 Okay, welcome everybody. We're excited that you're here to join us. I'm Dr. Nicole Fianninstiel and with me today I also have Dr. Stephanie Panucci, we're both from Millersville University and we're going to talk about connecting open education to primary and secondary education. So one of our focuses is on the idea of building a capacity of stakeholders. And one of the things that we've done on our campus, we are both at Millersville University, we're obviously working in higher education, but we also want to help, because we are at a public institution, we want to help our pre-service teachers as well as our graduate students who are current teachers understand, know how to find, know how to use, adapt, adopt OER. And so a large focus of our work on campus and we're members of the Millersville Open Educational Resource Working Group is to increase the amount of information that stakeholders know about OER, about how to find OER and then how to teach and learn with open educational resources as well as other digital resources, so that adopters have a community of peers to work with, a community of peers to talk to. And so Stephanie and I applied to a positive energy grant, which is a small grant on our campus. And it funded us putting on or hosting a conference for K-12 educators. And what was really exciting for us, we're going to talk about this in a lot more detail. But just early on what was really exciting for us is teachers from our state, librarians from across our state and teachers from nearby states attended our conference in our workshops. They have come to us looking for information. And they also wanted to turn their hours and they spent with us into Act 48 credits, which are the Pennsylvania continuing education credits that our teachers use. They wanted to really show their district that this is something that I was involved in and this is something that I'm connected to because these ideas matter. They want to demonstrate themselves as stakeholders in this ongoing conversation about OER. We knew we wanted to do this workshop. We knew we wanted it to be for K-12 because we've done a lot of work with higher ed and I spent 13 years in K-12 before I transitioned into higher ed as the education librarian working primarily with our education department. So I knew there was also this movement at the K-12 level. So I took what I knew about K-12 and some people that I work with who are now instructional designers in different positions and did kind of informal surveys like what are you interested in, what would they be interested in based on my experiences with that. We did, as Nicole mentioned, throw in the incentive of Act 48 hours so they could get continuing professional development as long as they attended live. So that carrot did draw on some people. So that was the beginning user. I know this has been used for a while, both K-12 and higher ed. K-12, it's really starting to gain momentum at higher ed. There's that grassroots movement of, oh, I'm paying for the textbooks now. So I realize how much they cost. In K-12, it's more a district level purchase. So although we know it's expensive, we know we placement cycles aren't what they should be, we don't always think about the cost of the individual textbooks and alternatives to using those. So we were looking at the beginning user and people that haven't really investigated this too much. So we end up with a broad audience from college students all the way through district administrators, as Nicole mentioned, because we initially planned on being on campus, like a one day thing on campus and then COVID hit. So we end up with this four webinars over a course of a week. And it actually expanded our reach and we were able to easily record all of them, post them online. And in a mix of people which provided some interesting discussions. When you have a technology director where you can ask them, hey, how are you guys saving, you know, this stuff on your, when your people create it, and pull them into the conversation so that mix of roles within K-12 education really added to the discussions. We also pulled in the expertise of our education faculty colleagues, because we've been running for three years now, and send them programs and support programs for faculty on campus to convert their textbooks. We knew there were some people that we had worked with in the education department in STEM and English language arts, that we could pull in to talk about these specifically within their curricular areas. So it was nice pulling in our colleagues and including them in the project as well. And because we're focused on the beginning user, we really wanted to introduce them as quickly as we could to the breadth of pedagogical approaches, and kind of think through praxis of adoption. And this is a combination of I teach in the English department and I've adopted open educational resources for as many of my classes I possibly can. Occasionally there's a grad text or two that I have the students you need to pay for. And then Steph, as she mentioned, surveyed the K-12 teachers, K-12 technology coaches, you know, just a breadth of administrators and teachers at the K-12 level to find out what they know and what they wanted to know. And what we really settled on is when we're building this capacity of stakeholders, pedagogy needs to be an important element of all of the conversations. Open educational resources, we're feeling and in the conversations that we had with the people who attended, the value and the credibility and, you know, just are these useful compared to a commercial textbook. That conversation was not as meaningful or as important. The assumption was that open educational resources and the information literacy skills of the adopter would take care of, is this a good resource to use or not. But what they had not considered is what does it mean to adopt an open educational resource? What am I allowed to do? What can I do? What do I want to do? And how does that start to naturally lend itself toward open pedagogy? In a lot of conversations, oh, we are conversations shift very quickly and we're seeing this in Pennsylvania and I know that other states are seeing this as well from once you've adopted, you should start writing your own. And what we wanted to push instead