 All right, once again, welcome to our faculty OER dialogues for Open Education Week. This is Zuna Daly from the Community College Consortium for OER and our topic today is sociology. So one of the areas where OER has really taken off and has really, we have lots of rich resources and also some wonderful people to tell us about that today. I'm going to introduce first Vera Kennedy, who is a sociology and education professor at West Hills College, LaMoure in California. She's also the OER committee co-chair at West Hills College and Vera, do you want to say hello? She took a minute and a webcam to pop up. Yes. Hello, everyone. Thank you, Vera. Wonderful. And our second speaker, who is still, I think, working on her communication technology is Christine Monnier. And she is a criminal justice and sociology professor at College of DuPage just outside of Chicago in Illinois. And we're really pleased to have both of them here today. And Christine, I wonder if you can hear us now. I see you're back in. Can you hear me? It's a little bit quiet. If you can turn your microphone up, I think it would help. Try it again. Can you hear me? We can hear you pretty well now. Just, yeah. And Christine, we just got started. And I don't know if you heard. But I just gave a very brief introduction that you are a criminal justice and sociology professor at College of DuPage in Illinois. Just sociology. Just sociology now. OK. You need to change your web page, because it still says that. And I had the pleasure of knowing both of these amazing professors. Vera and I have worked for a long time together, because we're both in California. But I had the pleasure of meeting Christine at the Chicago Community College OER Summit at the end of November last year. So you're in for a treat. All right. I am going to go ahead and get our slides started here. I hope you were able to see those. And this is really meant to be a conversation. And not only between, of course, our two faculty members who are here with us today, but also to include questions from you as well out there in our audience, I guess, our attendees. And before we get started, I thought maybe a nice question to ask is, how many sociology faculty do we have online today? Besides, of course, Christine and Vera. And if you want to type in the chat window, that would be super. Just let us know. All right. So we do have some. That's wonderful. All right. Well, at least three out of 33. Well, I should say five out of 33. OK. And not that folks from other disciplines are welcome as well and librarians, et cetera. And deans of distance learning and all of that. But wonderful. I'm going to ask each of our faculty here to tell us a little bit about themselves. So tell us a little bit about where they teach and what courses they're teaching and how long they've been teaching. And a little bit of noise there. So if you're in a noisy area and you're not speaking right now, I'm going to ask you to turn off your microphone. Christine, I'm going to go ahead and mute you to see if maybe. All right. Vera, would you like to start? Sure. I'd be happy to. I'm currently teaching at West Hills College in LeMore and also at Fresno State University. I've been with West Hills about 12 years. I started in community colleges as far as teaching. But before then, I was an administrator at the CSU. So I kind of did it backwards. A lot of people start administration and stuff. They usually do that after they teach. And I did it backwards. So but I've been teaching at West Hills for about 12 years and then at Fresno State, probably about 10. And I teach primarily sociology classes. I teach all the lower division classes that most community colleges have available, such as like intro to social problems, marriage, and family. We have a couple of unique courses at West Hills because of our student population. So we have a sociology, a cultural sociology course. And then we also have a sociological practice course, which is applied to sociology. And then at Fresno State, I teach the critical thinking course. But my upper division emphasis and focus is on deviance. And I do teach pop culture every year. So that kind of gives you a rough idea, at least, of my teaching background. Wonderful. Thank you, Vera. And I think you mentioned that West Hills College, in particular, is a small college in the Central Valley, about 6,000 students. That's what the district is about, 4,500 just on our campus. Yeah, so it is pretty small. And I do teach some education courses. I forgot to mention that. So I teach future teachers K through 12. All right. Christine, tell us a little bit about yourself and College of DuPage. What did you mention? I teach at College of DuPage. I've been here for almost 20 years. Gosh, did I do that? And I've been teaching sociology the entire time. And like Vera, this is a community college. So the bulk of my teaching is an introduction to sociology. I've also taught, again, social problems and some more specialized courses I teach in our introduction to data science and our introduction to social research as well. Wonderful. And College of DuPage is a little bit larger than, what is your student population? Well, we have about 33,000 students, something like that. Wonderful. So it's kind of a nice juxtaposition that you're teaching to different populations. So wonderful. And maybe I'll combine questions two and three together. But how were you first introduced to OER and what OER materials are you using now? I don't know. Maybe that's a mouthful. And Christine, I'm going to let you go first this time. And then we'll come back to Vera. OK. So actually, I was introduced to OER because I have one colleague, one librarian, Denise Cotay, who might be an audience today, who's been very dedicated to that course for a long time. And actually, years ago, she brought you already to campus before the summit just November. You had already come to the college for one of our insertion service days and the whole day of