 All right. Welcome, everybody, to CCCOER, the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources November webinar, how OER can support student equity and diversity. And this is Una Daly, the director of CCCOER. And I'm really grateful to our speakers today. Each of them has a unique perspective to share with us on OER and equity. And I want to welcome all of you. And I'm very thankful that all of you have joined us today to hear from these folks who are working directly on issues of equity in OER. So our agenda today is we're going to introduce our speakers here in just a moment. We'll have a brief overview of CCCOER. And then we'll get right into the presentations. And we're going to hold a Q&A till the end, although please do use the chat window to share comments and questions as we go along. And we'll answer those as best we can. And then there'll be, there should be plenty of time at the end for questions. And you can even use the audio at the end. All right. So first of all, I would like to introduce Francesca Carpenter. She is the associate director of the OER degree initiative at Achieving the Dream. Achieving the Dream is a community college reform network that has a strong belief that higher education institutions have an obligation to work toward equity for their students. And the OER degree initiative of which she is one of the leaders requires their grantees to ensure access and support for low income students and students of color in their programs, in their OER degree program. So Francesca, would you like to say a few words? Thank you, Una. I just want to say welcome to everyone and thank you all for joining us today. It's very encouraging to hear that we have a large group of people who are interested in this topic. So I welcome any questions later on and I'd love to continue the discussion later as well. Thank you. Thank you for being with us this morning, Francesca. And next I'd like to introduce Dr. Daphne Secre. She's a professor in the speech communications and theater department at borough of Manhattan College. She's a member of the team developing the OER degree in the administration of justice there at BMCC. And she believes in the importance of creating learning experiences that are relevant and engaging for the diverse students that attend her college. And she will share how she supplements existing OER textbooks to be inclusive for all her students and quite a lot else. Daphne, would you like to say anything? I just want to say hi and just welcome everyone for coming in and joining us and listening to our little spiel today because it's very important and especially it's crucial when it comes to my students at my community college. And we're so excited to have you, Daphne. Thank you for coming. And finally, I want to introduce Dr. Preston Davis, who is the Director of Instruction at Northern Virginia Community College's Extended Learning Institute. Under Preston's direction, NOVA was one of the first community colleges in the nation to offer its students an OER-based degree program in general studies to reduce costs and improve engagement and learning outcomes. Preston is also the VP of Partnerships for CCCOER. Preston, would you like to say a few words? Thank you, Anna. I just want to welcome everyone today and I look forward to not only hearing what my co-presenters have to say about examples of things that they are doing in relation to equity and diversity, but also what you all who are attending this webinar have to share. Your thoughts, your examples, and your questions. I think that this could lead to an interesting discussion and I look forward to that. Thank you, Preston. And for those of you who just joined us, please feel free to share your name and your institution in the chat window with everyone. It's a fun way for us to get the conversation started online. So for those of you who might be new to our webinars, the CCCOER mission is expanding awareness and access to high quality open educational resources. We were actually founded 10 years ago this fall and our organization, among other things, supports faculty choice and development and these webinars are part of that, of supporting faculty, staff and administrators at colleges who are promoting open education to improve student success. At the heart of it is improving student success. We are proud that we have members in 25 U.S. states. We have eight statewide consortiums and we also have members in British Columbia and I noticed that we have Amanda Koolage online. So welcome Amanda and other folks from around North America. Primarily, of course, community colleges exist in North America as we define them. So we don't have members outside of there but we're always willing to talk to people about that option. And thank you all for introducing yourself. That's great. All right. Before we get into our presentations, I just wanted to say a few words about what motivated us to plan this webinar. You know, for many years now we've been talking about cost as one of the access points for students to get an education and it's not that that isn't an important consideration but beyond cost, what are the other important factors that help students to feel included in the conversation and to be successful in their education. As some of you may have attended our webinar in May where we started this conversation, we had Lori Cattalozo from Bunker Hill Community College and we had Paula Minishwitz from Salt Lake Community College talking about diverse, I should say culturally relevant curriculum that they're developing at Bunker Hill and Paula spoke about accessibility. So how do you make your materials accessible for students with disabilities? And we also had Quill West on that webinar talking about how open licensing makes it possible to modify educational resources to be inclusive and culturally relevant and also accessible. So we're continuing that conversation today and diving in a little bit deeper. And so at this point, I'm excited to turn this over to Preston to give us an overview of the discussion around equity and equality. Preston? Great. Thank you very much. I do appreciate that. I wanted to start off the conversation with a quote from John Rawls who is a professor