 Welcome everybody and happy open education week. We are in our final day of open ed week, and we hope that you have had an opportunity to really get a deep dive into many of the open ed week opportunities that have been happening all around the world especially, and that you have had a chance to celebrate yourself as well as those who are at your institution as well. My name is Shinta Hernandez, and I am the Dean of the Virtual Campus at Montgomery College in Maryland and I am also the President of the CCCOER Executive Council, and I have the fortunate opportunity to moderate this panel that will be talking about CCCOER membership and benefits. Before we get into the panel itself, I just want to provide a brief overview of what CCCOER is for many of you who may not be familiar with or simply want to learn more about our organization. We are a part of Open Education Global, specifically the North American chapter of OE Global. We have about 101 members across 35 states in North America, and CCCOER is really a community of practice in which educators and practitioners all around the continent support and encourage one another in a collaboration and a fruitful collaboration in the development of open educational resources and programs that really ensure that our students all around the continent get equitable access and are much more successful in their learning environments. Right at the bottom there, we have a join us URLs at cccoer.org slash become a member if you're interested in learning more and sharing it with your colleagues about what CCCOER membership might look like for your institution. So without further ado, I have here we have here a group of panelists, amazing colleagues that I've had the fortune opportunity to work with in the CCCOER space. Here they are going to discuss some of the stories and examples and experiences of themselves as well as their institution with being a CCCOER member. So with that, I'd like to just ask my colleagues here to introduce themselves and we'll start with Marina. Hi, everyone. Good morning. My name is Marina Amini. I'm the executive director of the California virtual campus. We support educational technology and core sharing and a lot of digital solutions for the California community colleges. We're made up of 116 colleges and we're the largest educational system in the world serving about 2 million students, give or take depending on the economy. And we have about, gosh, tens of thousands of certificates and transfers to four-year institutions every single year. So we're a pretty big ship. And in my current role, I do support the whole system. But the way I became familiar with CCCOER and even the concept of OER was when I was a dean at my previous role at one of those 116 community colleges, Saddleback College. And I confessed to about seven or eight years ago. I didn't know what an OER was. It really was not in my vocabulary. I felt like I was a good teacher and then later a good dean. And a couple of my faculty members who had been involved with CCCOER came to me as their dean and was like, hey, Marina, there's this thing, OER. We really want to see it grow on campus. We think it's good for students. And so from that little kernel of inspiration, it began a five-year odyssey at our college where initially we couldn't even find more than about three or four faculty members who had OER. But through the mentorship, the network, the inspiration of our membership with CCCOER and our entire system has been a member since 2013, although I was not really fully utilizing those benefits. But once we became fully involved, our college went from having a handful of faculty using OER to today, more than 60% of its schedule being fully OER, more than 30 fully zero textbook costs, pathways and degrees and certificates now at the college. So it's a pretty inspirational and amazing journey. I can share more details about how we kind of overcame barriers, but that's truly how I became inspired and excited. And one of the greatest proponents of CCCOER is that I was able to witness some really amazing transformation at my own institution. That's a wonderful story, Marina. It's great to know that several years ago you had these opportunities from colleagues and now where you are today impacting so many students in the state of California through this work and certainly nationally. So we appreciate your contributions. Thank you. Gracie, please introduce yourself. Hello everyone. My name is Gracie McDonough and I am an instruction and reference librarian at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas. I became involved with CCCOER. Actually, we had an instructional designer who started at our institution right before I started who coincidentally worked with Andrea who we'll talk next at Salt Lake Community College. Because Salt Lake was so involved with CCCOER and OER just in general, she brought the knowledge of CCCOER to the College of Southern Nevada and then we joined on. So right as I was starting, we were really kind of upping our efforts with OER. At that particular time, there were only about 3% of our faculty that were using OER and we are almost at 20% at this point. So in the past six years, we've had pretty substantial growth and a lot of that does have to do with our CCCOER membership. I have instructors asking me that have not used OER previously and maybe have kind of a bizarre course that they're teaching. How do I find materials on this? And a lot of it has to do with the CCCOER listserv. I can put out a call for it to see if anybody has anything and I will get responses from CCCOER members from all over the place. It's like, oh, I have a couple of assignments in this area. I have a couple of books and the listserv for CCCOER has just been a wealth of information for that. And just the way that we collaborate as a group within CCCOER has really brought about a lot of the growth that we've had too. I have made amazing friends through this organization, but one of the things too is I can go and do conferences. We can present with different colleges who are in different areas of their CCCOER growth and have different perspectives on it. Debbie Baker, who works for Maricopa Community College, we recently went and presented at the OE Global Conference up in Canada and we had a great time. We got a lot of attendees at our session and actually because Debbie and I have such a great relationship, I'm the vice president for communications for CCCOER. I do a lot of our blog posts. I keep our webinars and our virtual conference calendars up to date, but Debbie is the vice president of membership