because that's a huge ask like that in my mind as a faculty member and I teach 100 plus students and I teach writing, so I'm grading hundreds and hundreds of essays a semester writing my own textbook is a really high bar. But shifting towards open pedagogy and considering how can students become involved in this conversation? How can students create materials that are useful to them and their future purposes to what they want to represent for their work and their learning in this particular class? It's not just about me then I'm really shifting the conversation and I'm really reengaging with pedagogy from a student-centered perspective and this is the conversation we wanted to really emphasize in all of the sessions that we held with the teachers and the students who came to our particular sessions. So find and replace is absolutely a fantastic place for people to start. But there are a broad spectrum of practices and pedagogical engagements and not only did we have to shift this entire design to online as Steph mentioned, we really use that and harness that to point out that the shifting and those changes impacted students and different districts and different students and different experiences and different access points really impacted what students are able to do. They don't have regular internet access or they don't have their own device it's going to seriously impact the use of OER so we talked through and we started thinking through what cannot mean for open pedagogy and what can that look like in various classrooms so that the pedagogy discussion was always front and center in addition to what students are able to do but we are great and here's how they can serve your curriculum. Along the lines of the pedagogy, we also brought up the point that it doesn't have to be textbooks and a lot of people don't realize that there's so many opportunities for students to contribute to open data. There's different projects where you're doing interviews for the Library of Congress or you know all kinds of things that are adding to that open collection out there that students can be engaged in with these real world projects and see what they're doing and how it contributes so pulling the conversation away from textbook only and that's that's all we're talking about instead of this broad spectrum of you know contributing to anything out there that you're using curricular wise. So some of the things that we pointed out was one thing we did make sure to do was define open ed resources, the zero textbook costs or if you're using like library resources or something like that in open pedagogy and clearly explain what that was and what we meant by it. We also had some great discussions about accessibility, both technological and physical. Sometimes these resources can help with screen readers and things like that for students, but the technology piece often can provide some barriers because most of these resources are digital although you can print them out. Most of the time, you know, fairly cheaply compared to the cost of a regular textbook, but the technology aspect both with the device and what we found in Pennsylvania usually is like urban and rural students seem to have more access issues with internet. But being aware of those issues and how are you how are you going to address those which with the covert switch we all found out real fast how that stuff works and and what needs to be done to hopefully alleviate some of these problems as we move into the spring semester of working from home. We also did look at subject specific resources we wanted to do some general things with what is OER. What's open pedagogy and we knew that people are going to be looking for stuff in their area so we went broadly with stem in general and English language arts in general. And who knows maybe if we do this again we'll get some more specific with other areas but that we started out with the big two divisions with curriculum. We set up a research guide, and I have the link there so if you want to check it out it's ever evolving as most if you anybody here's a librarian and you're doing research guide you know they're always changing as we're finding new resources. But there, it has a focus of different collections of resources, as well as the videos from our webinars. So you can see those online. And we also took some time to demonstrate some of the resources there's so much out there and there's so many different archives and collections. But when we were able to show them just a little bit of like OER Commons and drill down into from, you know, the national level down to the state level down to our intermediate unit, which is our states divided up into intermediate areas and they're supposed to be like a local resource within our counties, or multiple counties to help out like a regional thing with education, and there's resources there that we didn't a lot of people don't even realize so we were able to demonstrate some of this and then that makes it a little. I'm showing the list that that did help because we could show how you can search by standards and oh look there's people I recognize local teachers that I've met at different things and so this is like real now you know like there's actually people I know doing this. So that made it a little more accessible for some people. So what I found from hosting these sessions and from working with these educators is that, you know, it's not surprised to everybody who's in this room and in the sessions that are surrounding our particular presentation. K12 is interested in OER adoption, you know that's not surprising but it is really important I think to say it over and over and over as we're heading towards building a capacity of stakeholders that this matters this matters to K12 there's just in K12 there's value in K12 there are resources available for K12, and there are spaces for open pedagogy to exist in K12 that can be really meaningful for both the teachers and the students. We also found that there are access and affordability issues from pre K all the way through PhD that came up multiple times with the students. Some of the teachers who attended were graduate students there were librarians from other institutions you also brought up access and affordability issues. So really paying attention to