of philosophy, it was a professor of philosophy at Harvard and really sort of the lead thinker in terms of the modern definition and focus of social justice. And that is this idea of justice being the first virtue of social institutions in the same way that truth is the first virtue of systems of thought. And it's just important to think about the idea of justice in society and what that means at all levels of society. And so when we think about social justice, which I think really is the foundation of this discussion in many respects, and you do have to forgive the fact that I am a professor of philosophy. So this is not only something that is important to me, but I do think that it is certainly relevant. When thinking of social justice, that ultimately social justice is concerned with how human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society. And so when we think about that and the idea that this is something that impacts folks at every level of society, we need to understand that there are very varying needs among the diverse population and that we need to address those needs for the betterment of society as a whole. Okay, well now you can go to the next slide. Thank you. And so thinking of the key principles that guide this thought, we start with the fact that each person should have the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the liberties of others. And so in terms of a social contract, what we're talking about here is equality and the idea that as long as people are not infringing on the rights of other folks, that they should have the highest degree of liberty and freedom as possible. And the second pillar is the idea that social and economic positions are to be to everyone's advantage and open to all. And so if they are to be at everyone's advantage and we understand that people are going to have different constraints on them, then we need to be able to address those folks and the individual constraints that they may have on them to help them to advance so that everyone has equal opportunities to all. Okay Helena. And so I wanted to just briefly talk a little bit about equity and equality and the distinctions between those two as we continue in this discussion. And so when we think of equality as being the state of everything being equal to all, we do know that when we think of equity, it's important to think about fairness and impartiality. When we think of equality, it involves treating everyone in the same manner irrespective of their differences. With the concept of equity, it involves treating each individual according to their needs. And so that does not necessarily mean the same thing as treating everyone the same. It is treating everyone fairly. So it's less about making sure that everyone has the same. It is about needing the individual needs so that everyone can attain the same. And when we think of it in that way, then we can recognize how openness and open education really does serve to help benefit the social progress towards equity and diversity. Okay, Helena. And so just to think a little bit about where we have come in terms of the open education movement as we are about to hear some examples from some of our colleagues other institutions and organizations. As we think about how we began with open access materials that really allowed for folks to find and use materials effectively in pursuit of their educational goals. And these open access materials certainly address the issues of cost, which are very important to students, particularly disadvantaged students. And also it gave them an opportunity to find some diverse materials and not just rely on one or two specific resources that might be made available to them from an institution. And then, of course, open courses and open MOOCs were established to really give people an opportunity to learn on their own outside of a sort of organized and structured system of higher education that most of us function in. And then openly licensed material and OER gave us a foundation to allow for specific permissions that would give folks a chance to use materials in different ways, but also to create and share materials in different ways. So this gives students not only access to materials, but the ability to create and add to materials and resources that can be shared and used by everyone. Open degree pathways took this concept and formalized it into a structure that would define what courses a student could take to complete a degree program and giving them the opportunity to do so without having to purchase educational materials. And that gave them access and increased affordability to higher education. And now we talk much more often about open pedagogy and open practices, which allows faculty to share resources, which allows students to share resources to provide content and materials to really expand the knowledge and the amount of resources and materials available to all of us. And next, I think it is up to all of us to determine where we take this forward to the next level in terms of openness and open education. And I think that we all are playing a significant role by sharing and providing assistance to others. And I think that there's going to be some really good examples from my colleagues who are about to speak about things that they are doing. And I also look forward to hearing some things that you all may be doing in support of this mission. So I would like to turn it over to my colleagues. And I hope that I will be able to hear from some of you all in the audience as well. