 there please feel free to, and now we're recording. Please feel free to flag that for us, and we're so excited that you could be here with us, Monica. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, and thank you to everyone who's made some time in their schedule to come check out what we've been up to at Boise State. And so today, I just want to share with you a little bit about how we took our, oh, we are development practices and created them for a distance program during summer 20 to money when our campus was fairly shut down. So today's agenda here are the things that I kind of want to share with you all. I'd like to provide some context on our program and outline the way in which we scaffolded our curriculum just to give you a sense of what we were able to tackle during what is undoubtedly a stressful and short summer. I'm going to talk about some strategies. I came across to build a community practice around OER at a distance. Ideas for supporting faculty and leveraging open licenses for greater equity in course materials. And then of course, at the end, I'm going to share with you all my slide deck. And I have links to all of the things that I've developed as a part of this program theater of eyes and remix to meet your own context. So just to get us started, I want to provide some context. If you were here a few minutes earlier, I was chatting about being at Boise State. So I'm an OER coordinator. And I'm housed specifically within our campus unit. And what this is is we're a support unit that is designed to help get faculty to develop programs for online students. As a part of this, we have a very structured and highly regimented development process, which we put faculty through about every eight weeks, they develop a new course with the help of instructional designers, as well as an accessibility and technology team that teaches them how to build it. We currently use Blackboard, but we're actually in the middle of changing over to Canvas. Yes, during the middle of a pandemic, it's real fun. So we're changing our LMS as well. But our unit's role is essentially supporting faculty, many of whom don't have a ton of technical experience in making this transition to online learning, and then developing programs that are actually meaningful and have a lot of depth to them for our students. Some of the common challenges I see for online faculty at my institution using OER is that there's a dearth of resources relevant to online courses and programs that my institution has been building. And so one of the examples I like to share is that we have one of the first genetic counseling programs in the country. We're developing it online. I believe we're the only institution with one online, and their faculty were so great. They were very interested in OER, but turns out there's not a lot of already developed genetic counseling texts. They were unfortunately very disappointed to find that. And so we have these really cool custom programs coming through, but there isn't always a direct alignment, especially because we do so much coursework at the graduate level. The other thing we're finding is that there's a limited time for review and revision of resources during the course development cycle. As I mentioned earlier, we have about an eight-week process. It is very regimented. The faculty are in contact with half a dozen folks who help them create this course. And in the middle of all that, it's hard for me to kind of wiggle in and be like, let's talk about OER. You're thinking about assessments and you're already on to your next step. But have you thought about OER? It hasn't been as successful to try to integrate with that process. And then finally, when faculty do have resources that they'd like to do to use, we want them to be able to share them in a way that feels professional and polished, but they don't always have access to the technology and expertise to openly publish. So to revise, remix, and combine resources for their online programs. And so that's kind of some of the challenges that we've been having that we sought to address by developing this program over the summer. And so let me give you kind of some stats about our program. This is the first year we ran it. We actually started designing it after our campus shut down. So it was like my first week remote working. I came up with this program. This really ambitious idea to try to get faculty to develop their own textbooks over the summer. So we created a competitive application process for an eight-week online learning experience that combined both synchronous and asynchronous elements. We opted for a smaller faculty this first time around just to make sure that it would be successful from a variety of disciplines, including two faculty from respiratory care who were actively involved in managing our state's response to the pandemic, while also working on developing OER and online courses. We worked with them to produce at minimum of a five-chapter textbook that leveraged revised openly licensed content and original writing. So our goal in this process was never to necessarily fund folks to write from scratch. We don't want them to have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we want them to be able to take what's out there and repurpose it for their specific program and courses. And so we wanted to create kind of a minimum level of completion, five chapters. It's not necessarily enough for a whole course, but it's the majority of the course. It is that level of commitment that we were looking for and hopefully having them reuse materials that they've already known and found and then providing that kind of next level polish to make them more customized for the course. So what those requirements for completion ended up looking like? So each chapter had to cover at least one module's worth of online course content. So by the time they were done with our program at minimum, they had five modules of their course done. Most of our online courses are seven modules. So this gets them almost the whole way during that eight-week period. They needed to develop originally authored chapter objectives and textbook learning activities. This is where we wanted to steer the bulk of their time and attention. How do you polish and bring together these resources in a way that is allows students to be able to understand the materials they're encountering. And then the book must pass an accessibility and a licensing check. So at the end, myself and our accessibility expert came through and we checked all of the final book products before dispersing their final stipend. And