 Hello and welcome to our session titled open for learning and advanced technology. We are coming to you today from Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Washington State, and we'd like to share our work in advancing open education to include technical fields, such as electronics and welding, where we are is just beginning to make an impact. So I'm Catherine Kelly, a faculty librarian, and I started learning about OER about five years ago, when I joined LW Tech, and I began by supporting faculty teaching, education, general education courses to move to OER. And I'm joined by Priyanka. I am Priyanka Pan, Dean of Instruction for Schools of Manufacturing, Engineering and Transportation Technology. Prior to this, I was a faculty director for science and professor of chemistry, and I have been a strong promoter for OER for a very long time. The first training I took on open education resources was in 2017, and I started with a simple chemistry course to a zero degree course, a grant provided to us by ATD. So, love OER, love the aspect of OER and how it supports not only students, but faculty too. Let's talk a little bit about where we come from. We come from Lake Washington Institute of Technology. We love to address ourselves as LW Tech. The mission of our college is to prepare students for today's careers and tomorrow's opportunities. A little bit of history about LW Tech. We started as a technical academy for our Lake Washington School District, then became a Votech college to a LW IT. And now we have bachelors, we have associate degrees, we have professional certificates, you name it, and we have it. We have all the pathways possible for a student to enter a college and get any degree they would like. We have school of business, school of design and arts, education, engineering, health science, information technology, and transportation technology. We are a workforce college. Open education resources at LW Tech, we started late in 2016, and prior to that, our math department was already OER. And we have been working towards motivating faculty to convert to OER and avoid copyrighted published textbook. Each textbook that we had in science cost approximately $200 per quarter. And if we multiply that with the academic year, it was a lot of money students saved. Open education resources has been prevalent in a lot of basic general education courses at Lake Washington. Now we are entering into technology based courses too. Another aspect of LW Tech is our addition of diversity and social justice requirement. We started this in 2021, where every student taking an associate degree has to have one DSJ course. And this helps our students get employment and retain the employment because they are aware of the cultural diversity in our state in our nation, and how to work with a team of diverse cultural or social economic backgrounds. Here is our OER core team. We have Dean Sally Halstead, Vicky Chu and myself in this group. We have faculty leaders, Sherri McLean, a shout out to her. One of the first person to adopt open education resources at Lake Washington Institute of Technology, Sharon Rez from Social Science and Kelly Whitcomb from Dental. Some of the faculty, computer science, computer software, Tom Abbott, Bartina Carr from Biology, Oscar from Art and Design, Stephanie Bostowick did phenomenal work in engineering, and our phenomenal group of librarians, Greg Bem, Catherine Kelly, and Sue Wozniak. This team has been working together for a very long time and motivating not only through trainings, workshops, but even just a simple chit chat across the campus, and thus have involved a lot of people and motivated them into adding OER. Here's a link to our website and you can see all the work done by us on open education resource at LDAPTECH.edu slash OER. Here are some of the courses that where we have adopted OER, you can see general education and natural science, biology, chemistry, math, physics, psychology and sociology. We have also created PowerPoint decks which are open educational licensed, CC licensed to be used openly by other faculty. A few other courses in technology side have been art, computing and software development, funeral education services, nutrition, as well as early childhood education, and we would like to add more. Now when we move from general education to technology based courses, we face some challenges. The first one, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So I repeat that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So there was a little bit of reluctance from faculty in reworking their course, as it was already completing all the learning, learning outcomes that were required. Another issue that we found was limited availability of openly licensed material, and a majority of these classrooms have workshop hours, hands on work hour, and they worked on machines or equipment which have copyrighted manual. So they cannot be openly licensed. The other issue we face was hesitancy from our faculty to create openly licensed resources which are CC licensed, because they were coming under universal scrutiny of their work. And they were apprehensive about releasing their open education resource to work. Another factor that is observed in workshop and technology based fields is in the individualized workshop work. Every machining program may end up creating a metallic dice, but how those steps are shared to create the dice differs from one faculty to another. So how to create a common core where we have similar guidelines, and then each faculty can tweak it to their own methodology was another struggle that we faced while working towards OER and technology based courses. Post COVID we also got hit with low enrollment chaos. And one of the main reasons of low enrollment in our technology based programs was on the job training. We observed that a lot of our students who had previously shared that they are interested in electronics technology program, our laser optical programs had ended up changing their field of work because of COVID-19. They ended up entering workshops which provided them on the job training and stipend and started working and have continued working there, even though that field might not be their field of choice. But now it is how they are able to financially support themselves so they are staying in that field. Another challenge that came up for us was the pay scale differential for faculty. Keeping for hiring faculty and retaining them became a big issue because of the