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, Preston, for that great overview. And you did have one comment in the chat window from Greg Bem. And he said, don't forget about open data. Yes, thank you. All right. Thanks, Greg. And next, I want to turn this over to Daphne to tell us about the great work she does in her classroom and with her students. Well, I just want to welcome everyone again. And just to talk a little bit, I want to start off with an example. And I'm hoping, Una, I don't think I have access. All right. There we go. Now I think I do. There we go. Now we have access. Okay. So I want to start with an example of something that I do in my classes. And when it comes to creating sort of equity and understanding of representation and equality in all of these words. And so how do we put these words into action is basically what I'm trying to do. So I teach public speaking. I also teach introduction to theater. And I teach public speaking for social justice. And so in my public speaking class, it's a mandatory class for students basically all across the campus. So we have about 20,000 students who end up taking public speaking. And it's also an intro class. It's a very basic course for a lot of our students. And when students come into this course, you have to teach them all the things about what entails to be a public speaker. But then you also have to talk to them about their visual aids. And so when I do that, I do this activity. And you can see it right now. I'll type the word hug or I'll type the word hugging on Google. And I'll see what comes up and I'll see the images that come up. And I asked my students who are predominantly black and Latino, I'll ask them, what do you see in these images? And I'll ask them, do you see yourself represented in these images? And of course, my students are like, no, they don't see themselves. I mean, this image right here, they'll be like, Oh, there's a little kid in the middle. And then there's a mom that kind of could be like my mom. But that's it. They don't see themselves represented in these images. So then I have another. So then imagine when you and those are images just by typing Google. So then imagine images when there are actually open access images, images that are free that everyone can use. There's even less diversity, less equity, less representation. And so here's an example. Same words typed in. These are images that anyone can use. They're open access to everyone. And again, much less diversity and representation. So if I have six or seven black students in my in my classroom, usually I have like 10, you know, where are they? If they're to create a visual aid, how, you know, how are they going to put themselves on this visual aid? How are they going to put their colleagues in the visual aid? How are they going to put their audiences on the visual aid? Are they to create a visual aid with all images of people who are Caucasian? You know, and so again, when their audience is not predominantly Caucasian. And so we talk about these things as a class and we talk about how do we, you know, how do we, how do we change this? How do we make sure that we can find these images that are going to work for the students? How do we make sure that we can cater to who our audiences are? Because one of the things with public speaking is learning who's your audience before you step into a room. Who's your audience? Who are you talking to? And if you're creating a visual. So again, if your visuals are lacking representation, imagine everything else that is there. Imagine everything else that is available. And so BMCC has taken this into account and has really taken this into account when it comes to our textbooks. And again, one of the things I do with my students, I used to be a high school teacher with my social studies students and we were talking about this in my, in my public speaking class. I used to have my students look at textbooks and we're not even talking about OER textbooks, just plain textbooks and look at are there stories in their textbooks? Are they represented? Are there histories in their textbooks? And again, they're not. And so, you know, but I had them look through the entire textbook and look to see what is there and what isn't there. And so again, we have to think about these things like who are we teaching in our school? Who are our students? Why aren't their stories there? And how do we remedy these? And how do we change this? And so I think one of the first things that has come to mind with OER is the ability of having us write our own stories, the ability of having us being able to edit and share and get all these resources. And BMCC has done an incredible job. Again, first we're looking at access that entails money. And how do we get that to students because textbooks cost so much. But then the next thing has become, once we have this notion of here, we have this, like how do we promote it with our students? You know, so we have this program and OER is not something that's very, you tell a student, oh, all we are textbooks, they have no idea what you're talking about. And so we changed the word to zero textbook costs. And we promoted it as well. But again, I want us to think about equity. And I want us to think about if there's only so many programs that we have, we have our social justice program that now almost all the textbooks are online and available. And most of the textbooks are OER. And I am a part of the program. I'm not a professor in the criminal justice program. But criminal justice students have to take public speaking. And they have to take a creative class and with the creative class and take an introduction of theater. And it comes really handy for criminal justice majors to take into a theater, believe it or not, it works really well because it involves storytelling. And if you especially be going to criminology and you go into law school, storytelling is very important. And so again, how are we catering to our students? We've created this major. And we have all these professors. But it's not enough. If I go back to this zero textbook cost initiative that we have pushed forward, it's amazing. It's great. But we have 27,000 students at BMCC. So yes, it's great to promote this amazing zero textbook cost. But what if we don't have enough classes? Or what if our professors only teach in the mornings and they don't teach evening classes? So then how do we cater to our evening students or a weekend students that work all day? So again, so not only are we talking about representation when it comes to our own individual textbooks, we are also talking about how do we promote these programs to create this equity for everyone across the boards? Is it only going to be available for criminal justice majors? Or do we want it to be available to everyone at the college and how do we expand it? Of course, we need resources and money to train teachers to