LTI integration that allows those H5P exercises to be embedded into the D2L coursebook so that faculty can use the H5P exercises as grades for their students. And I work closely with our faculty in training them with regards to the use of Pressbooks, H5P, and we also have embedded an online annotation tool called Hypothesis. And this is our site for our titles that we have published so far. That's the URL where you can find all those titles. And we also have more titles that are slated for publications. We are just finishing up with our accessibility report and our copy editing. So all of the titles that we publish have been fully vetted in terms of accessibility because we run accessibility reports to all of them before they are published. Next slide, please. So actually, this is to illustrate how we are really supported across campus. Last week, we just finished the Give Green Day, which is the annual MSU fundraising. And OER is one of the projects that our alumni and our MSU community can donate to. And within two hours, we exceeded our goal of 3,000. So at the end of the day, we had like over $5,000. And this is the third year that we have OER as part of the Give Green campaign. Next slide, please. And so at MSU, we don't stop with just having OER as resources that our faculty can adopt and create. I really believe that OER is a step towards rethinking our pedagogy. And so in 2020, I started facilitating the open pedagogy and open educational practices learning community. And this is composed of the faculty who got the OER awards and all faculty who are interested in using OER. And so we collectively learn from each other and think of ways where we can create OER that are student-centered. So that's what we're hoping to achieve in our learning community. And this is the picture of our student government. Next slide, please. Our student government really are an integral part of our advocacy efforts at MSU. They created the bill back in December 2020 or November 2020 advocating for the use of OER in all undergraduate courses. Next slide, please. And this is part of their strategic initiatives, our student government. As you can see in their site, OER Awareness is part of their strategic initiative for the student government. Next slide, please. And incidentally, this week is Open Educational Resources Awareness Week, and we have slated really amazing events for this week. And ASMSU has allocated funding to purchase OER swags. And we really have really awesome cookies with the OER logo that they designed. So next slide, please. And I just like to conclude this presentation with voices from our students. So our students are really the beneficiaries of this OER initiative. So we want to hear from them. And every semester, we have a survey where we ask our students how is OER impacted them. There's a train coming, I'm sorry, you might hear it. You might hear it, so I apologize for that. But I just want you to see how OER has impacted our students, especially those from underrepresented population. So the other slide has more of our student voices. So I'll end with that. And I'll welcome your questions or comments. Thank you. We have a number of questions coming in in the in the chat. So you might have want to have a look at that. I see a question from Rosalynn. And thank you. Yeah, the return on investment. That one really was something that we are Dean. Joe Salem encouraged me to do because that is something that we present to our provo and administration to make sure that we have continued funding for our OER. So our 50,000 budget, if we don't finish, if we don't use that up, rolls over to the next fiscal year. And I've been very fortunate that we have that as a regular recurring allotment and support from MSU. So your question here, I went all around and I did not probably answer your question. So have you done any work to calculate staff faculty time dedicated to the funds you are giving out? Be interested in hearing more about how much money and time we are dedicated. Okay, so the thing about the time allotment to doing or creating OER, it really is difficult, right? Because of course, it depends on the faculty. It depends on the extent of work that that OER project entails. And it also depends on the level of interactivity and multimedia content that the the faculty wants to incorporate in the OER. So I am finding that when I was at a community college, it was strictly, you know, you do it in your own time. At MSU, I'm finding that our faculty do it like more in the summer or towards the end of the semester. So summer is really busy for us, because that's where our faculty do a lot of the work that they have on OER. I hope I answered it. But if not, we'll talk more. All right, Rosalind says thank you. And I'm happy to take the next question from Joan. So thanks for your question, Joan, about the intellectual property issues that the faculty mentioned in our focus groups. I think the answer to that question is a little bit of both and. So the faculty expressed concern about creating works that then wouldn't be properly credited back to them. And having had experience where they didn't include like a Creative Commons license or any kind of copyright statement and then seeing their work in other places without that level of credit. And then secondly, the faculty mentioned kind of being nervous about using other people's work and like what are they allowed to upload into our Canvas sites, for example? What can they use on their own without having to go through some kind of copyright clearance? So I think what this really indicated for us was an education opportunity and that that has to be a part of our affordable and open course materials project moving forward is that there's just a lot of confusion around who owns what and how people are supposed to give credit and what are your like avenues for recourse if you don't have credit given to you even in a Creative Commons license kind of way, as well as letting folks know about how they can use materials in Canvas. I think some folks are airing on the side of never doing it because they're nervous about it and some folks are perhaps a little bit too cavalier about it. So definitely an education opportunity. Regina, have you encountered this as well? A lot, a number of our faculty