 You're not recording. Oh, hi. We're just laughing because, you know, we're not techies and we're recording a workshop. Welcome to our presentation. Hi, I'm Paul Ricciardi. I'm an associate professor of theater at Kingsborough Community College. And I'm Michelle Turnbull, who has a very unique experience of having been in the high school world and now is making the transition into the college world. Yeah. Yeah. So just, we just want to do a quick overview before and I apologize in advance I'm looking this way because my script is over here and you're here. So I just want to make sure I'm saying everything I want to say. Okay, so what I would I just want to say a little bit more about myself just to give you a little context and Michelle will and then we'll dive right into it. So I'm a full time theater professor at Kingsborough Community College, and I'm also a course coordinator for college now, which is an early college program at Kingsborough Community College Michelle will talk a bit more about that a bit. So the thing to do today is in general we want to tell you the story of how we, Michelle and I, who are co coordinators for a humanities college now course. I live on a truck route that was a truck that just went by at Kingsborough Community College so we want to tell you the story of how we created an OER for humanities course with the college now program at Kingsborough Community College. So we will talk a little bit about sort of the what inspired us to do this, the sort of coming up with a solution to a problem. Yeah, in the process, talking about how we went about doing it. And then we're going to share with you the OER text that we created. Did I get that right. I think that's perfect. Hello, Paul is Michelle. Basically I taught high school English for 14 years of my life. And during that time I got involved in this college now program through Kingsborough. So basically Kingsborough offers college courses to students while they're in high school. So they're earning college credit. They're getting money, they're getting kind of this intro to college to see what it's like it's really a beneficial thing to our students so for many years while I taught high school, I taught this humanities course that we're now coordinating. So I understand what it's like to be on the teacher end of it. And now as the coordinator, you know, trying to help the teachers with with their courses. Yeah. And it was interesting Michelle and I started co coordinating this class right when you transition from teaching to to coordinating programs we kind of started together. And then the pandemic. Yeah, yeah. And we'll talk more about that later. But before we dive into the process I just wanted to also talk about so Michelle talked a bit about and she'll talk a bit more about college now and what it is. I wanted to tell you a little bit about Kingsborough Community College so Kingsborough Community College is part of the city University of New York system. It is located on Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn which is at the very southern southern tip of Brooklyn so kind of near Brighton Beach, and she said Bay in that area. We have an extremely diverse student body 75 different languages are spoken over 100 different countries are represented. Our students are coming from homes that are living at or below the poverty line so a lot of our students are coming to college for free. And many of our students are first generation college. And then I just think this is an interesting detail. Most of our students pre pandemic, we're commuting well over an hour and a half to two hours every day to get to school. So I think that's just sort of an interesting piece to put into the puzzle but that's just a little bit about Kingsborough Community College. And now Michelle is going to say a little bit more about college now. I just want to point out like that's why this oh we are so important right because, yeah. First of all, textbooks like how I mean we'll get into that but I'm so college now so basically what Kingsborough does is they hire high school teachers as adjuncts as faculty of Kingsborough to teach these college classes in the high school setting. And she told us it's like Kingsborough is renting space in the high school to teach this course, right the kids get a Kingsborough transcript. They get access to the Kingsborough library, all these college amenities they can actually use the campus. There's also a beach. Paul mentioned we're on the beach so there's like this private beach. There's a lot of benefits and, and it's really great for the students not only because they earn the college credit for free without having to pay all the fees and pay for the textbooks. But I always told my students it helps them get into college these are students who might not be in an AP class or advanced honors classes. So this is a way for the colleges to see that they have the abilities to succeed in college and there's so many things we do college writing, they have communications, obviously humanities, there's business courses. They also offer Kingsborough has like these amazing college now courses that the kids can take on the weekends, one of them is like culinary. Yeah, yeah, theater, I actually can coordinate another theater arts course. Yeah, it's really kind of extraordinary. And what about the maritime one where we have a boat. The kids can take these courses on a boat. Yeah, yeah, it's really, it's kind of amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Should we jump on to the why am I jumping ahead or is that right. Let's do it. All right. Yeah, so this is the problem that we encountered I'll never forget we were having a college now meeting with our director, and she told us that the textbook budget was $0. I think I laugh like thinking okay, but she was like no no I'm serious there's $0. So as the coordinator in my head I'm like well if we have a teacher who has 25 textbooks and 30 students in the class. How are we going to get them those extra couple of textbooks. So then, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about the process like we actually met with the publisher of our textbook to see if there was an online version like we're remote let's switch to online maybe it'll be cheaper, and he was giving us a great deal, but it was still too much money to be spending on it was really it was really a conundrum so we had gone you know coven began all the public schools