 Okay, hello everybody. This is Mary Lou Ford. I'm the Director of the Open Education Consortium. I want to thank you all for attending the quarterly membership meeting today. We have the opportunity to learn from some of our colleagues about some of the exciting things that they're doing to promote OER. We also have the opportunity to talk about the State of the Field Report that we would like to author and to get your feedback on that. We're going to give a quick demo of the Open Education Professional Directory We'll talk a little bit more about our Open MOOC project and give you an update on how that's going. And then we'll talk a little about Open Education Week, a few other updates, and then leave time for discussion. So one of the things that we would love to do with these quarterly membership meetings is to make sure that you have the opportunity to learn from others about what they're doing to get an idea of best practices, to exchange ideas, and to have plenty of opportunity to talk. So at any time during the discussion, if you have a comment, a question, if you'd like to talk with someone else, you can either use the chat window or you can raise your hand or you can turn on your microphone and start to talk and ask us questions. We want to start, as I mentioned before, with two presentations this morning or this afternoon from two of our members, Sylvia from Tech in Montreal, Mexico, and Lisa from the Maricopa Community College District in Arizona in the States. So Sylvia, if you'd like to first start us off with some of the exciting projects you're doing to promote OER. Hi everybody and greetings to all. Today I'm going to speak a little bit about what we do at Technological and Monetary to promote the use of OER. We have an Open Educational Resource Portal which is called TEMOA. That is a word in NAWALT, one of the languages spoken in the Mesoamerican culture. This project started in the World Economic Forum back in 2007 and then we started actually with the project in 2008. Since then we have had over a hundred thousand visits per year because we have a large selection of educational resources over half a million and those have been audited by expert catalogers which gives a great advantage to educators around the world and how we are using these resources at TechDemont array. Well we have some strategies that professors are using the resources in the classroom. For example an IT academic department has designed course activities that include the use of OER for first year undergraduates. So there is a group of teachers and several hundreds of students that are using or taking advantage of Open Educational Resources. Also we have other professors interested in designing their own OER and then to share them with the rest of the world to our TEMOA portal. Another strategy that we have followed is training in the development and use of OER. We have training programs for K-12 professors and underrated professors through with some of our experts in this topic. Another strategy has been the dissemination and outreach articles that have been published in several journals and also in our graduate school of education we have had several pieces that have had this topic as their main research. So the the rest of the community can identify practices that they can incorporate in their own and while this was a week presentation of what we have done in as a strategy we invite you to visit our TEMOA portal and share with us your thoughts and continue learning. Thank you. Great, thanks Sylvia. I wonder if we want maybe Lisa to talk about the work that she's doing at Maricopa and then we can answer questions. Great, thank you Mary Lou. At the Maricopa Community Colleges we are the largest community college district in the nation. We're comprised of 10 community colleges and we serve about 260,000 students and we set out with a goal in regard to open educational resources of saving students five million dollars in five years and we have a strategic plan that we are implementing and we're in year two right now to meet this goal. In year one we did a number of different outreach activities as well as implemented an internal grant program so our executive vice chancellor and provost provided funds to help our faculty adopt and or create open educational resources and to date we funded five different classes our first year composition one and two, our developmental reading, our college success strategies course and general chemistry and we the project includes training of the faculty giving them the time to develop funding for the time to develop and adapt and adopt OER and then one semester of piloting those classes and then at that point we'll be moving on to some of the things that Sylvia has shared with us in regard to developing some kind of repository to share these out with the world once we have peer reviewed them and made sure that we're ready to get them out there and so in regard to outreach one of the things that we've been looking at is how can we promote this the idea of OER to our students and so we have identified courses as either having no cost or low cost course materials and so we did a number of focus groups and what we found were a number of different things first of all we found that our students were spending hours looking through the schedules going to the bookstore site finding out how much the books were to find the courses that they could take in the sections of those courses that had the lowest cost course materials and then we also reached out to them and asked them how they what they determine low cost because sometimes they're printing costs associated with open educational resources or there might be a small copy written book and so it's not just OER we're really looking at no cost or low cost and so we put in a filter into our online schedule so that students can search for their courses based on subject based on the method of delivery as well as whether they have no cost or low cost course materials associated with them additionally we've added a note in all of our OER courses so that students will also see that as they're looking through their courses that they may have low cost or no cost textbooks that may include open educational resources and in our e-schedules many of our 10 colleges are now looking at other ways that they can share this information so we've I've shown you the find the class so that students can actually search for materials with OER and I've shown you the notes that all 10 colleges have and then some of the individual colleges in their e-schedules are providing additional notes so that the students can know to go and search for the