 Thank you all for coming today. Before we start with the meat and potatoes of this presentation, I think it would be beneficial if Plum and I kind of explain a little bit about what we do at the university and talk a little bit about our state university system so that you can understand a bit better the movie that we're going to show about our students and their perspectives on ebooks and online education. So just a little bit about me, I'm a collection management librarian at St. Claude State University. So that means basically I'm in charge of putting resources on the shelf and resources online. And this conference was a big wake up call for me because if more colleges and universities, faculty, students are engaging in open education resources, this is going to be a major ideological shift for academic libraries. And Plumman, would you like to explain to the audience a little bit about your role at the university and what you do? Everybody here, Plumman? Let me put the microphone up to the speakers and see if I can hear them. We're going to plug you into another speaker. Because I'll be honest, without Plum, and I wouldn't even be here today to talk to you today. He is a dynamo in what it does. So could you explain to the audience a little bit? You're hooked up to the speaker about your position at St. Claude State and what you do? Hello, Plum, can you hear me now? Oh, yeah. OK, I'm deeply chagrined that the first row is empty. I see empty chairs. But greetings from the center. You have a beautiful mirror here. Thank you. The table has changed drastically. I'm working with an instructional design group, Burrian by education, but they work with other faculty. And we deal mostly with technology. I find a very strong, very productive connection between traditional librarians like Rachel and myself. I'm going to go start with the slides if that's OK. Go ahead, Rachel. OK. So let me tell you a little bit about our university. So we are a public university. We are one of seven state universities in the Minnesota state colleges and universities system. We are considered a regional comprehensive university, which means that the focus of the faculty is more on teaching and student engagement rather than research, even though for our professional development and our tenure, we are also expected to do research and publish. This number of students that we have at St. Cloud State University actually went up. So now we're up to about a little over 17,000 students, mainly undergraduate students. And almost half of those undergraduate students are considered nontraditional students. So students who are returning from a career, students who are starting school later in life, veterans, so forth and so on. We offer 96 undergraduate degrees. And of those undergraduate degree programs, only 3% of them are totally online programs. And 1% are considered blended. So in other words, you can get your degree through a combination of online classes and traditional classes. We also offer 50 graduate degrees. And again, the percentage of online degrees that we offer is very small, maybe, compared to other universities. Other university systems in the United States. Just to give you an idea where St. Paul is, we're between 70 to 80 miles northwest of the Twin Cities Minneapolis and St. Paul. We're kind of like an island done to ourselves. Anything you want to add to that comment? We do not have snow yet. So even though we only have a very small number of online degree programs, the majority of our faculty do use course management systems, such as D2L. In fact, we seem to be very locked into D2L, otherwise known as Desire2Learn, course management system. We have a very love-hate relationship with the system. And the entire Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, a lot of the faculty in many of the schools are using this system. Because I think the entire system has a license for it. There are some people who are just starting to break away. So about roughly 20% of the faculty use their own Wiki to create a course. And a little more than 10% use Facebook for online instruction. And about 5% use a combination of all three of those. You want to add one? I just can confirm that it's kind of a complex issue. We don't have very strong statistical output. We don't have a robust system to data mine. What faculty are using is instructional means. What are the other tools that are rivaling the course management system? We hope that this will get better. And when we open the auditorium for discussion, we want to hear you folks, how do you tackle these issues? That's it for me. So just to kind of give you an idea of where we are with online degrees and comparison to the rest of our state colleges and universities down here, these are all of the two-year community colleges in our system. The blue are just standard certificate programs, and the red is associate degrees. Up here is what the state universities in our system offer in terms of certificates, bachelor's, master's, and even doctoral programs. We are here. We are, I hate to say it, we're pretty sad shape. We're better shape than, because I'm from the state university, but it's not the same as the whole hell of a lot, when you consider that we have significant number of students who are coming from our community colleges transferring into our programs. Do not have the same number of options if they're coming from community college to our colleges for online education. Pretty scary stuff. And we're supposed to be like all advanced and stuff. So being a state university, most of our students are on some form of financial aid. We have students even living out of their cars in order to go to school. Students who have kids and families at a very young age and trying to go to school. So would they like to have online education opportunities? You bet they would. It would be a lot more affordable. If you remember from the map, if we have students from the cities coming to St. Cloud, that could be a 160 mile drive round trip for somebody to attend classes. For some people, it's even longer than that. Two hours, even three hours to go to school. So more convenient to have online classes. At the same time, even though we have students who are digital natives and all of that, it's not their preferred choice for classes. Most of the students ask them they actually enjoy having the engagement with an instructor, face to face time with