do all this type of stuff. And in doing all this type of stuff, it entails hours of work. We're not just looking at, let me see if I can get to my next slide. Here we go. We're not just looking at, oh yeah, let's just do this. It requires finding the correct things and what are we going to fit in? So that brings me back again to my classes, my public speaking classes that students in the criminal justice major have to take, or my intro theater classes. So I have two textbooks. I have the public speaking project for my speech classes and I have theatrical worlds for my intro theater classes. And these are great texts. I'm actually very fortunate to have found both of these texts. I'm a huge fan of the public speaking project. It's really, really good. But again, one of the problems with this text is A, all the writers are white. That's not an issue, but again, there's pictures of these writers. So our students are looking at these chapters and as they look through the chapters, everyone who's written this chapter is white. What does that say? How come we don't have writers of color writing parts of this textbook? Where are our other writers that could be incorporated? And believe it or not, it does send a message of who's publishing. I'll give you a perfect example. I teach at another university and my students know that I publish work. And believe it or not, my students are so excited that I publish work on Black Theater and Latino Theater. My students are so excited that I publish work. They want to read my work. They're like, this is so amazing. You're a published author. This is incredible. So as a professor, they're not just looking at me as a teacher in the classroom, but they're also looking to see what I'm writing, what I'm publishing. And they're looking up to that. The fact that you have a Latina who's publishing and is in books that they can buy and that they can read, it makes them proud. It makes me very humble, but it makes them proud. And that's really special. And so I want to urge people, how do we get more writers of color to be incorporated into these projects? And how do we even diversify our own texts? And that leads me to theatrical worlds. It's the best OER text I've found for theater. There's another one I found, but I didn't like it. But it's still to me problematic because it's looking at a very European Western concept of theater. It doesn't look at storytelling. It doesn't look at performance. There was rooted in Africa. It doesn't look at some of the beginnings of performance in Egypt. It doesn't look at how that influenced the Greeks. It starts with this is how, and again, the Greeks are not the birth of it all. They're amazing and incredible and very important because they did shape theater. But again, what does it say when we're erasing histories of others or not being inclusive of histories of others? And again, when I have students who are predominantly black and Latino, yes, I do need to teach them a Western because they're expected to know the Western playwrights and this and this and that. But at the same time, what else can we teach them? For example, they have a whole chapter on Shakespeare for theatrical worlds, but they don't mention anything that goes on anywhere else during the Renaissance. They don't talk about what's happening in Italy with Comedial Arte. They don't talk about Spanish Asiglo El Oro. They don't talk about playwrights in, again, in Spain during Asiglo El Oro, we had women writing plays, we had women acting, then that wasn't happening at all in England. And so you're again erasing histories, you're erasing histories of women. And also, they're not talking about we had playwrights in Latin America. They were writing during the Renaissance, and those aren't mentioned anywhere. And so I have Latin American students in my classes that don't know by reading a textbook that their ancestors that, you know, were writers that had been contributing to this amazing source of text and art, unless I bring additional sources. And that's what I do. So even though my classes are OER, especially my public speaking and theater, the public speaking is 100% OER, but my theatrical world, I have to bring in additional sources. And so I find articles that suit my students. If my students read the chapter on Shakespeare, I find an article about Sor Juana, who is a playwright during the Renaissance from Mexico, and she was a nun. And they love it because her plays are just like soap operas and Spanish telenovelas. And so they really love it because they're like, ooh. And I have them read instead of reading Shakespeare because they will read Shakespeare. And oh, they already have. Usually I ask them, how many of you read Shakespeare? And they always their hand because they read it in their English classes. I have them read Sor Juana's House of Desires. And they love it. They love, and they can see how it's rooted in soap operas today. They can see how her work is the perfect example of watching any soap opera that is on TV today. And they can be like, wow, we did this. And there's this, again, this pride that comes with this notion of knowing that your ancestors or that your background or did contribute to the arts in some way, shape or form. And that's very special. And we need to do that. We need to be contributing to this on a consistent basis. So there's still work that needs to be done. I just wanted to give a couple examples of some of the stuff that I've done. It takes training to do this, and it takes time. I've spent, and I do every single semester, I find new articles. I found another article, for example, that talks about Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, and how Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare actually did co-author five works together. And it's now proven. And so, of course, that's not in the textbook. And so I bring that article also for them to read that. And then we talk about the theories of Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare and how people thought it was one person, but it's not. And they love that too, because it brings us fun. And so I have to do the research on the consistent basis every semester. So it takes time, but it's worth it. And