 Happy Open Education Week everybody! We are in our final session of our tour de force of OER degree and adoption showcases and I'm very pleased to have Sarah Profitt and James Boldman from Ivy Tech Community College. I wanted to mention to you, for those of you who aren't familiar, that Ivy Tech Community College is the community college system in Indiana. It encompasses 30 campuses and we're very pleased to hear about the OER degree work that they have been doing and the savings that they have been providing for their students. Sarah, go right ahead. Thank you. So yes, this is Sarah Profitt. Actually my title did recently change so my title is Director of Instructional Design Services at the college. So basically as you'll see here in a minute I do wear quite a few hats. My main hat is leading the instructional design team and we work for a statewide system so I'll explain a little bit more about that here in a minute. But the hat that I'm most proud to wear is the OER hat and so I kind of leave the charge for our OER initiative at the college and try to move things along and get folks rallied around certain initiatives to move forward. And so I'm kind of the cheerleader for the efforts at Ivy Tech but I have a lot of folks behind me that are invaluable to the work that we do and one of those folks is here. I actually think I have more than one actually in the meeting today but James is here to present with me today. James Goldman is associate professor and program chair of communication and foreign language so he's going to talk a little bit about his experience from a faculty perspective which I don't have that perspective so I wanted to make sure that somebody who's actually taught with our OER material and has developed our OER material could share with you today his perspective. So we will do a little bit of that today and I will do my best to keep it brief. I just have a few slides and then I'll take you into more of the meat of the presentation. So to explain the statewide system as Una mentioned we do have a multitude of campuses. We're actually restructuring so the number is still a little bit murky but we're now dividing our all of our campuses into not just campuses but sites and then those campuses are kind of identified by size and the amount of services they offer so I won't get into all of that because again we are in the middle of a restructure so I'm still trying to understand it myself but our statewide system basically what that means is we have each campus has their own kind of what we would call campus level courses. Some of those are online courses that were grandfathered in before the statewide model but any new online courses that we offer do go through the statewide model which means that my team of instructional designers will hire a subject matter expert to build the content. They build that in a master course. We use Canvas as our LMS so they'll build that in Canvas and then we will share that out to the commons and faculty can download that content into their section. So we have that kind of top-down approach in terms of statewide courses. The OER courses they do exist in a similar model. We work with our curriculum committees to identify some reviewers on our content which is important to to our process as we're building OER and what we do with that is we've identified and I'm going to talk about this on the next slide but we've identified some pathways to target to build out those OER materials and what we do from there is again as I mentioned earlier we have the folks from our curriculum committees. Those folks are all program chairs that make the curricular decisions at the college for each of their program areas so we tap the curriculum committee members to serve as either developers or reviewers for the OER content as it's being built. We again will look at those specific pathways to build out our OER material and then once it's completed we add those materials to our Follett book list. So Follett is our partner in terms of textbook adoptions and getting those materials for students listed for students on their website. So Follett lists our OER materials as green source so that's kind of our our tag for what OER is at the college of green source. So those books are listed on the on the Follett book list and the reason why we do that is so that any faculty member teaching in a traditional or a hybrid modality can choose to adopt those materials into their section by using the OMSS which stands for open material selection fee attribute and our banner system. So what that does is the OMSS attribute will then add a course fee to that course which will be charged to each student. Right now that fee is $10 that the student will pay with their tuition and fees and that will essentially give them everything they need on day one all of their content in their courses ready to go. We partner with Women Learning for our OER initiative so we use currently we're using the Candela system to get those materials prepared and into our courses in Canvas. So once that student pays their fee they have all the materials on day one which is excellent and so where this kind of started so let me get into a little bit of the history of what we've done with our initiative. Back in 2012 was when the first conversation about OER started and that was with my colleague Adam Bordestras who's no longer with us is at BYU Idaho now. We definitely missed him but he was the kind of founder of the OER initiative at the college so he had a conversation with a developer and with the curriculum committee of the political science 101 course the introduction to American government and politics. That developer had a concern about textbook costs and so OER was something that was looked at. Unfortunately we used OER that was just kind of out there open to anyone we didn't we weren't partnering