and recently we combined those two committees. So now it is membership and communications together because we want to make sure that our members are getting the right information that they need and that's useful for them. Thank you so much, Gracie, for that introduction. And when you had mentioned at the beginning, Noe Andrea, it just illustrates to all of us how small of a world higher ed is and I think how even smaller of a world the OER space is. So many of us work across different programs and efforts initiatives all around and it's really just, and I mentioned this earlier, a real community of practice, a really intimate community of practice on which you can rely on and just really get some great information from. And Gracie had mentioned something that I will want to touch on a little bit later in the panel and that's the listserv that CCCOER has. That's one of the tools that we will talk about and I will ask the other panelists later to provide some more examples of tools and resources that CCCOER offers its members. But before we get to that, Andrea, please introduce yourself. Yes, thank you so much for having me here today. I'm Andrea Scott. I'm the director of open educational resources for Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City, Utah. And I'm also the co-vice president of the CCCOER EDI Committee. So I'm so happy to be here today because we have had such a wonderful history, open SLCC has had such a wonderful history with CCCOER. And we began, now I can't speak to when the actual partnership began because there was a different leader that was in that role at that time. But I can talk to my first experience with meeting the group at CCCOER and it was at an open ed conference and CCCOER was hosting a meet and greet session. And it was my first open ed conference and I remember coming into it, feeling somewhat intimidated, not knowing very new to the, I understood some about OER but not anywhere near what a lot of the people I looked up to did. And so coming into that space and just feeling so welcomed and even there was the option to participate and ask questions and I'm thinking, I'm new, why are they wanting to hear from me but so inclusive? So that was my first like my personal introduction to CCCOER. But as I mentioned, SLCC has partnered with CCCOER since 2014. I think for us, there are so many benefits. I could talk for a whole hour about how much impact but I will just focus on a couple here. So one of our main areas that I know that our institution has appreciated in our faculty are the opportunities to promote their projects so the visibility aspect through webinars. We've also had several of our faculty and practitioners participate in the summer book club, the EDI book club and learn about inclusive facilitation. And then also the global aspect, right? The global visibility aspect with open education week and connecting in those different levels and seeing what's going on globally outside the US is very important. Beyond that, I just wanna mention, I feel like our full relationship and some things for me came to realization. We went under what a program review at Salt Lake Community College. We've been doing this work for a long time and we wanted to do some assessment to see what can we improve or what can we do better? And throughout that program review, CCCOER is mentioned in their role in partnering with us and visibility aspects. Also, when I think about that program review, it just makes me think of our relationship with CCCOER coming to full circle and that when I think about it, two of our external reviewers, I met at CCCOER events, at separate events, right? And then two others of our comparison institutions, I also met at other CCCOER events. And then although I've seen them throughout the community, right? That was the beginning space. And so it just, that report for me was also full circle of how much support CCCOER has given Salt Lake Community College and we are just really grateful to be a member and within this community. So thank you. Thank you, Andrea, for that introduction. And I will also share in the sentiment that Andrea just shared about my, when I first came into the OER space, feeling intimidated because I was so new and didn't know anybody, but quickly realized how welcoming and warm the community is and obviously as many of you probably are a part of the community at your institution or within your region, you can certainly attest to that same warm feeling that the OER community of practice is. So now that my panelists have introduced themselves, what I would like to do is just stop share because I would like to see everybody in big screen and we all can see each other is in the larger screen space. Couple of things to state that for us here, we will have a Q and A toward the end, but if anybody would like to enter a question or comments into the chat before that Q and A session, please feel free to do that. We will keep authors of questions anonymous. So you certainly feel free to ask us any questions that you'd like. And for those of you who may have missed this part of the introduction, my name again is Shinta Hernandez and I am the president of the CCC OER Executive Council. I am also the founding dean of the virtual campus at Montgomery College in the state of Maryland. I am also the director of the Maryland Online Leadership Institute and why that is significant is because MOL, Maryland Online is a member of CCC OER and Montgomery College is a member of Maryland Online. So there's a lot of that spider web connection, if you will. So thank you again to all of you for being here. And so let's continue this discussion that we're having about CCC OER membership and the benefits that membership can offer. Our panelists here have already shared a little bit about some of their success stories and examples of how CCC OER membership has positively impacted themselves or the people at their institution. So as they continue doing that, let me reach out to Marina as you continue talking about your success stories. Can you share with us opportunities that you have either seen or would like to see available from membership in this organization? Yeah, I would say kind of at the earliest stages the benefit that really kind of was the trigger to get our college moving, it's out about college and toward OER was a grant opportunity. A lot of times we have these great ideas at our colleges and then everyone's like, well, we don't have any money for that, we don't have any resources for that. And so it was not a huge grant, it was like around $30,000. We're not talking millions