 All right. Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are. This is Una Daly from the Community College Consortium for OER. And welcome to our first fall webinar in our Back to Basic series. And we're really thrilled to have Karen and Bill here today to talk about the OER projects that they're working on at their colleges. Both of their projects are in the one to two year span. So this is a wonderful opportunity to hear from folks who are leading successful projects that aren't five to 10 years old. Which we love to hear about those as well, but it's wonderful to hear about the ones that have gotten started recently. We hope that that's really helpful for those of you out there who are starting initiatives of your own. Our agenda today will meet Karen and Bill here in just a moment. And then I'll give you a very brief overview of the Community College Consortium for OER. And then we'll jump right into the presentations. Bill Hemig will be speaking about the initiative at Fox County and Karen Picula will be speaking about OER learning circles at Central Lakes. All right, let's go ahead and meet our presenters here. And Karen, I'm going to start with you. She is a psychology instructor at Central Lakes College and she's also the Minnesota State OER coordinator. Hi, nice to meet all of you. Yes, as Luna said, I am a psychology teacher at Central Lakes College. I also am the OER coordinator for Minnesota State. And I'm an OER coordinator for a separate NGAPA grant that we have here at Central Lakes College as well to work with our school college and the school partners in adopting OER resources. So nice to meet you. And so nice to be here today. Thank you, Karen. And next I'd like to turn it over to Bill Hemig, excuse me, who is the Dean of Learning Resources and Online Learning at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania. Bill, I think you might still be on mute. Let me. Sorry, forgot to unmute there for a second. Hi everybody. Yes, as, as Luna said, Bucks County is in southeastern Pennsylvania just north of Philadelphia. The college's FTE is about in somewhere in the six thousands right now, I think we have three physical campus asses and a very robust virtual campus. Bucks County has a lot of resources, which is the department I head consists of the library, Bucks Online, the academic success center across disciplinary multimedia lab and also the college's center for personal and professional development. So we're pretty much one stop shopping for academic support for students and faculty. So I once again want to thank Bill and Karen, who as you can hear are very busy people running not only projects within their college but also doing some statewide work. And once again, I believe I introduced myself but I'm in a daily the director of the Community College Consortium for OER and we're part of the, the global international organization the open ed consortium. All right. Just quickly, the Community College Consortium for OER our mission is to expand awareness and access to high quality OER we were founded just about 10 years ago. So we're just about to celebrate our decade of existence and our mission really remains very similar to when we were started although of course things have changed a great deal in the open education space in the last 10 years. Different technology, different techniques, different emerging trends. But we're all about supporting faculty choice and development and that's what these webinars are about is providing faculty and other staff at the colleges with information about what are best practices and what are the emerging trends that they should be looking for in open education. And ultimately at the heart of it all it's about proving improving student success and making sure that our students have access to the materials that they need and that they can progress through their studies in a timely manner. We are in 25 states. Yeah, we have members official members in 25 states in the US and also up in British Columbia. I realize many of you may be from states besides the ones on here, and we welcome you. Our webinars are open to all open educators and those who are interested in it. And I have to say our newest members are in Colorado that's front range Community College and I need to add a little flag for them. I didn't get a chance to do that before today's webinar and the other colleges Mercer College in New Jersey which is also another new state for us. So we're very excited to have those new members. Hi, this is Annie Fox. I'm from Front Range and I'm glad to be here. Well, wonderful. Welcome, Annie. That's great. So at this point, I just want to mention a few things you might be thinking about as as you're listening to our expert speakers talk about their initiatives. And this is just kind of an overview but in talking with Bill and Karen a few days ago. I was just reminded of the importance of identifying all the stakeholders at your college and getting them involved in OER and this is, you know, of course faculty but it involves librarians instructional designers, students, student counselors, accessibility experts. Establishing best practices for usability accessibility and open licensing at the beginning is very helpful so that you go in with the right set of best practices and don't have to go back and revisit those which which can mean some rework if it isn't done up front. Karen is going to speak about her learning circles at at Central Lakes, which is a wonderful way to engage faculty. And then of course course review by other faculty as faculty are developing their OER courses having other faculty review it is so important to the long term adoption by by additional faculty so that this OER can really spread throughout your college. And finally student feedback and Bill is going to share with us a wonderful survey that he did with his students this last spring, who've been participating in OER courses, getting that feedback from them and making those changes as needed to continue to make successful progress