 Welcome, everyone. My name is Jenny Parks. You have tuned in signed into building our capacity in the Midwest, supporting grassroots efforts and statewide collaboration. I'm joined today by my collaborators on a commandee Jennifer's and Katie's a back. They will each give you a little bit of an introduction about themselves as they jump in to help in hosting this slide presentation. So, welcome. Next slide. So, Mac, for those of you who don't know us is an acronym for the Midwestern Higher Education Compact. We're one of the four regional compacts in the US serving higher education. The others are Richie, SREB and Nebby for those of you who are more familiar with them. For those of you who didn't know the four compacts have gotten together and received the Hewlett grant to do 18 months of work or capacity building in OER in our states with a specific emphasis on increasing educational access and equity. We all have the same outcomes for this grant, which we, we have a loose affiliation called the National Consortium for Open Educational Resources or MC OER. And if you went to tune in on Wednesday, we're doing a presentation specific to that collaboration. But if you look at this slide, you'll see the practices on the left are in, I mean the outcomes are involved. That's what we all share. And then if you look at those on the right, you'll see some of the specific outcomes that Mac is hoping to achieve with its work. Each of the compacts is doing things a little bit differently. Next slide please. So specific to Mac, we do have a number of areas in which we are conducting activities, hoping to achieve our outcomes. One of the big things that we've been doing for three years now that is kind of unique to Mac, but I think the other regions are also kind of looking at something similar is to work with OER state action teams. We try to get a group of individuals together in each state to create an OER identity in the state. We've been doing that, like I said, since we started in the fall of 2018 with a convening that was region wide, and which Hewlett Foundation also supported. Those teams keep meeting and keep building community and capacity in each of their states. We try really hard to have members of all sectors of the higher ed community. We try to have the K-12 community, the public libraries, and as many diversified partners as we can so that we can create a new culture of open education and open educational resources in each of our state. We also have a couple of research projects in which we are engaged. You're going to hear a little bit more about them today from the principal researchers in both of those. We're also supporting virtual convenings in each of or virtual leadership activities in each of our states. So we have collaborated there with the open education network for those leadership trainings. This will be for institutional and systems leaders. And then we've been helping a few of our states actually launch their first OER statewide summit. OER also have been trying to work with Revis Foundation to help CTE practitioners develop some new resources across the region. We've had a number of webinars. You can go to the MAC OER page or to the MAC webinar page and you'll be able to find many of those webinars already recorded and put there for you. So we do have an OER technology working group where we're trying really hard to build an understanding of the technologies that touch OERs and the technology that yet needs to be developed and to develop that marketplace and that understanding so that we can keep moving forward with those types of innovations. Next slide. So, one of the things that it's important for us to say that we've been doing in MAC, like I said, we have our OER Action Team is really our unique thing. We have representatives from public universities and many from private universities too. They meet quarterly with phone calls that we all share, but then there's a lot of contact between that time. And they are also the folks on whom we draw upon to schedule our leadership events, but also to schedule our summits. In January 2021, we asked each state to complete a capacity assessment. We're really trying to figure out what are the precursors, the preconditions that are needed in a state to really help it build from the ground up and OER infrastructure, culture, and set of practices. So I'm going to turn this over to Anika now and she's going to tell you a little bit more about that assessment and what we hope to learn from it. Thanks, Jenny. Yeah, so as Jenny mentioned, we developed a state capacity assessment, which of course we're happy to share with folks as part of the resources for this session. And the assessment covered four main areas. The first two are related to state policy and advocacy. And what we asked each state to do was to sit down with their OER Action Team and sort of answer these questions. So do we have legislation in our state yet? Do we have a legislator who is knowledgeable and maybe passionate about OER that we can depend on? And for each of these items under all these categories, they sort of said yes, no, or it's in progress. And then took some time to write some notes on where they're at with each of these things. So under state policy and advocacy, it's really around legislation and support from the state government. Under institutional commitment, we ask people to think about who is engaged in OER across the state. Does the university and college system have an OER initiative? Does the community college system have one? How about our independent institutions? What about our K-12 folks? How are we engaging across the P-20 spectrum? How about our library association or library system? And what about our student organizations? So we want folks to really think about each of these categories and think about whether they have folks engaged at each of these levels around OER. And if