 So welcome to this panel on Open Educational Resources in Reappointment, Tenure and Promotion dossiers. My name is Christina Hendricks. I am serving this year as the Vice Provost and Associate Vice President, Teaching and Learning Pro Tem at EBC Vancouver. And I'm happy to be moderating this panel today. So I'm going to start by sharing my slides. I just have a few slides to begin with. Beginning with a land acknowledgement, UBC Vancouver is in the Point Gray Campus is hosted, excuse me, is on unceded traditional and ancestral Musqueam territory. And on the slide is information about where you can find your own location on native-land.ca. And I'm joining you today from my home in Vancouver, which is on traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Slavitooth and Squamish nations. And I wanted to share with you something that I've done recently, which is I live relatively near to a new development that the Squamish nation is doing in Vancouver, which is right below the Burrard Bridge. And so I walk by there actually fairly frequently and watch that going up. And been trying to learn a little bit more about that nation and their language. And in so doing, I watched this amazing video that helped me to understand how to pronounce the name of the nation. So, Rachel, I wonder if you could put into the chat the spelling of the Squamish nation. Yeah, thank you. So, you know, when you look at this word, it's, if you're not familiar with the way that the language is written, it may not seem very obvious how to pronounce it, but I found this fantastic video, really breaking it down very carefully into each of the sounds. It's like five minutes long. It runs you through exactly how to say the words and what the marks mean, excuse me, how to say the sounds and what the marks mean. So, someone could post that video into the chat about how to pronounce that word. And I'm going to do my best. And I believe it is Squamish, Squamish. And if you watch the video, it's fantastic. It goes through each syllable, but then it also has you go backwards. So, Mesh, Hop, Hop. And then you go forwards again, Hopmish, which I think is really helpful and interesting. And something my son and I have been thinking about more lately is the ways in which some of the indigenous languages have used phonetic alphabets and specific accent markers and letter markers. And we're just really interested in thinking about how to learn how to pronounce those words more correctly. So, wanted to share that with you in case you are ever using that word in your own context. Here today, we are talking about open education, open scholarship, and how do we represent those in reappointment, promotion, and tenure packages. And we have a fantastic lineup of folks today to talk about those things. So, I've got me. I'm the moderator. We also have Elisa Bani Asad, who's Professor of Teaching and Computer Science and Acting Academic Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at EBC Vancouver. We have Amanda Coolidge, who's the Executive Director at BC Campus. Agnes Dantramald, who's Associate Professor of Teaching and Mechanical Engineering at EBC Vancouver. Jonathan Ichikawa, Professor and Department Head in Philosophy, and his cat. We're very happy to have the kitty here. Maya Kurzyk, who's Associate Professor in Applied Biology and Forest and Conservation Sciences. And George Rieger, who's Associate Professor of Teaching and Physics and Astronomy and also in Vantage College. So, welcome to all of you. And I've just got one more slide to share. And it just talks a little bit about the kinds of questions that we'll be asking. They may or may not be in exactly this wording, but I will also post them into the chat as I'm asking them so far as I remember. But generally the topic for today is how do you include open education or OER work in a RPT, reappointment, promotion, and tenure dossier? So how do you categorize it? But we'll also talk a little bit about challenges or barriers that are present when doing so. The degree to which others recognize your work in open education as part of your academic or scholarly work. And then thinking also about activities or support services at the institution or elsewhere that you would find useful for this purpose. And to the degree that there's time, we might also get to a question around promoting OER work in other ways. And there's a couple other questions. We just didn't want to include them all on the slide because there's quite a lot. And just say a little bit about the format. So I'll ask folks to introduce themselves and a little bit about their work in open education. And then I'll start asking the questions that we've prepared in advance. And I will also be making sure to leave space towards the end for any questions that participants in the session also have. So you can post those in the chat. I'll probably wait until a little bit later to get to the rest of the questions, but if you want to not forget, you can post them in the chat or you can wait until later and hop on the mic and it's up to you. Okay. So without further ado, let me start by asking each one of you to let us know your name, department, although we've already noted that, but you can remind us again. And one open education or OER project on which you have an OER project. So I will start with just looking at my screen. I have George up next up first. Go ahead, George. All right. Hello everyone. I'm George Rieger. I'm from physics and astronomy. And I became interested in OER by wanting to solve a problem. And that is in our large first year courses, we have a lot of resources, you know, to work all of these things and it was often very hard for students to get up to speed with, you know, registering for commercial online homework, database and then other things like clickers and so on. And so our work was to bring all course materials into one platform based on an open textbook that was just available, the open stacks physics textbook. And so I integrated it in a weekly format and adapted it for the physics 100 purposes. So all course materials are now integrated into one website organized by weeks. So they have a pre-reading, they have quizzes, pre-reading quizzes. They have online homework and all of that was made possible by the open stacks textbook. And then, yeah, we did some surveys and I was happy to be part of a publication that in which Christina is first author. Yes, it was a wonderful project. Thank you very much, George. Maya. Hi everybody. My name is Maya Krusek and I have a joint appointment with faculties of land and systems and forestry. I am a soil scientist by training. And when I was hired at UBC back in 2002, the group of soil science was kind of on its decline. And I was one of the very few faculty members left. And in such situation way back in early 2000s, I realized that there are certain disciplines of soil science that are absolutely necessary for training of both undergraduate and graduate students are going to lack at UBC for who knows how long. So that prompted me to reach out to my colleagues outside of UBC with expertise in those areas to start developing materials on those topics that were needed. So I really started developing these resources back in 2004. I think I got my first DLEF grant. And I continued working on development of those because our soil science group kind of started recovering in last maybe five plus years. So over time I developed 20, I believe, different open educational resources. The most recent and probably the most extensive and comprehensive one is open textbook, which is a national endeavor that involves 60 or so Canadian soil scientists contributing to this open textbook for introduction to soil science. And I'm glad to see Amanda Coolidge here because some of the funding for that book came from BC campus. The English version has been released two years ago and we are still trying to release the French version of that textbook. So that's one of the