then eventually, if I had more time, I would love to be able to contribute by writing a chapter that they could read, because it just means so much. It's so important, and it's important to have diverse authors to tell multiple stories from multiple perspectives. And you could be teaching in the middle of America, and your students are predominantly white. And they should still learn about diverse authors and multiple stories and multiple perspectives, because that's the world we live in. The world we live in isn't a bubble of just one identity. It's multiplex. You know, how do we bring Asian stories? And when we talk about Asian stories, we're talking about Indian stories. We're talking about Chinese stories, Korean stories, Japanese stories, and how they're so different and so influential. And again, we have to be aware of what our audiences are and how do we make sure that our students are being represented and how do we make sure that they can learn to cater to whoever their audience is, whether it be visual, or whether it be in the readings and work that we do. So I really ask for this push for accessibility, awareness, and acknowledgement of OER and also within OER. So that's kind of what I wanted to share with everyone today. Thank you, Gaffney. That was amazing. I really appreciate you giving us that full view of your students and the work that you started to make your materials more inclusive and to give students that, to inspire them, that they are learners, but they're also going to participate in this world as creators as well and giving them that inspiration. So I'd like to see if anyone has any questions for Gaffney before we move on to Fran. Alrighty. We please use the chat window and we'll have questions at the end for all of our speakers. All right. Now I want to turn it over to Fran who is the Associate Director of the OER Degree Initiative at Achieving the Dream to tell us about Achieving the Dream's initiatives to support equity. Hello, everyone. Thank you again, Una. So I enjoyed both of the openings and hearing Gaffney explain all of the work that she's doing and we actually served on a panel together at OpenEd where Gaffney was extremely instrumental in sort of opening people's eyes to a lot of content topics that I think that hadn't been thought of before. So I'm going to weave a little bit in as I go as well. So as Una said, I'm from Achieving the Dream and she also mentioned a little bit about ATD's mission and I'm just I have a slide here that talks about that. And really the mission of Achieving the Dream is to lead and support a national network of community colleges to achieve sustainable institutional transformation through sharing knowledge, innovative solutions, and effective practices and policies leading to improved outcomes for all students. So one of the main pillars of ATD is improving outcomes for students and one of the ways that we can do that is through sincere deep institutional transformation. We believe strongly in that. Let's see if my slide will go to the next. So as part of ATD's focus area, one of them is equity. We have a ton of different focus areas. And with the equity cornerstone, we have a statement on equity. So each one of our network colleges receives this equity statement. It's also on our website. This is cut a little bit from what's on the website. But it really encourages and pushes colleges to think about equity. And in this case, we're talking about dismantling barriers for students. Community college students, as you all know, I'm sure face a number of challenges. They come from a varied background with different ability levels, economic levels, experience levels. So we believe it is extremely important that colleges have these wraparound services that support students in all aspects of their lives. So we have this, like I said, very long equity statement. But the main part is the one that's emboldened on the slide here, where it says that achieving the dream expects colleges to dismantle the barriers facing underserved students. Colleges must routinely scrutinize structural barriers to equity and invest in equity-minded policies, practices, and behaviors that lead to success for all students. Our network colleges that achieving the dream all have coaches. So they sort of work with the schools to shape a lot of different areas, and they all mainly focus on student success outcomes. And we also have the coaches work directly with schools on equity. What are they doing to help sort of change the environment and the landscape of their colleges so that they're more equitable? Okay. So I just want to talk a little bit about the OER degree initiative. So this fits under the equity sort of focus area. And we have 38 colleges participating in the initiative from 13 different states. And as part of the OER degree initiative, as Una mentioned earlier, the colleges are required to focus on equity as one of their outcomes. And on my next slide, I think I'm having like a little bit of a delay. On the next slide, it talks about what grantees must be able to do as part of the grant. So they must ensure access, buy and support for low income students and students of color in their OER degree programs. So a lot of times we talk about equity in terms of financial equity, right? So just creating OER programs, OER courses, we're eliminating or extremely reducing the costs associated with going to class. But in this case, for this conversation, we're talking about finance and we're also talking about just cultural diversity and content that represents different student populations. And so we have a lot of grantees who are actually having issues and are struggling a little bit. So I'm going to talk about those right now. So some of our grantee challenges are the obvious, right? So there is a lack of availability of culturally relevant content. To what Daphne mentioned before, it's clear that trying to find culturally inclusive and culturally relevant content that is going to speak to each one of those students is difficult. So we're talking about content that is varied as far as race, excuse me, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and just ability level. So finding those materials can be tough. And