in New York City were more remote all of the city University of New York was remote. All of our faculty were teaching these classes, and they had no access to the book, like, so it was a real conundrum. And even if we had the money for a book, we didn't have the anywhere with all to mail the book to them I mean we so that that's that was really part of the issue. Even before really wrapping our minds around what we are even was, yes, we were just trying to figure out how can we get this digital copy without breaking copyright laws to to our faculty. We found out about OER so we were like great. Let's find an OER text for our course. Right. And we couldn't. Yeah. So what was interesting is, you know Michelle mentioned before the college now has courses across the spectrum so I also coordinate a theater arts class and we do have an OER. It's an introduction to theater arts text. And for those of you that are just kind of new to the OER world, it's a whole world out there. So you can just Google OER introduction to theater arts text which is what we did. And it popped up there were several we were able to find one that kind of fit our you know pedagogical approach and we were using it. And I really. So I just assumed it would be really easy. So I said to Michelle I said well let's just find an OER humanities texts like the one we got. Yeah, I think and the issue with our course is it's not like a traditional you normally these humanities courses they're like in classical English and Greek and the Renaissance but our course is so specific to modern day right we only focus on 1900 on word. Yeah, so it was impossible to find this very specific OER text. So then Paul was like, let's just make it ourselves. And I was like what are the things that we're sort of working on our favorite Kingsborough Community College has an OER coordinator. And so, and so we were able to meet with the OER coordinator and we actually got a little financial support that will and to support this process and we'll talk a little bit more later about our, how we developed the OER so we did have some support at the college. Once we realized that a humanities OER did not exist at least one that fulfilled the the approach that our course took was really sort of a 19th, you know, 19th 20th century overview of the arts and humanities and how it impacts our culture. Yeah, and you always say like we have to ensure the course requirements are being met. Right and I think the only way to do that was to kind of find the different texts that we needed ourselves. Yeah, which is what we did. Should we move on? Sure, yes. So how did we do it? Well, I think it definitely was a unique collaboration. We were like a motley crew of individuals. You have me who's a high school teacher now transitioning to college, we have you, a college professor, that is, you know, you know, we had one teacher who's focused with special ed, which I actually thought was really interesting because one of the benefits obviously of OER is that you can kind of adapt and change parts of the text. So with the special ed teacher did with the OER text was he was able to kind of put in definitions to vocabulary and change some of the wording make it more digestible so that was really good. And then we had high school English teachers, we had the OER coordinator at Kingsborough, we were like, it was really, I mean, the process was really kind of extraordinary actually and just to back up a little bit so we Michelle and I were able to get some money from the program at Kingsborough Community College to pay four of our College Now Humanities faculty members. These are teachers who are out, you know, in the field teaching at the various schools. And each one of them and Michelle will talk more about this in a moment. And then Michelle and I picked up pieces to each of us that Michelle and I and these four faculty members each took sort of a chapter basically or a section of the book and started doing research. Did I explain that right? Absolutely. Yeah, I started just with our syllabus right what did we need, and I divided it up. And once we had the faculty on board because we had this grant money right I don't think. I think a lot of it is if the teachers have a hand in making it they're more likely to use it right we wanted them to be willing to use this new textbook that we were creating. So I kind of split up the syllabus and curriculum and I, you know, into different pieces and I said pick which one you want, which one speaks to the most, which topics are your most passionate about, and we assign them topics. And then we had to start to find the, like where do you even start. So I'll just quickly toggle to this slide here. So, this is how we started right. These, I gave them a list of these websites and said start searching. If your topic is Vietnam. Here, try and find some OER Vietnam stuff if you're working on 1920s. Great Gatsby here you go try and find things that relate to that topic. And really, it was actually once you kind of started so we were looking at other OERs to get material for our OER. And it was really inspiring. I did in a moment we will show you the text but I was looking for information. I ended up doing two sections one on theater and then one on sort of queer history and context. And in both cases, I found texts where the people who mixed these texts were really clear saying, use it. We're doing this to share and so it was a really kind of, there was a generosity of spirit once you kind of dove into this world that was really exciting to me. Absolutely. And that was, I think, well we'll get to the challenges in a minute but you know it was really important that we really try and make it a full OER right where we can kind of edit what we need and take pieces and edit here and remove what we don't need. So I think that there was a lot of challenges with that, specifically because we're like this modern art, finding the public domain images for the artwork. That was huge. I mean the law I think it's like it has it becomes public domain, 70 years after the artist's death. Yeah. So I need 1960s pop art. We're not quite there. Yeah, it was that was really tricky and some of the estates had had released it so that was kind of that was really hard because we kind of thought we were done. You know, we'd gotten really far into the sort of layout process and Michelle did all of the laying out and all of a sudden somewhere along the line we