 Thanks. Hi, everyone. I'm Liz Yadda from CCC OER. We're very happy that you could all join us today. Good afternoon or for Hawaii folks, good morning. Like Eunice said, if you can introduce yourself in the chat window. That would be great. This is our fifth and final timely OER tutorial that we're putting on for our members. It's a 30 minute tutorial and then an optional 30 minute Q&A afterwards. And the video and slides will be posted on our website. And all of the video and slides from the first four tutorials are already on the website. Today's topic is evaluating and selecting OER. And we're very excited to have Suzanne Wakeem here. Suzanne works at Butte College District in Northern California. She's a biology faculty plus the OER distance ed and student learning outcomes coordinator. Suzanne, when you're ready. Yes, absolutely. Welcome everyone. So yeah, today's topic is evaluating and selecting OER. What we're going to talk about today. Oh, I realize I don't have a way to move forward. Sorry. Off to a great start. Isn't that just the way. Okay. One minute. There we go. Okay, topics for today. We are going to look at some criteria for evaluating textbooks, specifically open textbooks. We're going to look at how you can customize your book. And some strategies for culturally responsive teaching. A little bit on accessibility and a little bit on universal design. So each of these is a really big topic. And we have a short time. So really what we're doing today is we're just going to touch on these. And kind of start the thoughts marinating. And there's other resources that you can look at to really start, you know, finishing the stew, if you will, following that analogy. So today is just kind of touching on things and introducing some concepts. Now the first question I want to ask you to consider is, how do you pick your textbook? Now I want you just to pause for a second because I don't know if we really think about this very much. And you can either think to yourself or type in the chat, how do you choose which textbook you're going to use? It's a tough question, right? There's price, yeah, quality and price. Yep, is there OER available? Looking at your course outline, does it follow along with what I'm doing? Is it up to date, right? So is it a current textbook? What do they talk about? Yeah, so we have all of these thoughts on how we select our textbooks and yet what copyright they have, absolutely super important one. And so I want to just currency, super important, especially if you're in a field that is changing rapidly. Yes, and Angela, absolutely. If you're a librarian just starting with that syllabus, like what content are you covering and then finding a textbook to match that? And I love that idea because I think a lot of times folks will start with the textbook and then build their course around that. And then in other cases, your administrators pick the book, which is a different approach. So yeah, and Lisa, a really great question. How, you know, you pick the book based on what is going to support students the most. And so I want to just share a story kind of related to that. So this was something that happened, oh, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. So before OER was a thing, I was a fairly new faculty and I was trying to pick my books. And I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to let the students pick the book for next semester. So I gave them a rubric and I said, here's all the books that I'm choosing between you tell me which one you like best. And so this graph, and you don't have to see the numbers or details, but what you notice is green is good, yellow is kind of indifferent and red is bad. There was some general trends, but the scores were a little bit all over the place. And so what I started learning is that there's no one right book for everybody. And so I kind of went in that these two books are the blue arrows were my favorite and notice that one of them I would have done pretty good if I had picked it. And the other based on my criteria for picking what I thought was best for students, the students would not have agreed. And I kind of wonder how often do we really ask students what resources do they like best rather than making assumptions on their behalf. And so I would encourage you at some point to try this give students different resources and see which ones work best for them. I've actually made this into a part of my class where students have choices on different resources and I'll show you an example of that later and I asked them which resource did you pick and why did you pick it. And what's really amazing is the reasons that students give for picking their resources are really intentional and really insightful. And so I think giving students the opportunity to do a little bit of meta analysis on which learning resources helps them is really effective. The other nice thing about asking students which books they like is it kind of brings them into our space, our academic space and selecting course content and really being part of that process. So that's a little bit of open pedagogy. And so it's just a really interesting thing to do at some point. Now, if you're looking at selecting books either for yourself or having students do that, there are some really great rubrics out there and these are live links so when you go to the slides you can click on these. And these are rubrics for evaluating textbooks that are quite helpful they touch on criteria like how comprehensive is it how relevant how accurate. So all of those things that folks were listing in the chat. And what's really cool about we are and especially these two links here so the open textbook library is out of University of Minnesota and BC campus is out of British Columbia. They not only have rubrics for evaluating textbooks they also have faculty who filled out the rubrics so that we can all benefit from that peer review so that's kind of a nice touch is what do other faculty think about this resource. Now, once you've selected a textbook. I think one of the best parts and my very favorite thing about we are is when I've selected a book. I can fix it after that. I don't know how you feel that whenever I used to pick kind of publisher textbooks. None know one of them was my favorite right there would always be that one thing that I'm really focused on for me it was the scientific method. It was pretty much if they did the scientific method the right way that was the book I picked because everyone does it the wrong way according to my opinion but. So I would