examples of what we've done. Fantastic, thank you, Maya. Jonathan. Hello, I'm Jonathan Ichikawa. I'm a professor in the philosophy department. I'm also currently the head of the philosophy department at UBC. So open access, open educational resources that I've been involved in. The main one is a textbook that I adapted and I wrote and made available free to students for a large introduction to formal logic course that I teach regularly. It's gone through a few versions over the time. It's relatively low-tech. I didn't invent it in a whole network, although I have a colleague who's doing a little bit more of that, which is pretty exciting. So yeah, writing this textbook is the paradigmatic thing in this neighborhood that I've done. A couple of other sort of angles that I know about and I have some perspective on that. I've probably heard the reason in here. I've spent some time with the Faculty Association on contract negotiations. So I know our collective agreement reasonably well. And so I have some of that kind of legal perspective there. As a department head, I'm now in the position that I'm one year into this headship. So I haven't been to this for a long time, but I have sort of overseen promotion and tenure cases. And I kind of have that angle of familiarity on that process. And I guess the other thing that I can mention in this category, maybe it depends on exactly how we define like OER, but if you include sort of research outputs that are open access, I certainly make a point when I can to be publishing open access journals when I'm flushing research funding, which is sometimes but not always. I pay the fee if I have to to make the thing available generally. So public availability, research outputs is also something that I've been thinking some of that. Wonderful. I can already see we've got such a wealth of experience here and still more to come. So Amanda, you go next. Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Amanda Coolidge. I am executive director at BC campus. And for those who are not aware, I'll just give a little bit of background. BC campus works with the 25 post-secondary institutions across the province of British Columbia in the areas of teaching and learning and open education. And we have been an organization for 20 years now or celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. And since that time, we have been very involved in open education. We're very committed to access to education broadly for students, faculty, et cetera. And so as you may be aware in 2012, we started the open textbook project, which is where we house a lot of our open textbooks that you might be using. And most recently we've branched out that open, those open resources to include open course collections. So really looking at ways that we can include more resources that are openly licensed that would help instructors use various curriculum resources that would be useful for students. So, yeah. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. And then I have another angle that I'll talk about later with regards to tenure and promotion, because I'm also very interested in how we can affect policy with regards to open education. Great. Thank you. Agnes. Hi, I'm Agnes. I'm in mechanical engineering. One of my more recent OER projects, it was just found by BC campus in fact, that first year engineering, the major gap in open textbooks or open resources was engineering mechanics, which is one of the things that I teach. And I was already interested in creating some resources for this. So over the past four or five years, I've been working with a team at Penn State on an open textbook online. And we've been building like mad, open homework problems in web work to try and recreate resources that could replace a commercial textbook in first and second year mechanics. And we've actually adopted this textbook and the web work resources for four institutions now. All right, fine by unmute button. Thank you, Agnes. Go ahead, Alisa. Thanks. Yeah, I'm Alisa Baniasad. As Christina said, I'm acting academic director at CTLT for the next little while. And I'm normally housed in computer science, which is where I, you know, do a lot of my, I mean, I do all of my teaching in computer science and I've done all my OER style work there. My main contribution in that is just sort of making a bunch of online materials. Like I've never, I haven't used a textbook that students would have to purchase in a really long time. In my field, it's just the textbooks go out of date in about a year. So it would just be really problematic to, I would just like, I would just need so much shelf space even to house the textbooks for myself. So it just very quickly became clear that curating materials and making them available online, almost as, you know, as soon as the web was a thing, was the best way to go. And so it's been a really long time. And then I also did make a series of videos that support one of the classes that kind of became like a video textbook. So that's, you know, so I've done a few, and then of course during COVID, I did a load of videos as we all did. And then those have kind of become a learning resource for the team of people that teach that class, not that they necessarily use my videos, but they're kind of have become like, you know, we sort of have them archived as a way to see different spins on different topics. So that's kind of neat. Actually, we kind of sometimes put them next to each other and play them and say, oh, these are different ways of explaining the same thing. So they have become sort of almost a research archive as well in terms of pedagogy around certain topics. And I thought a lot about how these are represented in tenure and promotion. You know, some of the questions that I think will be addressing are really vital because I think people do feel very confused about whether it sits in the category of excellence in teaching or innovation in teaching or in something that's more, you know, that has that impact to others. So looking forward to the discussion on those concepts. Wonderful. Thank you, everybody. Like I said, there's this really wealth of fantastic experience in creating using OER and people from different disciplines and in different faculty positions. And it's great to have Amanda from BC campus here as well. So I'm actually going to start with Amanda from BC campus because one of the catalysts for this discussion is that there was a matrix created by, and let me make sure I get the name of the organization, right? It's D O E R S three, driving OER sustainability for student success. D O E R S three. I think Will you have a link to post into the chat. But Amanda was part of a group in that organization that put together a matrix for OER work in tenure and promotion, which Will has just put into the chat. And so here's my question for Amanda. Could you describe the D O E R S three matrix and the motivation for creating it? Sure. So you can actually use it. You can say the acronym as doers three, which is, yeah, there you go. And so maybe I'll just give a bit of background as to what doers three is. So one of the things as BC campus, we fortunately are recognized globally for the work in open education, which means that all of you who are involved with open education are recognized globally for the work that you've done. And as such, we have the opportunity to work with a wide number of organizations. And one of the areas where we noticed we needed some more support in is working with other system like organizations like ourselves to figure out how best to do some of the open education work. So we joined a group called driving open education resource sustainability for student success or doers three. And that's a collaborative. It's a group of 35 public higher education systems that are both statewide and province wide. And we're really committed to supporting students success by promoting free customizable OER. We serve over 7.5 million students