so, are we working together effectively so that we can really improve outcomes for students? So these two categories on the state capacity assessment relate to communications and infrastructure and strategic planning. So here again people are asked to self-assess where are we at as a state? Have we put together a website around open education? Do we maybe have a repository? I think I saw Mindy earlier. So a lot of folks have been using OER Commons to create repositories and hubs for listing out their OER. So that's a great way to communicate what's available across the state. Is there an annual event like a summit? Can you say, can you look around and say, here's the people that are here, here's the people that are not here and come up with a plan to engage those folks that are not yet engaged around OER? So we have data and metrics. What are we doing to collect data around what we're doing? And Katie's going to talk a little bit later about what some of those data might look like, especially related to cost savings and other return on investment. And then do we get together regularly and present out to our constituencies and our stakeholders across the state? So in terms of strategic planning, a lot of our states have been working on developing their own vision and mission statements around open education. So what are we hoping for as a state to achieve with this? Each of the state OER action teams have started to articulate roles and responsibilities towards achieving that mission and vision. So we asked our states to think together about what are some three goals you think you could achieve in the next six months. And really spend some time thinking about what's achievable and what can we do together. And then finally we asked folks to think a little bit about what do you need to move your work forward? What kinds of resources do you need? Maybe that's from MEC, maybe that's from the state, maybe it's from your system or your institution, or helping people come together and really identifying what they need in order to build that capacity. So I'd love to hear from the folks here and I see there's a couple little blips in the chat, which I haven't read yet. Elizabeth Sue, you can totally join us in Illinois and Elizabeth Sue, we would love to have everybody. I'd love to know from you all, you know, do these kinds of things resonate in terms of building capacity within the state? And are there things that we're missing here? Are there other indicators of capacity that you think we should include here? Feel free to put your thoughts in the chat and I'll give everyone a minute to do that. What else could we be including? And I'll flip back to the first. Professional development, that's a great one. And we talk about in infrastructure and communications having like annual events and stuff, but we didn't talk specifically about other kinds of professional development. I think that would be great. Yeah, and rebel, absolutely, you can share. We will upload a copy of this assessment to sketch after the conference today, so that you can actually download that. Thanks, Jonathan, great thought. Yeah, we've been trying to work across the state, and sometimes that engages with state systems, but we've also been engaging outside of those systems and trying to bring different systems together so in a lot of states we have community colleges that are in a separate system from the public four years which are in some often a separate system from independent colleges so we've been trying very much to try to bring people together. The way that they're defining OER that's really great thank you for those thoughts. Yeah, thanks, Mindy. Yeah, professional learning is great. I think that's a great suggestion for us to call that out more specifically. Alright, we're limited in time. I'm going to put my email in the chat. If there's any folks here like our colleagues in Illinois that want to engage with the Illinois State team, just send me a note and we'll get you on to that team. Thank you so much. I'm going to pass this off to Jennifer now. Thank you so much. And thanks you all for joining us here today. My name is Jennifer Zinth and I'm founder principle of a consulting firm based here in Denver, Colorado, consulting and just a little background about myself for about 20 years I was at Education State, 50 state organizations serving state policymakers across row groups across the 50 states and dual enrollment. For the last 10 or 12 years I was there was the number one topic that I fielded I covered a number of issues on high school to post secretary transitions as well as stem and computer science but from state demand. And from our constituents dual enrollment was the topic that I did the most work on. In 2019 I left to start my own consulting business continuing to work with states nonprofit organizations. Also some foundations on this work so I'm delighted to be here today. Next slide please. So just a quick point of clarification in my comments today and in the report we use the term do enrollments as an umbrella term for college courses offered to high school students regardless of the course location instructor type, or course modality. So this report is really intended for multiple stakeholders on the OER side state and local K 12 and post secondary OER stakeholders, as well as dual enrollment stakeholders again coming from either the state or local level, both from K 12 and post secondary. And this could be for those who haven't yet thought about the use of OER and dual enrollment, or who have begun using OER and dual enrollment courses but are looking to take their efforts to the next level. And so the out the intended outcome of this report is to inform these stakeholders and state policymakers in general, on the potential challenges to equitable dual enrollment program access, participation success, and the cost of the traditional OER can be