who we awarded the OER grant are creators. So at MSU they use, there's very few folks who adopt existing OER. So we have open-stacks adoption, but majority of the faculty that we award our OER grants are for creation. So they create their own materials. Are there further questions? I don't see any more in the chat. All right. While we're waiting for them to come in, I'd like to try one. Oh, here Robert has one. Go ahead. Thanks Cliff and thanks to all the presenters. This is really interesting to hear your work and just so you all know, I'm working on an open textbook grant from the Department of Education here in New Jersey and it's interesting because we're seeing a lot of the same feedback and I was particularly excited to see the feedback from faculty about some of the obstacles as well as some of the incentives that would help motivate them so I'm just wondering, is there a place where you share some of your data from your survey or even the questions that you use? I think one of the things that we're finding, it was interesting too, I saw Joan's comment about, you know, these issues not arising when dealing with commercial publishers, but I think part of what we're trying to do with our grant project and we're clearly far from alone on this, this is not everybody's trying to crack, is how do you come up with a functional production workflow that's still bare bones so that you're not adding all those additional costs that commercial publishers have because they're selling something and so they're trying to write and so we just want something that works in the classroom, you know, and is education successful, which kind of leads to actually my question, my broader question, which is how are you, are you doing any kind of assessment for the pedagogical impact of the open textbooks or affordable alternatives in terms of impact on student outcomes? Yeah, so for us at MSU, like I mentioned in my presentation, we do end of semester assessment for that we give to, it's a survey that we essentially sent to our students who are taking OER courses. Now we use that data to kind of piece out more about the impact, like who are the students taking this course, what, you know, from what underrepresented groups are they from? Are they first generation? Are they Pell Grant? We are able to drill down, you know, with regards to the makeup of the students who are taking OER courses, which is very useful for us to know that we are impacting the students that need the most, you know, that would benefit the most from this initiative. So I am partnering actually with our director of assessment to do that. We are planning on writing something about it, having like an executive report to kind of synthesize all the data that we have since fall of 2020 when we started doing the survey. I guess I'll just add from the San Diego side, since we're kind of at the beginning of this process, that is definitely something that we want to look at. Our information right now from the student perspective is all self-report and how they feel in terms of were they able to complete their assignments? Did they feel like they belonged in their course or did they feel like they belonged in their major? They feel like they had everything they needed to succeed in the course. And then some anecdotal data from faculty, but we definitely want to look at specific courses in terms of like a pre and a post, especially with relationship to having everyone having the same access to materials. Yeah, I mean I will just share a little bit. Our approach is because we're able to pilot the OER that we're funding the creation of, we're having people with multiple sections do some with the OER and some without. And that kind of goes against a lot of these programs because you're trying to maximize the savings. And so we're starting from the position that well it's all good because we're reducing the costs and obstacles for students. And I think it's hard, right? It's like doing those controlled trials where the medicine works really well and you say well let's stop the trial, the medicine works. But you know I think it's important to get that data too. Yeah, that sounds great. I look forward to seeing those results. Okay, we are running a little late, but that's okay because we don't have our invited session speaker yet. So I'm going to ask one further question here if the if the presenters will indulge me. It's always struck me that these kinds of open educational resources have a very disproportionate impact from one course to another. There are typically a relatively small number of courses that have gigantic enrollment on a given campus. Are you doing anything in either in the program at MSU or the one under design at San Diego to specifically target those high enrollment courses? Yes, yes. And that is specifically why we participated in the OpenStacks institutional partnership program because as you know, OpenStacks concentrates on the top 20, right? College courses that are most that have the highest enrollment. So we have our chemistry and our general chemistry and our inorganic chemistry are like multi-section. So all of that are using OER created by our faculty who got like, you know, an NIH grant to redesign the course. So yeah, so we are specifically targeting those high enrollment courses to get more students impacted with the use of OER. Interesting. And at San Diego, we have a remit, a mandate from campus stating that we need to bring costs down for a large number of people and as fast as possible. So we are absolutely looking at variety of options, including those high impact high enrollment courses that you mentioned. And I'll also briefly add one thing that others may be familiar with or the idea of Z degrees or zero cost degrees. I don't know that we're quite ready to implement a whole degree program at that zero cost level, but I definitely think there are lots of options to explore what it looks like to get someone to graduation as well as to get them in through that high enrollment, high impact course. Interesting. All right. Well, I'd like to thank you all for a very very encouraging set of presentations. This is all so good to hear the progress on this. And thank you particularly, Regina, for sharing those numbers. It's really just great to see that uptake.