 Good morning or good afternoon everyone depending on where you are located. Welcome to the fourth webinar in our spring series faculty perspectives on OER adoption. This is from the community college consortium for open educational resources. We have three expert students working with OER for quite some time now and are making a real big difference at their colleges and also building communities of OER developers within their discipline. So we've got a real treat this morning. I just want to mention a few things for those of you who might be new to our blackboard board. The chat window is down below underneath the participants. You should see yourself in the participants window. Please feel free to use that chat window to make comments or questions throughout the session. We will save most of our questions until the end but we will answer questions in the chat window as they come up. So thank you for that. Again, here's our agenda. I'm going to introduce our speakers in just a moment. I'll give you our little overview on the community college consortium for OER. And then we're going to hear about English OER adoption at Glendale Community College with Dr. Alyssa Cooper. We're going to hear about physical geology, OER at College of Lake County in Illinois with Ryan Cunston, the department chair there of Earth Sciences. And last but not least, we're going to hear about psychology OER development and collaboration at Quatlin Polytechnic University in British Columbia with Dr. Rajiv Jungjiani. Sorry if I blew that Rajiv. And as I mentioned, we'll take the Q&A at the end. So once again, I'm Una Daly as I didn't mention that earlier. I'm the director of curriculum design in college outreach and I lead the community college consortium for OER at the open ed consortium. And I'd like to invite all of our audience please to introduce yourself in the chat window and let us know what college you're at and maybe what your interest in OER is. And now I'm going to move to my speakers here. Our first speaker is Dr. Alyssa Cooper. She's an English faculty at Glendale Community College in Arizona. She's also the faculty director of the Center for Teaching and Learning there. Alyssa, could you say a few words? Yes, good morning everyone. I'm on the west coast so it's still morning and normally I get to brag about the weather being awesome but you know it's that time of the year where everyone's weather is probably awesome. So anyway, thanks for having me. Thanks Alyssa. And Alyssa is located in the Phoenix, Arizona area so they do have really wonderful weather there. All right, next up is Ryan Constan. He is a physical geology professor and also the earth sciences department here at College of Lake County in Illinois. Ryan, good morning or good afternoon to you actually because I know you're in the central pressure. Yes, we are. Just north of Chicago we finally crack 70 degrees for a day so looking forward to hearing from everyone today. Great, thank you Ryan. And next I would like to introduce Dr. Rajiv Janjiani. He's a psychology professor at Quant One Polytechnic University and has several more titles as well and I'll let him tell you a little bit about that. Good morning everyone. I'm really happy to be a part of the webinar and to have a chance to represent Canada over here. But yes, I'm looking forward to talking about adopting, reviewing, adapting and just disturbing as much as possible. Thank you Rajiv. Sounds good. All right, for those of you who might be new to the Community College Consortium for OER, our mission is expanding access to high quality open materials, support faculty choice and development, and improve student success. And it's all about improving student success and where open educational resources can support that. That's really our job. This webinar series that we do is all around providing professional development for faculty and other staff at colleges that can benefit from this information. So we once again thank our presenters for providing that information. We represent over 250 colleges and 21 states and provinces. And we're very happy to have British Columbia as one of our members. So that's our province. And also I want to mention just a call out to our most recent speaker. I'm going to get right to the heart of this so that you can hear from our speakers. This morning, our speakers are going to talk about multiple facets of OER adoption and creation. They not only have adopted existing OER and adapted it for their classroom, they've been able to do that. And they've been collaborating with their colleagues and students to grow the use of OER and also to evaluate it and make sure that it's not only meeting the needs of students, but also that it's improving learning. So you're going to hear a lot of information about OER adoption just from a very rich perspective here. So without further ado, I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Alisa. All right. Thank you, Una. Okay. I've got my little arrows here. All right. So I'm going to talk about two projects. The first one is a literature course that I was able to teach here at Glendale Community College. And you know, it's interesting how the opportunity came up. It's an African-American literature class. And when I was hired here eight years ago, I just happened to be the first African-American instructor in our department. And we had an adjunct person teaching the African-American class. And unfortunately, that person decided that he didn't want to teach the course any longer. And everyone sort of pointed fingers at me. I don't know why they picked me, but they wanted for me to teach this class. And my background is mostly online and hybrid teaching. So I said, if I teach this, I have to make it online or hybrid. So I set out with this goal of finding some OER materials as well. And the reason behind it, most people when they start creating an OER course, you know, their motivation is that they want to save students money. And it wasn't that I didn't want to save students money. I just wanted to be able to create this course as quickly as possible and painlessly as possible. And when I couldn't find any textbooks that fit that bill, I was then forced to use OER. But it turned out to be a positive thing. But here's just a list of some of the places that I looked. And I really was not thinking about the idea that I could find a full course that was developed already. I had this mindset that I was going to have to go through each of the competencies, each of the areas that I would have to cover and find content for that. And for those of you that have created OER, you know that can be very time-consuming. So I set out and looked at several of these places. And I came across sailor.org. And surprisingly, I found a full OER course. I was so happy I didn't know what to do. I thought, wow, this is great. This is going to save me a whole summer of trying to develop this course. Now, the good thing about it is that, yes, it was developed. And there were some really good materials that someone had compiled into this course. But as you can sort of see from this image, as a result of the course having many links, sailor has even decided to make this a legacy course, meaning it's not available to anyone anymore