presentations pertaining to OER and a lot of different sources. So I started looking around, see if I could find things, especially for introduction to sociology that was my main concern at the time. So at the time, I found the open stacks textbook for introduction to sociology. So I started using that very quickly. And then a few years later, when I started thinking about creating an introduction to data science course, I went looking for materials, and they were not. So at that point, I said, OK, I'm going to have to create everything from scratch. And there was no question that whatever materials I'm going to create were going to be open materials. So I started creating a whole bunch of tutorials and materials that I put online in an open setting. And so I've been adopting open access materials through textbook and open stats. But I also started creating my own at the same time. So for that introduction to data science, all the materials that are in use are open materials that I created myself. Wonderful. And Vera? Well, my whole story is kind of like the perfect storm. There was a faculty member on campus who received some random email from open stacks. And he taught biology. And actually, he works for Pearson, too. He's a writer for Pearson. So even though he saw these open resources available, as far as him considering it for his discipline, he was kind of shy about it. But he saw that there was a sociology book. And he knows, you know, on my campus, I was involved in curriculum committee and all those kinds of things. I've been doing pedagogy and stuff. So he decided just, hey, take a look at this. And so he sent me some random email. And I looked at the text. And I said, well, there's some stuff I like, some I don't. But it's comparable to what we're using. So I sent it out to all of our part-time faculty who also looked at it. And we kind of had the same thing. It's free. It's not perfect. But what we're using isn't perfect. And at the same time, I just happened to sign up to go to a textbook affordability conference. And little did I know, like, me asking questions about OER, because, you know, I had to heard about it, but I wasn't really involved in the movement. It kind of was like this perfect storm. All of a sudden, I was introduced to Jerry and people from our low, all of a sudden. And they said, hey, we need reviewers. And then they introduced me to Kathleen. And then I was involved in Cool for Ed. So really, just because I was interested, and they were trying to get more people involved, I got asked to be a peer reviewer for a lot of OER. And then that was it. I was sold. Because then I kind of knew what we were looking for as far as quality in OER resources, what was missing, and what my faculty, what we could work on and share, and things like that. So now we're, I can say, we've been saying we're an OER degree in sociology for about a year. But I have to be honest, during that year, there were a couple of courses that I mentioned, specialty courses where there weren't any resources available. So I actually had to author them. So I had to create two original works. And I think I would learn the first time I actually wrote the text while teaching the class. And I promise not to do that the second time. But because things got away from me, I'm doing that again. But at the same point, that's also how I found out the best way to include student voices and perspectives in the text and in the materials and then how to make them in a way that they could be adopted and slightly modified from semester to semester. So we've used some of those that most faculty are using like the intros from open stacks. The social problem is the continuity and change. The marriage and family, we're using the same one as a college of the canyons that they remixed and put together, which we like. And then we developed a couple of our own. So it's been fun. At Fresno State, it's been a little slower. I'm working now right now with a committee there. I'm a faculty fellow trying to work on getting their GE pathway, at least, and working on some upper division courses and trying to identify and where we can put ORER resources for that. Because there's different challenges, different perspectives as far as faculty being so eager to get involved. Great. Thank you, Vera. And Christine, do you have any questions for Vera about what she mentioned about the development that she has done as well, or vice versa? And Vera, could you explain a little bit more about what you mentioned something about an OER degree for sociology? Can you explain a bit for what you mean? Yeah. What we did is initially, when this OER movement started, my college was one of the first ones to get actively involved. Because in my area, there's a high level of poverty. And we knew that students weren't buying books anyway. And how they were getting them was illegal. So once that we adopted in sociology, everybody started asking, what is this? How did you do it? Why did the curriculum committee approve it? They started asking things like that. And once that kind of snowballed, it became this idea that that should be a philosophy of our institution. And it was driven by our faculty. So we're a little bit different because we are small. We're a progressive college. And I know in some other places, faculty have been kind of hesitating to get involved. But for us, it came from us. And so the buy-in was there. And we decided to go for the high enrollment degrees first. And for us, that was teacher education and psychology. Well, we didn't realize that once we did a teacher education that we weren't really doing the GE pathway. And once you have the GE pathway, the major courses, you don't need to invest as much because you don't have to put as much time into developing the whole degree again. So after we did those two courses, we worked on the sociology zero textbook cost degree. So you can basically do your whole GE pathway. And you could do the sociology courses