 Welcome everybody. It's so wonderful to see so many of you here in this final webinar that CCC OER is offering for spring 2023. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening depending on where you are in the world. Thank you so much for being here. Our webinar today is called the transformative power of OER ZTC pathways. My name is Shinta Hernandez and I am from Montgomery College and I'm on the Executive Council of CCC OER and as the Vice President of Professional Development and let's get started. So to give you an idea of what we will go over in this hour that we are here together, I'm going to give you a quick overview of CCC OER. And then we'll dive right into the presentations from two wonderful panelists that we have here for you. And then we will offer an opportunity for you to ask some questions to the panelists. And then in the end we've got some things that we want to wrap up with wrap up up, including becoming events and ways in which you can stay in the loop. And then we also have a survey that we would love for you to fill out at the end. So a little bit about CCC OER what is our mission. We certainly like to and want to expand awareness and increase access to high quality open educational resources OER's. We also have a plethora of professional development. And so we support faculty choice and development. We foster regional OER leadership, and we improve student equity and success by way of the things that we do through CCC OER. And to give you an idea of how vast our membership is across the country and across the North American region, we've got 103 members across 37 states. So it's really a lot and it's I'm certainly probably growing as we speak and we're going to talk more about membership opportunities in a second. But if you're interested in seeing who the current members are, take a look at that URL that is at the bottom of that link and so you can see which institutions are a part of the CCC OER membership. And speaking of membership CCC OER is always looking for new members on our committees. And so we've got four committees who do a wide range of things that really help to promote and advance our mission. And so we've got the professional development committee, the equity and diversity and inclusion committee membership committee and research and impact committee. And to find out more about what each of the committees will be doing, please again take a look at the URL that is at the bottom of your screen, and it is also going to be placed in the chat. Take a look and if you're interested, definitely reach out to us. Some exciting stuff happening this summer. We've got what we have is the EDI Summer Book Club, something that we've been doing the last couple of summers. And these are live meetings with asynchronous discussion groups that and this year our focus will be this book right here. So we are origin stories pathways to the open movement edited by Ursula Pike, who's a longtime friend of CCC OER. And this book club begins June 1, it ends August 10. We are in need of some facilitators so please if you are interested in helping us facilitate this book club discussion. Please reach out to us sign up at that URL link that is at the bottom. There is training for the facilitators on May 7. So, please read some more. Go into that link right there at the bottom to read more about it and please if you're interested, reach out we would love to have you facilitate our book club. Another exciting thing that is happening OE Global Open Education Global. This year, this fall, it is happening in Edmonton, Canada. So, please join us it's going to be the theme is building a sustainable world through open education, being hosted at Northwest College from October 16 through the 18 and call for proposals closes next Monday so we don't we only have a few days left. So if you have an idea and you want to put it out there, please go ahead and submit the URL for the conference is down below on the part left. Take a look at it read more about it and submit your proposals and come join us in Edmonton in October this year. As many of us know and hire at this is the season of awards, right many of us at our own institutions are handing out awards to deserve students and faculty and staff and so we do something very similar we've got open education awards for 2023 opening up next Monday. Take a look. It's a wide range of different types of awards that will be given. Take a look at our URL link to look at the different categories and to see the past winners and the kinds of things that have been awarded. So, take a look we're really excited about this year's process again. All right, now, down to the real treat here, which is the actual presentations and our wonderful panelists. I have had the pleasure of introducing to you to people who are have a lot of experience in DTC and we are pathways. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to introduce and say a little bit about themselves, and then we will get right into the presentations. So first we have here Regina Blassburg Regina has been a full time faculty at the College of the canyons since fall of 2006. In addition to being chair of both the engineering technologies department and the construction management and construction technology department. She is a senator on the academic Senate and serve for five years as the first CTE liaison, where she established and co chair the career education committee. Regina implemented high flex instruction at College of the canyons in 2011, and was able to transition the water program to a ZTC AS degree program over the next several years through the development of OER texts for each course in the program. Regina earned her BS in civil engineering from Loyola Marymount University and her MS in civil engineering from UCLA. I also want to introduce Nathan Smith. Nathan is the interim chair of philosophy humanities and library sciences at Houston Community College. He has a PhD in philosophy from Boston College and the University of Paris Sorbonne. His dissertation was on Renee Descartes early scientific and mathematical work. He has been a full time instructor philosophy at Houston Community College since 2008. Introduction to philosophy, ethics, logic, classical philosophy, early modern philosophy, contemporary philosophy and social and political philosophy. He has published on Descartes, phenomenology and topics and open educational resources, including chapter contributions to introduction to philosophy logic, and he is a senior contributing author for introduction to philosophy by open stacks. In 2017, Nathan led a grant funded initiative, developing a C degree pathway at all major campuses in the Houston Community College system. So without further ado, let me hand this zoom over to Regina Blasberg. Hey everybody, welcome. Thank you so much for having me it's really a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the invite. So I'm going to start out by telling you a little bit about the water systems technology program at College of the canyons it is a career education program. We offer both an associate of science degree and a certificate. And the goal of the program is to prepare our students for careers as a water treatment water distribution or wastewater operator. And in the state of California, as in most states, there is a board that requires, or that offers certification exams and those exams are required for employment. So we help prepare students for those exams. What you're looking at on the slide are the courses that we have within our program. The program is designed with five core courses. So they have to water math classes, a water supply a water quality and then a general introduction to water course. And then the students can choose whether they wish to sort of specialize in distribution treatment or wastewater. So many of our students, especially if they're pursuing the degree will take all of those courses as they can have certifications in more than one area and be more marketable in the employment arena. Oh, shouldn't you want to move that on there. There we go. It's really an idea where a relatively small program compared to some other more mainstream programs at the colleges, our median class size is 20 we offer 23 sections per year, and we do okay in terms of our AS degrees awarded and certificates awarded these are from the last couple years of data, and our annual student head count within the program is around last year it was 161 but it's in that 150 to 170 bracket most years. So not a gigantic program. So how did we go about developing our we are or ZTC like where did it come from water programs in the state of California, there are not many, even though we have, I don't know, 115 community colleges now 116 community colleges now, but out of all of those there was maybe a handful, 810 colleges that offered water courses. So there was just sort of a general lack of available resources. The Waterworks Association did provide some textbooks that we could use, but at that time, they were very informational and not instructional in the way that they were designed, and they were expensive. To develop our materials, we started looking at our full time in our part time faculty and tried to get some combination to work on the we are materials. Initially, in our one water math class, a gentleman who had been part of the program before me had developed a book and was allowing us to continue to use it until he wasn't. And of course that happens last minute. So our first book was our water 130 introductory mathematics Waterworks mathematics textbook, and that was developed by one of our part time faculty in conjunction with myself. So we have tremendous support from our online education office and staff James is here on the call and heads that up and he's tremendous in getting us both financial support and other resources to get things developed. The big push came from a grant out that James was able to assist us with, and that allowed us to start moving beyond the one textbook to other textbooks as well, which then required bringing in other industry experts and industry partners to help us write the content. I at the time was the only full time faculty member and I am split across multiple disciplines. So it really wasn't feasible for me to be able to write all of these textbooks on my own. So I had to rely on our industry experts and our partners and of course, on additional grant funding to ensure that all of that was able to be developed in a timely manner. So our successes as Shinta mentioned in the introduction. I brought high flex instruction to our college in 2011 high flex allowed our students to join our classes remotely via zoom. And so we were able to get water students from a greater range of areas and students were able to take more classes in a semester, because they didn't have to drive to campus three or four nights a week. But not having easy access to a textbook was problematic so the OER movement within the department really helped support our high flex and it really helped support access