because a lot of the links have become outdated and they don't match up anymore. And when I first started looking at it, I thought, wow, this is great. But I was a little nervous about all the links. And I would say that when I first came across the course, probably about 20% of the links didn't work anymore. Sometimes the videos weren't there anymore or the links would go to web pages where the content had changed or moved. And I thought, wow, I don't want to go through all this effort to import this into my Canvas course and then have things not be available as the course starts running. So what that did was it prompted me to start a different process. And this is just an image of how the course was designed with all of these links. You can see the blue text. So it would tell the students, you know, here's the topic we're going to cover. Click the link. And the first link is a YouTube video. Take us to YouTube. And then the second one was an HTML. So it was really designed well that I knew where the links were supposed to take me, whether it was a YouTube video or HTML. But I thought, I have to do something to make this a little bit better. So what I set out to do was import the content into Canvas but then add it so that students weren't actually going out to all these different places. Now in some cases, I didn't have much of a choice because I couldn't get the right copyright, so I did have to just link. But in an example of a YouTube video, there's no reason why you have to click a link to go to YouTube for students to watch a YouTube video. In most of our LMSs, we can just embed that video into our Canvas or into our LMS. So here's an example of my Canvas course where I've created these modules. And all of the lessons that I got from the sailor.org class became lessons within Canvas. And so let's you kind of have an idea of what I used. I used Softchalk Lesson Builder, which I'll talk a little bit about that. I used SoundCloud, which is a website that allows for you to record audio and embed players. And then within Canvas, I used Canvas pages, Canvas quizzes, Canvas assignments, and Canvas discussions. So if you ever have taught any course where you rely heavily on students to read content, that's literature in that case. If students don't read the story or read the article or read the information, it's really difficult for you to have a conversation about it or it's really difficult for them to move forward in whatever competency they are supposed to master. So the method behind my Madness here was to try to create ways that I could ensure students were engaging with the content. So when you say click here and go to this web page and read the lecture that's on that web page, you never know if students actually get there. And so my idea was that I need to figure out a way that I can know that they went there and to maybe ask them a few questions about that. So I turned every piece of literature that they had to read for this course into some sort of an assignment, whether it be just a Canvas page, a Canvas quiz, Canvas assignment, or a Canvas discussion. So I'll show you a little bit of, oh, okay, I forgot about this. So creating lessons. So not every source has a Creative Commons license. And that's why many of the links were there in the course that was created. So where you would go to a website that housed these awesome videos, you weren't actually able to download the videos or embed these videos on your own site. So I had to keep that in mind that I still would have to link out. So not everything is going to be in a nice, neat package like I really wanted. But my idea was that if I can eliminate as many of those links as possible, I'm going to make this a better class. And a couple of occasions when the links didn't work or I really felt like I wanted to use that content but it wasn't licensed properly, I would have to search. So I did end up doing some search, but instead of looking for 100% of my content, I probably had to search for maybe about 20% of the content in different locations on the Internet. And some occasions I just asked for permission from some sites. Many times there was no indication of what the license is. And I know many of us find that when we do searching for OER. And not everybody is aware of Creative Commons or even how to apply that to their content. And sometimes just simply asking and informing people of how they can do that became very fruitful for me. Not always, but in a lot of cases that was nice. My goal was to keep students in the LMS as much as possible so that they weren't linking out. And then I also didn't want to have to worry so much about my links going bad or missing. So instead of having to worry about 100% of the course, which is the way the sailor.org course was designed, I only now have to worry about probably about 15%, 20% of the course, checking the links and all of that good stuff. But the most important thing was when I was talking about earlier, I wanted to be able to add assessments to some of these lessons. So instead of saying go read this poem about whatever it was we were studying, I can say go read this poem and then once you're finished reading that poem, answer these questions about the poem or participate in this discussion. And I wanted to put all of that together so that you wouldn't have to go somewhere outside of Canvas and then come back into Canvas to answer questions. I wanted to be all together. And lastly, I wanted to make sure that I can track the engagement with these lessons. I want to know if they watch the YouTube video that you can't just rely on that there's one more view because that could have been anybody watching that video or if you had a PDF file for them to read. I wanted to know that 10 of the 15 students actually opened up the document and read that PDF file. Okay, so here's an example of a lesson that I created in Canvas. And so this is an example of just using a simple assignment in Canvas. So I was able to take, in this case, it was a YouTube video. So I embedded the YouTube video within Canvas. All of the same instructions that I got from the course from Sailor are there. And then at the very bottom, underneath the video, it asks for students to write a 200 to 250 word summary of what they learned from the video. So again, I've accomplished a couple of things here. I'm not sending them off to a link to YouTube. I'm keeping them here. I'm not going to be able to know for sure that they've watched the video, but because I'm asking them to write a summary, I'll know that at least they know something about the origins of African-American English. They can find that information anywhere, but that's the point anyway. Whether they watch the video or they research it, they're going to write that summary. And so that's just one example. Okay, here's another example of another lesson. In this case, I took the content from a lesson. So here was a lesson where when I went to get the content, there was no copyright or there was no Creative Commons license available, and I got no response from the website. So I basically did a little research on my own and found very similar information from several different websites, and I created a lecture. And I recorded that lecture for students, had