 Welcome, everyone, and we will be starting at one minute after the hour. Welcome, everybody, and we will be starting at one minute after the hour in about 30 seconds. Okay, it's time to get started and welcome everybody. You are at one of the project briefings in the CNI 2020 spring virtual meeting. I'm Cliff Lynch, and I'm just here to welcome you and introduce our presenters. I think you will find this presentation extremely interesting. I got a sort of a fore-sampling of it at the Executive Roundtable the other day. And what you're going to hear about today is Central Washington University's strategy for affordable course materials. The presentation will be by Rebecca Lubis and her colleague, Maura Valentino. We will take questions at the end. Those will be moderated by Diane Goldenberg Hart, and I would invite you as our speakers speak to queue up questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. With that, thanks for being here and let me turn it over to Rebecca and Maura. Hello there. It's great to be able to meet with you, even if it's virtually, so so pleased to see so many of you today. Today I wanted to talk to you about the Affordable Course Materials Initiative that we have at Central Washington University, which evolved from some open educational resource work that my colleague, Maura, has been deeply involved in and she'll give you some of the specifics a little bit later in this presentation. But the point of this is that the open educational resources really evolved into a comprehensive strategy, which addressed a lot of the faculty and student concerns that came up as part of talking about this. First, let me give you a brief snapshot of Central Washington University just to give you some idea of the context. We're a regional comprehensive university. We have some graduate programs, but we're intensively undergraduate focused at Central. We are truly geographically centered in the middle of Washington State, if you look at a map. Approximately 2000 graduates a year, roughly around 12,000 students, a portion, a good portion of those who are residential on campus. And we have a diverse student body. And also we have a very high number of first generation students represented in our student population. So it's just to give you a very brief flavor of CWU. So because we are so undergraduate focused, we emphasize small classes, that's really how we distinguish ourselves in public universities. Our class sizes very often look like class sizes that you might expect to see in smaller private institutions. But we have, but we emphasize affordability and accessibility. But there was something unfortunately that was at odds in this, in this ethic we have, which is a report came out late last year from the Washington Institute for Public Policy that showed that CWU had the second highest average textbook cost of all the Washington publics. So that was definitely something that we needed to respond to since affordability is such an issue for so many of our students, especially our first gen students. So the story so far is that one of the first major efforts that really helped with this is we were, we did the work and I keep saying we isn't so much we because it was this was before I arrived at CWU. Maura and some of our other colleagues at Central Washington got a Washington Educational Council grant to push out our first 26 OERs at Central Washington. There had been individuals who'd been using OERs before, but there hadn't been a concerted directed effort to like, okay, we're going to be a cohort and we're going to push to do this thing. And they did, they did the very, made the very insightful decision to use the general education program that was just being revamped at CWU to use for the drop from for the first cohort. So this is great. So it's mostly first year students and it touches a lot of students. So because of because of this, we were able to get these courses out really quickly and it started some conversations. There was a growing momentum on campus and there was a growing momentum at higher administrative levels about the value of OER. Maura did a presentation to our faculty senate this year and it got the attention of the provost and president which you know, got us that extra administrative oomph in order to be able to push further on on affordable courseware. And affordable course materials then became a major feature in the discussions for the CWU's new strategic plan because we just had a strategic plan end. And also for one for the libraries because of course the libraries are working on a strategic plan that's in concert with the one at the level of the university. My slide slowed down. Okay. So because it became a hot topic, the concern started to surface which shouldn't surprise you. And the first concern that came up right away, which I believe has come up with every institution that is very enthusiastic about OERs is but what about the quality? The other issue that came up is concerns that if this is a mandate that it's important that faculty have autonomy over what their course content is. So we had some more discussions and bringing out the statistic about CWU being the second most expensive average textbook in the state very much made a dramatic impact and definitely made an impact on some of the faculty that were most concerned about the topic realizing that we need to do something about this. And we also, Maura and I and our also our colleague Jerry Hopkins, an instructional designer at CWU, we took the opportunity of Open Education Week, which happened the first week in March just kind of as we were perched on the world was going to be changing very shortly. And we had a great open forum with faculty to discuss what the options for OER were and dispelling some myths about the materials and offerings that were out there. It was also an excellent chance for us to talk about the layered approach that we're going to use for affordable