forward. So, without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to the experts and starting with Bill Hemig. Okay, just take control of the controls here. Okay, you should have control now Bill. Excellent. So I do. Okay. Hello again. As I'm going to say this is going to be pretty much an administrator's eye view of the OER initiative at Bucks. Bucks has an annual program in which special projects we call them strategic initiatives that further the mission of the college are proposed by faculty and staff and selected for funding by either the college itself or by the college foundation. The OER strategic initiative proposal was created by our director of Bucks online in collaboration with our instructional designer who is a faculty member. I volunteered to be the project manager. The proposal was endorsed by the deans and provost and was accepted by the college for two years of funding. And I should add when we refer to open educational resources we stretch the definition to include electronic library resources which obviously cost us a fortune but are free to our students. The project was to include the project managers, two faculty developers per course, an instructional design consultant, a universal design for learning consultant, and one librarian per course. Our focus was on recreating the entire course, not just on extracting the commercial textbook and replacing it with a free one. Open means accessible in all its meanings and so we set out to rebuild the course templates with constant consideration of best practices and instructional design, information and media literacy, and universal design for learning. All of our full-time library faculty have liaison responsibilities to the academic departments and so those relationships were already in place. The librarians only had to familiarize themselves with the OER landscape. The total budget was $50,000, 80% of it for personnel costs. The first phase began in August of 2016, but there was some behind-the-scenes work done before then including the hiring of the two consultants, faculty participant selection, and the planning of a day-long OER universal design and quality-matters kickoff workshop for the Phase 1 participants, which was then repeated for the Phase 2 participants. Here's our original timeline. The entire project will take two years. Ten courses were ultimately to be transitioned to OER. We would work in stages beginning with three courses and only the online sections of those courses. I should interject here that we use Canvas as our LMS that will become important shortly. Those sections would run this past spring and while they're running, the teams would work on adapting those sections to face-to-face and hybrid modalities and on transitioning the Phase 2 courses. Per the year 2 timeline, the Phase 2 online course sections would be running this current fall semester and at the same time would be adapted to the other modalities. An important aspect not outlined here was a requirement that the faculty course developers would present drafts of their templates to their department or area colleagues and solicit feedback, thereby getting them comfortable with the project and entertaining the possibility of later adapting the templates themselves. Ultimately, all of the course templates will be available in Canvas Commons, which is basically a big OER repository for other faculty to adapt for their own use if they choose to, but only if they choose to. No one will be required to give up their textbook. So here are the Phase 1 courses which created their templates last fall and ran their recreated sections this past spring. Phase 2 courses which worked on their templates this past spring and are running their sections now. Anybody with attention for detail will notice that we planned for 7 courses in Phase 2 and ended up with 5, more on that in a minute. As with any project, we needed to adapt to unforeseen situations. As we recruited faculty for Phase 2, some of them were insistent on not partnering with another course instructor, so we allowed that. So we do have a few teams that only have one course developer rather than two. Another thing do mostly to scheduling necessities. Some of the faculty could not be assigned to online sections for the semester when they were to first run their revised courses, and so they had to think about face-to-face from the beginning. We found that reconceiving an e-learning template for face-to-face wasn't nearly as big a deal as we anticipated, but it was still wise to start with e-learning because it put everything right in there. Thirdly, we only managed to recruit faculty for 5 additional courses in time to start Phase 2, but some other faculty came forward shortly thereafter as the result of a professional development offering that we did in January that got some people jazzed up. And so we formed an unintended Phase 3 that's creating their templates now to run in spring of 18, which is still within our 2-year budget. And because some of the Phase 2 and 3 teams have only one course developer, we were actually able to add an 11th course and stay within our budget. So we're still on track to finish on time, but the timeline got tweaked in several places as timelines will. A few big questions that arose as things progressed that we didn't necessarily work into our original proposal. One, how will the course templates be shared with other interested faculty? We devised a procedure through which the faculty would upload their completed templates to Canvas Commons with a Creative Commons license and with information to make them easy to search for. Secondly, how will OER sections be identified? We're not fully satisfied with our solution to this one yet, but right now we are running reports on which course sections did not place textbook orders with the bookstore. And then for those sections, putting a note in the student information system that displays the text, no textbook purchase required. We're thinking of ways to raise awareness of the note in students and