with Women yet at that time. What happened was the owner of that content took it down and we had to kind of go back to the drawing board because we lost all of our content in the middle of the semester so that was you know not a fun experience but we learned the hard way that we definitely needed to get a stable partner for OER so that's where Lumen came in and we started with our student success courses with money from Illumina grants and we tapped the student success courses first. Those are their series of six courses based on program so student success in business student success in health care so students will take one of those student success courses depending on what their major is or what their programmatic focus is. So we honed in on the student success courses with that Lumen of grant money to kind of get us started. Lumen came out and did a workshop our faculty were able to get up to speed and we were able to identify from there after the student success courses had materials built then we were able to identify the business PSAP was a one of our pathways that we wanted to focus on getting all of those courses built out with an OER option and then the transfer Gen Ed core was our other pathway we wanted to focus on and we are still working on both of those pathways today. We have not completed the entire pathway yet but we are getting very close to that and I'll talk about specific courses in just a minute after I explain this next item here. So with the group of faculty that were identified to help out with the initial OER development we were able to form an OER cross-discipline team. So this team of faculty program chairs staff all came together and we kind of represent different programs they represent different campuses so different areas of the state because we really had to build this up from grassroots type effort. This wasn't something that we started in policy we actually worked the opposite way from the ground up instead of starting up at the top with policy and I'll talk more about that in a little bit as well. So our OER cross-discipline team has been just a great resource to have in terms of getting the word out in being such a large system that Ivy Tech is it can be very difficult to spread word about something especially something as big as this. So our cross-discipline team really do a lot of cheerleading as well and they they help to inform other faculty members and a lot of those folks are also our OER developers which is is awesome to have those folks on board. So that's really all I have in terms of PowerPoint. I did want to share with you so basically the reason why I wanted to show this and let me know if you don't see this hopefully it's sharing still but I have an OER at Ivy Tech kind of handout word document now that's showing on my screen if you don't see that please let me know. I wanted to talk about this because we're not seeing that. Okay let me see if I can share. Let's try that. Let me know if you are now seeing an OER at Ivy Tech. So basically what happened was we were starting to really make a lot of headway with OER we were getting bigger. I had a meeting with the our new Ivy Tech president as of last year to kind of fill her in on where we were we're at with our initiative where we were wanting to go. She was really excited about it so I knew that we were going to be able to continue to grow. So this past the end of the fall early spring I had a few meetings with our curriculum committees so those are the folks I mentioned from each of our program areas there's a group of program chairs that represent each campus that form a committee in their program and so those folks make all of our curricular decisions they make textbook decisions and things like that so I was able to meet with those folks earlier this this term with the folks at Lumen and also with our follow-up partners about our OER initiative and this was the handout that I shared with them so I just kind of wanted to show you this from that perspective. I know that everybody knows what OER is so I'm not going to go through that but that's to the reason why you see that here in our our little handout here we just kind of went through the basics of what is OER what are the five Rs why are they important and the purpose and kind of the rationale behind why we wanted to start this initiative at Ivy Tech so obviously our main purpose is to dramatically reduce the cost of course materials obviously that's a huge one so that $10 fee right now is is the only cost that the student will have in terms of of any any course costs in an OER course that they take at the college so I've already talked about our cross-discipline team and here we get into some more specifics about the actual courses that we've we've built so you'll see here I have a little table of each of the courses that we have existing materials built out for there's a website here that Lumen put together for us that has our catalog of OER titles so that's the link I've actually sent that link out I've lost track here recently I've had a lot of requests for that our faculty like to look through those materials obviously to vet them before they are ready to make a decision on adopting OER in their section or not so that that link has been really helpful for us we also have ancillary materials that our developers build so in our canvas environment our developers will put together a course shell they'll add existing OER learning materials and sample assessments to include in the course it is not a completely built out course that instructors receive whenever they adopt OER it is just that kind of group of assessments sample assessment sample learning materials and then the link to the actual Lumen OER material are in that that shell and what happens is the faculty member will say I want to have OER in my section and then from