pick based on this one specific topic and maybe other topics later in the book aren't as good. It was just kind of a it was an all or nothing right. But this with we are what's really nice is I can go in and get that scientific method chapter of my dreams and then go to another book elsewhere and get the you know the the metabolism chapter that's helpful or whatever it might be. And so the really nice thing about the OER text is you can tailor the content to your class and I think that is key like a lot of times we talk about price but to me as an instructor that that's my favorite piece. And we'll talk about some of these other ones they allow you to represent your students as well and assure accessibility, but let's stick with this tailoring the content for a second. One of the really nice things that that is out there is a few of the OER repositories have a place where you can actually edit within the resource. Or in other cases folks will download the text and edit in something like word or whatnot so there's a lot of places you can go to edit the content. But if it's within an online format what's really nice is it's flexible. So this this image here is of Lieber text which has a really nice editing platform. There are others as well. In the back image here what you can see is a list of chapters and I know it's tiny but all of those rows those are chapters. And what I can do is I can pick chapters from this book and drag it over here to build my book. I can rearrange them I can pick chapters from other books so this is kind of on the large scale I can draw in whole section. And then I can go in and edit individual pages. And so here I can go in and change the images change the text add my examples. So a lot of really great ways to customize the content either based on the information that I teach right so I teach science and one of my big focuses is how is information presented how a scientific information presented. And so that's not a focus that a lot of the textbooks take and so I can wrap that in to my book and for my class which I think is really awesome. And so Val this is Lieber text and so maybe enough you could put the link to that in the chat. There are other platforms that allow you to edit as well. Yep. Yep and sorry I'm catching up on the chat so yeah lots of great questions about and I did answer yours but I want to make sure everyone gets that there's some really great repositories where there are both faculty reviews of the textbook but also information about who's using the book which can be really helpful because you know those of us that are using open content tend to be more collaborative in nature right and so you can often reach out to the faculty and ask them questions about how did you, you know, use this how do you're doing the tests and PowerPoints and whatnot. But it's a really great way to start building that community. So yeah we are allows you to customize the text to your content, which is super important, but it also allows you to customize the text for your students. And there's there's a couple of pieces to this that I think are particularly important. And one is I want to take a look at this image here and I wish I could remember where I first saw this demonstration. So I unfortunately can't give proper attribution. But the idea here is this is essentially just a Google search for eyes. So what I did is I typed in eyes into Google took a screenshot and this is what we have. And what, what do you notice about these eyes so maybe in the chat, what do you notice about these images just first 80 images flies that come up. A lot of them are white right so if you look at the skin tone a lot of light skin folks. Yep, a lot of the same color what color are many of these eyes. Yeah, a lot of blue eyes right. And if you look at the percentage of blue eyes in our population and those in the Google search here. It's, it's not the same right blue eyes are over represented and yet a lot of them are women. And so there's just certain groups that are over represented and in most textbooks and honestly in all textbooks quite frankly publisher books and we are. We tend to have those kind of traditional right the same examples of everything. And if you just do a search for eyes and you pick the first set of blue eyes you get it isn't representative of our students. And the beauty of we are is we can fix that right with the publisher books there they still have the same issues but you can't fix them. And so in the we are you can so actually I want to go back to this slide up here. This particular image this part of the book was about a wedding of some sort I can't remember why but it was saying you know the standard wedding picture that we're always used to. And instead I found this really beautiful image, really nice photo and a little bit different but still gets at the same concept. So we can change the book to represent our students. Another example of this is a lot of the textbooks that are focused on college are really aimed at you know things like talking about dorm life and for a lot of our community college students they don't live in dorms like that doesn't speak to them it doesn't resonate with them. And so you can change the examples to be more representative of our student experiences. So there's any. Yeah, a really great point is sometimes it is as simple as just replacing the images with something that's a little bit more reflective. So students can see themselves in the content. And this is actually a list that I got from the CCC OER listserv this came through one of the the email chains and it was so exciting first thing I did is just cut and pasted that and I have it saved in a number of different places but these are places you can find openly licensed images that are a little bit more inclusive and diverse than those that we generally find. This list is also been put on the CCC OER website and Liz thank you for linking to that. And while you're there there's some really great blog posts on increasing diversity and equity within the OER context. So lots are really great ways to really adapt the books to meet our students where they're at. Right and this also includes things like you can add more detail on topics you know they struggle with right so a lot of ways to bring students in. Now one thing I do want to mention though about images changing the images to more represent our students is important but it's not quite enough. Right it's not as easy as just swapping out images you also want to include things like case studies right so when there's examples