advisors. We were actually hoping to get the Z inserted into the section number, but we were told that we'd run out of characters in our section numbers and couldn't do it. Thirdly, how will the course templates be maintained and updated? That is still an open question. Should it be the area coordinators? Should the template creators be responsible for passing the torch when the time comes? Should we find funding to pay faculty to revise them on a set schedule? We're tossing around ideas and I'm open to yours if you have any. At the end of the last spring semester, we surveyed the students in the Phase 1 sections and were quite encouraged by the responses, which I will summarize. The vast majority of students accessed the OER on a standard computer rather than on a tablet or a phone, less than a quarter of them printed it out. More than half said that they used the OER more than they used a commercial textbook, which probably stems from the fact that not all the students would have bought the commercial textbook in the first place, but more on that in a little bit. Almost everyone found the material to be presented on their level and the quality to be the same or better than the text in their other classes. Three-quarters of them claimed that they would try to register for sections with no textbook costs in the future. About 45% found the OER easier to use in class, 65% found them easier for reading and studying, and 55% found them easier to use in preparing for tests and speeches. 57% found them easier for taking notes, but just 48% found them easier for highlighting. And here's some qualitative data. We also asked for comments. I was really impressed with the number of students who remarked on the resources accessibility and versatility in addition to the cost savings. And I think that spoke very positively to the way we structured the project in the first place because accessibility and versatility was very important to us. And of course, free, free, free. Lastly, we attempted to determine the cost savings of the 17 transition course sections that ran last spring. I came at this figure by averaging the bookstore price and the typical price for a used copy and multiplied that figure by the number of students. What I didn't consider was the number of students who would not have purchased the textbook in the first place. As we were preparing the strategic initiative proposal, we conducted a student survey that revealed that about 50% of our students don't buy the textbook. So taking that into account drops the estimate by half. We've been going with the higher figure, but it's really a judgment call, which of the two is more realistic. And that in a nutshell is our project. I think there's going to be time for questions and you can also email me separately. Thanks. Thank you so much, Bill. What an amazing set of resources and plans for our audience out here. And I think we're going to take a look at the chat window and see if we have some questions. All right. So let's start at the top here. So Kelvin is asking, Bill, can you share your sustainability plan, including your estimated year to year budget? Oh, wow, this is a tough one. It is a tough one. Well, we're only funded for this two year project after that. We have looked into maybe getting some grant funding if we want to go for example into doing, you know, a complete OER program, which might be the next step for us. But the sustainability plan at this point is just our course developers staying in contact with their colleagues in their departments and their discipline areas and getting them on board, which has already happened of the three courses that ran last spring. And at least two of them have recruited additional faculty and they're running more sections with more faculty with those templates this semester. But that's kind of where we're headed at this point is just kind of spreading the word. Yeah, so good questions, Kelvin. You might be just jumping a little bit ahead, but let's see, we've got one more from Kelvin here. The original content content our faculty building for the project compared to curated content. Excellent question. So far for us, none. It's all curated content at this point. Wonderful. Thanks for that bill. I'm having a little bit of trouble with my button here. I think if you want to go ahead and give me control back that would that would help. I did. Okay, thanks. Um, I had three people ask about the recording and the PowerPoint and yes, these all do get posted back on our website. And we will be sending out to the list of attendees where you can find that if you don't know where to go on our website to get the archives. They're on our homepage, but just in case we'll send those directly. All right, we had another question from Kelvin. Will courses be 100% OER based and not include access codes to publisher LMS content such as Pearson's my math lab? Um, In my personal view, I certainly hope so, but that that depends on on the faculty, I think. This, especially for some courses there are faculty who are at least at this point are are not going to give up their, their, you know, their commercial textbooks. Okay, and we had a question from Shagun. Has there been a shift in your enrollment in these sections, these OER sections vis-a-vis the traditional ones? There's something that we should be keeping an eye on this semester and we probably will very shortly because we we sort of settle in after three weeks and we're about at that point now. So I think we'll start, we'll just start looking at that for the earliest courses. Right. And we have a question here that two people want the answer to is, were there any incentives for faculty to develop the OER courses stipends or release time? The faculty in these projects, yes, each, each faculty course developer got a stipend of $1,000 for, for about one year's work. Okay. All right, we have another question here from Shagun. How many faculty with a discipline that now has an OER course have, have then adopted their colleagues shell? She's asking about