the text available as well, and then students were able to listen to that lecture. And then one last example is here's some content where, again, I wasn't able, here's a link. I wasn't able to get permission, so this one actually links out, but to make sure that students actually link to it and read it, I added it as a quiz within Canvas. So now I know that they've at least visited that content, and now they are coming back to answer some questions about what they learned when they were there. I see there's a question, but I'll get to that in just a second. This is an example of a softchalk lesson, so softchalk allows for me, once I get the Creative Commons license permission, to take that content and embed it in a very similar format, but within a softchalk lesson. And you can see over here at the very bottom where it says 0 to 20 is the score, I've embedded little quiz poppers within this lesson. So again, students are reading some of the content, and then they are answering questions as they go along through it. So that was my lit class, and then one project that we're going to be working on this summer, just quickly I want to explain this in my last slide, I'm calling it Crowdsourcing OER for English 101. So I was surprisingly able to get all of the online and hybrid faculty who teach English 101 involved in this process. So I sent them out a letter that said, hey, if we each pick a module, and a module is anywhere from three to four weeks, generally in 101, we teach a essay in each of the modules. So for a full class, you probably need four, no more than five modules. So I figured if I could get 10 people to create a module each, we would have 10 modules, and then we could each design our course by picking any of the four to five modules from the 10 that were available. I ended up getting 11 commitments, and basically what we're doing here on the screen, you can see that they're signing up for the theme. So what's your theme going to be? What mode are you going to choose? Many of us teach mixed modes, so we're not saying a student's going to write a comparison essay. We teach them multiple modes, and they choose based on their purpose. And then we talk about whether or not the essay would be multimodal. Will they be making a video or writing an essay? And then we also have writing lessons. What writing lessons would you cover? You can see here that someone chose writing transitions, so we're going to create lessons using the tools, Camtasia, SoftChop, or even Canvas to create these lessons. And again, we can all sort of interchange and share. And then because we do have to teach grammar, each of us are going to pick a grammar topic and do a lesson on that. Again, those grammar topics can be moved around into the different modules as you design your course from this. So the only requirements were that you fill in these categories and that you use all OER material, or you could write your own material. Many of the instructors say that they've already written a lot of the things. You know, when they introduce how to write a comparison contrast essay, they've already written up instructions and what that should look like with examples. So basically, we're going to put Creative Commons on licenses on all of that work and create these modules. And then once we're finished, we'll have this in our course shell in Canvas, and each of us will then be tasked with creating our own individual courses, which we will then later review. Because we teach online at Hybrid, we will review them not just for OER, but we will review them for QM quality matters as well. So that's the project that we're just getting started with right now. I only have four people signed up, so I got to send an email out to remind the rest of them to fill it out. But I'll be doing all the training, not just how and where to find OER. I've already set up the course shell in Canvas for faculty to go to to sort of see the outline of what your module should look like and what should be included. But I'm also going to include training on how to use some of the tools to create some of these digital lessons like soft chalk and Camtasia and SoundCloud. So that is it for me. I think I have one minute left, and I'll answer a couple of these questions if I can find any. Do you see any, Una? How long did it take you to build this course? I'm sorry, can you read me now? I can read you now. I see one question. He asked you how long it took you to build your course on African-American lit. I would say that Alan, I probably spent about two months in the summer, and I would not say that it was completely finished the first semester I taught it. In fact, I had a lot more links than I really wanted that first semester, but I wanted to see how students would react to all of these. I mean, everything I asked for them to read was an assignment, essentially. And I wanted to see how students reacted to that. So I built it over another semester after that, but two months just to get it sort of copied over into Canvas and to get a good portion of the links transformed into lessons. I would still say there's probably five or six lessons that still need to be converted over to a digital lesson. All right. I think we're probably going to hold the other questions Tilly and or Alyssa can answer them here unless you've got something immediate. All right. I wanted to mention one other thing about Dr. Capricci is the trichare of the Maricopa Millions OER project, which is a district-life project involving the 10 colleges within the Maricopa District. And so you guys have been doing this for a while, right, Alyssa? Yes. Sorry, I muted myself. Yes, we've been working with Maricopa Millions for three years now, and we've already met our goal of saving students $5 million in five years. We did it in three years, but we're still going. Wonderful. And so this, you know, if you develop this OER course for English 101, I'm assuming that you'll spread that out beyond Glendale Community College as well. Yes, we will. And we are in the process of getting Canvas Commons installed into our instance of Canvas. I think we're going to go live in June or July. And so we'll be able to share all of our OER courses in that manner. Wonderful. Yeah. Okay, well, thank you. That was Crissy's question. Okay. All right. I think we'll move on to our next speaker. And if you've got questions for Alyssa, please, more questions, please type them in the chat window. And we'll have time for her to answer those as well at the end. Thank you so much for sharing that great work with English, Alyssa. I'm here to email as well. Here we go. Next up is Ryan Compton, who is a physical geology professor at College of Lake County in Illinois. He's the department chair there of Earth Sciences. And he's going to tell us about his multi-year work in converting his physical geology course to OER and how he turned around some of his student outcomes as well. Ryan? Yes. Hi. Thank you for having me. And I'd also like to thank Alyssa. I found that discussion fascinating. Unfortunately, in the field that I come from geology, when I did a search, there wasn't much available in the way of OER. The best I could find was a MOOC, a massive open online course from MIT. But a lot of the images and