in the book, having those examples be more representative of our students. And what's really interesting if you think about you know changing the case studies, if you the professor are changing them, you're coming at that from a particular perspective, and it's a valid perspective but it's our perspective right. And so one of the things you can do is ask the students to share case studies that resonate with them and they don't necessarily have to share their own personal examples or histories or whatever. It's allowing them to share whatever they're comfortable with. But one of the really cool things that you can do and this kind of falls under the umbrella of open pedagogy is allow students to contribute content. And so you can ask them give me some case studies that would resonate. And that brings in some diverse voices and definitely would be what our students connect with because they're the ones that brought it in. And related to that so we can connect with our students but we can also connect with our region. Right so I live in California and I teach biology so of course I'm going to talk about water issues extensively. And so I can bring in those extra examples and content and you can connect to so this is a an openly licensed book on water technology. I teach intro biology so probably this is a lot more details than I need but I can certainly pull in bits and pieces and really bolster my content to resonate with my students in our region. So that is I think one of the benefits is this adaptability. Now if we're following the thread of diversity equity and inclusion for just a little bit. There's also a rubric that is focused specifically on that. This is the Peralta equity rubric Peralta is a college in California. Now this rubric was actually created for online course design, but it works equally well for measuring a we are and looking at is this text demonstrating equity properly. And so these are some of the examples of what's in the rubric and this link here will take you to the rubric itself and I would encourage you to take a look and and look at your book whichever book you're using. And compare it to this rubric and just see how it how it fares and the the other piece of equity that I want to make sure we touch on is accessibility. And accessibility is one of those topics where when we're using publisher resources, we just kind of assume that they are accessible. And they're not always and that's kind of an issue because when they're not there's nothing you can do about it. So as I said before with with the traditional resources it's an all or nothing. And so if it's not accessible that's kind of the end of it. But it was an OER if it's not accessible you can fix it. And so this is just kind of to remind us that accessibility is important. These numbers here are percentages of undergraduates with various disabilities and so notice it's it's significant, especially things like learning disabilities and others like that right and learning disabilities are really relevant for what we do right. So these are important things to consider. And I think a lot of time people think of accessibility as another thing I have to do like I have to create my class and then I also have to make it equitable I mean accessible. And I think I think the really important approach is as a community college instructor accessibility is hardwired into my role right this is part of our mission as community colleges. And so this is important content. However, it's not something that we have time to get into right now as far as how do you make your course accessible. There's a lot of really great workshops and there's probably resources on your campus that will help you with this but this is an important consideration for equity as well. And, oh thank you Sunny so that is one I need to add to my list. There's also images for the gender spectrum, so adding diversity for that as well. Thank you. So, yeah this is kind of an exciting part of being in the OER community is there's all these great resources out there and people want to share them and so my list of resources is always growing, which is awesome. And Val absolutely UDL I'm totally getting there in fact that's my next slide. So, yeah, universal design for learning so let's let's focus on this for just a second. The way I think of universal design for learning is its accessibility taken to the next step. Because a lot of times when we look at accessibility it's fixing particular issues for a particular group. Universal design is really more about making our content as useful for as many people as possible. And so by definition if you're creating a course that focuses on universal design for learning, it's going to be accessible, but it's also going to be more than that. And so, thank you Val for having that link in there. There's there's a whole world of information on UDL and that's a whole hour webinar on its own so I'm not going to get into a whole lot of detail. But the idea here is, if you give students options, that will help them find the resources and and learn the content in a way that works best for them. So, for example, if we go back to that slide where I asked students to evaluate textbook. And you notice no one textbook was like a clear winner. And that's because different students learn in different ways. And the written comments were really interesting. So some students would say I love this book because of the example and others would say, Well, this book was writing was too hard for me to read and others would say I love the pictures right so they're all looking for different things. And so rather than picking the one resource that's best for everybody. What I do in my class is I let them pick the resource that's best for them. And this falls under multiple means of representation. So I give students various ways of acquiring information. Basically, I give them a list of a whole bunch of really great resources. So here's a textbook, here's some videos, here's all the stuff you pick away that this works best for you. The next piece here is multiple means of action and expression. And what this says is providing learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know. So the students get to pick how they're going to show me that they know the topic. And so again, I say here's the thing I want to show me that you know this figure out how you want to show it to me. Now, if this sounds like just a free for all. I want to assure you that it's not so let me let me take us to the next slide here. So when I'm talking about giving students