 Okay, yeah, I'm just gonna get started then. So hi everyone, welcome to the opening plenary of the 2020 Open Ed Conference. This is super exciting and it's super weird to do it digitally, but I mean, we're gonna embrace it while we can. And so my name is Akeksha. I am a former student leader at the University of Alberta Students Union. I was president there and now I work for the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations as their comms and public relations officer here in Ottawa, Canada, or the Algonquin Nation. So I'm really, really excited to be here today. This is my third Open Ed and it was actually my first Open Ed that I was introduced to how big this world actually is. And so it's been every single day. I feel like I'm learning more and more and it's been only a few hours of the conference and I feel like I've already learned something. So it's been really incredible having to do this digitally. We have thousands of people here today. So we'll get into a little bit more about who's actually here as we keep going, but I'm gonna be one of your hosts today for the session. And this year's Open Ed Conference is all about community. And so this session is focused exactly on that. We're gonna be able to connect with each other, share stories and build a community through our shared interests. And so one of the biggest benefits that I found from the conference was the offline connections I was able to make once I returned back to my home institution, which allowed me to do things like help create a committee, help look at different ways to engage students and professors in open education. And so during the session, we really want you to be able to participate in an interactive way by live polling as well as some storytelling that we're gonna do at the very end, which I think is a really interesting way to get to know people. So we're really excited to learn about what Open Ed means to you. And we hope that this session gives you a really good understanding of what Open Education might mean to others. And with that, I'm gonna let my co-session hosts introduce themselves and I'll pass it over to Amanda. Thanks, Acacia. My name is Amanda Larson and I am the Affordable Learning Instruction Consultant at the Ohio State University. And that is a weird job title to say that I do a lot of, I create a lot of professional development around open pedagogy and open educational practices, working closely with faculty to help them incorporate those into their courses. As you can see, can we go to the next slide? You can't see it yet, but you will see it in a minute. There we go. As you can see from the session agenda, we are going to do some polling questions through Menti. And with that, we're gonna get an idea of who is and who is not in this Zoom room while also exploring what Open Education means to you. And then after our group polling exercises, we're gonna enter into an interactive storytelling activity where you'll be invited to either share your stories or stay here and listen to others share theirs. The goal of the session is to help us all understand what education means to ourselves and also our colleagues and friends who are in these sessions as we enter into a week of fantastic sessions. Now over to our third co-host, Sarah. Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah, thanks Amanda for that introduction. I am a teacher librarian here in Denver, Colorado. I'm also a graduate student at the, at the BASCA University where I'm studying open educational resources and open educational practices, especially in the K-12 realm. And I am super excited. This is my first open ed conference and it has been a delight thus far. So I'm really excited. So in order to, for you all to participate in our live polling, we're gonna ask that you would join us at Mentimeter. And we're gonna use Mentimeter, this tool to, to solicit live audience input and feedback. So if you choose your device of choice and navigate to menti.com, it might be nice to have kind of two devices so that you can keep the slides up and also interact with Menti. But you would enter the participation code 1-8-5-7-0-1-3. And we've included on the screen the QR code that you can go straight to the poll for the session. And I think we're also gonna drop the link into the Zoom chat. So that will give you just a minute here to get connected. Yep, and there's the link for everyone if you need it in the chat, right? Yeah, you should be seeing the kind of setting up Menti on your, on your screen for Menti. We haven't started the polls yet. I think, yeah, like once we, once you type in the, the, the numeric code then, you should be, you should be seeing just the setting up Menti. Okay, so we're almost, we're almost there. Okay, okay. So we should now see that, now that most of us at least are connected to Menti, we'll start up with a warm up or ice breaker test. So how are you feeling about a week of virtual conferencing? Like are you feeling giddy? Is it a tight schedule? Are you feeling like a party animal? Multi-tasking? I know that's me over here back to school or perhaps Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. See what it looks like. It looks like we have a bunch of people that are, let's see what it looks like over here to me. Looks like we have a lot of the blue. We have a few party animals. We have some Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, yeah, versus all of the above, of course. I think that's a, that's part of it. But yeah, like multi-tasking, I feel like I have work happening and then I have open ed and I have kind of school. And yeah, it's definitely kind of, kind of crazy these days, but I'm super excited. It looks like we're having work for catching the hang of Menti. So let's get going on learning a little bit more about who's here in our Zoom room today. So with this question, we are kind of looking to see, learn a little bit more about each other and these questions will help us better understand who's here in the Zoom room. So where are you joining us from? You can enter your state, your province, country, your city, whatever, whatever makes sense to you. Yeah, it looks like, wow, look at all of these, look at where we're all from. That's super exciting to see. I see a variety of states. I see some countries that looks like I see Arizona, Texas, Florida. Let's see if I can zoom in to navigate to countries. I know that we are an international crowd, which is super, super exciting. Oh, wow, look, and we're even entering in the chat as well. Welcome everyone. It's just really beautiful. So yeah, I'm super excited about that. She's here. Wow, welcome, welcome. This is really fantastic. I mean, our next slide after this one is gonna be kind of some information from registration and it looks like we have about around 1,500 people that have registered for OpenEd, which is a record-breaking attendance here. And yeah, I mean, as hard as it is to be remote, I think it gives us more opportunities for all of us to participate. I think the next couple of slides are gonna indicate maps of information where people came from. So you can see that in Canada and the US, almost every single state and province is represented. We were having a conversation earlier and we are pretty sure that someone from New Mexico is here. So it's really exciting to see how in Canada and North America, how we are represented. And also then we do have some global maps indicating that there are over 50 countries that are represented here. It's, I love that we're part of this global community. I think I'm still on this one. So I think we're like kind of looking at our, what your primary profession is. And we thought it would be interesting to see kind of what the lenses are that we are bringing to OpenEd. And it looks like we have lots of librarians in the house and teachers and educators. We have some students, some instructional designers. Yeah, I