OER adoption. Yeah, I, and as I said, that's happened. I, I know for a fact with a couple of the phase one course is the effective speaking class. I know there are at least two other faculty member who are not part of the project who adopted the template and are running their sections with the template this semester. And I believe for our intro to site class, there are a couple full time faculty, again, not part of the original project who have adopted the template. And I actually, and I think they're also making the template an option for adjunct faculty. Okay, wonderful. Glad to, glad to hear that adoptions are growing. We had a question. How did you coordinate the various contributors on the team to support each course? Well, I mean, we started one of the most difficult things about this is getting a whole bunch of people, you know, faculty with busy schedules, face to face for meetings on a regular basis. So we did most of it virtually. We had a project canvas space in the LMS where they were able to communicate with each other and look at the templates and all of that. I found that the the opening day lawful day workshop was good for getting everybody together. The, the universe, the instructional design consultant was a former instructional designer here so she was already familiar with all the faculty and the project the universal design for learning consultant was from outside the, the, the institution, but we were lucky enough to get her in for the opening workshop and that that really sort of made it, it was very important for making a team out of everybody from the very beginning. After that, it was mostly virtual communication. Great. Thank you for sharing that that's really important. And we had a question here from Chris, how are librarians compensated for their involvement, or were the extra activities assumed as part of their regular job duties. It was assumed as part of their regular job duties because they already have liaison responsibilities to the, to the academic areas. Okay. And we had another question here from Kelvin faculty who are should faculty receive the same stipend the $1,000 for curating content. I'm not sure I understand the question. Yeah, I'm not absolutely sure what Kelvin meant here either, but I know that Karen is going to talk to us about sort of different pathways, you know, reviewing OER, then actually adopting it into your course, and then finally creating it and that there tend to be different pathways and so sometimes colleges recognize that with a different stipend structure. I mean, if it helps at all, we did have built into the budget some funding in case faculty couldn't find the resources that they needed and had to create their own but that so far that hasn't happened and we haven't used funding for that purpose. Okay, thank you. And this is going to be our last question for now before we switch to Karen we'll have some more time at the end. And the final one is from Shagun again, were the courses peer reviewed or tested by others within the discipline. Yes, partially because we wanted the the the instructor the course designers to get feedback from their peers and also because we wanted to get the peers on board with the project. We made it a part of the timeline of the project for the course designers to present their template drafts to their colleagues in a department or area meeting at a specific point in the process. So they could both talk up the project and and get some very important feedback from their peers and it did affect the final outcome of the template designs. That is such a key area. It's such a key point is to get other faculty involved. So, thanks for the question and the answer. And now I'm going to go ahead and switch this over to Karen Picula, who is going to talk to us about the learning circle support that she runs at Central Lakes College. And let me give you a control, Karen. Karen, we're not hearing you. You might be on mute. Can you hear me now? We can hear you now. Okay, I'm going to actually take my video away while I show my slides so that you can concentrate on that. And then I will be back visually for a question and answer session. Okay. Perfect. I want to start with telling you a little bit about Central Lakes College. We have two campuses. One of our campuses is located at Brainerd, Minnesota, and one is located in Staples, Minnesota. Our Brainerd campus houses most of our liberal arts courses for our AA degree, and our Staples campus is the home to most of our tech programs for our AAS degrees and our diplomas and our certificates. Central Lakes College serves about 6,000 students annually, and many of our students are really struggling financially, which is what prompted this part of the reason for our OER initiative, with about 35% of those 6,000 students being Pell Grant eligible. I think what I'll do is I'll start with just a little bit of a history of how we started our initiative at Central Lakes College. In January of 2014, our then dean of technology and our librarian, Dave Bissonette, invited David Ernst from the University of Minnesota, who's the creator and manager of the Open Textbook Library, and Todd Digby, who was then the OER representative from our system office, and Gary Hunter, he's our system legal advisor, to give a presentation to our faculty on OERs for our duty day. This presentation and the support from administration and the drive from our librarian led to the creation of our OER committee. And as a result of this presentation, many of our faculty came very interested in the concept of OERs. And then as a result, participated in a system-wide offered textbook review, where faculty were given a $200 stipend to review a textbook from the Open Text Library, that's how it's at the University of Minnesota. Some of our faculty have adopted OERs as a result of those reviews. But what we also discovered was that many of our faculty were already using free or self-created materials for their courses. So we decided to move ahead as an institution and we formalized an