for the major all at zero cost. And we also have a liberal arts degree that we're still finishing up. I think we have three more courses in there that we're finishing up. I think we're really fortunate. And that's kind of one of the things now I've been advocating at different institutions. If you can really get the GE pathway, then it also makes it easier for other people and majors and disciplines to get on board. Because then really they can just focus on what they know and develop those resources and materials. And then once you find out you start talking to other part-time full-time faculty, you'll find out that a lot of people created their stuff. And so it's just the idea of sharing. Even if they don't share externally, a lot of faculty will at least share internally. So within the campus it can be a zero cost degree even if they don't wanna make those things completely public. But hopefully over time they'll feel safe about it. And notice that they'll get more credit and more recognition for doing that than trying to keep things hidden in for a criteria. And what's the real purpose of that if you're an educator? Thank you, Vera. Did that answer your question or Christine or do you need a little bit more on it? That answer did, but I have some follow-up if I may. Yes, please. Well, there were two things. Vera mentioned that you created a whole textbook and you would not do that again and then you're doing it again. Are you being given incentives to develop certain textbooks or other materials at your institution? And what kind of incentive are you given any or is it just additional to your teaching load? Yes, so that is one thing. Faculty were on board on my campus right away, but like everyone, the hesitation was where do I find the time and do am I gonna get compensated for my time? And so because my college was eager to make this happen, institutionalize it, we looked immediately right away for funding. And so we are part of the Achieving the Dream Network and they had some OER funding. So we were one of the first grantees through that funding stream. And then also the chancellor's office had some textbook affordability dollars and those dollars were even better, more flexible because it wasn't about OER, it was about just reducing costs. So even at first, if we couldn't make courses OER, we at least had some professional development stipends to get faculty to research and look at just adopting lower cost materials. So that is like how we first made our savings for our students initially. But since then, because it did work, we noticed like giving faculty stipends either professional development stipends or a stipend to do the research or to do a course redesign or like me the author, even if you're remixing that still fits under authorship. We developed an ad hoc committee that decided different levels of stipends to basically compensate faculty for their time that they're putting into this work. We didn't wanna take advantage of anyone and also we just didn't wanna make it a free ride either. You're not getting paid to adopt OER. You're getting paid to do the research, develop the materials, do a course redesign, things like that. So yeah, so I mean, it was good because then faculty felt like they were getting compensated for giving up their summer or it almost felt like overload. Usually we're getting compensated that for a class, those kinds of things. So yes, we are compensated, but I also have a commercial publication experience and I have to be honest, my publication that I wrote for a GE class, it's not a high enrollment class, but it's a required course in area A. I have still yet to make the dollar amount that I have in a stipend for developing an OER textbook. And not that the money means a lot because the money I do get from that commercial book, I donate it back to the school, but it just, it made even me realize, we have this fantasy idea about commercial publishing and the recognition we'll get and those kinds of things. And I've actually had more opportunities and it's for, not just for my students, but for myself professionally and doing OER. The network is bigger, it's more supportive. Like I said, the stipends I get are really stipends that help me develop and be a better teacher in the classroom for my students. And then I've been able to get funding for my students to do different things in OER. So it's been a good experience for me. Christine, do you wanna tell us about what adopting OER was like for you and if you ran into any challenges? So really the main driver for me to Dr. Yaw was kind of dual, right? For the courses where there are textbooks already, the incentive was really, the motivation was really purely the cost to the students. There was nothing beyond that. And there's a ton of introduction to sociology textbooks and they're pretty much all the same at this point. So there's really no reason for me to turn to a commercial version when something could be made available for three, four of the students. So that was really the main driver. Again, for my intro to data science course, there was nothing that I could use. So that was really, I was gonna have to do something and create my own materials. The question was, what do I do? Do I try to get a contract with a publisher or do I go with an open system? And it fit more of my values and I would say to make it open and that people use those things as they want it. In addition, of course, introduction to data science, it's not really a course that lends itself to a textbook format. It's a lot more applied hands-on. So there's a bit of programming involved and you do a lot of using it, learning to use algorithms, et cetera. So a textbook format would not be my favorite, pedagogically speaking. So I went with a format of mini lectures, no longer than 15 minutes and then a bunch of tutorials, application, et cetera. So what I created, it's a sizable number of video tutorials and mini lectures on video about the different topics