barriers. How we are can mitigate those challenges on the current state policy land escape in terms of who's responsible for covering dual enrollment textbook costs, and a sort of how to for integrating OER to dual enrollment courses, or taking OER integration and dual enrollment, the next level. Next slide please. So before we dive in on, I sort of share a word about how using non OER textbooks and dual programs can potentially negatively impact equitable course access and student participation. And the number of states have two or more dual enrollment programs and so even within the same state, the entity responsible for covering door at textbook costs can vary. For example, in a state where a post second institution may receive a small amount from the state, that amount might be responsible for covering not just the cost of tuition, but also fees, textbooks, any course materials as applicable. And so an institution might be disinclined to offer courses with high textbook costs if we have to cover all of those types of expenses with an amount of money that maybe even less than they would get for tuition alone for a regularly matriculated student. And so an institution may pull back on offering courses to high school students that are some STEM courses have high textbook costs than most liberal arts courses, or some CTE courses that may have high course material costs like for example, photography welding or culinary arts courses where each student has to have their own knife set they might say, you know, the textbook doesn't cost that much for that culinary course, but you have to cover the knives as well so maybe we're going to have limited slots for high school students or just not offer that course to high school students. Alternatively, where the district has to cover textbook costs for dual enrollment courses. The district similarly may want to scale back the number of dual enrollment courses they offer the types of courses, or the number of seats and some courses again to rein in textbook costs and this could be daily common in other resource school districts, or rural districts that are experiencing declining enrollment and having to make difficult decisions on staffing facilities, all sorts of other issues, in addition to a dual enrollment costs including textbook costs. Alternatively, if a district has to cover their textbook costs, the district may tell students not to take home their dual enrollment textbooks for fear that students will lose them or they might be damaged, or they might tell students not to write in their textbooks, so that the same textbook can be used in the same course offering in a subsequent academic term. As you can imagine, both of these practices might negatively impact student learning and student performance in the course which is going to be on their permanent student transcript. Next slide please. Oh wait, sorry. I went back to intended outcomes so informing state local policy or stakeholders on the benefits as practices, state policies. Next slide please. And so to research this report, I first looked at dual enrollment textbook policies in the 50 states and District of Columbia. And in dual enrollment, I used to call updating this 50 state resources playing whack-a-mole because it could be in a single state, it could be in statutes, it could be an appropriations bill, it could be in board K-12 regulations, higher education board regulations, and a policy document that sits outside of regulations. But I looked across a number of places in the states and as needed clarified practices with state K-12 or higher education agency staff. Interviews in early 2021 reaching out to folks who responded to request for interviews on Listers operated by the education network, SRAB and MEC. And the SRAB states, southern states per SRAB's preference, those were more focused on state or system level OER initiatives. And then the MEC states, we looked more at institution level initiatives and we included a couple of interviews in Colorado. They are under the same post-secondary regional accreditor as Midwestern states and are experiencing some similar challenges related to dual enrollment as part of their accreditation. So it was a total of 11 remote interviews conducted with a total of 19 state and local stakeholders and you can see here the variety of stakeholders I talked to in those interviews. Next slide please. And so looking now at the state policies on who pays for dual enrollment textbooks. This adds up to more than 51 because as I mentioned earlier, in some states there may be two or more entities responsible depending upon the program, the post-secondary institution type, for example, in one state. A student takes a course through community colleges. It's one funding model, but if a student takes a course through the four institutions, it's a different funding model. Or again, just depending on the type of high school the student attends, public, non-public or homeschool, there may be different entities responsible for those textbook costs. As you can see here, in three states, the state was responsible for covering textbook costs. In seven states, it was the school district or the high school or secondary school. In one state, the post-secondary institution, independent of state aid was partly responsible for covering those costs. In 13 states, it was the student. In 16 states, it was the state policy required that the local agreement between the K-12 and post-secondary partner specified if the K-12 partner was covering the cost, the student or parent, if the post-secondary partner or some combination thereof is covering textbook costs. And then the largest number of states, 20 states, plus the District of Columbia policy was completely silent. There was no mention anywhere of which entity was responsible for covering textbook costs. And so in practice, it's something that's locally determined between