of dollars, but it was just enough to sort of seed, to put a seed there and allow this initiative to grow on our campus. And with that came, so we earned that, we received that grant to grow our ZTC or to launch really the ZTC in like, I think it was 2016. And from there, we also received a ton of membership because membership benefits like mentorship and support and guidance, because no one's gonna give you money without giving you some kind of criteria around it. So it kept us accountable. If we said we're going to convert a certain number of classes, we had to do it. We had to sort of make sure that we were spending that money in appropriate ways to support faculty to get the professional development they needed. We brought on speakers to help spread kind of professional development and awareness of what ZTC and OER is on our campus. And so that kind of seed money was tremendous. And from that, gosh, if I had to estimate, students have saved millions and millions of dollars since 2016, because we would give $500 stipends to faculty to convert one class. They would have 45 students in that class and they would teach four sections of that class and they would have two semesters per year and those faculty are gonna be around for 20 years. So do the math and that's just one faculty. So that $1,500 part of that grant really led to this amazing savings down the line and a return on investment for our students. And so multiply that by a lot. So that grant opportunity to me was everything. And again, not a lot of money, but with that, the membership and the support and then the examples from the other grant recipients, we were able to figure out, oh, we're doing it this way. What is this other college doing? Oh, this other college is really focusing on STEM, for example, because these are hard to convert classes for OER, so there's a lot of support there. Or this other college is focusing on certificate classes because they have a higher number of certificate recipients and they're not transfer bound. So really understanding the different examples from our network through the CCCOER was really tremendously helpful too. Thank you, Marina, for sharing that. And when you talked about grant and the start year of 2016, it reminds me of what happened here at Montgomery College. We started off within achieving the dream grant in spring of 2017 and it's interesting. I mentioned how small of a world it is. Just from being in that ATD grant allowed us to see a little bit more of CCCOER and just the interconnectedness of those various organizations really helped us to get to where we are at Montgomery College as well. So thank you for sharing that story. Gracie, what about you? Any additional success stories you wanna share and particularly any opportunities you'd like to see or have seen from CCCOER membership? You know, one of the things that I would really like to see, I know Shinta, you have mentioned this and Andrea mentioned it too. Just kind of when you're a brand new member of CCCOER, you kind of feel intimidated by all of the success stories of all of these things that your other colleges have done. One of the things that I would really like to see for new members of CCCOER is some sort of mentorship program. And honestly too, not even, you know, new college members. Maybe the college has been a member for quite a while, but maybe it's somebody else's coming into the fold of using OER and they really kind of need to just be walked through on like how all of this works. So, because I know personally, I had Paula McNabbich who I had mentioned earlier who is an instructional designer for us now, but she had worked with Andrea before. If I didn't have her, I know that I would be feeling that way. You know, being someone who was new to it and kind of taking over and being a person who people were going to for information on this particular topic. But yeah, I feel like mentorship for new members and just new people coming onto it would be a great opportunity for a lot of people. I think that a lot of people would benefit from something like that. That's a really great suggestion, Gracie. It's mentoring program for new members especially. Well, many of us know this, that research shows that when you've got a mentoring support system or some sort of mentoring infrastructure, there's greater success of both the mentees as well as the mentors. I think it becomes this mutual agreement, mutually beneficial partnership for the folks involved. Great, thank you, Gracie. There's different ways that we could possibly pair people to that have had a lot of success with it, maybe by region or we could do it by college size, we could do it by state or, there's many, many, many different ways of looking at this. So there'd be a couple suggestions that people could have who do you think that you would like to be paired with and doing something like that? Yeah, those are excellent variables in which we would categorize the mentoring. Thank you, Gracie. Andrea, what about you? Yeah, so I just wanna real quick make a mention of just to talk about Gracie, which is bringing up with mentoring. And I just wanted to mention that I felt like CCCOER and many of the leaders at that time mentored me. And so it's just this full circle going forward. So I really like that suggestion as well, like a more formalized program, Gracie. So thank you. So I would say when we're talking about additional, when I think about additional opportunities, one that comes to mind for me is research, like collaborating on research more. And I'm so grateful because we do have now, we have the community of practice around research and I'm excited to see how that, it looks like that we're working on, or that particular committee is working on a curation list. But that is one area that we have struggled at my institution. We, many OER programs have capacity challenges. We have a lot of data. We haven't had the capacity or the resources to analyze that data to the extent we would like to. So having, being able to have maybe some other resources or other, even other institutions, meeting other institutions that are interested in doing some similar research or similar areas they're interested in looking at. So that is one. So I'm glad that we do have that research committee and I'm excited to see where that goes. The other area I would say, and I feel like CCCOER does address this in many different ways and pieces, but one topic that comes up a lot that I'm hearing a lot is about sustaining OER programs. And when we talk about that, there's many pieces to that, right? There's infrastructure, but I often