in the introduction to data science. And I have to say that when I started getting acquainted with OER, as soon as you get beyond introduction, the availability of materials drops dramatically. If you get to more specialized course or more advanced course, you're gonna have to switch a lot more to adoption from adoption to creation. That means you're gonna have to make up your own stuff. And then of course you get into discussions of incentives, which is why I asked Vera that question and also again, and time mainly, how do you, and what kind of materials do you create? Is it this pedagogically makes sense to go with a somewhat traditional textbook or should we try to do something different using technology when necessary? And to me, again, getting involved with OER is also a good opportunity to question the use of a textbook. Is it the best, is a textbook the best pedagogical tool you can use in your different classes? And maybe that's true for intro, but I wasn't true for my intro to data science. So that allowed me the freedoms to switch to very different materials. So that's pretty much what I'm at. And if I can ask Christine, were you compensated additionally beyond teaching the course? No, and that's the thing. So we're a lot less advanced than Vera's institution is. We're still, I mean, it always starts, right? With a couple of individuals who are very motivated to do things. But again, if you can't find a way of embedding this into the institution, it's just gonna be the work of individuals. And I think Vera was lucky because they were able to do that to start with a group of motivated people and take it to institutions. We are still behind in that, where we're just very slowly getting started into making it an institutional program as opposed to just the hard work of people who are willing to do things on their own, which is not sustainable on the long term, because you just make a few people work really hard, but nothing gets expanded at the level of institution, which we're so big, so it's not that easy. But yes, so we are in the very early steps of having an institutional program across the college with OER. So that's where we are. Yeah, thank you for that. And as Vera mentioned, in California, where I'm also located, we have been lucky that there's been a history of OER and our state university systems been very supportive of it all along. So, but what I am seeing in other states that are more in a catch up mode where they didn't have that history going back you know, 10 years or longer in California because the California State University System is the ones that created Merlot, which I think many of you are familiar with, particularly in the library. But we have found that they're actually catching up quite quickly. And I, so from once you get infected with the OER bug and you can get the legislature perhaps to provide some funding as well. And of course you do have Senator Durbin in Illinois, which is certainly on your side. And I certainly hope that makes a difference. Vera, I was gonna switch to the next page unless there were any questions on this page that you wanted to... I don't have any questions, but I think I have some ideas just to throw out regarding funding. Because like I said, my experience at West Hills-Lemore is way different than Fresno State. And one thing that I did find is that not just myself, but other faculty is a lot of times colleges and universities, they do have some, how we say, soft moneys that they fund different projects. And so I have in the past applied like to the colleges, social science at Fresno State to develop some of these innovative courses and do OER. I have to integrate other things. Like I had to do one that made it service learning. And the focus was service learning, but it was really about how to bring OER and service learning into a particular course. So I found that sometimes those moneys are there. At West Hills College-Lemore, there was a time we didn't have funding and we had an innovation award that was technology money. So myself and a colleague, we applied for individual grants for OER courses and we tied it to the use of technology and tablets in the classroom and all that. So sometimes your schools have those moneys, but recently now even us, we're going towards our equity dollars. So you can use equity to help support OER development, professional development and things like that. So it might be something that you could bring up and you can look at as an institution if you currently have funding right now. Thank you for that Vera. That's invaluable advice. Finding other initiatives, strategic initiatives on your campus such as student equity that align well with the values of OER can be one way to approach that. One other one that I just might throw in real quickly is there's organizations around the country usually educationally aligned, but it could be libraries, could be museums that are looking for catalysts around educational innovation. And so they might not say open education as part of the proposals that go out or the call for proposals, but we've had a lot of colleges that have been successful applying for those moneys to use open education for some kind of an innovation. So there's other ways, there's those moneys as well. And I'm gonna see, I don't see anything in the chat window about that at the moment, but we did have a question Vera from Bill Hemig who asked you if you could explain a little bit more regarding the statement about getting your students involved. Yeah, I love OER. OER was maybe realized how much academic freedom we could have in courses and materials. A lot of times, I mean, when I first started to, I taught like how I was taught. So I kind of copied, lectured. I followed the course outline in the book to the T. I made sure I went through every page when I was rushing through things. And once I started to looking at adopting OER and I had the ability to change, remix the textbook and the materials, it just made