at eight hundred and 14 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. And it was initially launched in 2018. And so really what it does is it helps organizations implement scale and sustain OER by advancing research and policy sharing tools and learnings and showing how OER can foster equity and student success. So one of the working groups that I was a part of is called capacity building. And in that area, we really identified that a critical part of sustaining OER in higher education is recognizing the contributions by instructors who create and improve OER as part of their professional work. So anyone who's familiar with the OER community knows that questions about the role of OER work in tenure and promotion and reappointment are constants, constant questions where any practitioner or administrator gets. However, as the criteria for tenure and promotion can vary widely between different types of institutions and even between different departments within an institution, answering questions about the role of OER in the tenure and promotion process can seem really daunting. And so one thing is that we did some early research and found that according to James Skidmore at the University of Waterloo, he recommended that institutions recognize the creation of OER in the TNP process. He said doing so would communicate clearly that institutions of higher education take seriously the responsibility to tailor knowledge to students and to reduce barriers. And so what we did as a group is we developed an adaptable matrix, which I think is being linked in here, to help guide faculty as they attempt to include OER work in their tenure and promotion portfolios. So we initially thought of soliciting the OER community for pre-existing TNP policies that included OER, so we could draft a model policy that the community could use at their own institutions. But we had to set this aside partially because there's so few pre-existing policies that would fit the bill, but also because we didn't want to appear that we were suggesting some sort of a background solution. So due to the variance of the tenure and promotion process, we essentially ruled out a model policy. And what we came up with was more of a bottom-up approach. So we wanted to help faculty, staff, and administrators change the culture of their institutions, and we felt that the most effective way to do that was to create an adaptable matrix. And we knew from research that while individual students may differ from this matrix in its categories, most variations of a TNP guideline can be adapted into teaching, research, and service. So we then determined that the best approach was to systematically think about how OER work, a varied class of work itself, might fit into the three categories of research, teaching, and service, which then resulted in the development of the matrix. So we decided whether the contribution could apply to those three categories, and in some cases have marked multiple categories, and which one is most relevant will really depend upon the context. In addition, the matrix includes examples of how faculty might think strategically about where their open education contributions would be valued best and how best to frame those contributions. So we started thinking about how to best fit their OER work into their local TNP guidelines, and faculty documenting their OER work in portfolios should characterize their work using these terms to help colleagues understand their contribution. And this, the current form was created with individual faculty in mind. We do encourage tenure and promotion committees to adapt or edit the document to use as possible. It is CC by and we hope that you might be able to adapt this based on the needs of your institution, your department, et cetera. Wonderful. Thank you for that, Amanda. And I was excited to see this come out, and I think it still can be quite useful. It does separate out categories into research, teaching, and service, as you mentioned, and what it does is list out where you're meeting OER, using OER, adapting OER, doing research on OER, and then where each of those could fall under research, teaching, and service. So I think it can be a really useful matrix to think about. So I'm going to move on to the next question, which is a very broad question and answer. It could be applicable to most folks here. I'll put it in the chat. If you have included or plan to include OER work in your reappointment, promotion, and tenure dossiers, how have you done so and under which category? So I will note that we have folks in two different faculty streams here at the faculty stream, and folks in educational leadership and teaching, and folks in research and teaching faculty streams. So maybe we'll start with educational leadership. George, Agnes, Elisa, we'd like to begin. Sure. I can jump in. I think educational leadership is a really easy place to put a lot of OER work. It makes a lot of sense. We're talking about a definition that's impact beyond your classroom. So anytime you've created something where someone else is using it, or have taught another instructor about how to use a tool or supported someone in building their own OER, that falls under educational leadership. So I think it's really easy to put a lot of work into it. Adopting OER in my own classroom under teaching and service, being reviews, or other things like fun adjudication and things like that. Great. Thanks, Agnes. I was just finding the definition of educational leadership, and I believe this is the correct one. I don't know if it's actually OER elsewhere. Maybe it's in elsewhere. To advance innovation and teaching and learning with impact beyond one's own classroom. That was my quick Google to find it. It may be pretty close. Elisa or George? Anything to add to this question? George, do you want to take it? Okay. So yeah, I think there are a couple of ways to categorize OER work. I think there is a sort of concern around double lifting things when in the educational leadership track there's a kind of obsession around is it service or is it educational leadership or is it teaching or is it educational leadership? I think this needs to be dispelled in the context of the same activity that are one or the other and that doesn't mean the whole activity has to be listed under one or the other. Excellent creation of an OER piece of content that nobody uses but is a good thing in and of itself or only your class uses is teaching. It's excellence in teaching. You've created an artifact that is excellent within your own classroom and it's an excellent thing and you have maybe even done reflection on it within your class to say I've checked that people aren't swiping past parts of the video or I'm maybe mining through it to see which parts of the video people go back over and I'm feeding that back into my reflective process for teaching to say obviously my description of that concept was too encoded people needed to watch that three times next semester to understand on that concept so that is all within the core of excellence in teaching as soon as you communicate any aspect of that out for any reason all of that becomes educational leadership as soon as you communicate out I did I explained this concept in this way people needed to watch it five times and then I explained it differently in a more expanded form second semester people needed to watch it once then you have something to say you aren't just applying that knowledge within your own class you are able to communicate that learning out to other people and however you do that is impact beyond your classroom and that is educational leadership you can do it as a paper which is convenient for the reviewers of your promotion and tenure case because then they know that you did the work rigorously good venue read your dissemination and were able to say yes that was well done work that had meaningful impact or you can count the number of people who viewed your blog