for our students. So that has been incredibly successful for us. It certainly did a lot for inclusivity and DEIA as because we developed the books were able to really write them in such a way and try to include graphics and things in such a way that it is more inclusive. We also found that our books are highly, highly accessible. And that's again thanks very much to James office and his staff they do a tremendous job of editing our materials and making sure that they are fully accessible. Going into this OER realm then also allowed students to access their materials materials digitally or printed they could print them at home, they could print them for free through our ASG student office, and then our bookstore also offers a low cost option for providing a printed copy. And of course it's been super successful in the program as the material is very customized to our curriculum, and what we are trying to do, whereas prior the only other option we had where the A, W, W, A textbooks, and we then kind of had to make those work for our content. So, in doing all of these things and bringing OER in Shinta you want to pop it to the next slide please thank you. We saw that our success and retention rates slowly began to rise. And that to me was a huge benefit and improvement for our program overall. You can see back from 2014 15. I mentioned we kind of started these efforts in 2011, but it was a very slow build and then James was able to get us a grant in that I think 2016 17 or 1718 year. And you can see as we started implementing after that that's when we ended up with an entire pathway with OER, then our numbers absolutely began to to increase and we've been able to pretty well maintain that now for a number of years. And I really believe strongly that the high flex paired with our OER has been really the primary reason we're seeing these improvements. Challenges. This is the cover by the way of our Waterworks Mathematics book currently. The biggest challenge has just been ongoing funding as a department chair and the only full time faculty. I didn't really understand and jumping into this, what it was going to mean to be a book publisher, which is what my department has become. It has been very challenging to continually update textbooks and to have the funding and the knowledge base to keep everything as updated as it needs to be to align with what's happening in industry and the changes that are, you know, happening within the water world. A peer review has been a problem. We, for example, we're doing CID common course numbering within the state of California, and there's so few programs in the state that it was really hard to find individuals who would be willing and able on the academic side to do a peer review of the material. Faculty workload is an issue. You know, it's not something that most of our faculty can just sort of absorb into their day to day workload of updating materials and keeping things fully current. That ties into that content expertise. If you're a treatment person, then you wouldn't necessarily be comfortable updating the wastewater content. You just have to be hunting out that individual expertise. Academic freedom is also a concern and something we're looking at. Every faculty member is entitled to select their teaching materials. So although we have chosen this as an OER pathway for our department, we constantly have to have that discussion within the department that this is the challenge that we wish to proceed and the materials that we wish to use to benefit students. So, and then lastly, one of the challenges was distribution. How do I, at the department level, get it out to other colleges and to other water programs that these materials are available for their use so that all of the effort and money and expense we've put into developing OER for not only our students but for the industry actually gets used. And that will benefit beyond the borders of our institution. Thank you so much Regina for sharing your, your work with us. And at this point we'll hand this over to Nathan Smith to talk about what's been happening at Houston Community College. So hopefully you can see my screen alright. So, I'm the interim chair of philosophy at the humanities and library sciences at Houston Community College. One of the cool things is that actually we are now are going to be a philosophy department in the fall so I will be the incoming chair of that department. We, but I'm going to talk about my experiences with the Z degree program which we launched in fall of 2017. And we've, we started out that this was a grant funded act opportunity to develop a Z zero cost textbook pathway in in business associate of science and business administrative in business. And we. That was the initial plan we rolled out courses starting in fall 17 by the spring semester of 2019 so to four semesters after launching, we actually had the entire pathway built. So we had trained instructors in the relevant courses and had either found materials or adapted materials or implemented those materials. At that stage we had done very little serve, we are creation, but we. So we ran with business and at the same time we were building an associate of arts and multidisciplinary studies which is our basically our Jen, Jen at our general, our general studies, sort of associates in arts. So that we were building that alongside the business pathway. And, and what that has allowed us to do is basically generate a zero cost core curriculum. So in Texas we have a 42 credit, or that's actually completely