me change my paradigm even about how I saw textbooks and the role of them and my role in the classroom. And one thing I always noticed is something that I struggled with. I'm Hispanic, I'm Mexican-American. And a lot of times as I was going through my educational experiences, I could not always relate to the examples. So even though there were examples in the book or the teacher used these examples, they were not my life experience. So I understood what was being said, but I could not figure out how that applied to me or I couldn't draw my own personal experience to truly comprehend what the instruction was. And so when I realized I had this opportunity with OER to make the changes that I needed without worrying about copyright or things like that or making sure that I used every page of the book because now I decided what pages of the book were most important. It helped me just open up in the classroom now when I give students an assignment to read, instead of coming back and going through what they read, I say what was hard. So I don't even know, and this is hard for some teachers that are like I can't do what you do, but it fits for me. I just go what was hard. And then we make a list and I'll have some plan that day so I don't go through that list that day, but I take that list back. So for the next three, four weeks, I work on what was hard out of the reading. I'm not just lecturing over what they read. And then I have them help me create some of the materials. So I'll have an idea, like today we're gonna talk about one of ones I have right now in my education class is we were talking about a content. What is important content to include in a lesson? But instead of me coming up with it, I just said, all right, so television and what in television might work with content in lessons? What does television teach kids? And the students brought back different shows and segments and it just became a more interactive experience than me getting up there and saying, here's the rules, here's what we have to learn. There is some of that with terminology and theories, but it really just opened up my pedagogy experience and how I teach and things and how students are learning and they're not afraid to bring things now and suggest things to me. So yeah, thumbs it up a little bit. Wonderful. So Christine, do you wanna tell us about how your teaching has changed with OER as well? I would not necessarily say that my teaching has changed. I mean, I've used textbooks and we have certain course objectives that we all have to cover, generically speaking, but within these broad confines, I've always pretty much do whatever the heck I wanted. So that never really stopped me and if there's something in a text I didn't like, I would put some of my own materials online for them to review. And my own teaching styles always gotta be more dialogue and as we move from concept to theories, et cetera, to introduce examples and have people respond to those examples or provide them, provide me with the examples that they are thinking about relates. So I've always had an interactive teaching style and that has really changed. I mean, one thing that made it way easier to switch to OER is that I never liked textbooks. And it's probably because I come from an educational system which is not the American higher ed system that never used textbook. I had to come to this country to discover what textbooks were for higher ed. We never done that. So, and when I look at those things, I really don't like them. I don't think they're interesting. This is my field and they bore me to tears. And I can't imagine being a student having to go through that. It's terrible. But I've tried doing without and the students were kind of lost. So I said, okay, if I have to have one, at least it's gotta be free because I don't want anybody to pay for something that bore me and is not probably all that interesting to them. So again, I've always been kind of outside of those boundaries marked by the textbook. And again, I've always shifted the order of chapters and topics when I, but it didn't make sense to me to do one thing after another. So again, I've always had the flexibility to do that because I've been lucky to be in an environment that allowed me to do that. But again, so that made my switch pretty easy. And when I got to switch to my, creating my own materials, that it was even better for me because I could really do what I wanted to do this time. Great. So you were waiting for OER to, people could understand what you were already doing. That's wonderful. So, and Christine, I'll ask you this first. Have you done any assessment with your students who are in your OER classes? Have you looked at how they're doing compared to how maybe students did in the past with traditional textbooks? I have roughly not in a systematic way. And I can say that my, I mean, it hasn't had an impact on the success rate, meaning it's not worse. It's pretty much the same because there are so many other factors that affect student success rates other than the textbook and which textbook we're using. And again, I did not expect a lot of changes because as I said, if you look at the introduction to sociology text, they're pretty much all the same at this point. Whether you use, you know, whichever McGraw-Hill or Pearson or whatever, they're, they're, they covered the same content roughly. So when I made the switch, I did not expect any significant difference. Again, the only difference I was really looking for was the cost to the students. When I did put my intro to data science class, then I had nothing to evaluate against because there is really no class like that around. I did, I did the research before creating my course and there was nothing comparable. So I'm going with what I have and so far it's been pretty successful and they can obviously in that class, they function without a textbook. All they have are my little tutorials and mini lectures and it works just fine doing things