post about it or you can just collect experience reports from people or you can simply describe that you made it available that you have no statistics around usage whatsoever but it's publicly viewable and your approach was rigorous such that if somebody in theory came to look at it they could believe those findings and those are all elements of educational leadership so I think it I think it's about convincing your promotion and tenure committee and you know senior appointments committee that what you've done has or could have impact beyond your classroom and you know based on the fact that it's robust work it's something that was done at a high quality and that it's generalizable to somebody else's context and there are various ways to prove that so you can say well somebody use my videos in another class it so it worked it generalized to somebody else's context or somebody cited my paper so it generalized to somebody else's context or whatever however you want to demonstrate that evidence of impact is totally your call so I think that is really the conversation it's really about like you're creating the excellent materials or you're disseminating reflection about the or you disseminating the materials or reflection about the materials and that dissemination is the educational leadership piece and so it appears in both the conversations about each of those items is very different right so like in your teaching section in your excellent teaching section in your dossier you talk about the way you made the thing the way you know they're excellent the evidence based approaches that you used and all of the reflection that you did and you talk about your introspection about those things whereas when you then in the second half of your dossier and your educational leadership portion of your dossier you talk about all of the ways you know that these are generalizable evidence of impact and so it's two completely different conversations that you're not double dipping you having two different ways two different lenses on perhaps the same experience and I think that's a very important point to hammer home to yell folks that you are not you are not cheating by talking about something from two different perspectives. It's a really helpful thank you. It was very nice. I just want to add very quickly that because OER is so customizable it also allows you to you know come up with a template that works for your class but then you know you can also share it with colleagues and they can add materials or you know adopt materials from you and use it for their own class so it could also be easily part of service that way but I completely agree it really falls mostly into educational leadership and teaching that's where I have put it in the past the most Yeah thank you, me too it was mostly in educational leadership and teaching because I'm also educational leadership faculty but we also have two faculty members in the research and teaching stream so I would love to hear from you and how you've categorized your work Maya maybe to start and Jonathan. Well I guess I can start yes I come from a research stream and our CV template looks different than the other stream and it's really geared towards research and it is for somebody like me who has lots of these open educational resources struggle to find the correct spot and not to do the double dipping and to provide the evidence and in our template there isn't really anything specific about educational leadership so there is lots of things that I have to explain between a framework that is not geared towards any innovation in teaching I mean in research stream wanted or not we are told just do you know solid teaching and that's about it so where does this extra stuff go I just submitted my package right now for promotion this is my second attempt I tried once several years ago and it was a very stressful and lengthy process because of these extracurricular activities that I've done on educational leadership and teaching side that were a different level of assessment were viewed very differently by different folks it was very uneven how different people saw my CV some were really delighted with it and others were not in the end I wasn't successful again I decided to try again so I repackaged things differently this time around I put all of these educational resources under the publication in terms of here they are and this is what they are and this is who is using them and here is the usage of the open resources some of that in Google analytics I beefed up a little bit that better I think in terms of supporting information how many papers were published I mean papers in research stream are the easiest and most obvious way that people who are assessing us know but it's not just about publishing papers about your open educational resources what I found out coming from the research stream is that my colleagues in this stream don't really understand and before pandemic first time I went for promotion before pandemic people really didn't understand at all how much work it goes into development of these things so it was like well I got questions asked well is developing one educational resource same as writing one paper well maybe maybe it is maybe it isn't but what is really different especially when you have these resources for a long time there is a maintenance once you publish a paper you are done with that paper it's done you know you don't come back and revise that same paper but with open educational resources in order for them to be functional and usable you have to do the maintenance and some refinement in some cases and that is really different than just publishing a paper so anyhow I put these as I said I listed them under the references I try to separate what is service teaching more this time around will I be successful I have no idea I'm just embarking this once again but I'm glad that there is a discussion of this kind because if we are because coming from a research stream I'm getting a message in last 10-15 years that for us in research stream is really okay to do coverage teaching and just cruise along and being at academic institution I don't think that's right we still even if our focus is on research we are educators and we have to put effort in educating the students and transferring the excitement about our discipline and innovation in our discipline to younger generations so we can't just focus on research because we are not just a research institution so I hope there is less of a stringent division between the research stream and educational and teaching stream because it really sends a wrong message to young faculty members who are coming that you should just do this or you should just do that we need to be doing both of those or all of the three things that we are being assessed in order for institutions like UBC to be successful in everything that we do which is educating educating young people Thank you so much Maya thanks for sharing your story and the struggles that you've experienced really appreciate that Jonathan Yeah sure As Maya says it's a lot harder to find the right box for a lot of these kinds of things in the research stream and educational leadership at least when we are talking about these kinds of classroom resources if one publishes in an open access journal that's straightforward but if you are doing something like a textbook or classroom resources yeah we don't have a natural box for it so I reminded myself I pulled up my promotion CV from a few years ago and my textbook is alluded to twice one is under teaching there is a little heading that is often just kind of left blank but it says areas of special interest in accomplishments and I wrote a couple sentences saying about talking about the textbook that I wrote and why and then I did also list it in what's intended to be the kind of research section but there's publications and then there's like other publications sort of setting aside from peer reviewed kinds of