course materials. So we started changing the language of what we were using instead of just referring to OER. We started referring to affordable course materials, recognizing that we couldn't convert every single course to OER very quickly. But there were other paths to do so. And I'll talk a little about that more at the end about what those other pathways are. But obviously OER is one of the major strategies. And we are, we've had some interesting piggybacking now because professors have to convert all of their courses online. A few of them very smartly recognized that now is a really good time to convert to OER. So with that, I will save talking about the future strategies over the next two, the next three years and turn it over to Maura to talk some specifics about the lessons we've learned from our first cohort. Hi, I'm Maura Valentino and I was the instigator of the Washington Student Achievement Council grant. It was really very nice timing as Rebecca mentioned. We got the call for proposals for this grant, which offered $36,000. And I thought with that, given my experience running a similar program at a different university, I thought I could offer enough stipends to faculty to get enough faculty to change over their Gen Ed course that I could create a path through the Gen Ed where a student wouldn't have to purchase a textbook. So that was my goal. With benefits, $36,000 allowed us to give 26 grants. With that, if I look at each course and look at the textbook they were going to use and multiply the lowest and the highest cost of that textbook that I could find by the number of students in those courses, we saved between $358,000 and $602,000 just in the first year. And we reached more than 5,000 students. But interestingly, professors use all sorts of different resources. They weren't all quote unquote OER textbooks by any means, although some people did use OER textbooks. We had one that used it in combination with Top Hat and putting his own questions and kind of altered it himself. So, you know, people do all sorts of things. Okay. Oh, okay. Rebecca, I'm ready for the next slide. Okay. So one example was World Regional Geography and the first textbook I gave her was she was just going to use it. And then she mentioned to me that the chapter on China was weak. So I sent her several other books and I said, Well, maybe the, you know, the chapters on China in these are better. So she looked at those and she decided actually to use two different chapters on China from two different other books. I guess the first one wasn't very up to date. And with free books, of course, she can use as many as she wants to. Nobody objects, you know, if they don't cost under $200 each to using three textbooks. And who knows, the students may not have even noticed if she put the chapters into the modules. You know, most learning systems that we use like Canvas are done module by module. So the students may not have even noticed that they were using a different textbook for China. Okay, next slide please. And then this is kind of relevant, I guess, for the epidemiology course, the person just wanted to use the CDC website because they keep the most up to date with, you know, information. And, you know, they know what's going on, they lead you to the most recent research, whether it's peer reviewed, or whether it's something, you know, that they're just putting out there to get out there fast, like what's happening now. You know, they're not necessarily peer reviewed trials yet, but people are still sharing information. And next slide, I'm trying to do it myself, it's not working. And then in the social demography class, again, the professor couldn't find any textbook that he liked. So he decided to let the students do their own exploring using ran.org and World Bank.org. And if you think about it, there's a much better pedagogy too, because the kids can explore and, you know, find things out on their own, rather than just getting the one textbook point of view. And you can go ahead one more time. Okay, so I know this is a little confusing, but this is our framework of our general education. And students have to take one course basically from each row. So they need to take a first year experience in academic writing one, and so forth. And then they get down to sort of more categories, science and technology, global dynamics, and so forth. So they have to take one in each row. And then in some of the courses, and you can see the first three I have pathway doesn't apply because it doesn't apply. But if you look across the top, we have different pathways, health and well-being, civic and community engagement, and so forth. And students can get what they call a milestone if they can take five courses in one pathway. So we did not quite have a complete path. If you can see the red are the courses that I changed through my grant. But then I looked to see what other OER courses were going on in campus and you can see we have really quite a lot of OER courses in the gen ed. And I asked the math department to check my math, there are actually over 4 million paths now that a student can take and complete their general education requirement and not purchase a textbook. So with that, I will turn it back over to Rebecca. Rebecca you're muted. Okay, I'm back. Thanks, Mora. So I now get to talk about the happy, the happy thought of going forward both in our current environment and then what happens when the world is a little bit back to normal. So, first of all, our three approaches to to building these pathways. The first approach is going to have a textbook reserve program. And I know a lot of universities already have something similar and fortunately, our new associate dean has some experience with this coming from NC State, and is going to build on that experience for us to. So we're going to prioritize the courses with the highest enrollment so throughout the number of sections so we can hit as