OER adoption initiative at Central Lakes College. What we really needed though was money. Money to pay our faculty and a way to support our faculty in OER adoption. We decided to apply for one of the $25,000 grants that our system office was offering for OER adoption. And a huge part of that application process was the creation of faculty-facilitated OER learning circles. We applied for the grant. We were awarded the grant. And in 2016, the spring of 2016, we implemented our first learning circles at Central Lakes College. One critical piece of successfully launching an OER initiative is the creation of a campus OER committee. It has to be a committee that represents all of the stakeholders involved in an OER initiative. The Central Lakes OER committee members include our librarian, many of our faculty, bookstore and IT representation, administration, and more recently, we've added student representation. Two of our principal reasons for initiating an OER review were to save our students money, save our college money, save our college and the school's partners money. And then we had two other reasons that were not economically driven necessarily, but to increase our student success rates and to also nurture academic freedom. The learning circle process really has its roots in the things that I learned from novice teachers when I was interviewing them for my dissertation for my doctoral degree. I learned from them that there were four main things that were, that the teachers in training programs did not allow for that ended up actually becoming barriers to these teachers for their success as new teachers. And those four things were that they did not have enough time to learn or do their work. They didn't have enough time to apply what they were learning at the time that they were learning it. They had no time to collaborate with other learners, mentors or experts in their fields. And they didn't have enough support services, support from administration, from peers, or help with organization, pedagogy, or time saving measures. So I was determined to create learning circles based on the experiential learning model and provide those needed components that had served as barriers to teachers and learners and their success. And this is the basic structure of all three pathways for our learning circles. Faculty attend at least 80% of the scheduled learning circle meetings, and these have been face to face meetings. Faculty create, submit, and update weekly work plans and journals. And this is in a D2L course room that I've created as a support course room for the faculty. Faculty present their final work results to college at a final showcase learning circle where they showcase their work. Most importantly, faculty were paid stipends. For the OER textbook reviews, if they did them through the system office, they received a $200 stipend. If they did them through our learning circles, they received a $500 stipend. And then for both course redesign and the authoring pathway, our faculty received a $1,500 stipend. This was for attending the 10 learning circles consecutive weeks and for either creating and redesigning a new course in a D2L course shell or with a hard copy portfolio or for authoring new works. And we also created an application process as an avenue for selecting faculty for participating in our learning circles. These are the criteria that we came up with to screen our applicants and select our participants. So we looked at courses with high PSEO and CIS enrollment. We looked for courses that we needed to complete a Z degree. We looked for courses that were scheduled to be taught in the next academic year. We looked for courses with high enrollment. We focused on faculty that were new to our OER learning circles. We looked at applications that were sustaining current OER courses. This applied when we had our second, third, and fourth learning circles. If we had faculty who had already designed a course and needed to make changes or update materials, we want to also be able to sustain those things that we are working on. And then we looked also at the potential money saved in the next academic school year for both our students for our high schools and for our own college. In the spring of 2016, we held our first learning circles. We have held two semester long learning circles, which run for 10 consecutive weeks, meeting for three hours, the same day and time each week. We've run two summer sessions, which run for five consecutive weeks, ending just before the 4th of July, which is very important to our faculty. Using the same day and time format with each learning circle as we use for our 10-week sessions, they meet three face-to-face hours, and then they commit to at least one hour of independent work outside of the learning circles. And for their weekly plans that they have to edit and submit each week, they have to include their plan for that hour of independent work. And you can see here that we've had pretty good participation. I want to really highlight the fact that these are collaborative learning circles, and this is based on what I learned from interviewing those new teachers as well. The importance of being of the collaboration between departments and disciplines. Our faculty really enjoy these learning circles and learning about how other content areas teach and design courses, learning about the challenges they face, their successes. I have to say that our learning circles have really built new bridges of communication and collaboration across disciplines, content areas, and departments. Our learning circles are designed to cover three pathways. They're designed to cover OER review, course redesign, and OER authoring. All three of these pathways require faculty to meet the same weekly work objectives, but each of them has different end outcomes. The end outcome for the review pathway is to have reviewed OER resources and to select an OER resource or resources to use in their course or courses. The end outcome for the redesign pathway is to have created a