figures said this is subject of copyright or a lot of stuff was missing. So I decided to take the endeavor of trying to build everything myself, which has taken a long time. And I started with looking at student success and how we define it at various levels. At the institution that I'm at, it is a semester grade of a C or above. And that's the least personal aspect of data analysis. For professors, we look at mastery and or appreciation of the subject matter, how well do students understand and retain what it is that we are teaching them. And then for students, I joke they didn't fall asleep because I have a terrible monotone voice. Or things like the five-minute university, if you've ever seen the stand-up skit where a person talks about having an entire degree done within five minutes, something to that approach. So looking at how students were performing on exams really led me to OER development to get away from published works to try to have it more along a track that connected better that students could see where they were headed. So on theory-based exams in 2009, you can see a significant amount of students were getting a C or better. We would like to see that go up over time, but we moved to 2011 and we see this dropping down. No students averaging an A, some B, some C, but a significant chunk dropping into that unsuccessful B and F range. And then by 2015, and this again I was using the same exams for these specific courses, having a student count of about 50 to 60 students per year. Now that these data were pulled from, we can see a significant amount down in a failure zone. So almost 84% successful in 2009 dropping to less than a third of students finding success in a theory-based way as of 2015. So I switched the class from fully in the classroom with a two and a half hour lecture and a two and a half hour lab to a blended course format where students will work individually outside of class through digital media to learn and gather information that they then will bring into the class to apply in labs and in group activities. And one of the key important things I thought was that students are able to make a connection between what they're doing outside of class by themselves and then what they're doing in class. So key step for students is to clearly define each step. So I wrote a 100 page assignment packet that has each module we're going to be doing starting with a page similar to this where they can see all the assignments that are due by the start of class when we meet this week. So we have a guided study which asks them questions. They're going to be writing it out. So even though we don't have a textbook, students will be leaving with a 100 page packet that they've filled in and written themselves if they ever want to reference again. The guided study will look at the interactive learning modules I use in just a few minutes. They then take a quiz on Blackboard, excuse me, once they've accomplished learning about the material, followed by pre-lab activities where they use YouTube videos to look at different concepts, and a taste study where they will apply what we're learning to a real world example. So the first part I call phase one solo content ingestion. Start with a familiar but high-tech learning technique. I use Adobe Captivate because it has some higher functionality beyond what PowerPoint is able to do. One of those being drag and drop, very easy to create in Captivate that interacts. Students can interact with what's on the screen and actually manipulate and control what they're looking at. But I have an interactive module. It has audio embedded in each of the slides. Students click the buttons on the bottom. So I try to have it where they're only sitting for a burst of about two minutes at most before they actually have to move the mouse and do something again. I've taken online classes and I've talked with other people who teach online classes. And a lot of times you get something like an audio file or you get a Captivate presentation, but all you do is hit play and then you sit there for an hour or two hours depending on how long it is. So I wanted something that would keep students interested and keep them engaged beyond just hitting play and then sitting back and taking it in. The second part for the solo content ingestion is a mandated assessment. So at the end of learning about minerals, there's three different interactive modules just for minerals. For each module, they have to answer questions at the end of it related to what they just learned. So if they get an answer incorrect, it kicks them back to learn about it again. If they get it correct, they continue on to the end, which is point three at the right side of the screen, where they have coded access. So students are given a code at the end of the first module for minerals. They then must enter that code into the second module to begin it. So it's really controlling the flow and the access to the material to make sure students are really doing the work. And of course the whole time that they are using these interactive modules, which College of Lake County we have Blackboard I have embedded in there, they have the guided study that they are writing and answering the questions and drawing figures and everything else along the way as they go. Phase two, after they've learned about the topic, we prep for group learning or prep for the lab. So I use a distance learning modification of the active learning jigsaw technique. So students work in groups of four. There are four pre-lab activities. Each student takes one of them. In Blackboard, there's a link to my YouTube video. If you search for them on YouTube, I have it set to private right now, so nobody will find them. But once I complete this full package of stuff that I'm still developing, I'll have it available. But students watch the video for their pre-lab, say they have number one luster. They write down, and you can see in the second video on the bottom, I'm tech savvy in some ways, but not in all ways. So in the video is I hold up a sheet of paper, and that's part of what they're writing down for their pre-lab activity. When we meet each week in class, students will take their pre-lab and they will teach it to the other three members of their group. And then when they're done, another group member teaches it, teaches their pre-lab to everybody, and they're taking notes from their leader in their jigsaw from a distance learning perspective for that topic. That way also when students do the lab itself, they have an expert in every aspect of what they're going to be completing in class. Now problems, of course, do arise from this. What if a student misses a day? What if you have students who don't do the work and continually show up unprepared? For the latter thing, I've really found that I don't have to be the police officer so much in the classroom, but I'm sure everyone is doing the work that if students show up unprepared, their other group members who are depending on them are very quick to make it clear that that's not acceptable and that they need to pull their weight while still being respectful as much as they can be. And if students don't show up, what we've done is we have purchased tablets and we have free Wi-Fi on campus. So