mean, go team library. But it's super, super exciting. I'm so glad that there are so many different kinds of voices that are represented. And of course, like being one of the librarians, we're in a profession where we love coming alongside people and access to information is at the heart of what we do. So yeah, I'm really grateful to be part of that. Let me see here. And I think with that, I am ready to turn it over to, I believe, Akeksha, who's gonna lead us in some polls a little bit more about OpenEd. Awesome, it's actually incredible to see everyone from all over the place, like some of these places I've always wanted to visit. So post this crazy world we're in, perhaps I'll have to make a trip over to these international locations. But the next sort of set of questions is to help us understand how familiar everybody is with the OpenEd conference. There's been people who have come in the past and people who haven't. And it's pretty interesting to see how much more accessible this digital setting might have been for some people. So we'll go to the first question, which is how many times have you attended the OpenEd conference? Ah, we have so many first time attendees. My first time attending, I remember being super a little bit nervous because there was so many people and I felt like there wasn't that many students my first time. But I think once you kind of find your crowd, they never let you go, which is the best part. So it's been really awesome to build those connections. So all you first time attendees, I mean, I think it'd be awesome if you reached out to anybody really over the Twitter sphere or just anybody and just start following them and build those connections. We have two people who have been here for 10 plus years, five, six to nine times. Ah, lots of first year attendees though. That is exciting. Okay, that is really interesting. So we'll head on over to the next question here as well. How would you rate your level of experience in the Open Education field? So we have beginner, intermediate, advanced. I feel like I've only been in this sphere for like three years and I still feel like I'm a beginner or not sure because every, like literally every day I learn new things about all of the work that has to happen. Yeah, so we have a pretty like even-ish split here. Couple of advanced people. A lot of people are falling in the intermediate section. Some people that are not sure. Yeah, I feel you. Yeah, it is hard to define, I do agree. I think it's like a rate with your heart kind of thing. If you want to feel like you're an advanced rating then perhaps just rate yourself there. Why not? Awesome. Yeah, they're kind of staggering out. So a lot of people are sitting in this middle. A lot of people are in the beginning as well. So that's awesome. The best thing about this conference is that it does have the little stream so you can actually decide where you want to go. And I feel like there's a lot of stuff happening all at once, kind of like Nicole had mentioned at the very beginning of the conference this morning, like there were hundreds of people involved in the process to fill different committee or to fill different sessions and stuff. So hopefully there's something for everyone. We'll head on over to the next question, which is sort of your interest areas when it comes to open ed. So we're trying to figure out what the specific functional areas of interest might be or even subcategories. Just head on over to the next slide. There we go. So just like what things you're interested in, what kind of areas you want to see yourself. So we have practices, community connections and collaboration, specific topics for COVID-19, social justice, strategies, open ed, other, all of them. Yeah, I think you should have the option in my team meter to click every single one. So you can only just choose one. Okay, well, I think it'll be okay. You have a lot of people interested in strategies, a lot of people interested in social justice practices. When I'm hearing from the chat, people have many interests, which I'm not surprised by. Some people are pretending that other means all of the above, okay. Yeah, all interesting except for COVID, that's true. I'm a little bit sick of hearing. I think it's totally fair to be interested in a lot of them. Community connections and collaborations is leading a little here. As well as strategies. I think it's social justice is definitely a really interesting one because that was something that I did not know that open could do, was that it not only is, when I first was involved in open, it was talking a lot about free textbooks, right. From a student perspective, that to me is like the grab that you initially get. But the more that I stayed involved in it and interacted with people, I learned that it was so much more about our dynamic quality of education. So my professors that were wanting to teach me like topical issues would just send us articles and open things and I would never connect them with the idea of open. And so that to me has been a really big transition. So it's not just about one thing, but it can be about social justice in all fields because teachers and instructors are able to interact and interlace all of those different concepts. Something that I would never have learned had it not been for open ed. This is looking great. I found this slide super interesting. We'll head on over to the next slide and I'll pass it over to Sarah to talk a little bit more about the rest of the mentee. So we're gonna look at this last set of questions and it's gonna help us explore what open education looks like together. Of course, one of the hallmarks of the field of open ed is that we welcome all voices in the conversation. And we know in fact that in this session, there is so much variety and so much diversity and identities and opinions and perspectives and expertise and experiences, and which is such a strength of this field. But we also know that open education means something different to everyone. And this final set of questions is going to frame that diversity of perspective and kind of provide a definition for everyone who is attending. And so with that, we'll go to the next, we'll kind of go to the next question. So what values do you associate with open education? So we can enter some multiple words and we'll explore together what kinds of values are part of your idea. Equity is really big in access, inclusiveness, inclusivity and affordability looking really good. Yeah, I mean, I kind of see collaboration. I loved the conversation this morning in the opening talking about co-creation. You have inclusivity, accessibility, affordability, certainly a doorway to openness, diversity, of course in community. How beautiful that this has been a community endeavor for the past several months and now we get to be a community together. Sharing certainly and freedom, which is really, really, really beautiful. Oh, it is really lovely. Innovation, yeah, so many really, really great words but you can see affordability, equity, access, collaboration, accessibility. Kind of makes me happy to be part of this community. And the words just keep on coming in. So lovely. All right, I think we can maybe move on to our next slide and kind of add that more. So what words would you all include in a definition of open education? So what are some ways that you would define it? Affordable, free, dynamic, fun, yeah, fun, hard work, for sure, for sure it's hard work but I think super worth it. You have equity and equitable, accessible and collaborative. There's a lot of kind of our values are coming through in the ways that we choose to define it. Adaptable, for sure, those open licenses allow for so much kind of modification. Flexible, yeah, accessible, free. Open, of course, using kind of the words in our definition. Yeah, I think one of, in part of my newness to open education, it was kind of that openness of