things so I also listed it there in my particular case I think that my career has not been kind of focused especially in these areas so I've been doing the amount of kind of more traditional publication that the committee is often want so I don't really have the sense that this was particularly relevant for my promotion I think I was working on the strength of more traditional research and things but I didn't make a point of putting it in my CV in those locations Great I see at least you have your hand up please go ahead Thank you Jonathan just listening to you talk and also Maya it occurs to me that academia has really changed over the hundreds of years I think it used to be that perspectives on the field these insights where you could take a topic and distill it such that it could be digested by students and within your field I guess now we would sort of call it deeper discipline based education research it's but we don't respect it as much it's like there aren't a lot of venues where you can write an essay reflecting on conceptualization of a difficult topic in your area or nobody's publishing their lectures anymore but this really is what this is you're publishing your lectures and so if you had made it into a book format where you were publishing a philosophical thought on a concept then that might be more digestible to the senior appointments committee as a publication but because the target audience of students suddenly that devalues the publication impact in their minds that never used to be the case so in computer science we have all these essays by this giant of the field called Dijkstra and he was speaking not just to practitioners he was also speaking to students and these are held up as these huge these major works of the field and nobody would say well these are just lectures they don't count as being impactful maybe it's an optic issue I mean maybe we really have to start saying these are not just lectures for an individual group of students these are us framing carefully framing and thinking about the way to communicate these pedagogical concepts throughout the ages so that people will be able to see our point of view educationally on what these topics really are so that they can be communicated by other people and also so that people can better understand the current state of thinking about these topics to maybe even inspire future research in these topics as a launching point for further inquiry within the discipline so these are not just things that kids use to learn a little bit these are deep investigations of our topics by extreme experts in each of these fields so I think we want to raise the profile of these materials to that level thank you that's a really interesting way to frame it and think about it because it makes me think about the audiences if it's for your class that's an audience if it's for your peers that's another audience and it seems like these things can cross those audiences so it's not it's not that one is only teaching and the other is only research I think that's super interesting anyway that's what I got out of your comments I appreciate that we've already started to get into this question which is challenges or barriers is the next question so I see there's great things happening in the chat but anybody who hasn't yet spoken I know there's been a couple of things spoken about challenges or barriers either that you have encountered or that you've heard from others Amanda you're welcome to also share anything too about representing OER working in reappointment, promotion and tenure processes sure I think the most and this will resonate I think with everybody here is that for so long open education work has been seen as a side of the desk work it's not considered part of your everyday work and so it's kind of considered like oh they do that work look at that pet project that so-and-so works on that's a really cool project and yay for them and good for their students but they're somehow we're inherently missing the value and until there's like a recognition of the value and the sort of respect for that work I think that's sort of a that's a cultural conversation and so I think that becomes a real challenge and like to each of you who are doing it I mean congratulations because I think it's such a wonderful example of just like perseverance and doing something that is completely aligned with your value system and what you truly believe education should be about and for and so and I think sometimes when we get so entrenched in like what is considered proper academia requirements we forget about the real purpose and value of why we're in an educational institution which I think goes back to what Elisa was saying very similarly but I think that becomes a big challenge and I mean I am not an academic in an institution but that's what I hear is that the challenge is how do I move it from being the side of my desk to being a valued piece of my contributions of my day-to-day work. Thank you Any other barriers or challenges that folks haven't mentioned yet? I can quickly mention too it's time and money when I started doing the OER work the OER fund didn't exist and so we practically did it on our own time and since we didn't really know what comes out of it it wasn't really not very recognized so so at the time there was a bit of risk involved in that and definitely a lot of time input from our side without much support we did manage to get a TLEF grant for it and help from some grad students but yeah the that there is now support is really a wonderful development and promoting that there is support that there are people that have done it and that it's no more recognized it's really a good development the other one more quick thing and that relates to what Maya said one thing that is still difficult to get funds for is if you have to replace or make an OER project it's better if the OER is already existing then then making it better or replacing it doesn't meet OER criteria because you're not saving the students money you're just future prove it really helpful George and I just wanted to give a shout out to students for the OER fund because it was really strong student advocacy from the alma mater society who made that happen and then again we just got it renewed so super excited for that but appreciate your points about sustainability that's a good point anybody else have barriers or challenges Agnes I think one of the challenges that I've encountered is trying to quantify impact especially for things that are out in the world you know if you've got a paper you can find the number of citations on that paper if you've published through a commercial publisher you call them up and say how many books have you sold but something that's just available online for downloads that maybe you know in your google drive or something it's hard to measure the impact of that you don't know who's using it or how much they're using it or how many students and so that that is one thing that I've struggled with yeah I definitely have as well I remember I think I did a lot of video views and downloads of slides on a slide sharing website and things like that like it is just challenging Lisa yeah I think another I mean maybe this Agnes kind of goes to your point too I think infrastructure I think is a challenge so finding a platform finding a hosting service you hook up with one group and then it gets defunded and then all your videos disappear or they get delinked and it's a disaster I mean it just it's like we aren't you know we aren't printing presses and nobody would ever have expected us to be but we are expected to be people who can somehow do a lot of data management around our resources and software developers to some extent right and that is you know and I am a software developer so why can't I do it but it is actually really non-trivial to to try and make that work it's I think it would be worth having a conversation all of us maybe about how about our