find the class that keyword search that I showed you and also know that this is an option so we've really been starting to work with outreach to our students because they don't know what OER is and so we're trying to find a good way to promote it with our students that they can understand in regard to our faculty we're doing a number of things in regard to OER awareness and increasing adoption so we've done presentations across our district we do have these grants as I mentioned earlier we've been bringing in experts for dialogue days so we've brought in people from creative commons open stacks we're going to be doing another event bringing in a number of OER repository players like sailor and lumen and open stacks the idea of water cooler discussions and we have promotional items which is really interesting whenever we have these events up that I've mentioned the presentations or dialogue days or go to department meetings we ask people to tell us a week or so later what they learned and how they're going to implement OER or consider OER and once they do that we'll send them one of our cool little stylus pens and people get really interested in in OER and we're not just giving these promotional items away they have to tell us what they think of OER what they're going to do with OER and again we're working really closely with our centers for teaching and learning and our college libraries so we're doing our best to get out there to our faculty to our students and as we continue to follow our strategic plan we'll have much more we hope to have much more adoption and have these materials available to great thank you Lisa I see that we have one question already for for Sylvia in the dialogue window how much of your content is translated from other languages versus originally created in Spanish it's about uh at 30 percent our our portal is a content aggregator so we do have best resources open educational resources from across the world so the vast majority is in English language and we have some percentage in Spanish and Portuguese great I wonder too Sylvia do you track the cost savings like Lisa showed us in person so far we haven't done that the goal of when we started tomorrow or as it was thought was to offer a platform for the for professor for professors across the world so we haven't done yet what is an economic economic site of this yet okay thanks I see another question here for Lisa um you know it's really interesting because we have a lot of high level support in our project from the executive vice chancellor and provost on our steering team we have two college presidents a vice president of a college a number of deans so we have a lot of support however there have been some challenges and and some are even continuing to come in and so one is the idea of helping faculty understand that these are quality resources that are available and that just as they have to take the time to review a potential textbook they need to take the time to review open educational resources but just because they're free doesn't mean that they're not quality secondly it's interesting that we've gotten some pushback in regard to just that they're not pretty they're not you know some of the OER aren't if we're printing them they're not for color they want like high quality printing materials or the our use of some open source software programs aren't as pretty as from the publishers but as we work with the faculty and they get to see how what a high quality they are we were able to work through that our most recent challenge is that our search for that low cost no cost that I showed you a moment ago is really prominent and I there's concern about that so we're actually moving it into an area where of our find a search for classes where students can search for delivery method whether it's online hybrid face to face if it's an open entry open exit and they'll have the option to see OER or low cost no cost in that area as well so as we get challenges it's really just great I wonder if you we want to answer Lisa the next question too which is do you take student feedback to evaluate the quality of OER is it just a fact um that's a great question in regard to the review process initially what we're doing is when when when our grants when this faculty complete the materials we're using the achieve rubric and modifying that to look at the quality of the materials but during the pilot phase we're getting feedback from the students as well on the OER so do the students feel that they're having a good experience with them do they feel that it's the same that they're learning as much with it in regard to quality and the teaching and learning process so we're definitely collecting that data and we've been collecting that data and student satisfaction data for years and even when we didn't have a fully formed program and we had individuals using OER they were collecting data as well great and then related to that James had a follow-up question about since you do have such high level support do you ever get any pushback from faculty feeling I'm in regard to the america pemillions project and our district as a whole academic freedom is extremely important this is not a mandate of any kind this is an option for faculty and so in that respect there haven't been concerns I think the area where there is concern is that if students are making decisions about a course based on cost and that's that's something that we're working through right now and I'm aligned with I'm aligned with that you know the idea of course is filling up faster because they're OER I think that may be some of the concern that's out there and we do not have data yet on whether they are filling up quicker because we just put the low cost no cost filter in place and in regard to our OER and Donna Godet who teaches math and has been as vice president of the community college consortium for OER she has been tracking retention rates and success rates and what she's found is that we're really causing no harm there's no there's really no difference in the materials the students are doing just as well great and then there's a question for both of you actually maybe Sylvia you want to start with this can you talk a little bit about the resources that you've dedicated to promoting awareness to a site pointed out we have some experts and in our campus we are a multi campus university we have 32 campus in Mexico and we have identified some experts and from their own schools they are promoting the use of OER we have for example a professor that is using that in the administration in the business school we have two professors in the graduate school of education