choices. It's one of the things that I'm not changing so the choice they do not have is the content. We're all learning the same content and the rigor has not changed. I'm asking equal levels of rigor. The difference is they get to choose how they learn the content and how they demonstrate that they've learned it. Let me give you two kind of concrete examples. So this is the multiple means of representation, which you remember is giving students options and how they they learn the information. And so this is I think protein synthesis or some complex topic in biology, and there's all sorts of ways to represent this. So we have a textbook and here's some texts. I'm sorry, some students love that. We have a list. Right. So some students really prefer to see things in a bulleted or numbered list format. So I'm really like pictures. Right. So here's a nice picture. There's all sorts of amazing videos out there and there's interactive. And so I give my students a list of all of this stuff and they get to pick how they're going to learn it. Now to balance that. There we go to balance that I also have to be and this only works because I'm super super clear about what they have to learn. I have two pages out of my out of my class. The page on the right here is the study questions. And this is a very detailed list of here's what you need to know. So here's the terms you need to define here's the concepts you need to know. And because this is so clear, I can give them more choices and how they learn the information. The page on the left is the list of links that I give them. And at the top is a customized we are book. So this is the book that I made I showed you how how I edited it and customized it. That link is here. And that is the book of my dream, but it doesn't mean it's the book of my students dreams. Right. And so I have another we are book that's below it. And I tell them, you know, both of these will give you the information you like you pick the book that resonates most with you. And notice because we are as free, I can link them to multiple textbooks, right because they can try one try the other. There's no, there's no downside to letting them test it out. And then I also link to other resources online that are interactive and then some YouTube videos and all sorts of stuff. And I can give these, all of these options to students because they're free. And I can create my customized books because it's openly licensed. And that is how I approach you deal. Now there's a couple more components of this which is giving students options in how they demonstrate their knowledge. And I don't have slides of that but the idea is much the same I have a page that says here's very specifically what you need to show me you need to show me that you understand what these structures are how they're related whatever it might be. And I give them some examples and tell them you show me in the way that makes the most sense to how you learn. And that is, is quite effective. So a quick summary. Benefits to the open educational resources approach and the open pedagogy approach to course design. And as, as we know, and this is where we generally start is these books are free and I say low cost because there's also a lot of my students like the print version. And so that's a really nice benefit of this is I can provide low cost print resources as well, which lowers the barrier for our students for whom the, the super expensive textbooks are problematic. But the other benefit that that I think we don't talk about often enough is that it allows students to have multiple resources. I can give them three textbooks to choose from and they can pick the one they like best. And then the other advantage is the open license. So the free is lovely but the open license I think is really the core component, because it allows me to customize my content to how I teach it to what my students need. It allows me to customize the content for my students so they can see themselves represented in the book, and we can talk about locally relevant examples. And it allows students to take ownership of the material because it's adaptable, I can have the students add content that resonates with them, and I usually do that as part of an assignment right so they're both showing me what they've learned but they're also creating content for future students. Okay. And so Liz, I think at this point it is back to you. So, we, we did set up a Google quiz so if you want to test out your knowledge, or if you're watching this recording and you, you want, you want to get credit for the, the, for the professional development. Please take the quiz. Since we don't have any way to track who watches the archive. Just a few questions. I think it's four questions. Okay, can you go to the next slide. And this is, like I said, the last of our timely OER tutorials. And all of the archives are on our website and there's a bit down there. Oh, someone's saying please put the quiz link in chat. Maybe you can do that and I'll go to the next slide. Okay, so we have a couple minutes left. So does anyone have any questions versus and you can put it in the chat window or you can unmute yourself and ask a question. And actually, Diane, I see your question in the chat I'd like to start with that one because you make a really good point about students may not have different resources and I totally agree with you. And, and it does come down to how I've organized the list. So the way I have it organized is the very first link is the book that I would have picked, like if I had been doing this the traditional way and there is the textbook, that's the textbook. And what I tell my students and this is in my my introductory material and in the assignments and all over the place is this textbook will give you all of the answers you need. Now if you read it, and you got the answers and you're clear and all is groovy then then good you're done. But if you're reading it and you're not quite there, then go down the list and find another resource. That's how I encourage students to use it is and hopefully and they have they have commented on this is those that have gone further down the list, tend to find the thing they like at some point. And for example in biology there's crash course videos that are on YouTube, not openly licensed but free and students will say you know that's where I learned best and it's great. You use that you don't have to go back to the book, but you're absolutely right. It's nice to give them an order of operations. It's not just a big old randomized list. Yes, and Val.