technical needs around OER and how we can try and get the maybe we pool our money or do something to try and get the kind of infrastructure that we need because we need to be able to do those things Agnes like you said like we need to be able to count views and to even be able to do a hey you've watched six videos you have to do a little survey about how good they are or whatever like you know something so that we can get the data that we need to make it obviously worth it that we've done it as opposed to just knowing in our hearts that it was worth it I think that that's the real issue is that I think generally universities generally don't believe the people who are creating any of the content that their content is good that's why you have to publish somewhere else or get a grant from somewhere else or get letters from somewhere else you always need an external opinion about whether what you've done is any good and so if we can somehow get data around it to help build that picture then that would be hugely helpful otherwise what the letter writers have to do they actually have to go in and watch the videos and see if they're good and do the assessment themselves and they're probably not going to do that they might watch for two seconds but they're not going to do a whole inventory they're not going to do their own entire analysis about whether we've actually improved the field by providing these videos but we could maybe figure out a way to do that in a robust way that would be believable by the senior appointments committee so I think it's worth putting our heads together on that Yeah that is a big problem I'm also thinking about platforms that have existed and then disappear after a while like I have a number of OER things on various platforms like YouTube is not going to go away anytime soon but you know someday and then one or two other things that I put stuff on have just disappeared just a bit ether right so having like resistant URLs, DOIs like just a permanent place for things to go the library I should say the library institutional repositories can be really useful for that purpose but anyway that's a great conversation to start and think about further I wanted to move on to another question specifically for Jonathan but could be anybody else really and that's about department chairs so any thoughts on how department chairs might support faculty members in representing OER work? Yeah thanks I at least in my experience the questions aren't all that different so I think of in the cases that I've been involved in so far the role of the department head in a promotion tenure case is large but it's sort of it's about kind of taking the file and the referee reports and crafting a letter that kind of becomes the main cover letter for the file as it goes up through the committees and everything that really represents the case for the promotion so when I did that with two colleagues last year there were both cases where it was clear within the department it was clear to me that these were promotion cases to support and my job was to explain that case in a way that's going to be legible to DAC and the SAC so a lot of what we've been saying already is kind of the same thing I mean the department heads are doing this work in a sort of at a different scale and the SACA is very large and it includes lots of things and hopefully includes some pointers to pay attention to the head needs to write a letter it's not a short letter but the part about that this particular OER resource is probably a paragraph and it needs to explain in case of an educational leadership file why it's educational leadership impact on pedagogy outside of classroom and if it's a research file that's tricky I haven't really dealt with that as I have that side of things I did have an educational leadership file that included some things in this neighborhood and so part of that was explaining to the generalist committee why this is significant and the more metrics we have the easier that is letter writers can say helpful things the they don't as I understand it these it's a little bit less of that I mean I was really impressed by like Alyssa should mark about you know it's too much to ask for people to kind of watch the video and decide to self order it's good and that's true but it's also not even exactly the question that like they care that much about it's not even so much is it good it's really is it is it doing this stuff amongst the scholarly community and so the more things that are that are kind of objective or close to objective measures that can write about in a letter easier that job is like it may be something like you know view counts could be interesting I didn't have anything like that in my case would you talk citation counts sometimes on the research stream but if there are things like you know here is a list of universities where this material is being used or if a letter writer talks about their experience and how it's transformed their classroom then I can relate that story as a letter those are the things that are a lot easier to convey in this kind of a context great thank you thank you anyone else have thoughts about department heads and supporting OER work yeah Lisa I just had like a little tiny follow-up to what Jonathan said about the influence I think honestly I think philosophically I think that you know not your kind of philosophy I feel like influence is a proxy for quality work it's a proxy for being able to assess whether somebody is doing something that's important like you know being able to look at an artist's body of work while they're alive and say wow this is amazing we don't value that until after they've died and it's suddenly two million dollars for a painting right but it would be great it's not gonna happen if our institution was able to look at the work while the person is still alive and applying for tenure to say wow this is incredible work we just I just think we have to own the fact that we don't necessarily know how to do that but we could try I mean we could probably try we could probably come up with more ways to incorporate valuation of things while in terms of their inherent goodness rather than just that we're not really influence machines right we shouldn't really be influence machine the influence should be a by-product of excellence at our jobs and and having the thoughts that are important Nobel prizes aren't given out for years later hiring a bunch of Nobel laureates is is a great way to make your institution look great but you're not the one generating the Nobel winning ideas so we want to be the generators for ideas we want to be the incubator for excellence within our work and so I think that's the the tenure and promotion process is a proxy for thinking about things like that like trying to guess who is it that we should invest in a lifetime way who is going to have these incredibly important thoughts that in a hundred years will have had an influence we try and predict short-term influence as a proxy for long-term influence is that even right I think that there's a there's a case to be made that we need an inventory for being able to assess excellence within our within our own scope and not be lazy about it and not outsource it which is what I feel like we're kind of doing right now I really agree with that as a matter of value I this is making me notice a thing I hadn't really seen before in our contract language but educational leadership is defined in the collective agreement as activity take an EDC and elsewhere to advance innovation teaching learning with impact beyond one's classroom that is part of the definition contractually you're making me think that it shouldn't be and that maybe this is something that the Association ought to be looking at in the next round of contract negotiations because I think you're straight if someone is producing outstanding work and for some reason it's not getting taken up that shouldn't mean it doesn't count as educational