the definition. So I love that we're kind of putting the words together of how our community is defining openness. All right, and I think we can maybe move on to the next question too. That this is of course like our hallmark question because we're gonna move into a session of storytelling but what does open education mean to you? I think our open education stories are really important and yeah, so what are ways that open education, what it means to you though? I'm gonna have to make my screen bigger so that I can see all of the ones here. Community and potential, student success. It's really beautiful, equitable access. We're seeing affordable education and student-centered. We're seeing opportunities for people. Yeah, we're seeing, I'm not sure how the scrolling is working but it looks like there's lots of, there's been lots of comments there and it will be capturing all of these, these voices here. Yeah, it looks like we have a lot of responses. Yeah, I know, the scroll wheel. We need to see more- Sorry, scrolling malfunction. Right, there's so many, there's so many really great responses. Oh, yeah, oh. There were so many, it wasn't going. That's right, we're like packing it because I think it's super, yeah, learner as educator and co-creator. It's like so beautiful. Access for all, the democratization of learning, access to those who might not have it otherwise, care. I love the words about care and compassion that we heard a little bit earlier. Empowerment of students, equitable and accessible approach to pedagogy, freedom. Yeah, I mean, it just, it kind of, I feel like I was telling the group earlier, I was having a lot of feels this morning and it does. It's super beautiful to see all of these things that open education means to people, an opportunity to facilitate change, to make things equitable. I think the ability for students not to have to choose between eating and learning is really, really key and important. Anyone can receive that education. Yeah, it's affordable. It's equitable. Yeah, I think that, you know, I am so interested in hearing more of our stories to see how openness has impacted us individually and to be able to share that. And I think we're gonna be doing that this week in the conference. So, so beautiful. Thanks everyone. And I think with that, I'll pass it over to Amanda when we're ready to talk about what storytelling looks like. So in the community feedback while we were planning the conference, one topic that surfed repeatedly was that networking and meeting new people was a priority to the community. In fact, just one of my favorite parts of conferencing is getting to see people in the hallway and chat with them and, you know, grab lunch. And when establishing a virtual conference, this could be a difficult thing to do for many reasons. I mean, the nature of the conference of itself is different. And I mean, we might all be feeling that it's harder to feel commissioned to fully commit to the day when we're not physically leaving work to go somewhere else or when our work is virtual. We won't run into people in the hallway between sessions. We won't be able to go grab a meal or even sit down in the opening plenary with tables of the folks as you might have at the beginning of a conference. With that said, we wanted to organize a time where you could still make those kinds of connections and possibly meet new people to expand your network and have a chance to build relationships through a shared experience. So today we're going to do that through the power of storytelling. Storytelling and actively listening as others tell their stories is a powerful way to get to know one another. Next slide, please. So we're gonna go over the ground rules for what's gonna happen. So this is an exercise that is used by the OpenCon community. And I have the, I guess, luck to attend OpenCon in 2018. And the first thing that starts off with you're randomly paired up with a group of people and you're gonna sit down and think about the story of your life starting from the very beginning of who you are to why you're here today. And for us, we wanna keep in mind the question of what does open education mean to us as we're telling these stories. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna break out into groups and you're gonna get the opportunity to tell the five minute version of your life. So you'll get to know people in a way that we don't often have the chance to. Groups are gonna be assigned at random, so you'll have the chance to meet people you may want to connect with later in the conference. And I think it's a good opportunity to use this exercise as we start the conference to really reflect on what open education means to you personally and to the people who you're sharing this space with. So here's some ground rules. We're gonna listen while others are speaking. It's really important to stick to the time that you're allotted so that everyone gets their chance to share and moderators will have been set, instructed to set a timer, share inspiration, not names. So if you are tweeting, this is not the time to tweet. Respect the stories that are being shared. They might be private. So if you do want to do something, share the inspiration that you get. Share as much as you feel comfortable sharing. If you decide to pass, that's okay. So here's how it's gonna work. There's also going to be a public story circle if you don't feel comfortable going into a breakout room. And you are welcome to stay here and listen to the folks who are going to share their story in this room. Does anyone better want to explain how they're going to get into their breakout rooms? Okay, do you want me to do that? Yes, please. Okay, all right everybody. So here's how it's gonna work. And I think we all need to be comfortable with just a little bit of chaos right now as we all orderly make our way to the three breakout rooms that are currently available. If you go back to schedule, Spencer has put the link right there in the chat. There are three breakout sessions that are ordered by last name. So just pick the one that corresponds to your last name and enter into that room. As soon as you're there, the host is going to split everybody up into breakout rooms of seven to eight people probably. And then you'll have five minutes or so to share your story and share stories, hear the stories of the others in your room. So please go ahead and start making your way there now if you are here and we will be there to meet you on the other side. Oh, and Spencer, the actual links right in there. If you are gonna go share your story, you will leave this room to go into a breakout room by your last name in sketch. If you don't want to do that, you can stay here and listen to the public story circle and don't feel like you're going to miss out because the session is recorded so you can have both experiences. So you can go do the breakout room and then watch the recorded public story circle. If you are a panelist, please stay here. Yes, that's right Sherry. And all the panelists have been promoted to panelists. So I'm gonna join one of the breakout rooms, Amanda. Thank you very much. I'm gonna give people just a few minutes to head to their breakout rooms, just waiting for the number to stabilize. It looks like we have just a few people who are trying to head to a breakout room, but I think we can go ahead and get started. And I'm gonna start by modeling what it will look like. And then I'm gonna pass it off to Sarah to share her story and then I'm gonna let her pick who she picks next. I'm gonna keep an eye on the time for us. So let me go ahead and set a timer for myself. So thinking about my story, I was really surprised at how different it feels like now, doing it two years later. And so let me start with, I was a nontraditional student when I went back to undergrad and I was a Pell recipient. So without a Pell grant, I wouldn't have been able