hear about the inconsistent funding and once like, once for example, maybe some programs are grant funded, but once the grant funding runs out, what happens next? Those types of things. And then also you hear about competing institutional initiatives and communication sometimes is a challenge and just program assessment, like showing what we're doing, how the benefits of our work, right? And making those things visible. So I would love to see either like some, and maybe like some case studies or a community of practice. I know CCCOER has done a wonderful job in highlighting resources and having webinars on these different topics, but it would just be lovely to have conversations. And one thing, if I can say too, one other area that I think as a community, we need to kind of start addressing as well is like the succession planning, right? So we have seen OER leaders that have maybe left a program that was very successful and at times that, sometimes that success tends to follow that leader. How can we make sure that we are sustaining the work that we're doing at our institutions? How can we make sure that we're sustaining the work we do as a community? So that's very much an area of interest for me and it's something I would like to see maybe more formalized. And I'm sorry if I'm asking too much of CCCOER, but we're already talking about these, but maybe there's some interest here for a community to get together and have these conversations. Thank you, Andrea, I appreciate that. And in fact, all three of our panelists have either articulated or alluded to subcommittees that make up CCCOER that are already working or talking at least about some of these things. So later on in the discussion, I'm gonna share with you what those subcommittees are and how potentially you could also get involved in the executive council or by way of those subcommittees. And I appreciate Andrea's comment on OER program sustainability and succession planning. CCCOER continuously talks about strategic planning, especially as part of that succession planning and sustainability, as does our parent organization Open Education Global. So it is certainly, those are very important components of the work that we do because we recognize that not only are we here because we are drawn by very common interests, but we have to make sure that we provide the support, the network, the sustainable model that will help the organizations continue into the years to come and just to continue enhancing the work that we do and always thinking about different ways to make, to continue our innovation as well. So because I just left off with Andrea, Andrea, if it's all right, that I'm gonna start off with you this time. You know, there are presumably some challenges or barriers that are related to Open Education. Many of us probably are familiar with those challenges as it relates to particularly adoption or implementation. In what ways does CCCOER support its members in helping to navigate through some of those complexities? Yeah, so I would say from my experience, their CCCOER has the webinars that it offers that if we, you know, there are often topics that I am not familiar with everything in the OER field, right? So I can go listen to somebody who has expertise within that area because the field, the open education field is large. It's impossible to know everything. And then also beyond the webinars, I would also say the listserv is something that is definitely a huge resource. I've reached out there on the listserv and I know other members of our institution have as well when they've had a challenge or something, maybe either they've had a challenge finding a resource or maybe it's a situation that we're not sure how to address and just reaching out to that community and saying, hey, who has experience in this because we're not sure what to do here, right? And being able to have that conversation with the group. So I feel like that's one area. And then I think also just keeping us informed of the most recent information, just even with the automatic textbook billing that current topic right now, the first place I learned about it and others within my institution learned about it was through CCCOER. And then next we had a webinar this week on it as well. So I was able to, I'm able to share that information with my institution. So I think that's one way that CCCOER has helped us is by providing access to that information and resources for us. So thank you. Thank you Andrea for sharing that. And just to show the person who spearheads these professional development opportunities and these webinars is our vice president of professional development, Lori Beth Larson who is on this Zoom. So we appreciate her work and her committee's work coming up with such innovative and most relevant topics to share with the broader CCCOER community. So we appreciate you, Lori Beth. So I'm gonna go to Gracie now. Gracie, can you share with us how you think CCCOER can support its members in helping us navigate through some of those challenges or complexities? You know, I think a lot of it has to do with just our communication with one another. Most of you probably know that Nevada is a huge leading the OER path. But along with that though, we are trying to kind of catch up to what a lot of other states are doing. I know in the past two and a half years I kind of put together a monthly meeting with all of the rest of my community colleges in the state of Nevada. And we talk about our OER efforts now and how to grow those OER efforts because all of the librarians, the instructional designers, of course we all want to see this succeed. But I didn't even realize that until talking to Shinta about this actually. So colleges in Nevada is a standalone membership. We are the only member in the state of Nevada. But if the other colleges did want to join, we could do a consortium membership that way. And I feel like the next time I meet with them next month I'm going to present that to them. Because I guess that's something that I should have thought about before because states like California and Texas, they're huge and they have so many colleges. Nevada recently had five, but we're now only down to four because one of our colleges became a university. And so now we have four colleges and three universities. We're very small in that regard, but I would love to see the consortium membership for the state of Nevada. But it was Shinta that said that Maryland did that, but her college itself isn't an individual member. So it's just, you find out information like that and you're like, oh, I can actually use this. I