my department we load the content that's in that kind of quote unquote master OER shell load that content into the faculty member section and then they're able to customize it from their delete what they don't want move things around and do whatever they need so that's kind of the process of how a faculty member would adopt the content so the assets that you see next to some of these courses that are listed here that signifies that that is an entire course so we do have a few online courses that are built that were built using OER materials so the ones up up on top that do not have an asterisk those are just courses that are listed on our file it book list that has an OER option which means the online course is not using OER but any instructor that's teaching a traditional course or a hybrid course could choose to use those materials and adopt those materials in their section and then the others that have the asterisk those are statewide online courses that do use the OER material for for the statewide online course and then we have a few that are currently in development those are wrapping up later this spring and into the summer we have a few that will go into the summer so our student success there was one outlying student success course that never had an OER material actually completed it was just we had started the process and not completed it so that one will wrap up we have another math course that's being built out science course and another business course and again that's following our business t-sap pathway and our transfer gen ed core pathway those are the reason why you see those those courses listed so i talked about the omsfc here already or the attribute rather that we use in banner to designate our courses as OER and i also mentioned green source so that shouldn't be news here this is our this is our big topic here so the cost savings so just for the fall alone we had 12,160 students using OER it says current fall because that was when i first sent out this handout so i didn't update that language yet but when i shared this it was in the fall and at the average price of $100 per textbook minus the $10 fee that we charge students our savings were over a million dollars in one term which we're super super super proud of that's huge for us you can see on the graphs that we had we were steadily growing and then we just kind of took off in the fall which was excellent so again our cross discipline team has done an excellent job of getting the word out there and really selling the OER initiative at the college so where we're going to go from here if i can scroll down here our next steps our cross discipline team meet or across discipline team we meet on a monthly basis and talk through our strategies around OER and what we're doing there we currently have a ticket in with our IR department to to get data for an OER efficacy study that lumen is working with Carnegie Mellon on so we are going to get data pulled and look at that efficacy study which is going to be huge for us and that information will be shared at the state board of trustees meeting that we'll have in april so that'll be another huge way for us to get the word out and then we're again working on formalizing policy and the reason why we're so behind on policy is because if you have a group of folks that are working on what we call leadership institute at ivy tech and that group is going to be focused specifically on policy around OER and so that didn't kick off until later than we would have liked so we're a little bit behind on policy but that is definitely one of the big items on our list so what i'm going to do now is james i know i didn't leave you a ton of times but if you can maybe just talk for your experience as an OER developer and faculty member that would be great excellent thank you sarah i am on our OER statewide steering committee as well as being an OER course reviewer so i wanted to cover a little bit today of my story of how i got involved in that and then some of the tips and things i've i've come across the way in terms of being a an OER champion in our system i started the reason i got involved in this was i was using a in the i teach a public speaking course and in the textbook i was using was like $155 and i only referred to it three or four times in the semester and i thought this was really really silly so i looked out and i found some freeware online that i could use and because it made no sense to charge $155 or students to pay $155 there's something i was only using very infrequently in a course and the other frustration that i had was the lack of control when we were we would partner and we have some great publishing partners but every now and again we would have issues with our third party content and we had no control over that and so students were looking at us and it hadn't really nothing to do with us so between those two frustrating and it does two those two things coming together we we started looking at OER and so this is where i jumped into that i we have a lot of fun we have a lot of engagement with OER it's great to see the student success the student savings is phenomenal from a faculty perspective the fact that they have access to materials from day one we don't have to worry about whether financial aid came through or anything like that that we have the academic freedom to change and modify and reuse items in a way that we want to do uh one of the things that really struck home to this for those who went to the lumen open ed conference this last year in anaheim and we had a very large party that of us faculty who went was watching the student panel that they had i think on the second or third day students talking about their experiences and taking OER courses and it really really struck a chord with us and really kind of helped to reinvigorate us as to why we're doing