hands-on. So again, I would say it, it's pretty much the same as it's always been because again, there's, there are too many external factors for the kind of population we have that have an impact on success rate. All right, great. Thank you for sharing that. And Vera, do you, would you like to respond to that one? Sure, yeah. I also though, I forgot to add some stuff about the students getting involved. Since I'm not the only one at my college, but since we've kind of gone to OER and we have students being more active and helping us develop materials. So we'll pilot things. We revise a lot of questions and applications so that they're easier to translate from semester to semester but are open enough that it allows different student experiences whether they be cultural or linguistic or whatever to be relevant to them. And so some of our students have actually gone on and presented at other conferences. But to me, the most value that they've had is they've actually gone on to even present to our own faculty or faculty in our region to talk about what it was like taking an OER course, some of the things they liked about it, some of the challenges they had. So I think in that we've really given them a voice to talk about their education and where their needs are still not being met. So we have video testimonials as well that students have voluntarily done for us. And most recently, Eunice knows about this, we have two student advocates now that the Michelson Foundation is helping to support. And so they're doing some research with some other students throughout the state compiling like a instructional guide for students, how students can be better advocates for OER on their campus. So we're really proud of that because of what we've been able to do, it's really empowered our students and made them more engaged and involved in not just taking classes, but helping them to understand how they're designed and making some requests, empowering them to make requests about what they want in courses to have quality education. As far as like formal assessments, me and one of my colleagues in psychology, we were the first two to first adopt and use OER the longest on campus. So we embedded some course reflections that were closed and opened in our questions. And we also asked students to do testimonials. And we use that data and published a report after the first year. And like Christine said, what we found is there's no difference in success rates. We have about the same success rates we did with the commercial textbooks. But looking at the institutional data, what we found changed was retention rates. So students staying in courses because the, and it was particularly because they had materials and for us technology. We changed our lab hours and availability for wifi because we're in a very rural area. So we did that all at the same time. And so students were able to have materials, access them and keep up in courses. So the retention rates were better and the persistent rates so that they stayed enrolled from semester to semester also improve. And that was because of OER and access to resources. So yeah, that's a little summary of our assessments. Thank you, thank you for that Vera. And actually Liz just put something in the chat window about the story that we reported on from one of Vera's students actually. We just published it today for Open Ed Week. So check that out when you get a chance. So, Christine, tell me what would you like to change maybe? Or what changes might you make if you have the time or perhaps some compensation? What are sort of those things you've been saving up but that you might continue to improve your OER courses in some way? Well, first of all, I would want time more than money. I mean, if I were given the choice, you know, do you want a stipend or you want a one course release to do some work, I would take the time any time. Because to me, that's a resource that's much more valuable than money in that case. What I would do probably is I would start writing stuff and I'm gonna have the chance to do that soon with another course, but I would stop writing stuff for the upper division courses and be away from the intro course. And at the summit, you know, I asked the open-stack person, when's the next intro to social edition coming out? Because it's the second, its copyright is 2015 and well, there's a few things that have changed in our society since 2015. And sadly, she said there's no plan for a third edition in open stats. So that kind of notch me in the direction of fine, I'm gonna have to do something myself with this. But again, what I'm looking for right now is more technology tools to help me put content out there. Because again, you're not gonna get me excited about writing a textbook. I don't wanna do that, it's boring. I wanna do other things that more fit what we know now out of the science of learning. And that may mean, you know, adaptive technology, that may mean a whole bunch of things that have to do with technology and how we do things. And so, what exactly really about OER is the chance to get involved in pedagogical innovation at the same time. And get away from the traditional things that we've been doing. And I don't think it worked that well anymore. Great, thank you for that. If you're rude, would you like to jump in on that? I wanna- I just wanna- Give me the ball. Just before you start, Vera, I just wanna mention we are scheduled to finish in about four minutes. I'm happy to go over the time if Christine and Vera are, but just letting you know that we scheduled this originally for 45. So please go ahead, Vera. Oh, no, I was just saying, I'm excited. I like doing everything other than I've done. I'm always gonna go back in course redesign. So, you know, like I went through each course systematically is what we needed in the degree. And now that I'm finishing the elective, the last elective, the original work for that book, I'll go back to social on remixed. What are some