huge pay scale differential between industry and higher ed. The faculty we hired had to be paid. We were not equally violent, but somewhere close to what industry was providing them and retaining the faculty became a huge issue to overcome that we worked with the faculty and showed them how to motivate the current students into their industry where they have worked for so many years. And that is still a struggle, and we are still working at it. Now with the low enrollment, we were really confused because technicians are in high demand construction industry is on the rise. They need welders, they need electricians, and we are facing with situation where we cannot sustain these low enrollment classes. Plus, we live in Washington State, and we have the biggest in the major companies in technology industry. We have Microsoft, we have T-Mobile, Amazon, the Navy is here, Starbucks and Costco and many more. And even with the presence of these major giants, we are seeing a continued low enrollment in our technology based programs. All right, so now we're going to switch to how we are working to overcome these challenges. And the number one reason that we are able to devote large amounts of time to this project to getting more technical fields to move to OER is through grant funding. So the grant project that Priyanka and I are working on is through the National Science Foundation, and is specifically part of the advanced technological education track. So this track focuses on two year colleges who are preparing technicians in many different fields for the industrial workforce. And we were awarded 365,000 and it lasts for three years, and we have just completed year one. So the overarching goal is to redesign instruction to better train a diverse group of students to meet critical workforce demands in the areas of electronics and welding. So to turn that into something practical and actionable, our steps are to convert six courses total to each year for the three years to entirely OER materials. And now we are using Canvas as the platform for these materials. We are also checking for accessibility so that our materials can be understood and comprehended by students of all abilities, and we are updating instructional design where it's appropriate. So when, you know, we told our welding and electronics faculty that we were writing this grant proposal, and they did sign off on it. But I don't think they really understood what OER was or how much time it would take when they started and when we started talking about the actual work of the project. I think they started to get a headache and all those issues that Priyanka had discussed started coming into their heads. So we started by doing a lot of talking, a lot of communication and a lot of meetings. And we had meetings with all of the faculty involved. We had meetings individually one on one with faculty, and we met with our evaluators for the grant who provides support through formative evaluation to the grant leadership. And then finally we met with industry partners through advisory board meetings. And so this allowed for questions and discussion. And it wasn't just the faculty learning about OER. Priyanka and I had a lot to learn about welding and electronics and how instruction works in those fields. And then we also provided lots of trainings. And so a couple of things that made these trainings successful are that we opened, we opened them up to all faculty, so that everyone could participate and in some cases faculty were offered stipends. And we also pointed faculty to trainings that others were providing. So we didn't put all that burden of training on our shoulders. We had a variety of training topics that were necessary for this project. So first of all, OER understanding and awareness, including OER platforms such as press books, which is an ebook platform. Faculty also needed training in accessibility and instructional design concepts like transparency and teaching and learning or tilt. All in all, we had approximately 70 faculty from 15 departments attend trainings that were connected to this grant. And for those OER trainings for OER trainings, 100% of those surveyed reported increased understanding of OER. And that was about 18 faculty who were surveyed. So in addition to these trainings and communication, just having continued exposure to OER was really important. And so the OER core team that Priyanka mentioned earlier. They work to spread the word to the entire campus through our open for learning branding, you can see our t-shirts that say open for learning. We also have at least one interactive event each year, and we provide food cookies that have the OER acronym on them. And so just seeing it in more places and being exposed to it helps the faculty understand the impact that they can have. So probably about halfway through the year, maybe even a little bit longer after the faculty had time to process OER concepts. We had some real aha moments with the faculty when they realized that they were trailblazing with OER in these technical fields. And so there came much more understanding and acceptance of workload and expectations. And so at the end of our first year we realized that OER really shouldn't be done in a vacuum. The whole point of OER is openness and ability to collaborate. So we realized that to make our courses stronger, we needed to help from fellow instructors at other colleges. So over the summer LW Tech faculty reached out to other instructors throughout the state and they really took the initiative there to reach out to these people. And so we have four peer reviewers from three community or technical colleges that have agreed to provide feedback on our Canvas courses and even offer their materials that could be openly licensed and added to our courses. And also like to brag that our faculty provided presentations at the first OER Faculty Institute in Washington this past summer. And so they're really becoming leaders in their areas for this work. So to conclude our thoughts, blazing a trail for OER for the technical fields is possible. And I think it's probably very similar to how the beginnings of OER in general education felt as faculty goes through these learning processes for what is OER and how is it going to affect me and my students. And they they they're finding the larger open community that that is willing to build materials with them and work together. So please feel free to email me or Priyanka if you'd like to connect. Thank you. Thank you.