to attend college. I wouldn't have been able to afford my books. It was the little bit of money that I had to live on. And at that time, thinking about open educational resources wasn't even something I knew about. And the way financial aid worked at my institution was that if you wanted to purchase books, you could off your financial aid but you had to get a book voucher. So you were really locked into what was available in the bookstore. So top prices with markup, you couldn't shop on Amazon. And when I'm thinking about like, I use that money to live on as well. I mean, I was literally making the decision between how much money would I have to get through the semester versus the need to have a book. And thinking about starting there really changes the way that I interact with students now. Like I'm really willing to meet them where they are. And so that's sort of like the base layer of the Amanda Larson cake of open education. And then I went to graduate school and I have done that twice now. So the first time was for a master's in literature. And I got really lucky that I was selected to have tuition remittance because I was going to work as the editorial assistant for the Journal of Narrative Theory. And that's when I started to learn about open access because I had authors writing me about their publishing agreements and whether they were allowed to publish open access. So this is the first time that that really starts percolating apart from some big open source interest previously. And then I went to library school and it was the first time that I had to really take out like substantial student loans in order to pay for college. So I was like desperately looking for tuition remittance again. I couldn't really afford my books but thankfully like in graduate school it can be the trend that they don't assign those kinds of materials. And I had learned about interlibrary loan by that point. But my second year I was able to be the OER teaching assistant and I fell in love with this work. I fell in love with working with faculty. I was able to help them build textbooks in places where there weren't extant textbooks. And so I had sort of found my calling as a librarian was to do this work in open educational resources and to try and help things be more affordable for students. Then I graduated and I was really lucky to get a position as an open education librarian. But I found as I worked there for around two and a half years that I was really unhappy. I didn't get to work as closely with faculty which was sort of the passion that lights me up inside. And I had also really found that in addition to being a librarian I really care about other librarians. I care about the professional development they get. I care about the fact that their contracts are temporary that they're doing this open educational work off the side of their desk a lot of the time. And so before I was sort of told the story about how I love working with faculty and really miss it but now I've really discovered this other layer of advocacy. So I want to advocate for other open education librarians. I want to make sure that they get the support that they need. And so now I'm really interested in seeing sort of where the next phase of my life will go because I'm in a position that lets me work more with faculty and I get to talk to them about open pedagogy and open educational practices which are what fire me up about open education about how it transforms pedagogy. And one of my favorite stories to tell is I worked with an instructor at UW Madison when I was in grad school. And he told me, he came in, he was all fired up and he said, Amanda I can teach completely differently now like I can use this tool and we're gonna have a vocabulary lesson and they'll all be in the same place and I don't have to worry about them having the materials and it was gonna change the way that he formed lessons. And that's what really informs my practice with working with faculty now. And that is five minutes of the story of Amanda and what open education means to me. I'm gonna pass it off to Sarah. Did Sarah leave? All right, well, I don't see Sarah. So I'm going to actually pass it off to Jonathan Koretz, your five minutes begins now, sir. Hi, that's really cool to hear more about you Amanda. I didn't know your story very well although I know you're from lots of meetings. I just to jump in, I was gonna, I think I have a different perspective on things from probably a lot of people. I'm not a librarian, but I was gonna talk when I was thinking about this, I was gonna talk about more the first modern open movement I think in modern times which is the free Libre open source software movement. I use the acronym floss. And I was gonna talk about how Richard Stallman was sort of a hero of mine for many, many years. He has turned out to be a hero with sort of very clay shoes of clay. So I don't wanna talk about that. So let me talk about a different thing that will be sort of a similar connection to just coming from the more techy world into this open education community. So I'm a pure mathematician by training and by it's my first love. I wanted to be a pure mathematician since I was in probably elementary school. And since I do a lot of OER work in my modern life, I often talk about OER to mathematicians. And there's a story I can tell to mathematicians that they instantly know what I'm talking about. It's a story that has to do with sort of the Western Eurocentric canon of mathematics. So I apologize for that, but the story goes like this. If you look back 2,500 years or so in the history of mathematics, the two names probably everyone has heard, Pythagoras and Euclid. So Pythagoras was kind of an interesting guy. He had really good PR. Everyone knows the Pythagorean theorem. He did not prove that theorem. He did not use it for anything. He left no writings. He was a weird guy. He ran sort of a cult. He had a very interesting story of him. Someone in the inner circle of his cult revealed to the rest of the world a mathematical fact that was supposed to be a secret of the cult and they tracked him down and killed him. So despite having good PR, he had very little impact on the history of mathematics on the history of thought. People know his name, but not anything he did because he didn't really do important work in mathematics. And a lot of people also know the name Euclid. Euclid wrote this famous book called The Elements of Geometry. And Euclid was a librarian. So the librarians who should love him, he worked at the library of Alexandria. And he wrote this book. And so in mathematics, the proof is to a theorem the same way source code is to a program in the modern world. So Euclid wrote this book which had all of the source code of all of his theorems. All of the ideas were just laid out there for everyone. His book, not as famous as the Bedagrian theorem but has had an enormous history of impact that goes 2000 years. Abraham Lincoln had a copy he carried with him everywhere. Herman Melville mentions Euclid's work in Moby Dick, Descartes Newton. It was sort of the cannon of being an educated person in the Eurocentric West was to know Euclid's work because it was all open. He shared his ideas and it also was imported into the great moment in history of the West at least when the center of the intellectual world was the Arab world and Al-Qarizmi and other great Arab scholars translated Euclid's elements into Arabic and it was a source of a lot of inspiration in the Arab world as well. So from my point of view there are these two figures early in the history that the discipline I love one of them was closed had very little actual impact one of them was wide open. It was kind of a no brainer. We've known for 2000 years openness is just the right way to do scholarship. And so as someone who works in mathematics I wanna share my work. I used to do research I don't do as much mathematics