applications that I saw worked or didn't work and revise those? So for me, that's one thing I do like about it. It's kind of a living process. And so I can constantly, it's never done, you know, but that's what excites me because I'm not one of those teachers who, you know, I have my set of material and every semester I wanna do the same thing. I'm not one of those. There are people that do that and I respect that, but I would get bored. So I'm just excited now to go back. I'm gonna look at upper division at Fresno State as well. Now that the lower division, you know, if I teach those there, those are done, but I would like to look at my upper division deviance course, pop culture I've already moved to OER. So, yeah, definitely. Just more of the same, Una. And if I may add something, Una? Please do, Christine. Another thing is that in addition to my work, I think in our situation, what needs to work now is work at the institution level. There's very little institutional working done right now and I think a lot of my colleagues either don't know about OER or haven't thought about OER or maybe perfectly fine, whatever it is they are doing. And so the idea is we need to try to find a way to kind of get over that resistance that we may have and we've had already from some of our colleagues who are perfectly happy, they like that bit of commercial textbooks. They get a lot of belts and whistles that come with that that they can plug in and put their own courses and it's work for them. And we know that the commercial sales rep are pushing not just the textbooks anymore, but more the online environment that comes with a textbook because once you've embedded everything about your course in that environmental system, well then it's like football California, you can never really leave or the cost of living in terms of the modifications to your courses are so high that really, who wants to do that? So there's been a pretty aggressive push not for the textbook so much, but for the online environment where all the bells and whistles live and so your students in addition to buying a textbook have to buy a code to gain access to whatever virtual environment that the publishers now have. And so those are barriers we're gonna have to push against in order to convince more of our colleagues to do that and kind of embed in the institution practices that are more OAR friendly. And it may not be a whole revolutionizing of the entire curriculum, I think some of it's gonna have to be done step-by-step with colleagues in the natural sciences who started writing their own lab manuals. So not the entire course, but a bit of the course than the natural sciences of the lab component in the lab, not the courses. And so they create their own lab manuals and basically they sell them at printing costs for $5 or something like that. So maybe that's what we are getting people step-by-step, little by little to get rethinking about what they're doing rather than say you have to switch today through OAR and abandon everything you've done and reconstruct your courses from scratch. That's not a reasonable request to make up for. So for us at COD, the work now has to take place at the institution level. Right, thank you for that. And I'll let you come in, Vera, if you wanna finish off. But I wanna just speak, there was a question about ancillaries. And I think, Christine, you were talking about those just now and the need for those additionally. And we had a question from Edith, Edith Schwann and she said that she teaches online and she asked, do you create tests from the OAR materials or do you grade on interaction with students? I create tests, my faculty create tests, we share them once we have them. So we do, I've learned that especially this generation, they grew up around tests. I don't like tests, I had stopped them at one point and that whole academic year, I had a bunch of students just complain about how they didn't like, I was just assessing their writing and their presentations and projects. So I brought them back in. I don't weight them as high as probably some other instructors, but that way, at least I'm still teaching in the paradigm they're used to because they are students, they come to class kind of shocked that my class does not run like all their other classes. So I also have to find that middle ground because I don't wanna scare them away that they have to interact. So yeah, I create tests, we create tests, we share them, we have not shared them publicly because that's still an issue. How do you share a test and the answers out on the web without students having access? And typically me like, I don't care, I want the students to learn the material, I don't care if they have the questions because to me you want them to learn certain information but there are some faculty who don't want students to have access to answers. So I've respected that at my institution, I don't share tests. We will have someone will email us individually and we'll ask depending on who had the most input into it to make sure that we're okay sharing it. And we've shared with a few people but kind of behind closed doors only because I don't want to offend anybody who's contributed to the work and doesn't want their work shared publicly out there. And if I may, that's funny because I've had the exact same comment made to me that Vera made that she was told her course is different from other courses and I've had that same comment and I've shared that opinion on tests. I have some because I have to but they're weighted very lightly compared to what I consider to be a more critical fitting type of assignments and I have to do all my trials again and even replace the traditional papers that you would find in pretty much any sociology course or do other things. And yes, it gets the students a bit of balance when you ask them to work in a different format than what they're used to. So I've had students tell me, look, every other class is tested in a paper. Why can't you