can do something with it and make it better for my school or my state. Well, good, Gracie. I'm glad that that's beneficial in the conversations that you're having with colleagues throughout the state. And a lot of times that's where the ideas come from. They come from these community of practices that you all established. And you never know what comes out of those conversations. And then all of a sudden, voila, we've got an idea. Let's see what happens if we try to move forward with it. So thank you for sharing that, Gracie. Marina, what about you? Can you share with us how CCCOER can support members in navigating some of those challenges associated with OER practices and implementation? Yeah, so I would just really emphasize the two that have already been mentioned by my colleagues, which would be the webinars and the listserv. When you're launching a brand new initiative or program on your campus, there are so many questions that you have that you really don't have the answer to. And also so many people object to things because they're afraid of something new maybe or they don't understand it. So questions like, well, my academic senate, my faculty think that it's going to impinge on their academic freedom. Like is this true about OER? Who can tell me more? Or how do I mark a class as OER or is it ZTC? Like what's the difference, right? Zero taxable cost or OER? Who can help me navigate this information? Or if I need like a one-on-one meeting, who's the right person to go to? In our case, it was a good librarian, by the way. Your librarians are your best friends. Or if my class has a charge for like a calculator or chemistry lab materials, but the book is an OER, does the class still get marked as zero taxable cost? Or is it just OER? Like these are the kind of questions that I personally did not know how to answer. Cause, you know, my faculty would come to me and I'd be like darned if I know, but I really want to support this thing. And is there somebody who can help us? And so really the professional development opportunities offered by CCCOER were amazing because you know, you don't feel dumb. You have these people that are like, hey, we just answered this. Let me tell you how we do it. That statement of let me show you how I did it or let me tell you how we're handling it is incredibly valuable. It makes you feel like you're not going it alone. And then you can actually come back to your college and be like, hey, I spoke to Nevada or I spoke to Maryland and here's how they're handling it and it's working really well and they've been doing it for two years. So you come in and it gives you a little bit more leverage because you're not just sort of making up an answer. You actually have an example from an institution that's doing it and can serve as your sort of leadership on that. So that to me again, incredibly valuable because I did not have all the answers even though I was really well-intentioned and excited about the equity implications of what we were doing. And then secondly, I wanna kind of circle back to our previous question. Andrea highlighted some really important next steps for CCCOER as we kind of grow as an organization, right? Sustainability, succession planning, strategic plans. These are not things that you worry about in the beginning when you're just starting something new. So I was not at all worried about any of those things because I was just trying to get this thing off the ground six or seven years ago. The fact that we are in a space as a bigger organization and also at our colleges that we start thinking about, what's the next step? Now that I've got a bunch of OER courses, can I get an OER degree together? I need a strategic plan that I can take to my college president and get money and kind of ongoing general funding for this. I need research that points to the student outcomes around OER. These are all questions related to the maturity of a program which I think is a really exciting space to be in. So when my college was moving from that, I don't know what we're doing stage to, hey, we've got a really thriving OER program and we wanna make it grow and go the right way. CCCOER was also here for that because again, we had members that were in that mature state already and that could share their experiences and benefits and guidance. So really like at every stage from beginning to maturity, kind of future thinking, you have a network of professionals that are willing to share and support you. And that again is super valuable for removing those barriers. Thank you, Marina. And you really touched on the importance of how CCCOER can also facilitate collaboration and additional networking opportunities within the larger open education community. And I wanna just go back to your earlier comment about course marking as a topic that you were able to gather information from all sorts of individuals within CCCOER and other places, bring that back to your area and really just talk about it and show that people are actually doing this stuff. And so I just wanna say to the larger audience that course marking has been a hot topic for a long time. It's one of those things where we continuously see members of our CCCOER community and even those who are not members wanting to learn more about course marking. And going back to the webinars that CCCOER offers, we've offered a lot of different webinars and professional development opportunities on course marking as well as other really relevant, very timely open-ed topics. So being able to come into these webinar spaces or professional development spaces and like Marina and all the other panelists have mentioned and just be able to converse and to hear what other institutions are doing and bringing it back to your institution. It really helps a great deal in arguing for the cause. So I appreciate Marina that comment. I wanted to ask also Gracie and Andrea as well, how else do you see CCCOER helping with additional networking opportunities besides the things that we've already touched on like the webinars and listservs? Any other thoughts about that? Because of things like the listservs, I have found out about so many outside professional development opportunities just because people are posting about things. Like for example, right now one of my faculty members and I are doing the open educational practices certification through open textbook network at the University of Minnesota. And I found out about that because somebody had posted it through the listserv. I'm involved with witchy, which Andrea is also in and so is Debbie Baker. There's quite a few people in witchy but we