research I used to. You wanna share it as widely as possible put it out there, don't go to Elsevier and give them your intellectual product and have them sell it for some huge and insane fee to libraries that can barely afford those subscriptions. And similarly when I'm in the classroom I do much more teaching than research these days we should share our work with the students because just I don't really it's sort of an article of faith but 2000 years of history have shown that open is the better way to be a scholar and to be a teacher. And so that's kind of thing that has motivated me my entire life. And I since I'm doing more teaching now I discovered open licensing or I learned what other people talk and I learned from other people the wonders of overlancing and sharing my work and sharing the community. You know, I'm building a more open classroom and a more open perspective on the way I do pedagogy. And so I think it's just, it's a really it just is the same thing I like about mathematics. The ideas are so simple and so clear when you finally get the right way to think about them that you don't have any question anymore. In the same way the ideas of open licensing of the open approach to education to scholarship open access it's just clearly the right thing. It's as good as a proof of a theorem it's clear that we should do just the open way is better. And so that's sort of that's my path to it and that's why I'm in the open world right now because it makes sense. And I would 10 seconds over, let me handle it. Do I pick the next person, Amanda? Yes, clue. Please pick the next person. Regina, are you, are you ready to go? You are muted though. Okay, yes I am. Thank you, Jonathan and thank you Amanda. Really glad to share my story to all of you. My name is Regina and I am the OER and Student Success Librarian at Michigan State University and I come here from Ocumus in Michigan. Okay, so my story begins at the community college where I worked for nine years as a librarian and administrator in charge of technical services, library systems and collections. So unlike other community colleges, you know, that community college had a robust budget for collections and so a big part of what we spent for were for course reserves. So which means we purchase textbooks on reserves and many of you probably are from community college. You know that the students there are nontraditional and in that former institution that I was connected with 70% of the students were on Pell grants. And so, you know, I know that the students don't buy their textbooks and instead rely on the library to access their learning materials. So, and even if they were given vouchers to pay for their textbook, two weeks before the class starts or two weeks before the semester starts, we all know that they don't use that to purchase their textbook. They use that to live. They use that, you know, to take care of their day to day existence. And so we originally just purchased one copy of a textbook, which we loan for two hours. So as you can see, there's like a long list of students on waiting lists and they cannot take that book out. So they can just use that, you know, within the premises of the library. So because of the demand from our students, we decided to spend more. So we decided to buy instead of one copy. We bought two more. So it's three of all core courses that the college was offering. And we expanded the hours. So from two hours, we made available materials for 24 hours and 48 hours. So even if we are helping a lot of our students, I thought that that arrangement is not acceptable. Something is wrong, really, something is wrong. And so that was in 2014. And by the time I already am very familiar with OER and I really believe that that was the solution. To help our students. And so what I did was to pitch in that idea to the college-wide steering strategic planning committee. And since they said, okay, that was your idea, then why don't you go and lead it? And so that was how it came to be. And a lot of you are here as librarians. This is not unusual, right? Because a lot of us do this on top of what we already do. So this is like a full-time job masquerading a society gig, actually. So there wasn't really any full-time position and it doesn't matter whether you're working in a community college or in a four-year college. This is an added responsibility. And to complicate matters, the library director wasn't very supportive of me. So she believed that this is not something that the library should take on. And so even if I solicited the support of our provo and good thing that a lot of faculty came on board and that was how it really started. But really it's the open community that helped me. So back in 2015, I organized a statewide summit that David Wiley was there, Nicole Allen was there. The CCC, OER folks are there. I hope you're here. Una Dele, Quill West, Lisa Young, Preston Davis, they all came to Michigan. And I think that time, that was 2015, that was really like what opened the floodgate for the state and for the higher education institutions in Michigan to start their OER initiative. So admittedly, my entry into open ed and OER was because I wanna help our students in terms of affordability and access. But I've grown and matured since then. And my understanding of OER has expanded. And I really believe that it is a social justice issue and goes beyond affordability and access. That's five minutes, Regina. Oh my gosh, sorry, I really have a lot. But yeah, so that was just part of my story and I'd be happy to share with you in some other venue. So I hope you got something out of it. Thank you. If the next person, who do you want to go next, Regina? Oh yeah, how about Robert? Thank you, Regina. Love the story, such great energy and passion. Jonathan, man, I wanna go do some digging on that story. I'm the Pentecostan or my man. I never knew, I never knew. That's great insight. Well, I probably, it looks like each one of us gonna have like very different stories, which is so wonderful. And I think that's one of the powers of this storytelling. Cause I came into this in a very different way than any of the folks here. I work at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education and it's important to tell you that and not to plug the department higher ed, but that's my entry into this work of open. In my role there, I had been focused on serving as the statewide coordinator for assessment. And at one of our board meetings, our statewide student advisory group called the Student Advisory Council made a presentation to the Board of Higher Education and not only a presentation, but brought a resolution to them that they had voted 19 to zero to tell the mass Board of Higher Education that they needed to get on and take leadership on this work of open education. So the deputy commissioner for academic affairs, to whom my report came back to me after the meeting and said, you know, I think we gotta have to do something with this given the student interests. And we department need to get on this and start working on this issue. And she said, I'm coming to you because you're really, you're not only practicing faculty member in the department because in addition to being in the department, I still teach part-time online outside of that cause both cause I love teaching and also because it's important to my assessment work to still be in the classroom and doing the same work for the people I'm trying to influence to build assessment to her practice. So she came to me and said, you know, take this ball and see what you can do with this. So now, so I really don't know that much about open at all at this point that it wasn't my area of focus. So I had to get on a crash course and start learning. And we created an open an OER work group to have selected OER leaders across the state led by a couple of people that many of you probably know, Marilyn Billings