transferable from to Texas State institutions and we can, we have those core classes basically offered at most of the major campuses in an online. And because we have that core, we can then add courses in degree plans that include the core to build out there's those degrees that works really well in the liberal arts. So we've had success with interdisciplinary studies and English and adding them and we're in the process of getting at anthropology close to a complete associates degree. So the challenge has been more in the STEM areas where we've had less sort of uptake on these in these in that in the OER courses. So, let's see go on here. So when we talk about OER at HCC we have, I mean sometimes this is a little confusing to folks. So we have, we talk about OER internally, we train faculty on, you know, open educational practices, as well as sort of licensing and all that sort of thing. But when we talk to students and when we present the programs to students, we focus on the cost. So we have a course tags for zero cost books, low and low cost books. We also are integrated with the textbook saving a larger textbook savings initiative, which includes inclusive access so we also have an inclusive access tag. So some of our low cost books classes are either OER using some paid for courseware, or they are OER plus like certain some additional texts like monographs and so forth. So when we track our data, typically we focus on the zero cost books or the zero cost books or at least what we take to comprise our Z degree pathways. And these are current numbers where, and you can see we have pretty large reach, you know, about 60 unique courses, 260 instructors, over 25,000 student enrollments that's duplicated that's not individual students in the classes. And we're probably over $7 million saved since 2017. And this is actually calculated based on the real cost of the textbook so we're not just inserting sort of like $100 sort of average fee. We're trying to actually take the cost of the textbooks and put them in there. To support our instructors and help them kind of get transition to OER. We offer an online OER certification course. That's a, it's a four week course about 15 hours, and take some through some basics of, you know, the licensing. We do some course redesign stuff. We also talk about open pedagogy. We also talk about creation and sharing and sort of platforms for that. We also have adaptation and we have internal grants for adaptation development and certified courses. So we have a grant program set up internally that follows our faculty handbook guidelines for for grants and someone asked a question about how, how much money the stipends are. In our case, we, we are, we're constrained by paying our full time faculty at our adjunct rate. That's kind of the way that we calculate work that is beyond your regular assignment. We have, we calculate, we have a, like, sort of the, we have 15 hours for the certification. The certified course process is about a, is a, I think it's a 30 hour process. And then adaption and development grabs grants can be, can range from 30 hours to 90 hours, which would be the equivalent of a course. And all of that. We've also developed some, some repositories for faculty are our librarians have done an amazing job developing lib guides for various programs to help faculty find. We are, and we've also built a hub and just published a hub in the Texas repository, which sure curates materials and offers problem. Resources for faculty. So we have those ways of supporting our faculty to get them engaged in the program. And then one thing the coordinator does is try to work with the chairs to ensure that we are staffing and scheduling courses and a structured schedule so that students could actually complete a Z degree. Now, we don't have the great fortune that Regina does where they have a program where they can actually follow students through and they're getting students to graduate and they can say these students graduated without paying for their books. Unfortunately, we just we offer the courses we can't do any we don't have a ton of advising and contact with students in terms of their enrollment. What we see is that very few students take five, five zero cost courses in the course of graduating for their degree. Most students dip in and out they take like two or three courses in the in the process of getting to their degree. So we don't have a lot of students who are completing an entire Z degree pathway. I think we had like one or two who got, you know, maybe halfway there like 10 to 15 courses, but, but we don't have that sort of that sort of level of the advising and the high touch that that requires to get students through. I mentioned funding and we have been grant funded since 2017. We've also been internally funded one of the really good things that are a private grant fund or the kinder foundation provided for us was when we submitted the grant they said we want to one to one institutional match on this funding. So we developed internal budget lines to support the program. So that means we have a release time or alternative assignment for a faculty member to serve as the OER coordinator. We have some travel funds, which we used to use back before COVID, and I hope, and hopefully they will stay there in some form of fashion as we get back into the post COVID world of actually going to conferences. We used to send adjunct faculty. We'd send three or four of them to open ed every year that was kind of the way we use those funds. We have