leadership I agree with you but when I look at what's written down I see something a little different thank you very interesting discussion Maya did you unmute it I don't know if you have something to add well yeah now this I was on a previous stream of the discussion this was this is also very interesting so now I'm thinking about this but to go back to your original question of what can department heads do I'm a program director because in land and food systems we don't have department so that's the closest I can be and I am the very first of the on the totem pole of the people who are providing feedback to faculty members who are thinking about reappointments and promotion and tenure and I mean what I can do in that position is to give a continuous advice to these young faculty members who are thinking about these these things we have regular annual meetings with pre-tenured faculty members again most of them are in research stream in our faculty I only had one educational leadership colleague but she was just outstanding and she really didn't need any advice from me but in terms of research because again I mean I see myself in this in-between world I am neither either one of the I don't really fit the mold so when I am dealing with colleagues in research stream and they are doing something that goes in towards the educational leadership or innovation in teaching I am always careful how I frame my advice to them and you know how they should be positioning their work pre-tenure I try to calm them down because if they want to go crazy in terms of these things if they are in research stream and if they want to do lots of educational leadership kind of activities or work I would not recommend that because barriers are real you know that's why we are having this panel but that being said they shouldn't be discouraged by faculty members who are very keen to in the research stream who are very keen to put lots of effort into innovation in education and they shouldn't be told which is constantly the message you are getting at UBC if you are in research stream don't you know put too much effort into teaching they need to position that work they need to have a good balance publishing papers about that work serving on stuff that hasn't been mentioned serving on editorial boards of educational journals those are some outstanding things that you know show some impact that you might have obviously getting grants and stuff like that but also those are things that are kind of add on to just to developing an educational resources that do get a bit more recognition in the traditional way of viewing our activities thank you my appreciate talking a little bit about some things that might fall under service too so you know being I think the editorial board of a journal would count as a service because that part sometimes gets a little bit it seems to be a smaller category and so that we often don't talk about it quite as much I think potentially reviewing other people's open textbooks I know UBC campus has a substantial review process could also potentially count as service right so I'm noticing it is 10 after the hour and we have about 20 minutes so we may end a little bit early in case folks have another meeting to go to 30 minutes after the hour and I did want to save a little time for questions from the participants here we have a lot of questions that we didn't quite get to but I'm looking through them and going well we actually kind of talked about that one and that one and that one so I'm not yet and I'm actually going to open this out to everybody and panelists and participants if anybody wants to answer but this can be useful potentially for Amanda or if you've also heard other thoughts it's around activities or support services so what activities or support services would you find or would you find useful for promoting your OER work and reappointment or frankly in promoting your OER work outside of that process as well so just more generally so any panelists and any participants if you have questions that are separate from that please feel free to post in the chat or raise your hand go ahead Agnes I think one of the things is seeing how other people frame their work so I'm putting it out there if anyone wants a copy of my dossier you're welcome to have it not saying it's the best but it's an example and I think the more examples that we see the easier it'll be for all of us to frame this but I also think these opportunities to just tell people about what we're doing making those connections and I know BC campus has been really really fantastic for this and we made some connections in Saskatchewan that ended up we collaborated together on some work but just getting the word out about who's doing what and I know Will as well has done the same thing has been really helpful in generating collaborations letting people know what's out there that it's available I don't know the best platform for that but those conversations have been really essential in my history of L.Y.R. Thank you Agnes I agree definitely with both of those however you can network to find folks to collaborate can be super helpful Jonathan I always like as a sort of relatively low cost promotion and incentivizing future for things that the University likes that doesn't necessarily want to actually put salaries and merits behind prizes I would love to see a two or three winners a year UBC has awarded this excellent contribution to L.Y.R. and here's $2,000 as a token of thanks but you also put the prize in your CD that's pretty inexpensive and I think it can be pretty valuable Thanks Jonathan I'm kind of smiling because there's something in the works so stay tuned go ahead George Yeah I think it would be nice to have sort of a dedicated O.Y.R. conference or that sort of thing it may be just me being ignorant about this if we had a venue where we could exchange ideas or show our work that would be nice it could be an incubator for new ideas it could be an incubator for networking so it could be an online conference which are easier to organize I think but just a way of promoting O.Y.R. to work that way and then hearing about ideas of others I think would be really nice I'm seeing that Amanda is putting a few things in the chat thank you George just wanted to mention those I don't know if everyone is following the chat but BC Campus does have awards for excellence in open education so these are open for nominations at all times and so anybody who wants to donate someone then they're announced when they're chosen on a rolling basis there's also the open education conference it's a North American conference that has been online the past few years partly started during COVID but then has continued online which has been really useful actually for those of us who have issues traveling for whatever reason and then there's the open education global conference which this year is happening Edmonton but can happen all over the world so sometimes it can be somewhat difficult to get to but they also frequently since COVID have had online options as well so last year the conference was in France but there was also an online couple of days conference too so there are some George I don't know if you were thinking about something a bit more local or what but yeah a bit more local could be helpful as well as part of the end of year events that we have that we may have a dedicated session on or something like that that could be useful right okay thank you we will take that thought into account thanks I'm also noting Amanda says in the chat when you receive the BC campus OER excellence award we CC it to your department head the VP academic or provost and the president of the university which is lovely and I know Ryan has had his hand up for a while thank you for your patience would you like to go ahead Ryan first one check can everybody hear me sometimes this little mic doesn't work very well so that's great I'm Ryan Brown and with the community