found out about that because somebody had said something about it. I've done the Creative Commons certification which I know that a lot of us have done but I found out about it because it had been talked about so much through CCCOER. So even the professional development opportunities that CCCOER offers, they're amazing, they're absolutely fantastic. But then you find out more just by talking to people that are involved with CCCOER that have done additional things and we can take advantage of all of those different opportunities that are offered to us. That's right and that's the most important part. The opportunities I think are certainly there and more opportunities will come. I think making sure to have that conscious decision to take advantage of those opportunities is also important. I know many of us get inundated with emails and other information that may come our way from different areas of our work lives but when those emails related to open education come my way, I'm definitely looking at it, reading it, letting it marinate because I continue to wanna see what else can we do for our students at Montgomery College and within the broader state of Maryland. So yeah, thank you Gracie for sharing that. Andrea, how about you? Any additional networking opportunities? So I would just say beyond the listserv, it feels like for us, a lot of these opportunities have taken place at CCCOER events where organically, I have met people who are working on similar work or we have an area of interest and then something blossoms from that, right? So most recently, I can talk, Shinta, I think it's fine, okay to talk about this but SLCC is interested in exploring becoming a United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Open Pedagogy Program Partner. And so we're shadowing right now with Montgomery and that group. So that's great, but honestly, I'm not sure I would know about the opportunity, Shinta, if I had not met you here. So maybe we would have seen each other somewhere in the open education community, but very much. So that's something that we're looking at and we're excited to launch next year, hopefully. And so it's been for us, it's been these opportunities which are maybe more structured for one reason or another, but then it's at a meetup or some of those things that we just start talking in and naturally that collaboration comes from that. So I think it's really about OER's ability to organize that space, whether it be online or in person when we are able to do in person things. It's very valuable. Yeah. Thank you, Andrea. And yes, thank you for bringing up this international fellowship that so many partners around the world are now involved in. And in fact, the fellowship just as a brief background was born out of an open education conference that a colleague in Ike Montgomery College attended many years ago in Anaheim, California. And from there, it almost felt like an overnight success, if you will, but it became international so quickly. But I think one of the reasons why it became international so quickly, in addition to its unique elements of Open Pedagogy and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals pieces, is that this community of practice that is just so intimate yet broad and large enough has allowed this fellowship to grow so quickly in the last seven years. So like Andrea and Gracie from their respective institutions will become new members. You'll see when you click on that link, you'll see we have over 10 institutional partners from all around the world, including a brand new Asia chapter. So it's just nice to be able to continue these kinds of conversations that all somehow came out of either CCCOER or OpenEd or OE Global Conference, but they're all very much interconnected intertwined. So it's been such a beautiful evolution to be a part of that. Now, I'm gonna start again with Andrea because Andrea is the co-VP of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee of CCCOER Executive Council. And so Andrea, I'll ask you first, how does CCCOER support our EDI initiatives within its membership and the broader Open Educational Community? Great, yes, thank you. I have a lot to say about this as well. So we have the EDI Committee, which our goal is to help bring diverse voices to provide leadership opportunities, to also provide other voices within the process of facilitation and education, maybe some of those underserved voices. And I would say to, so some of the projects, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the projects that we've been working on. And of course the project, our scope continues to grow because my co-VP and I have lots of ideas about this, but we have to remember that we have limited time as well. So passion's great, but we need to be reasonable. So our first, the first committee that under the committee leadership started a community of practice and that included a book club, a summer book club that was focused on an EDI book. And sometimes it's a book that is, that centers in higher education and EDI. Sometimes it's not necessarily, but it will focus on EDI. The purpose of that book club is to offer a safe space to have discussions for the community to have discussions. But beyond that, we also have, and I should have talked about this first, we have a training that we offer a facilitation training for anybody who's interested in leading facilitation and maybe isn't sure how to lead these type of discussions or what to do if things get uncomfortable or how to have these community of norms and understand those and respect those. So we do have a training session that we offer our committee does for anybody interested in facilitating a book club session. And again, the book club, I just can't say enough that it really offers a space. What's nice about it is we don't often, we see new faces, it feels like every year. So, and we see, sometimes we see the same people that come to all the sessions or maybe they're able to just pop into one. But it really provides, and the feedback we've heard from surveys is that the community appreciates being able to have a safe space to have these discussions, these inclusive discussions. And beyond the book club, I'd also like to talk about this past year, we've also started a new project which is an EDI curation list. And what that's about is Wade and I were having a casual conversation about how many conferences have you been to or events and you get this great resource, this great EDI resource and only you go back to find it like six months later when you actually need it and you can't find it anywhere and you're looking and