and one more in the engineering school so they basically work within their school training and sharing experiences with their fellow professors and one thing that we started this year was the training for K-12 professors because we also have high school in our university system and we are also working in the strategy to follow the use of OER in our institution we have gone through a reorganization this past year so we are working in what will be the strategy for for technological in the thinking about in this decade and one of the topics that have come up is the use of OER yes yes we have it in our strategic plan and one of the well also this goes with some of the government policies that have been published this past year that all programs funded from the with with government funds they have to be available for the public as in an OER format so we have to comply with those policies and also we are seeing that great thank you just before we move to Lisa to answer that there was a related question about do you provide incentives for promoting OER Lisa do you want to address that and then maybe talk a little bit more absolutely in regard to staff the the district has provided we now have trichairs there were co-chairs myself and Paul Gholish and we were funded 40 of our time last year to work on the Maricopa millions project this year I've scaled my time back a bit so I'm doing part of it and then we brought in an English faculty member from one of our sister schools Elisa Cooper who is also working with Paul and I so now the three of us are working with dedicated time to this project additionally in regard to staff we when we get one of the grants put together we bring in the those colleges CTLs and the centers for teaching and learning and the library so and we try to get those grants to be cross college so that we the rubric for evaluating the grants leans towards having a multi-school grant so that you could get wider adoption so we do bring in the libraries and the centers for teaching and learning and then we have a district-wide instructional designer who also comes in and works with those faculty who have been given the grants or awarded the grants so financially those pieces are funded in regard to the three co-chairs specifically for Maricopa millions and that's a partial it's not a full-time situation and then we do bring in the libraries the centers for teaching and learning and the district instructional designer and then financially we also have gotten the support for the grants as well as the opportunity for our OER steering team to not the entire team but a few members of the team to be able to attend things like the open ed conference and some other conferences to network and learn more about open educational resources and what's going on throughout the world and so we're really fortunate that we've had that backing behind us in regard to providing incentives for promoting OER use by faculty with the exception of the grant we don't provide incentives and but when we do bring training we have the opportunity for our faculty to earn something called faculty professional growth so when we bring in a speaker about OER with a certain amount of time they're able to move on the pay scale for attending a number of different faculty professional growth opportunities and OER is just one of many that they're able to do that with great thank you um we um have a librarian a library faculty member on our OER steering team for the Maricopa millions project um they are we and we are looking for our low cost when it's not a creative commons license we're also trying to leverage a number of those um subscriptions to databases and such that we're using where it's not a cost to the students you know of of course in order to share that we have to pull those resources out to make something with a creative commons license and so we will have versions with and without that as we as we work on that but the librarians have been definitely involved in the projects and can help to find some of those open educational resources they've definitely been very interested in this project great well thank you both lisa and and silvia for your really interesting presentations i think some of the activities you're doing are very creative and certainly really inspiring so we look forward to seeing um your impact as you continue with your project so thanks a lot okay so moving on with our agenda we wanted to get your feedback on an OER state of the field report and what we're thinking of is that the field is is right now the time is right for us to introduce a state of the field report specifically on open education and there are some reports that have looked at them like the one from surf uh but they've looked at them in a time limited uh perspective or perhaps a geography limited perspective um and and there are surveys out there for example the slum consortium in the u.s. has done a longitudinal survey about the attitudes toward distance education and we're interested in doing that now for open education and what we would try to do would be to combine some um some data some some points about OER use or the number of materials that are developed a number of languages that type of thing with attitudes what do people think of OER are they aware of it do they use it those types of things so that we can begin to develop this long term view of OER and its use over time we think that this would be a really valuable contribution to the field but we also want to make sure that we're not producing something that is either already being done or that other people don't think is valuable so we would love to get your feedback on one whether you think this is something that the field needs um two what reports have already been done on open education that we can begin to develop the baseline from and we also don't want to send out our own survey we'd rather piggyback up of other people's surveys so if someone is sending out a survey on distance education for example we'd like to work with them to add a few questions on open education so that people don't get overwhelmed with too many surveys so for that in that respect we'd love to know who's doing reports in your area that you think we could work with and also to look for people who will help us steer the project to help us do the needs assessment to define the scope of the report and the audience and finally to help us design questions so if anyone has feedback right now we'd love to to hear that from you we'd also be happy if you thanks Lisa for the EDUCAUS we um I actually have talked with EDUCAUS and they're very open to great thank you for your suggestions and