D2L course room that contains specified components and to share that course room with faculty in their department and license that course to Central Lakes College. We also have backup plans for faculty who want to redesign a hybrid course or a face-to-face course. At our college, every instructor has to have a D2L course room to display their grades, so most faculty have a course room already that they can house these materials in. But we also accept hard copy portfolios of work or coursework for those face-to-face classes. And then the authoring pathway, the end outcome for the authoring pathway is to have created an OER resource for their course. It may be a textbook, ancillary materials to a company. An existing OER resource that currently does not have those materials or to create test banks, portfolios of PowerPoints, portfolios of worksheets, etc. And to share those resources with the faculty in their department and to license that resource to Central Lakes College. Our course rooms and all authored resources at this point are licensed to Central Lakes College. Gary Hunter, our legal representative at the system level has created a form for us for our faculty to license them to the college. And the reason for that is because at this point in time, we haven't really found an effective way to share those course rooms as Creative Commons license, but I think that's coming along with all the work that is being done nationally and globally. I also created a D2L faculty support course room where learning circle participants interact weekly by submitting their work plans and participating in optional discussion forums where they share a pearl for the week. The learning circles in this course room also offer faculty those support services that faculty need to succeed in their work. Resources, time saving templates for organization of materials, collaboration, faculty and librarian support, a chance to use what they are learning while they are learning it, and time to do all of this plus administrative support in the form of learning circles and stipends that show faculty that their extra work is truly valued. I don't have time today to show you, give you a tour of that D2L course room, but I would be happy to do that at another time if anyone is interested in looking how I have that structured. I have it structured in a QM format and also have sections in their guides for authoring for ADA compliance and QM for QM certification if they should want to have that course go through a review. We then applied for a second grant for the same reasons that we applied for our first grant, plus a desire to create a Z degree and create a print on demand process for our faculty and students to enable them to have copies of OER materials printed very inexpensively, which we have now done. We now have an OER ZAA degree at Central Lakes College. This just happened this week, and we also have created a great print on demand option for our students and faculty through the Graphics Arts Department. We actually have organized that in such a fashion that we are able to handle any system-wide requests from faculty in any of our colleges or universities or our high schools that would wish to have OER materials printed very inexpensively. In addition to that, we've also received this other grant that I told you I was the coordinator for, and this grant was secured by our Dean of Enrollment and Student Services, Paul Primesberger. It's a grant to promote the adoption of OER by our CIS high school teacher partners. We decided to implement the same learning circles with these folks, and so we have learning circles with the high school faculty and Central Lakes College faculty collaborators together. We have successfully run one set of five learning circles with these participants, and this fall we are running all of our Central Lakes College learning circles and our CIS learning circles together as one large group. As you can see in the last slide and in this slide, our course objectives for these learning circles were very much the same as the CLC learning circles. And Una would ask if I would just briefly give you an overview of what we're doing also at the system level, because we're actually ramping this whole learning circle process up from an institutional level to the system level. This fall we are offering campus grant opportunities across our system for individual faculty to design their courses for the use of OERs in those courses. We are also offering grants to faculty from different institutions to collaborate in teams of four to author OER textbooks for their disciplines in the four completed guided pathways that we have now in our system. We also have a consortia who received in achieving the dream grant that they are working on. We are hosting coffee with Karen sessions for community conversations across the state on OERs and suggest the topics of interest. For these sessions we usually have a guest speaker and then open discussions for the last part of the session. For example, this fall we're having David Bisson at our librarian for our first one to talk about the role of librarians and OER initiatives. The next coffee with Karen will be Gary Hunter talking about Creative Commons and copyright issues and the legal issues involved in your OER initiatives. And then for the November session, my guests will be Becky Groucham, our bookstore person who will talk about the bookstores role in initiating smooth OER initiatives on your campus. And of course we have our enhanced communications, our Lister website and Twitter. And now I have time for questions. Wonderful. Thank you so much Karen. It was really interesting to hear about how you're reaching out also to K-12 and working with them as well. Very interesting and of course so many other interesting things you shared with us today and the work that you do statewide. I think there was an early question on which I'm just going to answer real quickly and then we'll switch back to questions on Karen's. It was about grants. So there was some information in the chat window about CCCOER. We do not generally offer grants. It's been a while since we did. We offered some grants quite a number of years ago. Small development grants. But generally what we do is we make available any information about grants that's at a national level or perhaps offered through a private foundation. As Karen mentioned, her grants have come from both I think her system and her statewide system. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of the OER grants coming right now is at the statewide level or at the institutional district level. Not seen any nationally at this time. All right. There were, Karen I'm not sure if you're in the chat window there. Calvin had a few comments about your course redesign pathway. I don't think there was any questions there. He said it's interesting if faculty use the new course across the discipline for scale. The course can be a Lego base plate on top of which content is added by faculty. Exactly. Great. Amy asks, have you have you had any challenges to transfer ability with OER supported courses? We have not had. And I think that that kind of goes with the guided pathways that our system is working on now. And so that's one number, another reason why for our system wide grants, we're focusing this first round of grants on those guided pathways that have already been approved at our system level with our four year universities. I think it's pretty typical that almost all of my courses are OER. And if there is a question for transfer, usually they ask for my syllabus and also oftentimes I will make contact with the person, even giving them a tour of my course room or whatever is needed to reassure them that what we're using our quality products. I think that some of that is going away as education about OER is becoming more prevalent and administrators and faculty are beginning to understand that the OER resources are really, for the most part, high quality. And I think they're beginning to have more faith in their instructors in terms of the fact that they've trusted them to this point to select content for their students and that their expertise doesn't go away just because they're looking at OER materials. Thank you for that, Karen. Excellent answer. And we had one of our audience members share also I think a good point that we've used as well, which is it should not transfer ability should not be an issue of the content. It's the focus is on the course learning outcomes. Right. And I think he knows so wonderful. There is interest in, in, in getting access to your templates Karen and bills and bill answered in the chat window because his are in are actually in Canvas Commons so they can be downloaded directly. I don't know Karen if if there's at this point are, are you willing to share course templates or is that a little bit in the future. Well actually I'm trying to get my course designed for the system level. But I am, I'm willing to share those templates are just very simple things I've created just through a lot of blood sweat and tears of doing OER reviews. And, and so they're just they're very simple but they can be adapted. And I'm more than happy to share those. I would, I'm just really trying to get this up to the system level but I'm also giving the same presentation out at Anaheim. And at that point I know that people are going to want some of those templates so I have to just figure out how to best share them out. But if any of you are interested and you'd like to email me I would be more than happy to share any of those with you. And you mentioned that you're working on the licensing because I think with sharing the templates you definitely would want to have that license in place. Yep, and I have not been I haven't done that and that's kind of part of this process of moving it up to the system level. So it's kind of a little bit of a learning curve for me, also in terms of this sharing thing of it and getting those licensed. Okay, thank you for that Karen. And we have a comment here from Paige when a question to so congratulations on getting the Z degree up and running so I that's running this fall. Very exciting. And her question is, is it only OER classes or do you also include classes that are no cost, but not open materials. Yes, as long as they are no cost to our students. They have to be no cost like we can we, we have several faculty who have created materials that they have charges, the students like $10 for whatever. And if there's a charge to the student we won't include that in our Z degree. But we do include materials that are not Creative Commons licensed as well as what Bill mentioned. If faculty are using materials that our system or library is paying a membership fee for, but they're free to our students. Those are courses that we also can include in our Z degree or we do include in our Z degree, but they have to be free to students. Karen, can I just clarify something that this Z degree is this at Central Lakes. This is at Central Lakes College. They can, they can earn an AA degree here with zero cost. Wonderful and what's what is the discipline for that is that a. It's just a liberal arts AA degree. Yep. Wonderful. Thank you for, yeah for sharing that. We have a question here from Shagun is faculty recruitment easier for authoring pathways than redesigned pathways. I think one of the things with the learning circles that I was very, very strong about both at our institutional level and at the state level is the key to this is meeting faculty where they are. So our learning circles are designed to be very much facilitated by me and Dave our librarian, but they are very much faculty driven. So we meet them where they are if they are wanting to author works and that's where we meet them. If they are doing reviews, that's where we meet them. They've never designed a D2L course room and they need help with that. That's where we meet them. I don't know if that answers your question, but her second question was do some of the authoring faculty then migrate to redesign