another barrier with that is this lack of diverse content creators. So we know that there is a good certain set of population that is willing to charge forward and develop OER content. We want to make sure as we're doing this though, that we're not setting up barriers unintentionally most of the time, where we're blocking out another group of people who can write content. Daphne, for example, who time is an issue, but the passion is there, right? So we want to make sure that we're including very diverse content writers and creators because those people are the ones who help influence what our students are learning. And then the pictures that the students see of themselves and how they move forward on their pathway. And so also awareness is extremely important. A lot of faculty members just don't think, you know, diverse content is important, right? This is the content, this is the subject area. We heard a little bit of that type of sort of argument back at OpenEd where a question was given to us about, well, how do I do this? How do I incorporate these people? Well, easy. You just add them, right? So I think that people think that if I add somebody, then I have to take somebody out and I'm excluding another group of people. So we know that there's only a certain amount of weeks in a semester, right? But we want to make sure that we're providing a round picture for our students so that students can relate to the content and be more wedded to it, find ownership in it, and then want to succeed. So then we also have to ask the question, which is what I've been alluding to, is does OER content have a white male American slant? Overall, the answer is yes. And so the charge is then on our OER champions on campus, our librarians, our instructional designers, and our faculty to really try to move from that, include that, but absolutely incorporate other voices. And so is content unintentionally biased? The answer also can be yes and no, right? Sometimes you're including content because it's there and what you're used to teaching, but it's just expanding your horizons a little bit and finding content that is more representative is extremely important. So some of the successes to go with those challenges are we really have a good amount of self-motivated faculty members who are willing to identify and create content. And they're exploring the question of culturally responsive pedagogy. They're tackling what does that even mean? What does that look like from my content area for my team of teachers, for my students? How can I best meet their needs and also expand my horizons and my knowledge base at the exact same time? And how do I incorporate student voice? So Daphne mentioned that a little bit as well. Having students contribute to content creation and build and so that they become part of a larger community really helps them find a voice, express their voice and be able to share it and build on other people's thought process. That's what OER is really about, that whole remixing concept. Once you include students in that, it's extremely powerful. And so I talked a little bit about the culturally responsive pedagogy, but really we have faculty who are taking advantage of the possibilities of OER. So they understand that they have this flexibility to create content that is relevant and timely. So with things going on in the country, in the world, things that have just happened or environmental things that may happen, they're actually really thinking more about how they can change their content and adapt it for just in time. And it also is able to meet a range of student needs. And the range of student needs includes, like I said before, all cultures as well as ability levels. So a lot of faculty members are also now keeping in mind and really considering can their students access this content. Is there some sort of barrier there as far as images with no alt tags or sounds that can't be read through a screen reader, things like that. So faculty members really are starting to get very creative. They are showing their expertise and they're feeling very empowered to change things and influence the way that their students learn in a different way than they did when they were wedded to a textbook. So that's really all I have, Una. I wasn't sure if there are any questions directed at me or the group. Yeah, thank you so much Fran. Sure. We did have a couple of comments in the chat window that you might want to take a look at. And I'm just going to, while you're looking at those, I just wanted to mention that on December 6, we will have another webinar on adjuncts, faculties, essential role in OER adoption. So join us on the sixth if you can. And we'll have John Iuzini, who's Associate Director of Achieving the Dream runs the adjunct faculty initiative there. I'm sorry, he's the Associate Director of Teaching and Learning at Achieving the Dream. And we will have some folks from Broward College joining us. Tom Iers, who is the Associate Dean of Business there, and one of their adjunct faculty, Claudine Delaney. And just real quick on upcoming conferences, I'm just mentioning this, you know, the dream is coming up in February of 2018. We have the International OE Global in April of 2018. On our website under Get Involved, we have a list of upcoming open education conferences, along with dates around call for proposal deadlines. And you can stay in touch with us through our community email if desired. And now I want to turn this back to my presenters to answer questions or to make address the comments that have been put in there. All right, well, I'm sorry, sorry, I had to change the, I can address sort of one of the comments, which I think is really important. Fran and I also talked about this when we were at the conference. And we looked at this notion of, you know, how can OER promote the creation rather than adopt to incorporate diverse voices. And one of the things that came up at our panel was having spaces that especially when it comes to the academic, you know, in higher education, having colleges that are going to push and advocate for if we're creating OER content as faculty to count towards tenure, because that seems to be a big issue with a lot of faculty not or diverse