so we were able to ensure that to the greatest extent possible, these textbooks were accessible. Some of the things we sought to help faculty learn, they included defining, being able to define an open textbook and evaluate methods for organizing and managing it at the project level. So in a lot of ways, the approach over the summer was project management skill building. We wanted them to apply best practices for revising, remixing, citing, attributing OER, including being able to accurately interpret open licenses. Now, we didn't put them out there to try to figure it out all on their own, but rather just providing them that support and understanding the nuance of being able to cite something, attribute something properly and then understand what those licenses that they attached to their work mean. We wanted them to use iterative writing and research processes to produce prose designed for a student audience. So we wanted them throughout the process to really be thinking, what do my students need and what are the common challenges I saw in the commercial materials I used before that I can work to address by revising these other OER. We wanted to establish accessibility. We invited them to investigate methods for diversifying the curriculum within their discipline, which I will revisit again a little bit later. We wanted them also to plan and integrate a variety of images, videos, and digital interactives that were appropriate for their context. So that way, once again, we're building a more polished, complete learning experience for online students. To scaffold this out, we wanted to do this all in eight weeks, just all of that in eight weeks, no big deal. So what we did is the first two weeks, we worked focused on building community, developing the textbook scope, identifying OER, and understanding interpreting open licenses. It moved at a pretty fast pace, but the work was essentially to define what is your textbook going to cover? How are you going to structure it and what are you using to build on it? In weeks three to four, I onboarded them to technology. We primarily made use of press books and H5P. I also worked with them on citation and attribution practices, showing them how to have consistent citation practices throughout. We also talked about writing for a student audience. On weeks five and six, we transitioned to more inclusivity. We looked at interactives, how to embed those pedagogical activities, and some basic accessibility standards. Finally, in the last two weeks, we implemented the textbook development. This is when they really did the bulk of importing it into press books, editing, and then we also talked to them about future research opportunities and how to evaluate and iterate on their book over time. They were pretty busy eight weeks. And so here are some of the books that we are able to develop. We have a prior learning portfolio development. This is for students in our MDS program, multidisciplinary studies program. It's a great program for students who are returning to college after a stopout. And it's been an incredible book to see folks being able to use their previous learning experiences to get college credit. In the middle, we have a business law textbook that one of our faculty developed and used actually current cases from the summer in their writing. And then finally, practical research for clinicians. This is part of our respiratory care program. And so it was really exciting to see these books come out from a variety of disciplines. The covers you're looking at are all designed by the faculty in partnership with our media team at eCampus Center. So that's kind of a bit about the program. And overall, we were really happy with the results. All five faculty that we admitted created complete books and passed the final accessibility check this fall. And all of them are in use this semester. I'm looking forward to touching base with all of them to see how they're revising and changing it in the next semester. Now, I'd like to talk to you all a little bit about how to build community at a distance and kind of the lessons I learned, the challenges I encountered, and how I kind of addressed those. So some things that I found to be really successful, creating a list server, Google group for the participants to actually kick off the program before we ever met in person. I had folks invite, I invited folks to introduce themselves and their project and goals and concerns to each other in writing. And so there was already this ongoing email thread before the program even started where folks were getting to know each other and draw connections. Some of our faculty were working at that 200 level and some of our faculty were working at the graduate level, and they were immediately able to make connections, even though they were coming from different disciplines. Something I also recommend is that keeping the cohort small, it was really effective in terms of my ability to be able to reach out and have like, hands on contact with each book throughout the process. It was just super manageable at that scale. Synchronous Zoom sessions really did make a difference, but a little goes a long way. I did find myself that canceling a couple of them, we had originally planned to do them every eight, every week for eight weeks, and that ended up being a little much. And so I was able to replace that with just kind of office hour time where I was able to work one on one with folks as needed. So when you're building this community at a distance, it's important to also think about how the curriculum invites community or doesn't invite community. And so one of the things that I noticed very early on is that even though my faculty were expert teachers who have been teaching for years, they were nervous, they were scared that they weren't going to be able to do the work of pulling together an entire book. It was overwhelming and they never, none of them considered themselves authors at that time. So make sure Grant Curriculum includes space for discussing the challenges of writing and citation. I know that technical skills can be a challenge for a lot of folks, but it's not just about technical skills. There's a level of intimidation when it comes to writing and creating a room for that, for folks to talk about that, to process that challenge, it opens them up to be more authentic with one another. Another recommendation is to provide a central hub for the content. We used a Google site, which I'll share with you at the end, where faculty could locate any of the curriculum as well as additional support, session slides, anything