the K-12 and post-secondary partner. And as you might imagine, in those states where the policy is silent or it's a local decision, there's the greatest potential for inequitable development access between districts or even within a district, if the high school is making the contract or agreement directly with the post-secondary partner. So you could have a student in District A where the family is paying nothing. The textbook cost is completely covered by another entity. And the next district over, students and their families are fully responsible for textbook costs. Next slide, please. So I'm looking at the institutions. We've got a lot of interesting findings here. I'm the kind of person where, if I've done a report, I hate to just regurgitate information from the report. I'd like to include a few interesting tidbits that weren't covered in the reports. But looking here, commonalities that we heard across multiple interviews were that's really credible for course, for faculty to approve the learning outcomes first for the course, and then develop the OER or approve OER, or if the institution is updating its learning outcomes, make sure that update takes place before faculty dive in and begin modifying the OER or approving an OER. Another key finding that we heard in multiple interviews was the real need to explain to faculty, department chairs, even institutional leadership, the why behind the what. The benefits are to all different types of stakeholders, also students, and the benefits of faculty's ability to customize their content to their specific student populations, or specific learning outcomes or faculty preferences. And a couple of really interesting examples came through in interviews in Colorado. This is a story about a business law professor who was dissatisfied with all the business law textbooks out there because they didn't quite fit the course that she had designed. And so she had the capacity to enhance academic freedom by developing her own course materials and she actually co-wrote the textbook with her students but also pulled in some guest contributors from her time as a lawyer. The legal authorities, judges and so forth. And so the resulting OER business law textbook, she found that the course had actually become more rigorous by using this textbook, and at the same time, students experienced higher levels of engagement with the material as well as higher levels of academic performance. An interesting example was from Colorado State University's Pueblo campus, which is a Hispanic serving institution. They're using OER to offer Spanish courses to heritage Spanish speakers. We're looking to pursue Spanish in an academic context. And so these students having spoken Spanish from when they were infants have different learning needs from students who are learning Spanish as a second language. And so one professor developed OER to embrace her students experiences Spanish heritage learners and she liked the law professor found that using this OER resulted in better student engagement as well as better student outcomes. And one of my favorite quotes, which I think it's somebody from who's in this session right now said, I won't say who don't just tell faculty is so many ocean there are so many resources out there that faculty's eyes will roll back in their head. If they don't have some sort of guidance or support. And so this person urged both folks at the institution level but also at the state level to make sure that faculty are connected with curriculum developers their institution librarians and other types of staff who can support them today. I saw your learning outcomes for this course. There are five options you might pick and choose from to develop the OER that's customized for your course and your preferences. I also heard over and over again. I'm glad to hear professional development was mentioned in the responses to Annika's question but over and over again I heard in the interviews the high quality professional development and training are just invaluable for faculty as their high school counterparts. One example came from Baker College in Michigan that uses its Center for Teaching Excellence together trainings for faculty, both to help them know how to most effectively use OER, but also how to most effectively support students and using OER, along with interesting faculty the resources that might support their classroom and how to use the use of those resources. So the last on the institution interviews that I heard multiple times was really importance of sending staff and faculty out to state or regional conferences to further empower them on local adoption and innovation and that people commented that things changed so quickly in a digital world that these kind of external opportunities could help them stay up to date. So one example was in Arapaho Community College in Colorado which is the two year institution in Colorado that offers the most dual normal courses statewide. They talked about the value of sending a team to the state's OER ambassador training, which is a train the trainer model, but also helps faculty effectively message to their peers back on campus the benefits of using OER. Next slide please. So looking now at state level interviews. Again, a lot of really interesting findings with just a few here. It was really interesting that the span across states in terms of the number of years that some initiatives have been in place. There are some that have been in place for quite a long time, and then some that are just getting off the ground in 2021. There are multiple interviewees also that there were fewer OER in current technical education, both in terms of full blown OER courses as well as OER resources for CTE areas. At that said, people mentioned that there are multiple efforts underway. One was mentioned in Georgia where the technical college system is interested in developing OER