from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Susan Taschen from Northern Essex Community College. She's the co-president of CCC OER right now. And they both became not only the co-chairs for our work group, but also my teachers and mentors about open education is luck would have it. I couldn't have picked two better people to learn from. So basically we went on our journey over like six, seven months generated this report that we ultimately brought to the board of higher education. Now a year ago, a little over a little less than a year ago, they had a series of recommendations in it, about 10 recommendations specifically how we could both increase and deepen the utilization of OER in Massachusetts. Along the way, yeah, yeah, that was last year because that's when I attended the open ed 19 conference at the urging of Marilyn and Sue and came and like, oh my God, it's like this whole world, this whole world out here, I knew nothing about. And it was so, that's the thing. I actually, I think someone saying that earlier today, Sarah I think was talking about the opportunities to network and meet and chat with folks at every place, the coffee shop and the hallways and stuff that we can't do in the same way. We're trying to replicate a lot of that here, but it turned out to been the best thing. It was like being dumped into the deep end of the pool to swim with everybody who was doing this work. And as we like to say, that's where I kind of caught the religion from everybody around the importance of this work, which now I've been meeting, but kind of is an intellectual activity and a policy matter, but then I really became open to the power of this work, both to not only reduce costs for students, but also as some of the literature suggests, increase student learning and quite frankly, improve and enhance faculty members teaching their teaching because they now have more tools, more robust tools that allow them to do what they're doing at no cost, it's like, it's a win-win. So we've continued our work on it in Massachusetts and the board unanimously adopted our report and our recommendations. And in that recommendation, it said to create a statewide coordinator for OER, that me, so I've continued, create an OER advisory council, which we did, which now has represented us from all 29 public institutions in the state, Marilyn and Sue continue as the co-chairs of that statewide council. And that council has continued to work to both implement recommendations and to research on other recommendations in order to either implement or bring that back to the board of higher ed. Now, since this is about me, and I'm probably down to two minutes. No, you're done, five minutes are gone. I was gonna, and I gotta say this last piece, this is the most important piece, which is as a result of this, now remember I said I was a teacher. So I've been working on this work at the policy level, but I hadn't changed what I was doing as a teacher. This is the most important part of the story. I finally said, you know what? If I'm walking this talk, I have to do, I have to walk my own talk. So this summer, well actually I did two things this summer. I took a wonderful course, a certificate course in Creative Commons with my good friend, Jonathan Poritz here. So I could get exposed to that whole piece of the world that I didn't know a lot about. And I changed my macroeconomics, my principal macroeconomics course and did it as an open course this fall. So that $225 textbook I had been using, gone, gone. And I replaced it, it wasn't free. I'm using Lumina material. So it's $25 for the ancillaries, but no cost for the book. So I saved those students $200 a student for 25 students times how many semesters. And it's just been wonderful. So I've taken the religion, I'm all in. And obviously we all are who are here, but if you're not, you will be by the time you leave this conference. That's my story. Thank you. Thank you. Pick the next person. Oh, I picked the pick. I want to be new Sherry. Hey everybody, my name is Sherry Jones. And I'm going to start my story, I think, from when I was in graduate school. So first of all, I am Chinese-American. I'm first generation. So I had an adequate, I thought I was an adequate education from where I was and I entered the United States and I landed in philosophy. So I was very interested in philosophy and I thought, you know, a lot of these disciplines has to do with greater cultural awareness, understanding of American culture. And sometimes I don't quite understand what that was. And I started out not understanding a single English letter. I had no idea. So when I went into school, I discovered this magical thing called philosophy. So I started starting philosophy, but then I slowly, even though I love it very much, I started to notice, hey, you know, we started studying, you know, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Rachel's, I may go down to the list, Singer, Thompson, Wittgenstein, I may, Heidegger, whoever you want to name, they're all white men. I didn't get up diversity. I was wondering where our Indian philosophy was. Chinese philosophy was, you know, Middle Eastern philosophy. I was missing that very badly. And I told myself, when I become a professor, I need to try to spread that joy. So when I started teaching, I bumped into another problem. Okay? The textbook that we're asked to teach, again, the same people appear, the magical people that I know appeared again in the textbook. And I told myself, how do I enhance my students' experience? This was 10 years ago when I started developing open educational resources before I knew what that term was. So what I did was I collected articles. I collected philosophical readings, think to the internet. A lot of the works were open and it didn't require a textbook. So I started to gather that information and allow students to read them because I wanted students to see that philosophy is a cross-pollination of ideas. The ideas don't die at one country or end another. It cross-pollinate, the ideas spread. So I wanted to have students see that connection. Moving on from philosophy, I also teach rhetoric because I'm a busy lady. So I teach rhetoric as well. Same problem occurred. Geez, I opened up my rhetoric textbook. It's all writing about white writers or white experience or American experience. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted some diversity. So what did I do? Well, 10 years ago, again, 10 years ago, I started writing my own textbook because why? The textbook didn't satisfy what I needed the students to do. Not only do I write my own textbook, but I also assigned articles from, for example, Australia, China, England, okay? Haiti, articles from all over the world. Why? Because I realized my students are ill-equipped to understand global issues. They have no idea what's going on out there. It's a shock me, but then again, I take for granted that I have an international background, that I have the incentive and also the need to understand what's happening globally because what's happening globally affects us. If COVID-19 hasn't proven anything yet, students should realize what's happening overseas affect us too. A virus kind of teaches of that, okay? So I wrote a lot of textbooks. And in fact, another practice that I did is that my students, as we all know, we shouldn't be lecturing all day long. So I try to do exercises with them in class, but students still say, Professor, I really want to listen to how you explain these things. So I created a podcast. So I did a series of podcasts explaining all these theories and then little clips, like 10 minutes, so I don't bore students to tears. But way back when I was DJing myself basically, I was doing podcasts. I was doing all this. I did editing. I did all this work all for free. I never asked for anything because I'm that passionate about training our students. Then lo and behold, in recent