I will have students take one of the tablets, pull up the instructional video for the person who's missing, and then fill it out and complete it based on what they can see on YouTube. Phase three, this is where the students are doing their pre-lab activity teaching each other. I originally had this as a video, but for the bandwidth I just reduced it to a photo, but you can see the student has a lot of stuff gone out. They've actually used a separate sheet of paper. And now they're really teaching and engaging their classmates before we get into the lab. For the actual lab itself, I went through and wrote a 120-page lab manual by searching for Google images that had Creative Commons licensing or using my own images. And then all of the text and tables I built over a summer, as that was a great spending of my time, I thought. And so the great thing it's allowed is consistency. One of the big sources of feedback I got from students was that they didn't feel that when we went from the publisher textbook to the lab manual, which was by a different publisher, that there was good connection. They felt like things were presented in a different way and it caused a lot of confusion. So by building all of these things, I've really allowed consistency across all of the different aspects of how they get information. Now, the great thing because students are preparing outside of class and they're able to make those connections is that student productivity in each lab has gone up around 150 to 200 percent. So when I wrote this lab manual two years ago, I intentionally put in twice as many problems as I thought students could complete in the class meeting. And the reason for that was we would do problems in class and then they would have problems as practice outside of class. And what I've found is that students are completing all or at least 90 percent of each lab that we do just in the two-hour window that we meet each week. For the global perspective with the case studies, we have discussion boards. Students either provide links that they can go to to find a case study, something that they're interested in. Excuse me, or I encourage students to go and find something and grab stuff from the internet, provide the link for where they found it. I've had several students from other countries that have really focused on what's happening in their country for each topic and really showed sort of their background and opened them up as an individual to other students that's been very valuable. So going back to data and how this has been helpful, looking at lab exams, which is the application of what students learned. Going back to 2009, we see a bit of a bimodal distribution. Quite a few students getting Bs and then quite a few dropping down into the ass. Again, we'd like to see it go up, but by 2011, looking at how students have not performed as well, this was the time I looked at really transitioning to OER to try to bring that back up. And by 2015, with the OER resources built, we do see most of those students have climbed back up. So starting around 50% successful on application-based exams, dropping to just over a quarter of the students finding success in a physical science lab, which is difficult, but now I've got that back up to about two-thirds of the students finding success. And what has it done for the course as a whole? I've received positive feedback in class and on evaluations from students. The enrollment for this coming fall has gone up 250% compared to what we were back in 2009. So we're getting a reputation and steam with students. Also, we've tapped into a new market because of this high-tech approach. We are actually going into dual credit where students who are in high school will also sign up for our classes and earn credit in both. I will be teaching the first of these in the fall semester. So quite excited to see how high school-age students take on what college students who are adults have been showing. For me as a professor, success rates, while the theory side has dropped, getting students to be able to apply the material rather than just regurgitate it, I find to be more significant and we can see a drastic increase there. And then the success rate of the class as a whole transitioning to more application-based assessment, we can see it's increased to 72% as of 2015. That was by the start of the year. With this year included, students have gone up to an 80% success rate in the course this year. So it's nice to see that continue to rise up. Now, this obviously was a huge undertaking because at most I could use a single image that somebody had created Commons license for. But the key step was making a plan. What do I want to approach first? How do I chunk this into manageable parts? Because when I looked at the class as a whole, it was extremely overwhelming. So I made a guide to what I wanted to accomplish for student success. I looked at what do I want online versus what do we do in class? What are students going to do individually? How does that connect to preparing them for being in a group? And then what they're actually doing in the group and then develop OER resources appropriately. Now, what I started with was the lab manual because that's where I had the most feedback from students that we really need something that connects better to the other material. So I started there and kind of worked my way to the left actually in that bottom row. So the great thing is even though this isn't a high enrollment course, I have about 250 students a year to maybe 275 students a year. The savings that my course is generating just with not having to purchase a lab manual or a textbook is around $50,000 a year. So in those higher enrollment areas, we could see significant financial savings for students and also hopefully greater success trends like we're seeing in the physical geology course. And I would like to thank everyone for their time. And I am complete, Una, if you would like to move on. Thank you very much, Ryan, for sharing that work. And it's quite an impressive body of work and all of the evaluations you shared with us. I think there might have been some questions in the chat window. I'm going to let you go ahead and take a quick peek at those and you can answer them in the chat window while we're moving on to our next speaker. Great. Well, thank you, Una. Again, thanks for inviting me to be a part of this. Thank you, Rajiv. All right. I'd like to introduce Rajiv. And I apologize. We left off a number of Rajiv's activities at OER here, and that was my fault on the slide. Rajiv is not only a psychology professor at Portland Polytechnic University. He's also an OER research fellow with the Open Education Group. He's a faculty workshop facilitator with the Open Textbook Network. And he's also an associate editor with the Nova Psychology Project. And he's going to tell us all about this now. So thank you so much, Rajiv, and I apologize again for that. Oh, no, please. And thank you for embarrassing me slightly. I think what was useful, even just looking at some of the comments earlier about involvement in Open, is I just want to point out that about three or four years ago, I was just a simple faculty member, much like anyone else, who is interested in seeing how I