faculty not wanting or having the time, because if it's not going to count towards tenure towards publication, why should we? And I know that BMCC, Jean, here's a huge advocate and she's been pushing for our work to hopefully in the next, you know, four to five years that if we do have OER work that we are publishing that it does count towards our tenure. But of course, this is something that takes time, it has to be approved by the faculty, it has to be approved by the deans, and has to then be approved by this and this. And so it's not something that can just happen tomorrow. It's going to take its time. But I definitely think that that's one thing that's so important is to be pushing, you know, how can we, how can we, you know, instead of just adopting a text, how can we incorporate, you know, have people be creating these texts. That's so, but again, if we don't have the support from our administration, it's really hard to have that happen. Great. Thank you very much, Daphne. That's a, that's a wonderful suggestion. Do any of the other panelists want to address that? Well, I, I agree. And I'd spoken on this topic previously about professional development for faculty and how it is important that when looking at promotion and tenure, that administrators recognize the contributions that faculty make in regards to openly licensed material in the same way that they would recognize contributions made to a chapter in a published textbook or to an article in a journal that is behind a paywall, because the value of that information and that knowledge is really separate from the cost to access that material if it's copyrighted or if it's behind a paywall journal. And once that realization manifests itself in action at the administrative level, I think that we will see a lot more opportunities for faculty to create and share material and be recognized for the contributions that they're making. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Preston. Fran, would you like to share anything on that one? Just about the incorporation of content development time. So one thing that we have learned a lot from our grantees is that the development of content, OER content, takes more time or has taken more time than they envisioned. And so that's one thing that we know for sure. We knew beforehand, but each faculty member and their development time can be different. One thing that we are encouraging faculty members to do is to work together. And so what that means is if you're sort of in a consortium college and you have different locations where faculty members are developing the same type of degree that you're working together to develop the courses or to develop the entire degree. So then you have the option to sort of reach across and talk with your colleagues who may be from a different place than you culturally, economically, and as far as gender is concerned. So the whole community building process is one of the ways that helps faculty members share the burden and allows them to welcome in and invite in other voices so that they're not in this by themselves. By no means am I saying that it's extremely easy to develop diverse content. If you don't feel that you have that expertise, if you feel like you come from a place where you don't want to leave out certain things, you don't want to include things that might be insulting or derogatory. It's extremely, extremely important to talk with your colleagues. And if you don't have colleagues available, this is where CCCOER really comes into play because you can ask questions. You can have people come speak. You can have people send you content and you can incorporate so that you're not in this by yourself. Great. Thank you Fran. We had some other questions that have come in and one from Kayla Parks and I think this is directed at you Fran again. She asks, is accessibility of materials for students with disabilities a required part of the OER degree and I assure her that it is. But do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so it is extremely encouraged, right? So there are a lot of moving parts with this degree initiative and accessibility is one of the things at the forefront and we want to absolutely make sure that all students can access the content and we're very concerned about making content available for all ability levels. So we encourage, extremely encourage faculty to make sure that their students can access it and if they don't then that matters and then that's a whole other discussion that we have later. But we want to include all students because we can't say that content is available day one if it's not available for everybody. So we do keep that in mind. Also this is Daphne. In our training we are required, for example, I was using Prezi materials for my PowerPoints and Prezi is not accessible for someone who it won't read versus PowerPoint does. If someone is blind they and I had a Prezi the software doesn't work to be able to read what's on there versus PowerPoint does have that accessibility of software. So even in our training we're told we've got to make sure that we find materials that are going to be accessible or not. And someone had another question that talked about and like finances you know how do we guarantee that materials are accessible when students don't have like the assistive technologies. For example one of the things that BMCC tries to do is we have laptops that are available here at the college for students to use. We have computers here at the college. But one of the things that I like to do is my OER materials that I have are also materials that can be printed because still believe it or not students still like to be able to print material. So for example the public speaking project it's about 10-15 pages per chapter. Most of my students like to still print it out. So even though it's free and then they can go to the computer here at BMCC it takes five minutes for them to print it and then they'll take it because you also have to think about that even though we have OER even though it's online some of our students still don't have computers at home. Some of our students use their phones as a way to access the materials. They are reading on their phones or doing their