we'll we will also be sending an email out to members so that if you have other suggestions we'd be really happy to to work with people on this if you're also interested in helping us with that please let us know and we will contact you to help us with the steering committee the other thing that we wanted to do today was to give you a quick demo of the open education professional directory that was launched at the beginning of september you can find it by going to the url that's at the bottom of the slide or by going right to the homepage of our website it's now one of the tabs at the top you can see on the top right it says directory and it will take you right here you can search for a particular individual within the directory or you can look by areas of expertise or by a region of expertise or for a particular discipline if you look for example um under expertise you'll see how many people have expertise in that area that you might be searching for and you can further refine it by saying how many people have expertise in this area that also have experience in this particular region um if you look for a particular individual you just type their name in the search box and we typed in our own Igor Lesko and his listing looks like this so it gives you the overview of his his background where he's working his contact information and then under that it lists all of his areas of expertise and if you have not yet include yourself in the directory it's not too late if you go to the url you can click add me and you can put yourself into the directory we do want to make sure that the directory is useful both for professionals already working in open education and those who are looking for advice and support in open education so we would love to hear from you from time to time about how you're using the directory uh how useful it is to you and then if you're contacted we'd love to know some of the general parameters around that contact we don't need to know specifics but we'd like to know for example were you contacted for a consultancy where you can were you're contacted by somebody who would like to collaborate with you on a project that kind of thing this will help us refine the search uh and the user interface and that would be really helpful uh if you have any other general feedback or suggestions you can send it to directory at oeconsortion.org and we'd be happy to hear from you i want to also just give you a quick update on our open MOOCs this is the oecx project that we have going with edX we have three courses launched and they're taking enrollment now they will start in the next month or so one from Tufts University one from NCTU in Taiwan and one from Anarundal Community College if you'd like to sign up for them please do all of them are based on open content both based on OER and available for your use all the content that is produced for these MOOCs will be available on on the website so it will be listed in the courses. I want to just quickly review the key points for participation in case you would like to offer a MOOC you have to be a member of the open education consortium you need to make sure that it's built from existing open content so you can add and enhance the materials that you have but it already has to be open there's no cost for you to participate although you do have to think about the resources that you have to allocate to develop your MOOC you can offer in any language it can be a length from two weeks to 15 weeks we think shorter will be better but that's really your call MOOCs can be facilitated or they can be self-paced you do have the option of offering the certificate which has the possibility of generating a small amount of revenue from that which would be shared back to you we can also offer these in series so if you wanted to start with part one and go to part two or part three that would be fine and that could be from one institution or between institutions so you could start with a course for example the Anarundal course is in business if you wanted to offer a finance course that could be combined with theirs to make a series we'd certainly be happy to talk with you about that we can also be more creative so if you are interested in looking at materials that you have and combining them with other open materials to make a course we'd be really welcome to talk with you about that we are now able to offer MOOCs at any time during 2015 where the pilot is underway it's going quite well and edX is quite happy to see us expand the number of courses that we have offered so if you're interested in offering a MOOC at any time during 2015 please contact any staff member we'd be happy to talk you through the process and let you know a little bit more information we're also planning to have a series of webinars on designing MOOCs with OER starting in early 2015 and then we also wanted to make sure that everyone is aware of Open Education Week for 2015 it will be about the same time as last year in early March March 9th through 13th this year we'll plan to have the website up again in January like we did last year so the call for participation in Open Education Week will be going out in about a month's time we want to make sure that you're aware that the week will happen to let you know that you can already download posters and web banners and other kinds of things right from the openeducationweek.org site you can also access the archives from last year at any time and we want to encourage you to think about what you'd like to do for this year if you have a particular interest in helping us organize Open Education Week we'd be more than happy to have you on the committee just contact us at any time and we'll we'll get back in touch with you about that so we had a couple of other updates we wanted to share with you one is to make sure you are aware of the Open Education Global Conference it's going to take place in Banff and Alberta this year in Canada which is breathtakingly beautiful and we hope to see you all there we've just opened the call for proposals and the proposals for the conference this year will be due on November in 30th so we hope that you have the opportunity over the next two months to plan what you'd like to to say to your colleagues during the conference and to please feel free to submit a session a panel session an interactive session a regular presentation or other kind of proposal that you think would be most appropriate we also wanted to let you know that we have signed an agreement with a group called Edcast and what they are doing is they're a MOOC hosting service so for those of you who are interested in MOOCs or maybe even an online