materials not full loan OER courses, particularly for early childhood education. The state college system in Colorado was also recently awarded a grant just earlier this year to develop OER for the eighth college level courses in CTE that have the highest enrollments statewide of high school students. And then looking at what can help state efforts, some commonalities across interviews were not just a top down approach and not just a grassroots up, but some combination of state level direction and grassroots support. So a lot of thought could be particularly helpful. People also commented on the value of focusing the development of OER on the most impactful courses, for example, college courses that are general education requirements in the states that are also taken oftentimes by high school students. I did not find in any instances where courses or OER were developed exclusively for use by high school students, but post secondary faculty may work alongside high school instructors in developing college level content for courses for high school students. And the interviewees commented on a number of different types of funding sources, but that's funding itself was critical. This couldn't be done just on the existing resources that an institution might have. They talked about the importance of faculty stipends to cover faculty's time outside their regular teaching load to either adapt or update or develop OER, as well as when high school teachers were involved stipends that might cover their time outside their regular school day or school year. They talked about federal sources, including Perkins grants for developing for instructor support, professional development on using OER for CTE courses. Louisiana commented that they had received $2 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education to support built with OER. Some states mentioned using state agencies funds, for example, Louisiana previously used funds from their boards of regents before they received that federal grant. Texas has had a legislative legislatively funded competitive grant program for a few years now, but they're also using federal CARES Act dollars for OER projects, including but not limited to for courses offered by high school students. Jennifer, thanks so much. I know you have so much more you want to share, but we're getting a little bit behind on our schedule to make sure Katie has enough time for her piece. Thank you so much. Katie, you're up. Hi, Jennifer and Annika. My name is Katie Zabak, and I am a Education Consultant with Zabak Consulting. More recently, I was the Director of Policy at the Colorado Department of Higher Education, and I've been working with states and systems to implement policy change through data and research for almost the last two decades. So I have just really been fortunate as part of this project to get to be part of the OER community, and a little bit of background on my project. I'm working to work with that to create some consistency around cost savings, measures, OER, and conversations around investment. And so when they asked me to do this research, I did a quick scan and I said, we don't need more research on this topic. We've got lots out there, but what we do need is we need the experts to come together and tell us the best way to use the research to start it out. And so the way that we've approached this project is we put together a workgroup, and you can see the members of the workgroup. Some of them may be here today, but these are the 13 members of our workgroup who have just been invaluable in helping to guide this work. So on the next slide, I'll talk to you about what we're actually doing and what we define this. So we are developing common principles to improve consistency and reliability in the field for measuring cost savings and the return on investment of OER. We want the final product to create that consistency. So we want it to be possible for somebody to create and or replicate an estimate whether or not we publish a final number is still up for debate. So what is our audience? Our audience is decision makers who define resource allocation. So that includes many of mechs members, the legislators, the systems heads, institutional leadership. We do want our research and the report to be accessible to the public and to people who vote for those people who or help get those people into decision making rules. But ultimately, the conversation around cost savings is one around decision making. And so that's why that's our main audience. So on the next slide, we are the next I kind of tells you why we want to do this work and why Mac undertook this and one of their projects for as part of the partnership with Angkor. The first thing is that advocates in the OER space of which some of you might be need a clear and concise statement that articulates and communicates the value of OER. And there's lots of things floating out there and we know that cost savings is essential to this conversation and we want to be able to have some consistency around it. Decision makers want a consensus based metric to use or to customize when they are measuring the cost savings and return on investment of OER to students and their organizations. Leaders need to understand the good work and progress already created to measure the impact of OER so that they can use it within their own efforts. And similarly, practitioners have limited time. They need a short cut to help them be able to talk about the value of open education resources and to communicate to the field. And then finally, we need some consistency in the space so that we can hold ourselves accountable. And so that we can ensure that OER continues to increase the effectiveness of our in higher education and in higher education attainment. So those are just some of the reasons why this project has been important. Like the working group, we define some key questions