what it is that we're doing so much so that we're actually trying around trying to replicate that student panel at our internal ivy tech student summit because it was a very powerful moment in that whole conference i know for me for example i took away one of the students was talking about us to realize that as student as as professor's faculty you we are one of 200 that you may have over a course of semester however you're only one of us one only one to us and that was really powerful to hear it's really a joy also on this committee and what i think makes this one of the strengths of this committee that we work on this OER across disciplinary committee is the fact that we have everybody from multiple disciplines so we get a broad perspective and how we can approach things and cross departmental so we have distance ed our accelerated program faculty all coming together and owning this project and working really well together so that's been a really great experience so far we have a couple of challenges part of it is that this is all parts this is one part of our jobs and so with finding some time from time to time to be the advocate that we want to be can be somewhat of a challenge we constantly run into the challenge of understanding what OER is and what it isn't a lot of faculty will talk about well i found this free article online and then when you investigate further it's not true OER and in some cases isn't even free so educating them about what OER really is can be can be kind of a challenge to us some of the as as we've gone across our campuses some of and advocated for OER some some things that we've learned and probably have experienced some of this already but one if you can have multiple champions on your campus so for example on my campus not only am i the OER champion but i share that with the librarian other OER faculty members and our accelerated program coordinator on our campus it helps when it's just not one voice going out and from when you can do it from many different perspectives coming together i think faculty see some more value in that and appreciating that this may not be a fit for everyone that not every course fits into OER and being open-minded to that in your discussions doesn't mean that we can't have ongoing discussions about this and the other one i think this one is just from a learning as i've gone through and pitched to my fellow faculty when you talk about academic freedom maybe tweaking the wording so less on creation the ability to be able to create and more on flexibility a lot of my colleagues are looking for something that they can adapt relatively quickly quickly the fact given the fact that they are all very busy they want something that has the flexibility and i found that i have greater success when talking about that the flexibility that you can have versus what you can create and the other part is that have patience this is a longer process take the long view that there will be some quick wins but for the most part over time you're going to have through multiple conversations it will take to start to sway the minds and the other part is to keep keep the fire lit keep talking to your team attend the OER conferences such as this one etc the ones that lumen look for ways that you can you can keep that fire going because there there will be some struggles with it but overall it's a worthwhile and worthy cost we're we're just so pleased that we can be able to do this and see the success that we do thank you james that was awesome i just want to mention one more thing i talked about the omsf the ten dollar fee that we have but i didn't really explain why we do that um maybe it's obvious but i want to make sure that i'm clear about because when we first started adding a fee to OER we did get a lot of pushback about OER is supposed to be free and why are you charging for it and we're not really necessarily charging for the OER we're charging for the future of OER and so that ten dollar fee allows us to then offer professional development like james mentioned the open ed conference every year we're able to take a bigger group because we have the funds to do that and the ten dollar fee also helps fund future OER development so that we can continue to grow so that has been a huge part of our success and being able to build as quickly as we've been able to do is is mostly due to that that fee that gives us the funding and then the team of faculty across the state that have also helped us continue to grow well thank you so much uh sarah and james for sharing with us this afternoon um wonderful presentation and it was really wonderful sarah that you invited james because um although we had a couple of other faculty speakers earlier today they weren't really speaking from the faculty perspective because they're both leading an OER program now um at their colleges so james thank you for sharing um the faculty perspective that was really valuable um we are open for questions um and have just a couple of more minutes if uh if people have questions for sarah or james well i'm gonna say thank you to uh all of those people who joined us today um we still have 20 plus hearty participants who um have been with us probably many of you since early earlier today um this has been a wonderful session and we've been recording all of these and so hopefully we'll have these posted for those who couldn't join us today so thanks to um sarah and james and all of our presenters today and those who came and um engaged in the conversation around OER degrees and and OER adoption and this is unidaly and i'm here with my assistant liz yada from the community college consortium for OER and we're going to say one last time happy open education week um and there's plenty of more activities on thursday and friday if you're interested so check the calendar and good night everyone