years, I started teaching game studies. Well, what is that? So game studies is the study of how games help form society. So one of the scholars that's in game studies is Johan Housinga. So Johan Housinga is a Dutch historian. And what he basically argued is that society is built based on magic circles. So magic circles are pretend places where we create rules and we say everyone who's in this circle must follow these rules. And that's actually how societies are created. Now, to understand games, we use video games. We use digital games. We use board games and so forth. But to understand these theories and greater things, an interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary understanding of that material is needed. Guess what? It's OER time again. There is no textbook out there. There is no textbook out there. I am sorry, and I keep saying this. I still haven't found a textbook that explained these theories through a multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary focus because a lot of the writers, maybe as a single writer, they can't help but write from their perspective, right? Which I respect. But there should be a more of a global collaboration where we write textbooks that's from multiple disciplines, multiple perspectives. So we can actually understand things. So for me, OER means open to perspective, open to global perspective. So you become a better person and a more critical thinker. And I think my time is up. It is. Thank you so much. So I'm gonna pass on to the next period, Daniel. Thank you, Sherry. That was an amazing story. In fact, I've been listening so much carefully with so much name knowledge that I've been getting from all the speakers. Jonathan, I really loved what you talked about. That was really amazing. And so now my story, my story is a little bit different, I would say in terms of the region that I'm living in, that is Pakistan. So it's a developing country. And if you think from the perspective of developing countries, as compared to the developed countries, it's really different considering the fact, I guess certain aspects in a society, like if you look at the Mosul hierarchy of needs, so you fulfill the basic needs, then you go up and up and up. So I believe like in terms of open education, we are still in the stone age, right in the first phase of these concepts right now. However, I have been personally involved a lot with the student societies, student youth advocacy and involvement of the young people in the policy making, because these young people are actually the future makers. They tend to mold the futures and they tend to influence the future. So initially like going back to 2017, I did not know anything about open education or what is open education or all that. I only knew one thing about education, because the literacy rate in Pakistan is 59%. Only 47% of the women are literate in Pakistan. We are far way back in terms of these numbers as compared to developed countries. So my motivation was involving young people, like to provide them accessible education, affordable education. But one day I got to know about this open education concept from my colleagues. I think that was the international federation of medical students association. Again, that was a student association. So I got to know about this and I started, I love the concept, how this whole, like diversity, inclusiveness, co-creating, all this thing was really like it was very intriguing for me and introducing that concept within Pakistani society. It was quite a new thing for me because when you think of an advocacy, so for me, I define advocacy in terms of like, if you think of a funnel like this, to the top of the funnel, it's like awareness. So you first, the first phase in doing advocacy is awareness. The second stage below that is engagement. Once you spread awareness, then you engage people in that and then the last funnel, it's like a funnel you go through in the process. The last stage is once you spread awareness, you engage people and then in the last phase, you have people who actually want to be part of any activity, like for example, open education who know about that. So I started campaigning about this and luckily once I got introduced into this community of open education through Nicole and all of them. So I was lucky enough to become a part of the policy making platform at the Prime Minister's office. There's a department in Pakistan which is called Prime Minister's Youth Program. So this department makes all the policies across Pakistan for the young people, whether that's in the education sector, whether that's in the sector of skills development or the technology. So I had this knowledge of open education. I was into these circles. So when I became a part of this policy making platform, I pitched this idea of open education over there and to my surprise, they love this concept or the policy makers love the concept. And they said that since we cannot have this on a very wider scale, but still let's take a start. So how we took a start with open education on the national level, we took it through the platform of technology integration. So there were three programs that we started in Pakistan. The first one was laptop distribution because many students did not even have or could afford laptops. So that was like providing 1 million students with laptops. The second program was, what are these students gonna do with these laptops? So the second program was to provide them access to the internet. Because if they don't have internet, what are they gonna do with the laptop? And the third program was providing them with subsidized courses. Now I do know that these were not free open educational resources. But still as a first step, this was something a breakthrough for the first time on a national level in Pakistan that they were introducing such a concept. And this program reigned for three years. So because of this program, we sort of, like I talked about this funnel, awareness, people were getting away about this open education resources and why this concept of providing accessible education is important. And once we started talking about this, local communities in local cities, the professors, because they had the concept of open education, they started talking about and they started engagement with students. So we started having like student setups in cafes in other platforms. We started talking about the open education and why it is important and how it can revolutionize the education system in developing countries. So that is something where I got involved and I'm happy that I was a part of this community of open education. And that's why I kind of got that opportunity that I could contribute to the policymaking process in Pakistan, where they could actually work on open education over here. So and right now, I think I'm lucky enough to be part of the steering committee here as well. And this is another opportunity for me to learn from all these brilliant storytellers who are with us today here. So again, that was my story and I'm happy to listen to all of you. I hope I had something to share from my perspective of a developing country like Pakistan with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. And we're going to brown this off with I think she's sharing her story. Okay, hi everyone. It's been so incredible to listen to what everyone has got to say and where everyone started. And I think for me, it's really great to hear that everyone had like a different start because I always felt like it was so intimidating at first to get involved. But I was actually born in India back in the 90s. And I immigrated to Canada when I was what a year old. I moved originally from India to Toronto and then Toronto to Edmonton where I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. And so having parents or immigrants, it was really interesting to see how they viewed education I think. And