engagement office here Vancouver campus for UBC and thanks everyone for the great conversation obviously I'm on the administrative side really great learning from me to hear from faculty members in their conversations around promotion and tenure and things like that it's a part of my job trying to look at ways that we can improve promotion and tenure support that work from the faculty association side for community engagement specifically so a much broader umbrella than just OER but really helpful to hear about this particular aspect of people doing work that does engage beyond the campus I heard a little bit there about the challenge that culture has at the university that you know the recognition that can be interpreted in what's in the collective agreement what a promotion and tenure committee might be looking for based on the type of relationship that you've been able to forge with them I'm wondering if a piece of work that I've been involved in for the last, well not so much over the last year but for a few years from just prior to when the pandemic hit to just last year was a Canadian pilot of the Carnegie Foundation community engagement classification I'm not sure if this is familiar to anyone on the panel but we worked with 15 other institutions to pilot the community engagement classification that today is only in the US and the purpose was to test it and see how it fits in the Canadian context and then to try to see if it would work here in Canada so a set of institutions are currently in the process of bringing that to Canada so there will be a classification here and a big component of that is curricular engagement co-curricular engagement aspects of community based research really broad so anything that engages with community beyond campus and I'm just wondering how people think about classification systems like this and whether they would have an impact on UBC culture maybe changes to the collective agreement future to say hey we need to keep up with this classification system because other institutions are getting more engaged and they're showing baseline data about that type of engagement and just get some thoughts on the type of effect that that type of classification might have at UBC I didn't think you Ryan any thoughts from our panelists I think Jonathan let Lisa go first Jim okay so maybe I mean I'm not too familiar with what exactly the implications of having a classification system like this would be but certainly I think things that recognize that this is a type of value at work Canada at least incrementally help I do think a lot of the culture derives from big things and I mean one I mean it's it's just true that UBC values traditional peer-reviewed scholarship more than it values teaching and educational reform and educational leadership and one way that we see that is these challenges to getting this kind of work recognized another really big way this is closer to it actually like we said at the beginning educational leadership faculty have this sort of thing as at least officially recognized as part of the job as educational leadership and so it's harder to get recognized on the research stream nominally you know these are just two streams of faculty but with that with no kind of hierarchy attached to them but if you look at pay it's very clear that UBC considers people who are publishing and scholarly material and teaching less than the educational faculty do we're paid way more and that's always been the case there's no that's not the contract that should be the case but that's certainly the practice and the new collective agreement I think has a 1% thing for educational leadership which will make this a slightly smaller problem but so the very deep structural what does the university care about feeds a lot of the culture and I'm not against a classification system that says here's the thing and we need to recognize that it's important and like I said I think that might make it slightly better than not having that but I think if we want to talk about really changing the culture that really starts in materialist and I think pay is like a really central one I was talking earlier about years and things that you can do that are cheap and that's my pragmatic side but how do you actually change the culture to solve this problem side it's going to be expensive and it's going to involve really changing which kinds of scholarship and which kinds of scholars that are valued in the highest ways at this sense all universities thank you Jonathan Lisa did you want to add something well I I hesitate to say anything after that because I think that was the really important point I think that's really I kind of nailed it I'm always skeptical about classification systems but being able to quantify things is always dangerous in worlds where the institution that you're working for really loves quantification it doesn't necessarily mean that the data they've collected is any good but if they can make a chart out of it it becomes usable and so I like not I think we need fewer charts and fewer describing our accomplishments I think we have to take up the mantle of doing qualitative assessment deep assessment of our work and I think this does to some extent come back to what heads and directors can do on behalf of their candidates that they're putting up and that might be doing the work or maybe gathering the work to make the case to the Dean's committees or the SAC to say I have assessed this work no it doesn't have the citation count or whatever and this goes for any kind of work no it doesn't have the citation count zero people have read this paper nobody has clicked this link but this is amazing work we can tell because we are also experts and we can see that this is excellent work and firing somebody who has produced this would be a tremendous loss if they're doing this caliber of work we don't need other people's opinions we know that this is good of course at the extreme end but I think that heads and directors could be more courageous about making statements like that and going to bat for people based on their own assessments of the excellence of the people in their unit and I think there's this big fear that people will when left up to their own devices do poor quality work they'll get away with writing papers that are not rigorous they'll produce courses that are lackluster but just because there's a video about them they'll claim they've made a thing and I think there are some people who do that I think there are some bad papers and there are some bad online resources that people put together so you want to be able to distinguish but the heads should be able to do that they should be able to look and say like well I know there's a risk that people put something online and then we say oh it's online so it must be good that's all we're saying we've looked at this one and it's excellent and you should believe that it's excellent because I'd say it's excellent and my opinion is important it's not a lack it's not an ad hoc opinion this is a well considered well informed opinion so I think maybe that yeah that's all I want to say thanks great thank you well I put out a call in the chat in case there were any other questions I'm not hearing or seeing anything from others so I think with that just because I know some people including myself have another meeting starting in just a few minutes I wanted to say thank you so much to all of our panelists this was an incredibly rich discussion and we didn't get through all the questions but we actually got through most of the topics even though and just really value all of the contributions that you've made and your straightforward and really thoughtful responses to these questions which give us all some good food for thought and potentially action in the future thank you all to those who have attended today and I hope that this has been a useful session for you okay thanks everyone I hope you have the good rest of your day