could deliver a more engaging, authentic learning experience for my students while at the same time trying to save them money as far as possible. So I'm going to try and just tell a bit of a story in terms of involvement going from reviewing books to authoring books and then advocating and doing research. So for me, things began really when I learned about the BC Open Textbook Project, which I'm sure many of you know about. It receives government support and their mandate was to produce free and open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled courses, undergraduate courses in British Columbia, which are of course not very different from what the 40 highest enrolled courses are in any other jurisdiction. And so before they launched it really, they put out a call for reviews. And I was interested in reviewing these books to see what they were like, what was their quality. And so I put my hand up to review one book that was in the repository. And I identified another book in my area that wasn't in the repository. So I completed two reviews. Along the way, I found that one of them was actually good enough for me to adopt later that year. So I did the reviews in about May or June. And I was teaching a research method and psychology course that fall. The problem of course was that in research methods that are regulations concerning research ethics that vary across jurisdictions. And certainly in Canada, they're quite a bit different than they are in the United States. And so over the summer, I just took a couple of weeks and did a bit of revision outside of the BC Project, just on my computer with Microsoft Word hanging in the backyard. And tried to modify that chapter to suit my students for that semester. And it was a very light revision. It was just sort of just enough so I could use it that semester. And then that experience went quite well. And I happened to share my revision back with the folks at BC Campus who got very, very excited. Client LaLonde over there wrote a blog post about it. And I didn't really appreciate how uncommon at least at the time revisions of OER really were. So that catalyzed my involvement a bit further. And to the point where now I routinely adopt open textbooks for all of my courses. Keep in mind at my institution, this is an undergraduate teaching institution with an open access mandate. We serve a very high proportion of immigrants of visible minorities. But our classes are also captive 35 students. So that means that I'm able to engage in really active and hands-on experiential learning. But at the same time, in terms of the impact, the financial impact of the switch to open textbooks, I have about 140 students every semester. So they do save about $25,000 every semester. And that's wonderful. But to me, this was a relatively low-hanging fruit in terms of involvement in open. But beyond the cost savings, I wanted to get a sense of what else mattered to my students. So I began surveying my students midway through the semester. And these are just some representative comments of what I started to see about three years ago when I started to adopt open textbooks. And you can see some people talking about the convenience, about the accessibility, about the portability, even about how engaging or clearly things are written. But the one that I blew up in the middle is something that means the most to me because that's the group that I'm most concerned about is those students for whom required course materials are unaffordable and they're choosing between groceries in a textbook or rent in a textbook. And it's this notion that if higher ed is meant to be a vehicle that delivers us from social inequality, it's actually being structured in a way that reinforces social inequality. So aside from the impact on students in terms of cost savings, I also started to notice that there were a series of collateral benefits. And these included things like the rapport in the classroom. And it was really hard to miss this. I mean, on day one, when your students learn that your textbook is free and that you care enough about them and the impact of those costs on them, that you've thought about this, you really do have them at hello. It's hard to explain the impact of that. And it stays with them until the end of the semester. So this is an example, just a snapshot of one of many course evaluations from that first semester. There's four months after that these are good news. So again, all of this reinforces the work. It catalyzed my involvement quite a bit further. And I was happy to proceed as an early adopter, putting together resources, modifying it where necessary, and doing without the auxiliary resources that typically come with the glossy books that are unsolicited from Pearson at all. But my colleagues won't. And I think for many of them it was a deal breaker that even if they thought the book was good enough and they were excited about cost savings for courses like introductory psychology, it was a challenge for them to consider adopting an open textbook without, let's say, a question bank. And that's understandable because that's a topic that is a very popular course, but it covers 16 different areas. And nobody went to graduate school to study 16 different areas. So we do rely more heavily on auxiliary resources for courses like this, and so I had discussions with BC campus along with some folks in the states that I wasn't working with at the time called NOBA. And we put together this event, what I like calling the Great Psychology Test Bank Sprint. So essentially we recruited about 20 or close to 20 faculty members from seven different institutions across British Columbia, brought them together for two days, and ran a sprint. And in a sprint style we wrote a thousand questions across those two days. And I know that sounds like the most mind-numbing thing you could do for two days, but the group as a whole, I mean, we ate and we wrote questions, we drank and we wrote questions, we went dragon boarding and we wrote questions. And it was really a tremendous social and bonding experience for everybody. But at the end we produced this wonderful resource, a thousand questions to support Open Textbooks for introductory psychology. At the start of the process, almost nobody in the group knew much about OER or Open Textbooks. As I said they were there for social and other aspects. But by the end I'm happy to say that six of the seven participating institutions ended up adopting Open Textbooks. So I think it ended up raising awareness, it ended up giving people skin in the game so people understood what the resource was, they contributed to it, and it started to have a tangible impact. And this is just in psych, but at the same time I think psychology is blessed. Unlike geology, as Ryan mentioned, psych is blessed with representing a significant return on investment for philanthropic organizations. So whether it's open stacks or NOBA or even government like the BC Open Textbook project, we are quite rich and flush with OER in psychology. But that's not the case necessarily for ancillary resources, which is why this project was important. I should note that about a year after this I revisited the textbook that I revised outside of the project for my own students