so they were always pretty forceful, I guess that I was going to go to university. There was no real question there. I just knew that that was the next step. I had never really asked them why. I just, they said, we immigrated here for you to be able to go to university. So I went, okay, thank you for doing that. I will go to university. It wasn't until my university that I had really like understood that there were people that didn't have access to education the same way that I did. Like I thought it was a normal for everyone to have access to school. Cause I, from Canada, every school around me was a public school. So I figured if every school is public, what is the barrier to access? We didn't pay for any of our textbooks. I remember the costs in junior high and high school were just like those Europe trips. And I never was able to go on them. So now I'm just like with COVID, I can't even go to Europe right now, which I said earlier, but I think about that all the time. Cause it's like, should have gone in grade seven when I had the chance. But it's been, I just never really saw it as a problem. I knew that there was people abroad that couldn't access education the same way back home in India. And there was a lot of, you know, misogyny when it comes to that. But it wasn't until university that I figured like, wow, not everybody has the access to be able to come here. And I took out student loans and had them still paying those loans back, but I didn't realize that there were barriers to people even accessing a loan to come to university. And so in my first year, I chose to not get involved in anything because I was like, there's no point in getting involved. I just wanted to get my degree and then go into the workforce. But it was really soon that I realized that, you know, if I wasn't going to get involved in something on campus, that it would definitely be a disadvantage in terms of just like even getting to know what campus has to offer. So I originally got involved with just like a random student group doing work with them. And it was when I was first exposed to somebody there that was talking to me about how expensive their textbooks were and how, you know, they couldn't actually like decide between whether to get this textbook or whether to go back home to visit their mom who was super sick in British Columbia. And I was like, oh, I mean, just don't get the textbook. Like, is it really that? Like just don't get it, you know? And I just remember everyone in the group being like, yeah, don't get the textbook. Like just there's no point in getting textbooks. And I thought to myself, like, I had just bought my textbooks for school and I was actually an engineering for the first week. And then I dropped out instantaneously, like within the first week and went into the faculty of arts because it was not for me, but I was within the week so I was able to return all my textbooks. And then I went to go buy my arts textbooks, which went from like a whopping, I think I spent like $800 on like special engineering paper and special engineering textbooks and a special calculator with a sticker on it that was like certified for engineers even though it was just the same as like any regular calculator to spending like $30 on a course pack that had all my essays like printed out. And I remember just talking about the same class being like, wow, like the textbooks in this, in this faculty are way more affordable. And they were just like, oh no, it's not even a textbook. It's like, you're paying for the printing of the essays. And I think that was the first time that I was like, wow, there are a lot of barriers to education that are outside of the cost of tuition, outside of the cost of rent, outside of the cost of like supporting your family. Like it's just tiny things like groceries and textbook costs that really add up. And a lot of professors were like, oh, my textbooks only $100, you know? And I'm like, yeah, but I'm in five classes. So five classes times five is $500 worth of textbooks for me. And then when I decided to get more and more involved it was actually when the student union vice president academic at the University of Alberta I was working for him. And he was just talking about the cost of education, the open ed conference. And I was like, oh, like just don't get the textbooks. It's like really that easy. Like just tell students to never get textbooks. You know, why aren't you just doing that? And he was like, it's way more complicated than just not being able to purchase like your materials. And then that was sort of when he introduced me to the concept of open education, open pedagogy. And I met a lot of librarians actually on my campus that were doing this kind of work and building provincial repositories and trying to find ways to cross collaborate. And then I was very lucky to have run for the position. And when I ran, one of the first things I wanted to do was to get all these confused, like, or not confused but to get all these like different people that were working on this exact same concept but were not using the same language tools to be able to actually realize that they were doing the same thing. So we put together a steering committee for our campus that had librarians on it, a couple of students, professors and we were trying to just work on campus to centralize what we were doing so that there wasn't duplication but also being able to bring these up to the senior administration who most of the times like the student leaders on campus actually have pretty good access to and we were lucky that we also did. And so a lot of the work that was happening from the steering committee that had just been, put on pause because they didn't have the same access to the people in the positions of power definitely were a hindrance to them. And so it really taught me a lot about being able to collaborate with other stakeholders on campus to be able to get your message across. And so that's kind of like what I'll leave you with is that like really being able to like take your stakeholders and try to find a way to connect them in a way that they haven't before because at the end of the day like you're all genuinely trying to do the exact same thing but there's just different means of getting there. So I definitely think that there's a lot of people that you need to like put together and the easiest way to do that is just to like ask people and like spring them in and a lot of them that don't really know that they're doing open education work probably are. And it's just like, it comes to the fact of like being able to dig them out and find them and then putting them together even if it's grabbing a virtual coffee like it wasn't until I had that coffee with a librarian on campus that I was able to be like, wow, you're literally designing beautiful texts online that are completely free. And so that's kind of how I'll wrap this up. And then I will sort of wrap up the rest of the session unless you have anything to add Amanda before we wrap up the whole session. Nope, just a big thank you to everyone for sharing their stories. Great, yeah, I was gonna say thank you for sharing all of this. I think it's such an interesting way to like embrace the spirit of open education and there's so many like cool ways that we've all landed here together and we all have one thing in common which is we really care about the open world. And I really wanna thank the other panelists here that were able to share like their experiences because it just gives a different perspective on how things can happen. And I just think that was so important to be able to learn from each other. So yeah, thank you everybody. Hopefully we will see you at our, the rest of the programming throughout the week or we'll see you at the late night show tonight or any other of the sessions. Thank you everyone. Thank you, enjoy the rest of the week of sessions. Yes, see you.