 Hi, I'm Sony Bennett Grant, the Assistant Director of Institutional Relations at OpenStacks. Every year, OpenStacks works directly with a small group of colleges and universities to expand their OER initiatives through our institutional partner program. Last year, the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education inspired our partners to improvise, adapt, and try new strategies to reach instructors. COVID and remote instruction also put a spotlight on the barriers to success that many students, particularly non-traditional, underrepresented, and low-income students, have faced for a long time. In this video, you'll hear from three of our 2020 institutional partner schools about the most important strategies they used to bring more OER to their students and why they'll be continuing to use those strategies beyond the pandemic. You'll also hear from Barbara Gooch, a first-generation student and education reform advocate at Volunteer State Community College about what she hopes instructors remember about their students' needs as instruction returns to the classroom. My name is Dr. Kerry Miller. I am an instructional designer at Minnesota State University, Mankato. I'm here today to talk to you about my experience as part of the institutional partnership that we had with OpenStacks and one of the great outcomes we had from that program. During the pandemic, we had a challenge at our university because the students were sent home unexpectedly over spring break and many of them left textbooks and other materials on campus and were not able to return to grab them or gather what they needed for their courses. So in that transition, with helping both instructors transition their courses to an online platform and helping students get materials, OER became a huge conversation point for our campus, both with students and faculty. One of the things that I help faculty with is finding materials that suit their needs. So not just textbooks, but also things like ancillary materials. During my time with the OpenStacks institutional partnership, it became clear that OpenStacks has a great solution for faculty who use things like textbook publisher materials and web platforms and all those ancillary materials that make their lives so much better and provide some cohesion with the textbook, power points, test banks, study guides, those types of things. And what we found when I was combing through this, combined with trying to find answers for faculty who were in the midst of scrambling to convert their courses or find new materials or help their students find alternate textbooks for the ones they left behind in their dorms, what I found was that the D2L course packages for the OpenStacks courses were very few and far between. And as a solution for both the immediate need of during the pandemic and also as an ongoing way to present alternatives to traditional publisher packages, my graduate students and I decided that we would tackle the project of creating all of the OpenStacks courses in Desire2Learn Brightspace for not only my faculty on campus, but for anyone who wanted it. And it became a year-long project. It became our OpenStacks institutional partnership project. And it became one of the selling points for lack of a better phrase for OER on our campus. So now not only was I able to share those materials back with OpenStacks, but I was able to take this win, so to say, to things like college meetings, department meetings, department chairs and say, guess what we have? You may already be using an OpenStacks textbook, but do you have a D2L Brightspace course that goes with it? That includes the test banks or the PowerPoints or the student guides. Or I was able to help new faculty say, I know you're looking for something that you can get up and running in a very short period of time. Let me get that for you. I already have it created in Desire2Learn Brightspace. Let's get you a sandbox course and you can explore these materials. I have had great responses from my faculty on my campus here and I continue to share this information with my colleagues through different organizations with OpenStacks, with conversations around the country and around the globe. So I hope that if you are a campus that uses Desire2Learn Brightspace, you take a look at these course packages that we created and take a look at OpenStacks and what they have to offer. If you have any questions, I'm happy to talk to anyone about the process and I look forward to hearing more about all the fun things that everyone's doing around OER. Hey everybody, thank you so much for joining us. My name is Gabby Hernandez. I'm the Open Education Librarian at UTRGV and I wanted to talk a little bit about what we did here at UTRGV to help with our outreach and instruction with surrounding OER. So pre-pandemic, we really struggled with in-person outreach. We had anywhere from zero to five people attend our session and so the switch to online learning that happened because of the pandemic actually was very beneficial for our uses. What we decided to do within the institutional partnership was host a series of tiered professional development sessions for our faculty and we teamed up with our Center for Teaching Excellence to help us promote these sessions because they have a wide group and a faculty that already attend their sessions so we partnered up with them and our sessions were OER 101, How to Get Started, OER Adoption and Adoption and Open Pedagogical Practices and the reason we did a tiered professional development series was to really see where faculty were and who was interested in which topic and it was a huge success. We ended up with 83 unique registrants for the three sessions combined and 57 unique attendees and this was great because faculty that we had never seen prior to the pandemic attend because of our relationship with the Center for Teaching Excellence and what we saw were people who didn't normally come to us because of OER but they came because they were in this mindset and this mode of what do I need to become a better teacher and of course accessibility and textbook affordability was a huge topic because of the pandemic and what were our students