stipend funds and some funds, some small funds for marketing supplies. This has actually been pretty good big because we put a promotional materials in the enrollment offices at all the campuses and give flyers to advisors with the idea that they can tell students how to find our courses. So it's not just the kinder foundation grant that we've we've had success. We have a great, a wonderful state grant system through the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and we've been very successful in getting grants for that. Those are grants that go to individual faculty or groups of faculty who are developing resources or implementing them. We had a great success. All of our chemistry classes now, basically their lab manuals are all OER. They've developed entirely OER lab manuals. We have several in biology. They're doing the same thing. And then we've had success partnering with other institutions on the Department of Education. We've had open textbook pilot grants. And so there was this was one in 2020 with open stacks for computer science. And then we got, we've just been awarded one working with the University of Houston downtown to develop chemistry, online chemistry labs. So as we look at sort of success measures, I don't have as nice a slide as Regina did to show the nice upward progress of her program. But what I can say is that we did have done a couple of like pretty careful quantitative studies of the impacts of our program. One of them was a study that I was a principal author on. It was a zero cost books study published through frontiers in education. And it looked at sort of the early years of implementing our program. And we isolated instructors who taught with a traditional textbook and then flipped to an OER. And we looked at the impact of the OER versus this traditional textbook. So we could isolate instructor effects. We did a number of statistical, different statistical modeling that allowed us to sort of look at effects of students. And what we found was that on average, zero cost books students were more likely to pass than those students who are enrolled in traditional textbook classes. It wasn't a huge effect, but it was something that was that we can measure. We also saw that black students and Asian students both showed additional increases. So the interaction effect of a ZCB course plus those ethnic profiles seem to increase. So why is that the case, not sure, but it is interesting for you those of those institutions that are there that are like like ours that are definitely focused on closing achievement gaps for underrepresented minorities. We did an internal study where we examined the effectiveness of the zero cost books program, the low cost books program and the inclusive access. And I think the person in our institutional research who's been looking at that is actually looking to publish something on this so that will be really helpful. It will be one of the first of its kind to sort of examine to compare OER to the new, the publisher model inclusive access. And what we found was that at HCC at least zero cost books courses tend to have slightly higher success rates so it confirmed what we saw in the previous study. There are some exceptions. It depends on what course. But for most courses, we saw some improvement. We saw a couple of courses where it was a slight decrease and lots of them stayed the same. The reverse was true for inclusive access that is to say we saw a slight decrease in several course areas so that that's definitely something that that deserves further attention, and I thought was a really interesting. We had some qualitative assessments. I did some interviews early on with students. Their feedback is really helpful and I've really enjoyed getting that. I didn't have anything for you here, but we have, but I did talk to some students. They're big, their big thing was basically just it just seemed to relieve them of the burden of like carrying around textbooks and, and also paying things and freed up money they were all very appreciative that's kind of the, the sense we get from students they don't know they don't understand anything about the license type. I just know it's free. So I think we made the right choice in marketing as a zero cost books. We talked about challenges. I'll try to wrap up quickly here I know, maybe talk more about this in the Q&A. But I think, you know, we, this is we have implemented a very large scale zero cost books. OER program at a very large urban community college. We have something like 24 campus locations. So, and, and we service like 60,000 students a semester so that we can have a big impact. The problem is maintaining consistency and drive across the entire institution. The thing that we have have had an issue with is early on in our grant, we, I was persuaded by the idea that we, we could provide subsidies to our students to get access to OER courseware. And that the OER courseware would provide a kind of textbook substitute that looked like what the publishers were offering. And that that was the most effective way to get people into the program. That was a mistake. Because what has happened is that once the grant money was used up for that purpose. First of all, our funders weren't super excited about that. They didn't, they didn't think it was great to be spending grant money to pay for access to a courseware platform. And those faculty that I got that were the adopters under that system. Once the money dried up, they were gone. They weren't really committed to OER. And so I think