and with the help of BC Campus and an additional co-author ended up revising it. So now this is in the repository as the second Canadian edition of research methods in psychology. I'm going to keep putting the links in the chat window for anyone who is interested in any of this. And for us it was fun to be able to update the book, take advantage of the interactive nature of the platform to embed interactive simulations and videos, but also to embed recent developments within research methods in my field including the drive and move to open science practices, which of course is quite simple to go with everything else that we're talking about. So so far the journey went from sort of reviewing to sort of this collaborative creation of ancillary resources and of course revising co-authoring open textbooks. There was another open textbook as well of social psychology that we also produced an international edition for, I can talk about later if anybody has questions. But with research methods in psychology there was another opportunity as well because my institution is such a strong believer in open educational practices. We are also a partner institution with the OERU, that's the Open Educational Resources University TAS. It's a global consortium of about 35, maybe a bit more universities at this point which really seek to come together to provide access to tertiary education for those who have financial geographic and other barriers. And so we ended up developing an entire course around the textbook and the course resides entirely online on Wiki Educator and so we built assignments, formative assessments, summative assessments and the whole goal of the OERU is to serve any kind of learner. So face-to-face learners at my institution can pay tuition, take the course, have an instructor grade their work, give them feedback, routine stuff. But OERU students from across the world could go through the entire course at their own pace and simply pay a proctoring fee for the assessments. It's far lower than tuition that it allows them to actually come away with academic credit which is quite different from MOOCs of course. And then of course the course lives online for informal learners who are simply interested in taking the course and learning for the sake of learning. So that was fun and I encourage you to look into that and the OERU itself if you're interested in this course. With NOVA I know that they were recently in a webinar as well and you can certainly look that up. Thanks Ouna for posting that link. But NOVA I find is a very unique group to work with in my field because instead of sort of working to create a traditional looking textbook that looks and smells and tastes like a Pearson textbook they adopted a radically different approach. They went to the leading scholars, really unquestionably the leading scholars and the subtopicators of psychology and got them and asked them to write brief 12-page modules in their areas. They created an online customizable drag and drop platform. This is OER and they also both stripped with a suite of brilliant resources from question banks to PowerPoint slides to instructor manuals that have involved the award winning teachers within psychology in the creation as well. So it's really whether it's the leading scholars or the leading teachers in psychology that's what NOVA has been built around. But of course it's OER and free. And so for the last year or so I've been working with NOVA as an associate editor contributing to the improvement of that particular resource. But I like to mention them because I really think their model is one that's terrific because even when I do advocacy work and I talk to my fellow faculty in psychology about open textbooks I can talk about open stacks which looks fantastic, high production value and they look at the author and they'll say well who is that? Not all people will do that but some do. And sometimes those are disingenuous objections but sometimes they're real concerns. But when I talk about NOVA all of those concerns dissipate. And it's quite tremendous to see the power of a model that involves the leaders within your discipline in the creation of OER. Aside from NOVA and thanks for sharing that link Jim, I've been doing a lot of advocacy work. So I served first with BC Campus as a faculty fellow with the BC Open Textbook Project. And since January of this year I've been with the Open Textbook Network doing workshops for them at institutions across the states. And again this is raising awareness, this is connecting faculty to OER helping them to understand how to navigate this new world which is liberating but potentially terrifying at the same time when you leave the safety and security of a term key option. So that's a lot of fun. Aside from the advocacy work, there's been research. And I'm pleased to say that we're in the process of writing this out but what you're seeing over here are data from the first Canadian advocacy study of Open Textbooks. This was not in my courses. I recruited a number of other instructors in my department. We randomly assigned the sections to either use commercial textbooks the one that's been used for more than 12 years in my institution or open textbooks in this case from open stacks. But we also wanted to avoid conflating the format of the digital platform with the openness. So we assigned some sections to a free digital textbook with the option to print as they usually are. But other sections were given free print textbooks with the option to download and we measured how much they crossed formats. And I can get into the details again if people have questions but in a nutshell we found that in almost every case there was no difference in course performance looking at multiple instructors and multiple exams across the different formats or the different books. The only case where there was a difference was early in the semester which I suspect strongly has to do with access to course materials while people are waiting to purchase the book or waiting to decide to purchase the book where the traditional commercial textbook students perform the worst. And if this sounds surprising it shouldn't because it's actually fairly consistent with every other study that's taking place on this subject. And that sort of work can be seen on the website of the open education crew which I'm going to try and put up right now. Aside from looking at course performance we also asked them things like what do you think about the quality? And this is an interesting snapshot where we had, I think, 18 different dimensions of quality. Nine of them showed no differences whatsoever. These are the ones that showed differences and the differences were consistent. The only cases where there were differences in perceptions of the textbooks were ones in which the commercial textbook fared worse which is fascinating. Keep in mind this is open stacks which is a glossy, really high production value open textbook but this goes some ways of showing that it's really distinguishable for the most part and where there are differences it actually focuses more on the relevance of the examples, the clarity of the writing, substantive issues and it's not just a question of glossy photographs. We also asked them to