do that? And my answer was, well, if every all your other classes are like that, well, at least take one that isn't. That's gonna be at least, you don't need yet another one that has tests and traditional papers. So there's something different here. So I've had some and the question of, you know, your confidentiality of secrecy, whichever is a question and I don't wanna care about it. So yes, see if the questions go out and the test questions go out. Yeah, and we've been having some comments from our audience here saying that people and I assume here, they mean faculty are hooked on tests because they do not require the real work of creating a paper to show your work of really researching and learning the topic. So one viewpoint there. And I think, Christine, you were alluding to not even maybe a paper but some other kind of project that a student might undertake to demonstrate their learning. Yes, and again, depending on what's appropriate, I've gotten hooked myself on concept mapping, which is a non-linear way of conceptualizing things and using connecting sociological concepts to real-world materials. I've leveraged and we're fortunate to have a really great library so I can leverage the resources there. So they have access to the canopy catalog, for instance, which is a ton of documentaries that they can watch that my students can watch and then create concept maps that connect the content to the sociological concept that I want them to relate to. I have a whole bunch of different projects. I have them read, you know, an ethnography and extracts information out of there. All sorts of ways just to make it interesting for yourself and for your students outside of the beaten path of the test and the papers, which is so tedious. Wonderful. So I'm gonna ask you the final question to both of you and Vera, I'll start with you. Do you have any words of wisdom for faculty out there who are very early in their OER adoption? You're not alone, that's my words. You are not alone. I think there's so much support out there and regardless of what your discipline is, if you're interested in going OER, if you have institutional barriers, there are people who have gone through them, who are still going through them. If you're having trouble identifying materials or how to create or remix, that's one thing I do like about CCC OER is I love the network and the love there because of the movement. I don't know why it draws these kinds of people, but it does and I'm happy about it is that we care about each other, we support each other and we share what we have as long as we can and we don't offend anybody, we're not violating any rules, the information's out there, the support's out there. So reach out to people, especially on the listserv and you'll get responses back and when people don't know, people even go out the extra mile and help you. If they don't know, sometimes they'll go and ask two or three other networks that they have and then they find the information for you. So yeah, that's my advice is you're not alone. Don't give up, if you love it, if you're not sure, do it anyway, you'll love it in the end. Thanks Vera. And Christine, any? Well, I would second that, but I would add also, start small, don't think you have to revolutionize your entire teaching load. You know, make one thing first, right? Is there one part of your course that you think isn't working as well as you would want to? Change that little bit and switch that part to OER and then another and another and another. You don't have to think your course is oh my gosh, this is this mountain of work and now I have to do. Start small and see what happens. Change one lab, change one assignment, change one unit of work out of your course and then look for resources that might help you reconstruct that one assignment, that one unit of work and take it from there. Don't think you have to start with the big stuff first that sounds so, you know, overwhelming that you might just want to throw your hands in the air and say that I'm not going to do that. Start small, then you can always expand it. Wonderful, wonderful advice from both of you and Vera and Christine, are you open to receiving emails from people who might want to do follow up conversations with you? Sure. Okay, I would ask you if it's possible you could type your email address into the chat window for folks and if not, I can share that as part of the slides. I'll add it to the slides. And just as we're finishing up here and please if people have other questions, put those in the chat window. Vera mentioned joining the community email list. There's a link right here if you'd like to do that. You can go to our website, cccoer.org under get involved and there's a community email link and a button to hit to join and we have webinars every month during the school year. During Open Ed Week we have five of them, which is fun. So we have administration of justice, we've got English on Wednesday, we've got philosophy on Thursday and Friday we have math. So come back if those are of interest to you and we do record all of these. So they should be available for you as well through that and you can see we have other webinars scheduled for April, May and June and we'd love to have you join us. And so thank you so much, Christine and Vera for putting your email address in there. And do we have any other questions for these amazing educators? Yes, a huge round of applause for Vera and Christine and the hard work that they're doing to make their students successful. And I think at this point if there's no other questions and Vera or Christine, you don't have any last comments. I'd say that all my wisdom has been expanded. We got it all out of you, did we Christine? Well thanks so much to both of you and I will turn off the recorder and we'll be here for a few more minutes if people have questions they wanna enter in the chat window. And thanks to all of you who joined us today as well, some wonderful comments and questions.