an instructor, face to face time with peers. Because of difficulties with technology integration, and because the students need a lot more motivation and independent academic skills in order to be successful in online education, it turns out that sometimes without proper support, the online education is much more difficult for our students than face to face. Did you want to add anything to that comment? Actually, I was hesitant if we should add something to the previous slide. OK, we could go back. Because it finally proceeded this political connotation, which is not my intent. But the former governor, Polin Pinti, announced three years ago, announced that by year 2015, 25% of education in Minnesota should be delivered online. And I was flabbergasted to see that that message was carried across the nation, whereas the educators in Minnesota perceived it as a cruel joke. And Governor Polin Pinti eventually recanted from this unachievable number. Because what you folks see on the slide, we're so far down that it was just ridiculous to assume that we can go up 25% across the Mieski institutions. So just to add a little trivia to the picture that you guys see, that's all from it. Challenge, but this is not the only challenge that I'm not blaming my peers in this. And I'm sure Polin is not blaming peers in this. But as far as the faculty perspective on online education goes, it requires more time and resources to actually prepare for an online class than it does a face-to-face class. We're also limited with our course management system. I've seen some of the open education resources shared during this conference. And they're really fabulous, as far as being able to deliver video, chat, all of these things. And Desire to Learn is still very clunky. It's like very 1990s. There's a lot of skepticism among the faculty as far as whether or not the online experience enhances education, or just simply streamlines it and might even cause them to be downsized and outsourced. And one fear that comes up over and over again is, well, if we put all these courses online, what's going to keep the university from just delivering these things as webinars or having people from India teach the classes? What's going to be, are we going to have jobs? So that shapes a lot of their thinking. Paolo, did you work with the faculty and technology on a very regular basis? Do you have anything to add to that? Right, to sum it up, and I bet that a lot of people from the audience can resonate with the same thought. We have increasingly overworked faculty that we want to entice with technology. And they just don't have the time and the energy left to put another additional item on their plate. And I'm going to put in a plug for Plamin, because Plamin is one of the hardest working guys at the university. He tries to do a lot of one-on-one workshop with faculty who do want to improve their technology awareness and use different resources in their classes for online education. But right now, he is like a department of one, because there are people on sabbatical. There are people who are going to retire. Currently, he has a fixed term person working with him, Brad Busey. Thanks to Brad here. Yeah? Brad just walked in, so he's right next to me. So you folks are observed now by two people. Hi, Brad. We're going to give it up for Brad, because he helped us make the movie you guys are going to see. So without him, you could not have this movie. He is our film expert. Oops. I'm going to slide here. Talk about an electronic resource that most of our students are slowly becoming aware of, but not in the way that you would think. And this is the concept of a traditional e-book. Plum and I have done multiple studies on students at our university and their relationships with e-books. And although there's a lot of hype in the research literature, a lot of hype presented by companies about the convenience of e-books, the affordability of e-books, most students, even as told by the National Association of College Stores. They conducted a survey last year and published it. 75% of college students still want a print textbook. Do not want online resources. I do an assignment with my class every semester where I ask them to look for an e-book in our library catalog, upload it, and talk about their experience reading e-books. The only thing that has changed in a four year span of time is that in the past year and a half, I haven't gotten any students who have said, my professors tell me I shouldn't rely on any electronic resources for research because they actually have faculty confusing e-books with websites. So that's the only thing that has changed is that now our students are starting to recognize that an e-book is as valid as a print book if it's an academic source. No, I won't do it as much time as possible for a Q&A. OK. So one of the things that you're going to see in the film is some of the challenges that the students have with the e-books. Pew Internet Survey found out that very, very few people actually own e-readers and iPads. As academics, we kind of live in a silo because we tend to be techier than the average people. And we have this misconception that the digital natives have a lot of gadgets and have a love of gadgets. And the digital native age group, they are actually the least likely to own an e-reader, the least likely to own an iPad, less than 10%. The largest age group to own an e-reader are people who we would already consider senior citizens from 49 years old up. They like e-readers because they can make the text bigger on their e-books. The natives depend a lot on their laptop or their phone. So. Rachel brought here a point to himself, and he says, I have one, and I'm whispering to him that he's an old geezer. Yeah. And I'll admit, I still read print books. I don't know if you guys experience this. And maybe some of our students experience this, but they haven't verbalized it, is when I read from a screen, whether it's the fancy schmancy ink screen of a Kindle or a laptop, if I'm not just scanning text, like if I'm not just scanning information from a website or Facebook post or whatever, like if I'm going to read a novel or read something that requires deep thought, my eyeballs bounce off the screen. Think about that. Compare your reading experience in a print book to your reading experience on something that you have to read from a screen. And kind of be aware of how your eyes