many students as possible. And because of the current situation, and although we certainly hope that fall will be in person, we don't want to take anything for granted at this point. So looking at physical textbooks, we're going to concentrate on buying as many ebooks as we can that have agreeable DRM. And the I realized that one of the challenges of this that we already started running into is that so many textbooks now have with it a single user option, or not an option but a single user feature where the student who purchases the book has an access code to access text and assessment tools and other supplemental material that the professor may be using. So that's one of the challenges where this particular pathway isn't maybe a straightforward is simply buying a lot of books, but it is something we're working on and something we're raising awareness to encourage alternatives to that model, where possible. So, another aspect of the plan is a bit longer term it's not going to be something that would be up and running the first year. But we want to have a low flat fee textbook rental program very much modeled on what the University of Wisconsin system does where for a low flat fee, you basically can rent all of your textbooks for the semester or in our case, the quarter. And we've already had some conversations with our bookstore colleagues about this, and our bookstore is run by the University we don't have that optioned out to a third party. So, which is actually kind of nice in this environment because essentially the goal of the bookstore is to get the students what they need more than it is to make money. So if they're going to be converting part of their business to the to a rental library. That's not something that's existentially threatening that's just doing business a different way and that's the attitude we've gotten from our colleagues when we started these conversations. So that that's going to really be a wonderful partnership. And hopefully it will extend even if we're looking in an all virtual environment. And then, of course, the crown jewel of the strategies is the open educational resources themselves because that's ideally what we would like to move as many courses as possible to. So we have the wonderful testimony from cohort one about what worked and what didn't work. And we'll have we actually do have a cohort to we were given some strict what's called a CWU a provost strategic investment fund, and we were given a pocket of money for this to do another 15 courses for fall 2020. And as I mentioned earlier, we fortunately have already have some professors who have figured out the correlation between the work they're doing now. And, and that Oh, this would be a great time to piggyback and do an OER. And by the way, our OER awards are pretty modest. In the funds that we used from the grants and from the provost strategic investment, pretty much the library is absorbing all the overhead and all the time and just we're just considering this part of our work. The only thing that we've gotten for this is going directly into the faculty incentives. So it's it's like I said it's not a huge incentive it's only $1,000. And we do have to look at options like if besides converting to OER if you're actually authoring your own textbook. You know, we'd like to give a little bit more, but we'll be exploring those options as we go along but but I'm delighted that it's going forward even in the alternative universe that we are now living in. And the last thing I wanted to mention is the faculty advisory group. In light of the current situation. I'm going to probably be delaying this because right now faculty are so focused on successfully getting their own courses online. But so I don't know if we'll do this later this spring, or if we'll wait until the fall to do this. That's still TBD, but we're picking a faculty advisory group with the help of Faculty Senate and not just made up of OER fans it's really important we get the skeptics in on this this should not be a preaching to the converted situation. And we were drawing heavily upon the FAQ that Spark has put out about about ideas about OER's and what the objections are and how those are answered. And we're going to have it's kind of like it's a more guided version of a listening tour so we hear the faculty concerns but we're pre prepared to address what we know the the credit greatest hits of concerns are that are coming up. And I think that will also give us a chance to get what the particular local needs of CW are, even though probably some of the concerns are very much going to resonate with faculty throughout throughout the country and throughout the world on this topic. So, I kind of see that there's some questions coming in. So I think I'll end it there to open up for questions either for Mora or myself. And, you know, it's been just one concluding sentence is that in the last few weeks that despite how much our lives have been disrupted. I've been pleased to see that the that the ethic and the philosophy of making courseware more affordable is is more relevant than ever in this environment. So, let's open it up for that was great. Thank you. Thanks so much, Mora and Rebecca for that really interesting talk about the work that you're doing in Washington. And, yes, as Rebecca said we are now opening the floor up for questions. I see that we have a comment already in our chat which wonder if Rebecca or Mora would like to speak to Rob's comment which is about partnering on academic simply e any rights I'd love to partner with you on academic simply e to explore how we can deliver textbooks regardless of open license with a consistent user experience built upon an open technology ecosystem. And I will just say to the rest of our attendees, if you would like to ask a question, please type it in the Q&A or definitely in the chat. And I will invite Rebecca or Mora to comment on Rob's comment there in the chat, if you