pathways. Yes, and that's one of the things that we found that one of the reasons you have to be so flexible in how you create your learning circles and that D2L support room because you'll have you'll have faculty coming in thinking they're doing a review and all of a sudden they they find something and they have 10 weeks left and they want to move to a redesigned phase. Well, they didn't sign up for a redesigned phase so the stipend is different 500 to 1500. But we try to keep above her zone there so we can work with faculty because it's it's just you don't know where they're going to end up they can transfer very quickly they can start as authoring. And then decide no they want to do a redesign or they can start as a redesign and they can find out they need to first author materials. We're pretty flexible and letting them move between those pathways and then just working with them. Okay, wonderful. And so here's an interesting question with your OER statewide hat on. Are there any plans to do an OER two plus two degree pathway with one of your for your institutions. I'm not sure that I understand the language two plus two. Well, I'm I think he simply means doing a pathway that would be for a full bachelor's degree with one of the four year institutions. Well actually for our four pathways that we're doing right now biology psychology. I'm trying to think what the other two are, but for those pathways our system has already those are completed. We have all of our universities on board with accepting our a degrees from our four year colleges and then like if we have a psychology. We have a psychology pathway we just completed at Central Lakes College so now we have our that was approved by the system office so now at Central Lake College our path college path or psychology pathways automatically accepted into all of our universities as with that are in our system as their first two years and they start yes as a junior. So that the I think the the the second piece of that is are any of your four year institutions planning to give those students who came in with the two years of OER lower division to do a two years completion of bachelors that's OER. Yes, all of them in those four pathways and we're working on all of our other content we have four more pathways going forward this year they'll be completed at the end of the year in our system for four other pathways and for the content areas. Okay, so that's a system wide collaboration that's really not it's been long and coming. Wow, that's exciting. And let's see we have a follow up question from page here is the OER review pathway, simply reviewing and selecting existing OER. Do they do this on their own or do they work with librarians. They actually work in our learning circles. And it is for just review and at every learning circle Dave and I are there. That's our librarian and I am the faculty facilitator for the learning circles. So it's very much faculty and librarian driven. And they work with us for those three hours every week, and then independently on their own. All right, excellent. I'm going to just move on here for just a moment we'll come back to Q&A. I wanted to let you know that in two weeks we are going to have our second webinar for the fall series and it's going to be about faculty and librarians working together. On selecting OER and as you can see we have some folks who are going to join us from the Michigan system. Tina Ulrich at Northwestern Michigan Community College and and one of her faculty and also professor from Lansing Community College so we hope to see you at that one as well and I wanted to mention staying in the loop. I think many of you are going to open ed the open ed conference I should say, which is coming up here in October in Anaheim Karen mentioned that both she and Bill are presenting there so you, you got a special preview here today so thanks again Karen and Bill for sharing that what you'll, some of what you'll be sharing at open ed as well. And for those of you who aren't on our email list and would like to be added to that please use the URL there. It's on our website community email and you can hear about these upcoming webinars and also we share the archives out through that as well. They're also posted on our website but just to make it a little more convenient for you if you'd like that. And I want to just say once again thanks to our amazing presenters here this morning. Bill and Karen and thank you to all of our audience members who joined us and engaged with us on these. This really important topic of launching an OER initiative and we were just about on the hour we have about two more minutes so we'll just stay here for another couple minutes some. If you have questions please type those in the chat or you can even grab the microphone if you'd like at this point and unmute yourself. While we're waiting for any final questions, Bill or Karen do you have any final comments you'd like to make? I would just like to thank everybody for taking time from their day to attend this. It was really a privilege to be here and so thank you so much and if there's anything I can help you with please email me and I'd be happy to do that. Same here. I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with you all and please shoot me an email if you have any questions. Wonderful. Thank you both and Kelvin got one last one in here. Thanks Kelvin. One last question. Any efforts to create OER based adaptive learning courses? I would just like to say that the efforts that we're doing at the system level this fall, the grants that we're offering, those are giving priority to those pathways, those four pathways and any developmental ed. That's one of our priorities for those grants. Wonderful. I'm really excited to hear that because developmental ed is an area that doesn't have as much OER as it should and so wonderful to hear that you're working on that. Well, at this point I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording and thank you all for coming and I hope to see you.