we're, we've sort of had to reconstitute some of that stuff, some of that work. And I kind of, I wonder if we could have been more effective at the beginning. I think there's an issue around sort of clarity of purpose. What are we trying to do with this program. Now that I've stepped away, we're trying to get, have a succession plan with another leaders, and I think we're having a little challenge sort of focusing. We have a major competitor with inclusive access. This is a program that's been pushed by our administration and is being adopted widely at HCC, and it's directly at odds with I think what the OER program is doing. And so we continue to see sort of challenges where without, you know, wondering whether we have the sort of the support and confidence of our top level administrators. If you're, as you're developing, these are the kinds of things that, that really you need to think about. And the final thing, of course, is, is I think for everyone at HCC, we've been especially hard hit by COVID. Our enrollment numbers have not, not returned to pre COVID levels, and particularly on campus or on campus enrollment is just a shadow of for our former enrollment numbers. Since part of our Z degree pathways, the idea was to have a structured schedule on a specific campus where students could complete their pathways. We don't have enough courses right now to make that happen. And so, so we're really that I think is a big challenge as we move forward. I think that's all for me. So I'll go ahead and turn the calm back to back to Shinta. Thanks. Thank you, Nathan. Thank you so much for sharing your work with us. Thanks to both of you for providing us really all the successes and challenges and the data to show us what has worked and what hasn't worked. So I want to open this up now to a question and answer session. But there's some activity going on in chat that are at the time that we've been together and I see that there was a question earlier about compensation. James, thank you so much for addressing that in the chat. There is a question later on it could be for both of you. Kimberly Carter asks, I would be very interested in any published studies on student success. Do you have links to studies like that, or do you have any idea where you could direct Kimberly to to studies like that. I threw my study in the chat there and should definitely check the bibliography I'm going to go find there was a really good meta analysis done by Virginia Clinton recently and so I'll find that and throw it in the chat too. Thank you, Nathan. I don't have any separate studies, all of our data is pulled by our institutional research office that tracks all of our courses internally and provides us like the success and retention data. They did do a study early on of whether or not students were happy with the transition, but there's no otherwise outwardly published studies it's all internal data for us. Nina, and speaking of students in the chat Liz put that in 2018 CCC OER interview to student in College of the Canyons water systems technology CTC pathway to see what impact that pathway had on her educational journey and I just read it it's quite inspiring. I'm going to put it down here again. Take a look when you can it's always wonderful to hear student voices when we can or to hear about the students because at the end of every each and every day in our lives in our journeys. We do this for the students so I appreciate that Liz shared that story with us. I do have a question. Although there's another question that just came into chat so I'll ask this question and I'll save my questions for the very end. So Kate Kaufman is asking for saying we're also being challenged to consider I a versus OER as part of our student affordability model. Speaking of tracking points you found especially useful when speaking with administration about I a I find myself losing them when I try when I try to educate them about I a and need to make the case in a more succinct way. Nathan or again if you want to. I mean, I'm just going to share and response to Kate I shared a link to inclusive access.org which is a site that was kind of put together with the through the spark network which is an ad online, an open education advocacy organization. But the site itself I think is fairly balanced. There's questions raised that might be useful. There's, I will, there's a study actually you can find it on inclusive access.org by Elizabeth Elizabeth Spica from Tennessee, where she looked at the effectiveness of a statewide boost of access program. She found similar to our results that that they just don't see the impact the improvement in student success. When you when you go to that so it's I know it's hard to understand and I don't know that we fully understand why, but you know when your goal is cost savings. It looks like some cost savings are good, maybe zero cost savings would be better, but it's not clear why zero is qualitatively different than a lot. So from an administrative standpoint you can understand why I'm sure it was a well look faculty get to keep the same materials and they get cheaper. However, it seems that what we're finding is that zero actually matters. We have we found that at HCC and we see that in other other studies that actually eliminating the cost barrier is what you need to do, not just reduce the cost barrier. So I don't know if that helps. That's great. Thank you, Nathan. And just a couple of things and I'm reiterating what is in the chat just in case some of you might not be able to read