you're looking and you can't find it. So Wade and I were brainstorming with said, well, maybe we can talk to CCCOER and see if we can do this curation project. And so this has been our latest, most recent project we presented at open end last year. And the idea behind it is that we'd like the community to help us curate this list of resources, EDI related resources around different topics from teaching and learning to research, to photographs, to there's several categories within it. There's even one for AI. But we have over 80 resources right now in that community resource list. And so anybody in the community can submit a form to request to put the resource on the list. And the resource list is hosted on the CCCOER EDI committee page. And this is also a work in progress. So we're looking for the community for further help of the next steps of we have right now this Excel spreadsheet but how can we work together to make this work for everybody, right? So we're soliciting feedback there for that as well. We also do presentations we have and blog posts highlighting the work that we're doing and highlighting the work that others are doing outside CCCOER. So I think I've talked for too long but those are some of the main areas. Andrea, this is fantastic. Thank you for sharing all the wonderful resources in the EDI context with our audience. And thank you to Heather and Marina for sharing some of the resources in the chat. Let me, Marina, let me ask you that to any additional ways in which CCCOER can continue to support our EDI initiatives throughout the broader OE community. Yeah. So I know that once we kind of started hitting that maturity phase of our program at Saddleback the question kind of was like, well what research do we have around this? Does it support all students equally or equitably? How are students voices sort of brought into a discussion around OER? And so then working with our research office to develop and plan a research project on student outcomes related to OER, ZTC courses. And immediately from that project we saw that classes that had a zero textbook cost or OER were 7% higher in terms of success rates and retention and that there were the biggest differences for students of color. And so that was a very, very exciting finding because we felt like we were getting some validation that we were on the right track. So an area that I think CCCOER could really support colleges like mine that were kind of coming up with this as we went is to develop some protocols for research offices that they can easily adopt. Because I think a lot of time went into designing the instrument, designing kind of figuring out what data sets are we pulling, what's the research methodology for completing this project. A lot of time went into that. And so if we kind of prepackaged some examples or templates of research and how we ran it and what the design of that project looked, I think that could really encourage more research offices to do that more quickly and more effectively and efficiently. So that would be a great thing to see, I think moving forward. We kind of just hand that over to Leeds to take to the research office and be like, hey, I need you to do this and I've done half the work for you. Here's the design. You just have to kind of move forward. I know it's not that easy, but it would certainly help. That's a great suggestion, Marina, having like a toolkit or a blueprint that somebody can just take with them, run with it. Because we all, I think everyone in this space recognizes how important data collection and analysis can be for launching, implementing and certainly sustaining open education initiatives at your institution or the larger region and certainly the larger context of the nation. So that is a great suggestion, Marina. And I would just also add that there's often, I don't know, at least in California, there are monies tied to equity work. And so we have certain funding that colleges receive that's around equity work, specifically bridging the gaps between student performance across demographic groups. And so once we were able to show the gains that OER provided for students of color who were disproportionately impacted in our system, we were then able to tap into additional budget pieces that we didn't have access to before because we had evidence that it does support the equity work that is part of our mission at the college. So as an administrator, I'm always like hustling for money because after that little grant ran out, it's like, how do I keep that momentum going? How do I find funding? Because I know this is good for our students. So the research gave me sort of the backing and the stability to be able to be like, all right, here's why I need more money and here's why you should give me some of those equity funds because we're supporting our students. Excellent, and that's where money needs innovation meets success, right? Yes, exactly. And that ties into what Andrea said earlier about how we're always looking for feedback because if we can gather more innovative ideas, look for places where we can get support, put them together, that's why I think the magic can potentially happen and then we can scale it up and then the impact is even that much greater. Wonderful. Gracie, how about you? What are some other ways that these DOER can support EDI? So I will make mine short because I know that we are running short on time but one of the programs that has been, unfortunately it'll be available in California right now but the OFAR program, the Open for Anti-Racism program has been phenomenal. I know as much about it as I do only because I have been updating the website about it but it's a fantastic program and I feel like if we were able to grow that further, I know it was a California brand that started this but if we were able to grow that program to a national level or even further than that, I think it would be an amazing way to go with trying to get some of that in there. Just educating the community about how to incorporate that would be a great thing to do. That's amazing. And while you are unmuted Gracie, let me as we wrap up our time together, if you could give us in a nutshell, resources or tools that we haven't yet mentioned that you think CCCOER can offer its members to help us continue our collective learning and growing, what might that be? You know, we have mentioned most of the things but I would say every single webinar that I attend that CCCOER puts on all of the virtual conferences, I learn new things every single time that I attend something like that. So just keep an eye out for whatever