they needed at any time. And we didn't lock it down. So if a faculty member was ahead of the game or had a family trip or conference coming up, they could actually work at a pace that works best for them. We only had two extensions during the entire semester on any of our milestones. And so it was pretty incredible to see that folks were very proactive in getting ahead of things if they needed to. So I really recommend having all of the content available. The other thing that I really, really stressed with the folks that I worked with is that OER is a living resource. It is not a static document like a lot of other academic writing is. Iterations are welcomed. If you see an error, you get to change it right there in the middle of the semester. So you don't need to worry about being perfect. It just needs to be complete. And so that was able, I was able to use that to push them through the process a little bit faster and help them kind of check the perfectionism that sometimes gets in the way, especially when we're talking about working with academics. I want to take a moment now to just dig a little bit more deeply into building equity into the curriculum. I'm in no ways an expert. I'm a Black woman at a predominantly white institution and I'm working very hard to get folks to even be comfortable talking about anti-racism at my institution. As such, I don't have the opportunity to push this more thoughtful, in-depth decolonization methods that I would like to push. We often don't get there. And so building equity into this curriculum looked like a little bit at a time. So as a staff member, I really have limited influence over what and how faculty choose to incorporate equity into their curriculum or if they choose to ignore all together. But to nudge them in the right direction, I developed a series of what I call pause points. You will see this in the website that I share with you all. These pause points encourage reflection on ideas from outside our own limited perspective. They don't necessarily require action, but they can inspire it. And I found that in my particular institutional context, this sort of gentle nudging, this opportunity to step back and think critically about who we include and why, that invitation goes a really long way with the faculty I worked with. I also worked with them to bring intentionality to the table. And so when it came time to talk about images in our book, it was always centered on inclusivity. And so we started by looking at the different types of diversity that could often go overlooked, including race, body size, disability class, and gender identity. And so I challenged my faculty to think through all the ways in which diversity could be more present visually in their materials. I also encouraged them to avoid doing that kind of like diversity section. So you have people do a little breakout box and on a particular historical figure, who maybe is often considered exceptional. And this can often be kind of disappointing to diverse students because it suggests that there's only one in a million of us who ever make it to the curriculum or make it into achieving a scientific achievement of some sort. And instead, I really encourage folks to think about diversity as the pervasive part throughout a resource. That means we should have gender non conforming folks doing all sorts of things present in our health curriculum, present throughout, not just when we are in the chapter about gender diversity. And so that kind of conversation really flipped the switch with a lot of folks. And I saw that really resonate in the books at the end when I could see that their images were more diverse from start to finish and not just in particular sections. So I would encourage you all to kind of run with that idea. I found it to be really effective in like pushing my faculty forward a little bit. So now I'm going to share with you all some resources. I'm going to grab this link and one second, I'm going to stop my screen share and drop this in the chat so you all can actually see it. So go ahead and click on this link and you'll be taken to the slide deck. So in here, I have the program flyer info session slide deck, an application guide, as well as an application form. So we really took that competitive part of the process very seriously as a way to help vet who is ready for this commitment and who has that kind of openness to talking about diversity, equity, inclusion in the curriculum. And so I highly recommend kind of building on these resources as a way to see into the program. And the other bundle of resources, I have the grant program website where you'll be able to see pause points, the way in which we structured the curriculum, as well as a link to our folder of program milestones. Feel free to copy and use these, revise them, remix them however you'd like. We used five milestones over the summer to help faculty think through each step in that process. Each milestone was geared very specifically to getting the end result delivered and was not too much time spent on kind of, I don't know, busy work. We can sometimes tend to see that in teaching and learning work. And so we really focused it in on, okay, you're going to create a textbook chart or you're going to organize your materials, you're going to do your press books built. So feel free to use any of these materials. I hope they're helpful. And we have about a little under two minutes for any questions. And here's my contact information if you want to have more in-depth conversation about our program. Monica, this is so great. What a great project. And congratulations on doing like the summer sprint, as I like to call it, because that is a lot of work. And wrangling or herding cats as we like to say as faculty members, that takes a lot of effort. So congratulations on that. There, it looks like Justina said, or excuse me, Marisol had said that the grant program link in there was not working. So we wanted to flag that for you. So we'll have you double check that. And then folks, we'd love to have you continue this conversation with Monica over in OEG Connect. If you do not have access to that, please let us know. But I'm going to be following up with Monica, because I think I would love to learn more about particularly how she was leading her faculty in the equity work, if she would be willing to do that, not to put her on the spot or anything. But thank you so much for sharing this work. We really, really appreciate it. And if we could all give a round of applause to Monica, that would be great. Thank you so much. And we are going to transition-