everything that is in the chat. I would ask having an OER online certification program can be very helpful is that openly licensed. Nathan says yes it is available in Canvas Commons. So that is really good to good to know thank you for sharing that Nathan. And then another question from Elaine are books available for review on wastewater and Regina shared something in the chat so make sure you take a look at that. And if you're interested and definitely share it with your colleagues as well. I have a question for and it could be for either of you, Nathan you would, you would talked about this in your, in your presentation and I think Regina you may have alluded to it to leadership support right is a challenge especially when there is changes or gaps in leadership or alignments not the same across leadership levels. The OER efforts are it are the OER efforts in your institution strategic plan, or is it written anywhere that can serve as a guiding document for the work. So, I am actually going to throw that over to James, because he really heads up the OER work at our campus. It again it's integral to my department, we have determined internally to the department that this is for us, and that it's of great benefit to our students. The students in our program are part time adult learners, you know they're older than the quote traditional student. And so this has just been a tremendous impact and help for them. They're more of a that non traditional student. But yes institutionally up James thank you for popping in. Real quick. Thanks. We're going to begin it. It's kind of interesting in college the canyons. We had strong support from our executive leadership and strong faculty participation and interest in driving OER forward, long before sort of the institutional process is caught up and we now reference OER and ZPC degrees in our guided pathways plan in our student equity plan, and in our strategic plan. But yeah, the work came about because really innovative faculty like Regina wanted to do the work, not because, you know, an administrator like me wrote some words in a plan that nobody reads right. It's the faculty like Regina who are doing the real work. And thank you for sharing that James you're absolutely right the beauty comes when it's organically driven right when it is because people. Faculty such as Regina, who understand the students because they have those day to day interactions with students and understand the complexities of their lives are really the ones who are the driving force behind the work. Thank you and Nathan what about at Houston Community College is it written in the strategic plan or any kind of document. You know, we had a strategic planning process when I was OER coordinator and I tried, I proposed this. And the feedback that I got was that they didn't want to put any specific initiatives in the strategic plan. They wanted the strategic band to be very to be to represent general principles. So we were not able to get something specific to OER in the plan. As I said, we're working through right now, a strategic planning document for the OER program, where we're aligning it with the strategic plan for the institution and the alignments very clear. I mean, in terms of like a student success, increased access. And we have a personalized learning sort of component to our strategic plan. So there's, there's a lot of things that are really, that are really aligned there. So also I see the chatter in the chat about the my the training course and I am having trouble finding it in Canvas comments so I'm going to work on that and see if I can share it with you all. If not, I'll share a resource that's definitely public and free and that's close to what we used. We appreciate that, Nathan. Let me ask in the next couple of minutes if are there other questions and if you feel free to feel free to raise your virtual hand. If you'd like to ask it that way instead of on the chat. Luna is asking did either of you work with student student services. Thanks. Yes, we neglected to mention we, when we launched our Z degree we definitely had, we had an advice advising and enrollment student services Dean and financial aid in the in the room with us while we're trying to plan that. I think it's been harder to maintain contact with them. Most of the, we have an OER steering committee, but most of the conversations in those committees tend to be pretty nuts and bolts about sort of creation of content finding content what's suitable for what programs and, and it's a very academic or instruction sort of focus conversation that I think the student services are little disengaged from. So we have to figure out how to like engage them on the right level, but that's definitely we need them to partner for sure. We did something where we added OER course searching into the student orientation they do an online or an orientation when they enter. And so we have a slide in that orientation that tells them about how to find, find courses in the course catalog. Thank you Nathan and what about you Regina did you work with student services in your efforts. I didn't specifically out of the department level, but our college does have enlisting our course catalog, you know we do look at it does identify low cost courses ZTC courses. OER courses right we do have information for students through that process but I will say that we talked quite a bit about it at our academic senate meetings and it's still we still need better transparency to students when they register in terms of but there's limitations within our systems for how to put that information out. So we're still struggling with that a little bit. But yes, the information is available if students know how to sort and look for it in their registered registration materials. And Regina which system are you on. Christie is asking. James were on data tell. Right. Is that what we're still using internally. Yes, James. Oh banner. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, and, and really, to that point, when we approach a lot of our work, much of our work, including this OER work, coming from or using a holistic model that is really truly comprehensive and authentically partner with all the different entities within our community that is often the most effective way to achieve our shared goals and then when you have teams that are cross functional. Once again that really helps to allow different components of the institution to have ownership of the work so that they can see themselves in the importance of this work. So thank you to both of you let me just make sure that on chat. There's anything else. Any other questions that are being asked here. Any other questions that you all might have in the minute that we have left before I wrap up the webinar. I found the course link so I put it in there, and I also want to just highlight Judith Sabesta's comment. We, we in Texas we did develop a Texas statewide playbook that with ischemy and a number of people I know Jews was instrumental in kind of in putting that together and writing a lot of it. In Texas I saw a couple people from Texas in Texas that resources a great one for if you're building an OER program on campus. That's great. And maybe the final question here is from Una in the chat for Regina and Nathan what can you say about funding going forward. It's important. Right. Yeah, it's just something you have to keep fighting for and I know that again at our institution James does a great job of, of trying to push that forward through the career education side we get a lot of dedicated funding coming down through career education. So I'm also trying to use that funding stream to support faculty development of we are or in our case, the redevelopment and the updating and the constant work that is required to keep all of it in line with our industry partners, what they're demanding. Can we clone James I wish we could know that would be the best ever. I'll take one. And if we can call Regina and Nathan to that would be wonderful as well. I could use that. I was I'll say we're, I think we're really fortunate in Texas. In other states there are state grants that are available that funding looks like it is solid and is continuing. And the Department of Education Open textbook pilot grant is continues to be refunded and even increased. And they're getting to a place where they're encouraging smaller dollar amount so I think this is a great opportunity for a system or district or some collaborators to in community colleges to to apply for some development funding through Department of Education. But I think it's really important to get some kind of institutional funding, get yourself a budget line somewhere that is dedicated to we are super important. Absolutely a budget line that is dedicated to we are the strategic plan statements or some sort of statement in a guiding document also helps as well. In the several minutes that we have left I do want to have some wrap up slides to share with the audience. But I want to say thank you to Regina and Nathan so very much for sharing your work with us, sharing how it's gone for you, and particularly sharing your challenges because it's important for us to hear the good and the bad and because it allows us to learn as we grow together. What should we do what should we avoid what should we not do and that sort of thing so please audience. So thank you to all of Regina and Nathan a round of applause. You can use your virtual emojis if you'd like. Thank you Regina and Nathan. So I'm going to share with you a couple more slides for the audience. We have, as we mentioned at the very beginning this is our final webinar so congratulations to a wonderful robust lineup throughout the entire fall and spring semesters for CCC OER. We will be back in the fall with more webinars. If you want to take a look at all of our webinars, particularly the spring ones that the URLs are all there for your viewing pleasure so please take a look at it when you can. And stay in the loop. Keep in touch with us and so you learn more about what's going on in the CCC OER world. So we've got a community email that you can get information through. We've got on our website that there's a get involved menu that you can see some upcoming conferences. If you want to read more stories impactful stories about our EDI blog posts and our student OER impact stories. Go to the CCC OER website. And then last but certainly at least Liz had already put this in the chat. We want to know how was the survey. Let us know your thoughts or how is this webinar. Let us know your thoughts on this webinar. It really truly helps us to know the feedback so we know what what to do next or and how to do it for our future webinars. So I thank you all again for attending. Thank you again Nathan and Regina and everybody who contributed on chat and vocally so I we appreciate your participation. Have a wonderful rest of your semester and good luck. Thank you so much and it's been such a pleasure to be here and you two Nathan it's been awesome. Thank you guys so much. Likewise Regina.