interact with the surface. Very interesting. I'm going to show you the movie. What would be some of your concerns about this? Definitely. Thank you. Printing, how much they allow you to print? So if it's a 1,000-page book, it's safe enough to say allow 1,000 pages per display. I'll take a class on the presentation, because I have, I learn on the physical level. So I have everything I have to highlight. So I've gone that way for a lot of times. I know where I put my paper copy of a book, but trying to find it, which violates they did and keeps them and be more difficult. I usually like to print it out, because for some reason I have some time reading from a screen for some reason. And it's nice to be able to highlight a piece of paper as opposed to, I don't know if you, are you able to highlight from there? Really haven't had an online class. I've taken my first online class and I've done that with a social, sociality class that's all online. And with that class, I'm gonna print everything off there. So I can embrace it, and I just can't sit there and read when you want me to read. Law of law, I'm gonna come back. I have to be able to take that with me and read in my leisure time, or read when I'm just having a little of my kids, when I feel like reading. That was probably one of my favorite classes. I had to do it again on my own. I had my own page, so it wasn't like, you know, but you still have the deadline, but you can do it whenever you code, you know? So I got the deadline. Got a five minute signal from the presenter, so I'm just gonna, this is gonna get shared, so you'll get a chance to see it again. We have the link, but oops. The presentation is available online, so. Yeah. So basically, you've heard it from the students now, and these could be students at your college or your university. So just to start the conversation going, you know, what type of open education resources are you using, students now, your school, or content management systems, eBooks, eTextbooks? What type of support are they getting? So Western Governor's University just moved from all textbooks to all eBooks, so the big difference is that students purchase the textbooks, and we are now providing the eBooks. And so we always give them the opportunity to buy the textbook if they choose, and we have their own choice, right, and many do, which we would encourage against printing 1,000 pages. It's gonna cost you less to buy the book than the in-carb cartridges. But I mean, that is, in our model, we wanna just give the students the resources that they need for that course. And so we've gone all digital, but most are with a few exceptions, and are just providing it with a single sign-on link to them at the activity level within the course. Here's your activity, read this chapter, click, here's the chapter, and come in. And so that's our model. Tuition, it's our model. We are simply paying $500. The tuition is very low, you can look online, wtu.edu.gov, which we have not increased tuition in four years. We decreased a resource fee by $100, but that doesn't even start to pay for what the cost of the e-book is. But I thought you just said you paid for it through tuition, but we didn't increase tuition. We did not, well, we didn't, we paid for it just as a university. There's not a direct correlation to that project. Did you give your students all e-readers, or did they just log in to whatever system they already have, what the system may already have in the presentation of the e-book? So did you hear that comment at Western Governors? They have a system where they offer the e-text books to students, as well as the print. The majority of the students still buy the print, and they haven't raised tuition in four years. Even though they make the e-text books available. Didn't say majority. No, they don't buy the text book. We don't buy the text book for students. Oh, no? In the previous world, they had to buy the text book, and we didn't provide e-books. Now we're providing all e-books. If they choose to have a text book, you think, of course, you buy it. Yeah, but what I'm saying is you're providing the e-text books, but they have the option to buy the print, but the tuition money that you're generating is allowing the university to offer the e-text books. It's just a choice. I don't want to get hung up on the tuition factor. Okay, okay. Yeah. I'm from Tompkins, Portland Community College in New York State, and we have a very thriving learning management system in Angel and part of the SUNY Learning Network, which supports that statewide. But we're really trying to look at this whole issue of e-text books and OERN. As I see it, the e-book readers are not ready yet for the potential of e-text books, which is going to include a lot more digital content such as video, interactive exercises, and other kinds of multimedia that many e-books don't even handle color yet. And so I think it's a moving target. We're trying to look toward the future of this. Yeah, hi. I'm with College of Accounting in California, we're a California community college. We've got two sort of examples of this going on in our campus. On the one hand, our third party vendor bookstore, college bookstore, Barnes & Noble, provides quite a few titles via the e-book office, commercial titles via the e-book office, and students like that when they first see all those e-books cost less than the traditional textbook. However, the students cannot resell the e-book to the bookstore as they can resell the traditional textbook. So the students are actually taking a bath on the price point. On the other hand, we have a group of sociology instructors who are using completely open online textbook. Students can read it online, they can download it, they can print it, and you never hear, we don't hear any complaints from them about the price, because the price is free of course. So we've got a couple of different models going on there. Yeah, that's one problem about e-textbooks is sometimes the students pay for access, and so after a semester it goes away. Or if they are able to keep it to the licensing, they can't resell it. That is a problem. But it's zero? But it looks like we're out of time. Thank you all for coming. Please contact us if any questions, or if you wanna share any research opportunities, Plum, do you wanna say anything to the game? I'll enjoy the conference, folks. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can.