MOOC-like course for your own campus this company will actually host the MOOCs for you and let you have full control over what you do with it so you can limit the enrollment if you wanted to you can make it a really open MOOC you could offer certification you could offer tutoring for a fee all of the revenues that would be generated off of the MOOC would come back to you there is a hosting fee which is normally five thousand dollars for members of the open education consortium it would be three thousand seven hundred and fifty and you would get that automatically just by letting them know that you were a member of the consortium so if that's something that's interesting to you you can contact us or you can contact Edcast directly and we can talk to you more about that and then finally just an update on our committees we said last time that we had a number of committees going that we wanted your involvement in we are still taking enrollments for the committees for people who would like to work on them you can see this right on our website there's a underneath about us there is an OEC committees tab and when you select that it will give you more information about what the committees are charged with doing the goals of the committee and the timelines if there's a committee that you haven't signed up for that you'd like to participate in just send us an email to feedback at OEConsortium.org we'd be happy to put you in touch with the chair of the committee and you can help us with a lot of the really exciting work that we were planning to do this year for those of you that have already signed up we want to thank you very much for signing up and to let you know that the committee chairs will be in touch with you very soon with more information and then finally we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time for your questions comments and discussion items so we're opening the floor to you okay well people are typing in some questions and comments I wanted to just highlight that Sylvia put in the link for the government or the the documents from the government of Mexico for those of you who are interested in in how the government is promoting OER there oh dear that's a great idea yes we can do a designing MOOC workshop during open ed week we were planning to do those early anyone have additional questions that they'd like to ask to either Sylvia that's a great question she's asking about strategies to remote open education in developing countries I think that a lot of us probably have experience on that one and I open the floor to send here it looks like a bunch of people are entering some suggestions perhaps in the chat window I think there are a lot of resources that are available out there on promoting open education in in different venues in different universities in different countries a lot of it depends on on the strategies and the goals of the institution that you're working in there's some really great examples for example from Malaysia or from Brazil about groups that have worked from both the government policy level and from the grassroots level working with faculty working with students to first raise awareness about open educational resources and then to raise awareness about the value of their use both in economic terms and then the ability to modify and to take materials and put local examples in that that is available for you for example on the OER Africa site there's a group in Brazil that has a site devoted to open education and the work that they've been doing both at the government level and at the grassroots level and Malaysia similarly has started in the Ministry of Education with a policy to promote open educational resources across the country as has Indonesia so there are several examples that we can help point you to for policy work and also for some of the grassroots strategies I think that both Lisa and Sylvia had some excellent examples of involving faculty by starting perhaps with a small group of faculty getting them excited about it and then helping that spread out by promotion and awareness so maybe they well if I may thank you okay if I may one thing that has been very helpful to us was to approach the teachers the professors and identify what they their needs are and because well most of them want to have the budget to develop new resources or to have more tools for the classroom but when you find out what they are what are their needs and then show them that you all of that information is available on the internet they are greatly pleased and they also start sponsoring other teachers and showing them the results they have had and that one thing is that they're not going to have always the economic resources to be producing and developing developing their own resources but they can find resources of great quality already available on on the internet and then can easily incorporated in the in the classroom one of the main issues in developing countries is also the availability of the internet access but nowadays you can also find resources that they know that they don't need the internet that they can be downloaded or can be accessed by the professors and the students from their classroom thanks Sylvia Lisa also posted a link to a slide that slides that she does on a workshop to get started with OER so that could be a way to do some teacher training or some faculty training about OER to raise awareness I know that there are also slides out there from countries in the Middle East I know that one's been done in Yemen very recently and that there are a lot of resources available on the OER Africa site that's specific to developing countries as well as I think you had already mentioned from the Commonwealth of Learning that we can be happy to share more more of those resources with you and maybe we can ask people to send those to you if you want to post your email in the chat window all right well let me thank everybody for coming today and especially again to thanks Sylvia and Lisa for their presentations and for sharing the work that they've been doing to promote OER we're really inspired by a lot of the strategies that you put into place and thank you very much for your presentations and thanks to everybody else for participating and for sending us your feedback and your input we look forward to continuing to work with you and we want to invite you to the next quarterly meeting we haven't yet set the dates because we were looking at the holiday period but we will send that out to you as soon as we've got those things set that will be just focused a lot on a strategic planning process for the consortium and we really welcome your input at that point