homework on their phones. And so they're even writing papers on their phones. I even had a student create a video for one of my classes a digital video on their phone because that's what they have access to. And so again we have to remember when we're creating these materials that we they're also accessible to our students especially if they don't have maybe the finance or their means. And if they are using their phones what kind of programs do they have meaning like do they have an unlimited data. And if they do have limited data then they're not able to use certain things and they can only use it if there's Wi-Fi. So also again these are other layers to think of when we're looking at equity that it's not just financial but then it's this accessibility to a students who might have certain disabilities and how do we make that for everyone. And b this notion of like how are they accessing it what are they using to access you know to access this information. Is it their phone because their phone acts like a computer or is it something else. Great thank you Daphne because you addressed several points that were made in the chat window. Not only the one raised by Kayla but then also Jim's one about the digital divide. So thank you for that. And Ayuna I wanted to just comment on Jim's comment as well. I think that we we need to be very cognizant of the fact that OER is really a digital medium in many respects and although there are other ways you can access material it is primarily delivered digitally. And the idea of of a digital divide is one that we need to address. But at the same time we need to recognize that it is part of our responsibility as educators to prepare our students to be able to operate in the world that we live in and and look forward before thinking about how we work how institutions organizations individuals work and collaborate and we rely on technology business and industry relies on technology. And so we need to make sure that we are preparing our students to be able to work effectively in that environment. And so I don't want folks to be concerned about using digital material but I do want people to be concerned about how we're making sure that everyone has access to that digital material. And that may require institutions to consider how they provide access for students so that everyone is capable of using that material effectively. Some institutions provide computers or tablets or other means. We know that I think at our institution about 98 and a half percent of our students have smartphones and to Daphne's point we know students use those as their primary means of accessing material on a regular basis. And so it's not that there's not the ability to access material but how are we making sure that the material that we are using or creating can very be be very easily accessed and manipulated by the technology tools that our students have available. Thank you Preston. And I noticed that Angela just moving on to another question because time is getting short. Angela Kwan asked about how she could access materials that BMCC is creating around criminal justice because this traditionally has been a hard area to find OER in. And Amy came in and gave some information about what's happening in Oregon. Did you want to address that Daphne? Yes I sent her a little message and I told her to email me because we do have a web page but it needs a little bit of updating but I could also put her in contact with some of our OER faculty that are doing this especially Brenda and who was at our panel and I'm pretty sure that they would be more than willing to share some of the materials that they're using. Great. And that goes for anyone who would like to email myself or you know and any way that I can help please do please feel free. Great thanks thanks so much Daphne. And let's see we had a comment then from Buddy about open pedagogy and perhaps giving assignments to students that will draw from their actual experience. So I think that's a great comment from Buddy as well as having students contribute to these materials and I think a number of folks, Daphne and Fran, referred to that in their presentation. Let's see. Just trying to catch the last few comments here. Sorry zoom is being tricky it's not letting me get to the bottom of my chat window. There we go okay. And Suzanne asked about Suzanne Wakeham asked about continuing this conversation. So Suzanne asked about how to continue this conversation and Suzanne we at CCCOER are going to start some blog posts about this. I don't think we have exactly a location at this point. If anyone else knows about that it would be wonderful to hear about that but I this is a really important area that we need to keep working on and I think we need to find kind of a place to organize those discussions. Would anyone else any of my other panelists like to chime in at this point we're just about at the hour and would like to give an opportunity to either one of our panelists to any final words or if anyone out in the audience would like to either speak on their microphone or share another comment with us. I don't I just have one thing to say that I just want to thank everybody for being interested in this topic. A lot of times like I said before when we talk about equity and diversity as it relates to OER content we're talking about financial and we often leave this part of the equity conversation out and I'm glad that a lot of people are interested in this concern about it and willing to change content delivery and creation so that it includes so that it represents different students and different populations so thank you very much. Thank you Fran and we I will say that we had a we had over 60 people attend this webinar today. We had actually over 120 people register so we'll be sending out this recording to all of the people who registered so that additional people can hear the wonderful information that was presented today and at this point I think we will stop the recorder unless we have any final comments. All right and I want to thank our amazing presenters today. This was truly inspirational for me and I know for many of you and I want to thank those of you who attended today and we hope to see you in December.