which starts with why are the current model or what are the current models of cost savings and return on investment in the research and what are their strengths and weaknesses. So we've been exploring that. We really wanted a landscape of what's happening in the field. We wanted to understand what are the best practices for states and institutions who are already measuring cost savings and return on investment. I'm sure some of you are in that group. We have had good conversations about the distinction between textbook cost savings or resource cost savings and return on investment. And you'll see on the next slide we've made a distinction between the two. How are cost savings and return on investment different for the state, the institution in the student and in the student and you're going to see some of the answers to that questions there out in the next slide. How and should we define OER when measuring cost savings and return on investment. What is the time horizon for measuring the impact of open education resources. And how do we account for non monetary costs, things like faculty and structural changes, and also non monetary returns, things like student learning additional access to resources, increased retention greater equity. We know all those things are associated with open education resources and how do we measure those things. So on the next slide you'll see kind of the two constructs that we hope to talk about in our final report which we plan to release early next year. The first is an understanding of cost savings and so there are some really good examples of state level reports that have come out system level reports that have come out around how much does creating an OER save our students overall either at the individual course level or at the national level. In general the way that we calculate this is pretty consistent. We often look at the number of shop sections that have open education resources this is made easier when states have course marking or systems have course marking. We look at the overall level of enrollment sometimes that's specific enrollment sometimes that is an estimate of enrollment. And then we look at the multiplier and this is what varies the most that's why it's in red and our multiplier has the tendency to have fluctuation in it. And so that looks at what what cost savings to students see because of because of an implementation of where we are. But there's other important things that our system needs to consider and that is where return on investment comes into play. As somebody who's trained in policy I am starting to think about our return on investment conversation as a cost benefit analysis conversation. So what are the costs to our state in our institution to invest in OER. And what are the benefits that our states and institutions gets from implementing OER. And so that's some of the key things that we are thinking about as part of this work, and in order to support the, the discussions that will go. Okay, I think you muted yourself back then. In order to support this work, and to put this work in context, we have put together a set of principles that we follow when we're looking at either the cost benefit, or the cost savings. And so this is our set of working principles that will continue to evolve prior to the report coming out. But the first is based on the fact that all students should have access to the course material that they need. The second is based on the fact that open education resources support learning in the same way that commercial and all rights of reserve materials support learning. And so we that's just a general principle. Good course development requires planning and integrating regard integrating course material regardless of whether or not that course material is OER and so we need to think about that when we think about the costs. Developing new new OER resources is not always required. Sometimes we're supporting the implementation of those resources, but there's been a lot of development that's happened and so when we think about costs and assumptions around costs we need to look at what's already out there. OER has benefits beyond the direct cost savings that should be acknowledged so that's key to our cost benefit side of the equation. That's important, but to scale estimates are probably going to be essential. And their estimates are really invaluable tool when we start to look at national cost savings. And then you need different levels of specificity for cost savings and return on investment estimates, the 10 depending on the kind of stakeholder you're working with so whether you're working with a legislator, or as somebody at that. If you're working with a specific department level at the school, those individuals are going to need different kinds of information and so we want to make sure that we call that out as a principle and we also acknowledge it in the final report. So when you. Thank you so much I think we only have one minute left in our session today. Our time is really flown by. I think we can stay on for questions after the session concluded for a few minutes. If we do have some questions I just wanted to acknowledge that we're we're just approaching time so if you want to just wrap up with some of your next steps. Yeah, I know I was going to do the same thing so thanks. Thanks so much. And very interested to hear folks feedback on this. Well thank you, Annika Jennifer and Katie. One more time. Thank you all for being here we did learn some big high level lessons in the work we've already conducted, and we find it helpful in informing the work we are moving forward with. I don't have time to go over all of them but if you take a look there you'll see that they really involve taking people where they are acknowledging their diversity and leveraging that to make the movement stronger. And we'll stay on for more questions. Thank you. Thank you.