our our materials accessible and universally designed for learning so how are they accessible to different devices how do they meet various learner needs. Our materials accessible and do they exist in the content areas. And this is really key, especially when we're looking at K12 and the quick shift occasionally the K12 can make to include new subject areas or new topic areas. If the curriculum at that particular district or in that particular school take a while to adjust but teachers are being held accountable to additional standards. Where can we are in those areas, because the content areas might exist more often or more readily available in we are in digital format how can we fill in some of the curricular gaps that exist. How can we find for the specific content areas how can we think through from again pre K all the way through PhD, what should be taught in these different K12 areas. I'm sorry in these different content areas and then break up resources to actually meet those learner needs in both content and their dispositional critical thinking skills. The big problem you know the big question that adopters need to ask themselves is always do I have time to find them and we knew that this was going to be an important question going into our design of this entire session. And so that's part of why and I think that Steph discussed this very very well in the last slide. Our live guide is ever evolving and really connecting with the attendees on why the ever evolving nature of format like this of the live guide is really really important why we want them to continue to connect with us and to share resources and why as we encounter resources will continue to update that live guide so that they have access to it to meet needs. As those needs change to try to reduce the amount of time that it takes to find resources because usually that's the biggest barrier is time to find the resources, not integrating the resources on their own. And then the big push toward open educational resources from a K12 perspective is does the schools have funds to purchase the textbooks and did the students have funds or the big shift compared to higher ed is not do the students have the funds to purchase but in this case to the schools have the funds to purchase the textbooks and you know again coven post coven are the school districts going to have even further limited funds when it comes to textbooks to textbook publishing to digital access publishing where are the funds going to be spent why should they be spent there are other ways that teachers should work with librarians so that librarian resource budgets are put to use both in the classroom and to benefit the librarians that are in those schools. There are a lot of different questions related to the shifting of the funds and where the funds actually are that really connect heavily to access and affordability and what students are then able to get access to. But the biggest takeaway which should be obvious at this point is the building a community is absolutely necessary for we are adoption having somebody that you can ask questions to having somebody that is sharing in the adoption process with you. Recognizing that and I think that both Steph and I mentioned multiple times that we've been working on projects at Millersville University for a while but also connecting with the teachers that are in attendance to say this is an ongoing shifting process we're constantly rethinking all of our goals and really pointing out we're constantly rethinking all of our goals is a really important conversation in we are adoption to point out how often we're reassessing all of these. And that's where the community is open and joinable so please join us. Wonderful wonderful thank you Stephanie and Nicole it's it's amazing to me every time that I listen to people that are working with K212 the passion and the willingness to do things better it's amazing to me. And, and Christine I know would you like to jump in this is exactly your area. I know it just makes me very happy. I was, I was sending a message Marcel and I was like, it's like looking at my own slide. This is all the information that I get to talk about often so I'm so grateful for your for the lib guide that you've shared here because I know that we can continue to, you know, share that with others and I'll make sure to share that in addition to this and I think we're also uniquely positioned at open and global to help build that community and in a global context. And so obviously the folks that are here in the room like burner and we can connect with, you know educators in Chile and how can we learn from each other but how can we also share resources so it's really exciting. Thank you. Thank you both for sharing you were so good with time that we even have two minutes to spare for a quick question. Very quick. And of course, the we have this space you know we do connect for people to continue this conversation this is just a snippet of everything that you're doing so anybody. Yeah, Marcella it's Connie. Yeah, I'm back again. Anyways, thank you so much for the presentation. I'm just curious Stephanie and Nicole. Did you find sort of, you know, when people are coming in these teachers that are new to we are. What would you say their greatest has a hesitancy would be probably time. Because I got to figure out what it is, and then you throw in I'm doing the creative common certification right now. And when you throw in copyright and we are and and all the, and, you know, creative comments and all that stuff that's, it's intimidating, and you're also bucking the system, you know, like we raised on textbooks now we're saying, do something else. What do you want to teach, what do you need to teach that, like changing the conversation from, this is the curriculum I got to jam this textbook into meet that curriculum. And then now we're saying what do you want to teach get your curriculum. What, what can support that instead and it's, it's a mind shift it's totally, you know, their safety blankets gone when you get rid of the traditional textbook. Yeah, I can, I can see that. Yeah, I'm good. I'm just very interested. I do work with in service and graduate students and we are is my passion. Anyways, yeah, just curious to hear your perspective. Great work.