needs and focusing on student needs so it really went hand in hand and it was a huge success and what I took from these sessions was that connecting with your equivalent to a teaching center where faculty go and look for professional development was a huge success. Faculty are used to looking at those calendars and planning those sessions so if you can somehow connect with those groups who already have professional development calendars running on your campus it can be very very beneficial instead of trying to start your own from scratch if that's not something that's already done within your library. Also choosing to do something that was tiered helped me understand where my faculty were without doing an interest survey so how many people registered for the OER 101 really shocked me because it was one of my lowest attended actually more faculty were interested in the actual adoption and adoption of OER and open pedagogy and open pedagogical practices so I was thinking you know a little bit differently but my registration told me where my faculty were and where I need to continue professional development in the future and a tip to take away is use those registrations once you have them keep lists because we are currently using those registrations this semester to implement new grant programs and new professional development series so I'm using those registrants to continue the discussion and conversation about OER textbook affordability and open pedagogical practices at UTRGV. Hi I'm Dr. Derek Manns executive director for curriculum and graduation initiatives at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. Excited to be here today. We've been working with OER and OpenStacks for the second year now and we're excited about providing students access to low cost and no cost textbooks and resources. One of the things that Texas Southern University has learned through this pandemic is that it's the heightened need and awareness to be able to provide affordable textbook materials and resources for students during this time. Many students lost jobs, hours or a means to purchase the necessary materials to be successful in their classes. In some cases that meant the families, the students and or any aid that they may have received had to go towards providing basic supports and needs so it's these types of OER materials are critically important to be able to reduce students and help them during their times of need. One of the things that Texas Southern University has learned is the power partnership. Former TSU student and OpenStacks intern was also part of SGA at Texas Southern University. Through his participation in exposure to OER he was able to talk with SGA about opportunities to get more faculty to use OER materials to reduce some of their costs in terms of the student side. After some discussions with our OER team it was decided that he would sponsor legislation to fund faculty participation in this initiative. With the escalating costs of traditional textbooks the proposal was unanimously supported. This means SGA will provide $2,000 of funds in a committee structure to assist with providing seed money. The Library Learning Center will also contribute up to $5,000 so we may have some money drawn on to encourage additional faculty to use OER as well. The current process is being developed to get those interested in faculty engagement with this initiative. Thank you. My name is Barbara Gooch. I'm a Ball State Community College student in Middle Tennessee. I'm also an OpenStacks intern since 2019. So far you've heard from different institutions about the strategies they use to build OER use on their campuses. I wanted to take a moment to share what I hope instructors remember about student need both during the pandemic and afterwards. So remember that a lot of times we have unexpected emergencies ourselves. This could be family care, medical, job constraints, or transportation issues. Even just this week, I had unexpectedly had to watch my grandson all week because he was sick and couldn't take him to daycare so I ended up watching him. I also attended a funeral that was unexpected. So these life circumstances usually end up putting us back and not maybe being able to turn in our homework we wanted when we wanted to wear a plan. These are setbacks that students experience. I want you to ask yourself, does your course allow for empathy towards students and unexpected life situations? While there shouldn't be expected high standards, students do need the ability for that empathy when these decisions arise. So to help combat some of these emergencies, consider letting students work ahead or have open assignment. For instance, if you have an online course or even possibly an on-site course, allow information to be readily available to work ahead of schedule or allow deadlines to be just midterm and final deadlines. This allows that a flexibility that we need while also maintaining some accountability. I found that this has been very useful for me that rather than having those weekly deadlines, if something happens, I can either work ahead knowing that there might be emergencies that come about or to also just maintain that that's flexibility I need. Communication with students is important, especially in online courses. I cannot stress this enough. Emails are lifelines to students. We understand that you may not be available 24-7. Just put it on the syllabus when you think that your office hours are or that you're available or won't be available if you have vacation or unexpected emergencies also. Please just list that. But we need communication. We need those emails answered within a reasonable time. That is our lifeline for online. Make sure that the office hours are known. However, I encourage you to also think about like Zoom meetings still because some of the students won't have that flexibility to attend your office hours and will need to be able to have that flexibility maybe meet online or at different times. I understand very well how hard times are right now and I do want to thank you for the time and the effort and all that you have been through as teachers and professors and it's been a whirlwind experience.