rate global quality. It looked much the same where open print textbooks were rated significantly more positively than commercial textbooks which is really fun. And then of course a couple of other things. I think some faculty do tend to feel, especially in psychology where they're familiar with the theory of cognitive dissonance that if you get students a book for free surely they won't value it. Turns out that's not really the case. When we asked them what they thought would be a fair price for their book the students would spend over $100 on their books thought that they would have been more happy spending close to $50 but the open textbook students regardless of format would spend zero also indicated that they thought it was worth about $50. Now these are different students. They just happen to converge which shows you that they are valued similarly which is quite interesting. I should also note that even though the open textbook students perform the same or better than the commercial textbook students these were students who actually were taking more courses at the same time were less advanced in terms of their progression and the degree and they were spending less time studying per week relative to the commercial textbook students. And so whether you look at number of courses taken concurrently, number of credits completed or number of hours spent studying per week all of those should have predicted a better performance among those students using commercial textbooks but we didn't see that. We saw the opposite. And I'm going to sort of try and wrap this up by saying that beyond the research I think the involvement has cascaded to a point where it's been hard to ignore the parallels between the open access movement, the OER movement the open pedagogy movement which is a lot of fun to talk about and I've been having a lot of fun playing with open pedagogy as well as that particular blog post will show you. So I've been very pleased that I've been working with a colleague of mine and later this summer we hope this book will be published by Ubiquiti Press of course that will be open access in its publication it will be nonsensical if it wasn't but that brings together leaders in this world whether it's Cable Green from Creative Commons or T.J. Bliss from Hewlett or Quill who everyone knows from CCC OER folks from BC campus, open stacks open science, open access and Strana brings this together as not just the philosophy but the practices that are changing how we are conducting our work in higher ed whether for scholarship or in the classroom and I sort of wanted to put that on everyone's radar in case that's useful it will be CC licensed so I would encourage folks who are interested in any aspect of open to take any of those chapters and repurpose them as best works for your local context but really I think from my perspective the moral of this story is that it started very simply for me as a reviewer who had learned about open textbooks courtesy of David Wiley and wanted to see if it was suitable for use in the classroom and boy things cascaded from there pretty quickly to adopting and co-authoring and editing and doing research and advocating so at this point I think it's fair to say that open ed work represents more than 50% of my work even though technically it all falls off the side of my desk but at the same time I must say it's been an extraordinarily fulfilling journey and it's one that I absolutely encourage people to explore as well it's changed my career much for the better so thanks for all the questions and comments and again feel free to pepper me or with any other questions moving forward in the time we are remaining. Thank you very much Reggie that was an amazing journey through which these OER accomplishments we are running just a little bit over but we are going to use the last three minutes of this webinar well in additional three minutes to grab any last minute questions and while we are waiting for some of those to come in I just wanted to mention we do have a May advisory meeting next week and it will have our usual CCC OER update and we have Nicole Finziner from OpenStacks who is going to talk about the OER platform that they have introduced that's free to faculty who want to edit and customize their OpenStacks textbooks. We also have a webinar on June 8 which will be on Open Pedagogy and Reggie mentioned a little bit of that earlier and so do tune in for that as well if you can. And we are open for questions here and you can grab a microphone if you would like or you can simply type them in the chat window. Alyssa, I know you were up first presenting were there any questions that you answered in the chat window that you would like to repeat in person or using audio at this point? I think I answered them all there was just a comment about the Canvas Commons and I think that was probably referring to the general Canvas Commons so I figured that out to see if we can put the course in there but we will definitely have it by the end of the summer in our own version of Canvas Commons and I think I already answered the other question. All right, well thank you very much Alyssa and Ryan did you have any did you have any questions or comments that you would like to add at this point? The only thing I might add is that I'll be building OER instructional videos or other faculty on how to sort of take the holistic approach to completely flip your class using OER to try to build more success rates. I'll be teaching how to make instructional videos how to make the interactive modules and just sort of break down what I gave today but no I think this was great and thank you for hosting it and having me. Well thank you so much Ryan and I hope that any of the videos that you make for your faculty there at College of Lake County that you openly licensed those so that we can share them out with a larger audience. Absolutely. Okay, well thanks so much. And Rajiv, I wanted to give you a last moment if you had any final remarks. Thank you, I think the only things I would add is there's a couple of events this year and I don't know if anyone in the group is attending but it would be a wonderful opportunity to connect and post over there and talk about work and maybe even how we can collaborate moving forward. One is the Festival of Learning which is in Vancouver in the second week of June. This is the link to that. And of course the other one is the bigger one which is the OpenEd conference itself which will be in November and the first week of November in Richmond, Virginia. So I just wanted to just put that in everyone's radar in case people are attending. It would be great to connect in person. Thank you so much for that, Rajiv. And we do share those on our calendar and our advisory meetings but it's always good to remind folks about those so they can plan for that. Well, I want to once again say thank you so much to our presenters today for sharing the amazing work that they do and thank you to all of you who were able to come and join us and thank you for your thoughtful comments and questions and we look forward to seeing you next week if you can make it to our advisory meeting or the first week of June on Open Pedagogy. Thanks everyone and have a great rest of your day.