webinars there are, keep an eye out on the lists served, always see whatever virtual conferences you're able to attend, you will always end up learning something new. Thank you for that Gracie. And Andrea and Marina, what about you? Any additional resources or tools you think that CCCOER offers its members? So I would just mention OEG Connect, that's not something that's been talked about but it feels like there's a more global presence on that platform as well. So that is one area that we have not discussed that I'd like to mention. That's wonderful. And OEG Connect is a great place for asynchronous discussions to happen on some of the most innovative and relevant topics. Thank you Andrea, Marina. Yes, all of the above actually, you know, webinars, professional development opportunities, virtual conferences, the lists serve, you know, sometimes you can see somebody who really has something good to say on that listserv and I would just reach out to them privately and ask for their support. Our colleagues are incredibly warm and welcoming in terms of providing that support. And if there's anybody on here who's like, well, whose job is it on my campus and who's gonna start this thing? It's so much work, it's probably you. So if you're here and you're listening to this, it's probably you, you're in charge and you've gotta go do that work and get on that listserv as a start and attend some of these webinars. Well said, thank you Marina for that. One more thing that I will add before we offer our concluding remarks as a resource is social media. CCCOER has a strong presence in LinkedIn and Twitter slash X. And so if you are able to follow along, for example, the webinars and this panel discussion was posted on the various social media platforms. There are a lot of things that you can learn from our social media posts. And in fact, I actually look at social media as a place for professional development because not only is it there as a post but you can also interact with the author of that post with other people who might be following that person who has a network. So it's another great professional development tool that you can get really valuable information. Now in the remaining time that we have, I do wanna provide you with additional information about CCCOER, but before that, I wanna say a huge thank you to our amazing panelists today, Marina, Gracie and Andrea for such insightful information about what CCCOER membership can offer. And I hope that our audience members are able to take that back to their institution so that you can take advantage of some of the things that we offer. But we had mentioned earlier that we have committees that make up the CCCOER Executive Council. And in the chat, I believe the interest form and the link to the committees were entered. But the professional development, the VP of professional development is here on this call, Lori Beth Larson. Andrea Scott is Co-VP of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Membership, newly branded as Communications is Gracie and Debbie Baker. And research and impact are two Co-VPs. I don't believe are on this call, but this is that research piece that we were talking to you earlier. And then, as you know, Marina is the Executive Vice President alongside me as the Council President. So if you are interested in volunteering your time, energy and passion in these committees, please fill out that interest form. I would love to have that conversation with you about that opportunity. We also want to share one more, this is later today, one more Open Ed Week webinar that we are hosting at 5.30 Eastern Standard Time. It is called Open for Anti-Racism, Leveraging Open Education to Support Anti-Racism in the Classroom. We hope that you have already registered. If not, please register. We hope to see you there for our final conversation this week. And then these spring webinars, we kept talking about webinars throughout the panel discussion today that Lori Beth Larson is in charge of with her committee, that these are the additional webinars that we have for the remainder of the spring 2024 semester. So definitely don't miss out. On April 10th, we will have a webinar on the intersection of AI and OER and how is that redefining education. And then the very last webinar of the semester is on May 8th in which we will be exploring open education publishing platforms. So the link will be placed in the chat so that you can find out more information including time and the registration link will be there as well. This is the next EDI summer book club that Andrea was talking about. There's a lot of information here, but please, if you are interested, you can take a look at the EDI committee webpage or most definitely contact Andrea Scott. I'm sure she will be very happy and excited to talk more about this year's summer book club. And she had mentioned session facilitators and the training that that committee will offer. So that information you can also gather from this slide as well as the webpage and directly from Andrea if you wanna reach out to her. And another way to stay in the loop, we were talking about resources and tools just now, several ways in which you can stay in the loop. One, upcoming conferences. So when you go to our website and you go under the get involved tab, you can see the additional conferences that we have going on. We talked about an email listserv. So you have the URL. I think that was also placed in the chat not too long ago. And we had also talked about EDI blog posts and student OER impact stories that you can find on the CCC OER homepage. We're always delighted to see and hear and witness the student OER impact. So that's definitely really wonderful stuff to read into or read about. And then certainly last but not least at all, I wanna just give a shout out to Heather Blicker here who is our newly selected program director of CCC OER. Heather, thank you so much for your leadership and your vision in getting us to the next chapter of CCC OER. So we very much appreciate what you've been able to offer and will continue to offer in this space. I also wanna congratulate and thank Liz Yatza for doing such a great job with all of our webinars today. Liz, thank you for engaging us in the chat and putting all of the relevant information that our audience members will need. So with that, and I recognize that we are getting close to that hour, but if there's any questions here, I'm sure, I'll stick around if panelists could stick around for a little bit, great, but we are here for you. Any questions for us? Well, thank you so much. Great, thank you for being here.