would like to do that. Yeah, so I'll make a few comments and then I'll throw it over to Mora. And so, first of all, yeah that that sounds great and definitely the, the working with our already licensed content is has been a huge aspect of this. I had forgotten to say earlier that I recognize that our version of OER is a very kind of flexible version. Many of our OERs do depend on content that the library licensed so it may not be truly it may not be truly material, but it's material that CW students have access to. So at least from their point of view, it's free even if, if they're paying for it in one way or another with their tuition dollars. And that was definitely an area that we needed to be aware of to open up that, you know, not surprisingly faculty are not necessarily aware of just how deep our electronic resources go. And we did find some unfortunate cases where there were being books required that the library did have licensed electronic versions of that could have been leveraged to the students in managing having to buy fewer textbooks. So that's definitely an aspect of this. So Mora, if you wanted to speak up. Yeah, it is sometimes hard to get the experience consistent. But as I mentioned, I do think sometimes thinking about our educational resources as textbooks, I think limits us since we're in that kind of module system I'm redesigning a course right now that I normally teach in person for online. And, you know, it's a module by module thing so the resources are musing in each module are different but I think it's a it's a smooth experience. I see the first question here in chat I'd actually like to kind of address to Kristen. She's asking, how do you engage skeptics. And one of the ways I've actually been able to get progress with skeptics is by talking about the social justice issue by explaining that the data shows and my data shows this to the students don't buy the expensive textbooks. They do other things they borrow from a friend, they learn it from a different resource, you know they go to the library and, you know, use reserves, you know they have all kinds of different methods they buy an older version from Amazon, you know that costs $5 instead of $150. So they have all kinds of ways of doing this but anyway, when I say to the faculty that you're teaching in a two tiered classroom where half the students have the resources that they need to succeed and half the students do not the light bulb goes on for a lot of people when I say that. Yeah, and what I would follow up on that is is, I think also what we're trying to provide is a systematic way so the students don't have to hustle to figure it out themselves. I actually had one skeptic talk to me about well, I'm already doing this because I'm already get using an older edition and I'm telling them how cheaply they can get it on Amazon. But if we provide a systematic way for the students to just not have to think about it. That's one less barrier in a situation where, you know, going to college for the first time, maybe the first person in their family. There's a whole lot that they're navigating and figuring out for themselves. So if we push it at them. That is one more thing that's going to help them be successful because they just don't have to think about it. Interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't see any more questions in the Q&A, but definitely if you have questions, please share them with us. We have a little more time. And I think I've got a quick question while we're waiting for our audience if they've got some more questions they'd like to ask. I was just wondering, Rebecca and Maura, are there fields or disciplines where open educational resources have not worked well for you or where you foresee that they may not be a viable option? I'm a little worried about the ones that are visual heavy, you know, thinking like art and graphics. But I can't say that we've run into an issue with that yet. So Maura, do you want to jump in? Other campuses, I know, have had more kind of lopsided buy-in to OER. We've had really a good buy-in across the board. Our law and justice professor had to write his own thing because, you know, law and justice books are very expensive and there hasn't been a lot of OER created there. But that's actually being addressed because cases themselves, of course, are open. But, you know, textbook companies put the cases in textbooks and put comments or whatever and then charge huge amounts. So they're starting to work on that. And then in an OER conference I was out in the fall, nursing was one of the big gaps, but there was a whole grant and now there's a whole curriculum for nursing. So I mean, I really think that different places are really trying to cover the gaps. Yeah, and I should add that that law and justice professor that Maura is referring to is fortunately one of our, an OER, a major OER supporter and also the person that was just named our director for center for teaching excellence. So in terms of the political leveraging of OERs, I think that's going to help us a lot. Oh yeah, that sounds like it would. Okay. Well, this has really been so interesting. Thank you very much to both of you for coming to CNI and sharing a little bit about your work with us and thanks to all our attendees for joining us. We're really pleased that you could be here with us today. I just want to remind you that there's much more to come with CNI spring virtual meeting. And I know you join me in thanking Maura and Rebecca for their time. Check out our lineup at CNI.org and stay tuned for more to come and I'm getting lots of thank you for your work and thanks again and I know there's great information for your presentation here today. I'm sorry that we don't have live applause to share with you our gratitude. And with that I will close the webinar wish you all well. Thanks again to our speakers and hope to see you back here again very soon. Take care everyone. Bye bye.