met with our OER coordinator at Kingsborough and she kind of flagged it she was like, guys, you need to deal with these citations for the photos as well. So we had to kind of double back check all of the citations for all of the artwork and we again we'll show you the text in a moment. It was a lot of checking. And then of course the you know making it more accessible right another benefit to this OER is the access it has for all. So if you're adding the alt text to every single image that we have and this is a very art heavy course. It was very humbling, because the I really had to think about well, how do you describe a Picasso painting to someone who's never seen a Picasso painting. Yeah. You know it was, this is like one of the big challenges I think. Yeah. Yeah, and excited it was so exciting, you know, we, but neither one of us knew anything about this beforehand. It was really. It was definitely a learning curve. Okay, so let's show them the finished product so okay. I'll, if you stop sharing then I'll go ahead and share my screen let me just make sure I have the text. So just so I will pause pulling it up. It kind of lives on this CUNY website CUNY Academic Commons we wanted it to have a website so that when this teachers are using it. It's very easy for the students to pull it up on their phones or their tablets, very easy to access it in class so it currently it lives just on a website but when we talk about our next steps, we have a lot of goals as to where we would like to see it live. Michelle, can you see my screen. Yes. Excellent. Okay, beautiful. So just want to give everyone a little tour. Yes, you know, our baby. So, you know, with the way we organize this is, you know, the birth of modernism, the jazz age, the search for meaning and the beginning of globalism, liberation and equality. So starting, you know, you know, at the beginning of 1900s and then moving through to the century. And I just want to kind of give you. Let me just talk a lot of this for a second because it's easier to navigate that way. Let me take you just because I had a hand in it and I understand let's go to page 133. Just a second. So the book we tried our best to create a text that had images to sort of reinforce what the students were learning. So here we are there. So we're in the Vietnam era. And so with all the sort of the protests and the uprising of the 1960s. We started moving on and then women's rights and then we started. We included chapter which I mixed on LGBTQIA plus history, there's Ma Rainey talking about representation. Stonewall AIDS activism and so you can see, you know, we did these images that Michelle was talking about, you know, we wanted to balance. The images with text and then, you know, the main one of the things that I love so much about this textbook is the fact that it's really putting the artwork into perspective, right. It's encouraging our students to make the connection between the artwork, whether it's theater or a novel or a sculpture, and how that is being reflected in our society. So what's so cool is that our, you know, this has been we released this one Michelle. I think in like June or July is when we uploaded it to the website. Yeah. And how many times has it been downloaded like a couple hundred and I'll text Paul like did you see our numbers like it's really exciting. We are downloading our text in the Philippines and India and it is just very exciting. So, along with our text, you know, when we were trying to find all of these resources. Of course the search brought up a lot of in other information that was not OER, but that could also be useful in the classroom, you know. As we were kind of developing these topics. These teachers were finding all these other resources YouTube videos, links to other websites, other information that the teachers could use with the lessons so in addition to the textbook it just kind of made sense to create a teacher companion to go with it because there was so a lot of other information that I wanted the teachers to have so each teacher companion, we have the outlines and all the topics covered in the textbook right so they can see what pages go with what we have a list of essential questions and objectives for the English teachers and the humanities teachers to follow. There's a vocabulary that showed up in the text that they might want to go over with their students. There's an area for making connections because in the humanities course we really want them to make connections between the different disciplines, and then a huge list of everything else that we found that was not OER, but that the teachers could use in their classrooms right because educational fair use. And then, lastly, our next steps. Yeah, big goals. We do. I mean so the, the, the, you know, we have a good working text that we mixed along with the four college and our faculty members and we're going to pilot it this fall. We're actually meeting with all the humanities faculty on Monday, and they are going to be using it this fall, and hopefully we're going to, you know, get some really important information about what's working well. What are they missing are their chapters we need to rethink. More than likely at the end of next semester of this semester rather, we will be looking at our text and making some changes to it. And that's the beauty of OER. It's like, you can just edit it if this isn't working. We'll take it out if if there was a topic you taught and it wasn't in there, we can add it in. And hopefully we can. Right now I said it lives on the website we really want it to live in something called manifold, which gives teachers ability to like annotate. Right and they can highlight things and it's just more user you can interact with the text more, as opposed to just living on a website. Yeah. Yeah. And so I it's, it's, it's going to be really exciting to see what happens and we encourage you to look at it too so if you can't find it email us. Oh, that's really interesting how can I think our guys our contact information in the next one. Oh, it do you've got because you're so smart. So feel free to reach out to us and we'll be happy to share you the link to get to our. Yes, so I'll leave this is our and this is what Kingsborough here's our little King's on the beach. And here's our emails but the most important thing we want and hope that you got from this presentation is that if we can do it. We didn't know anything. Yeah, you can do it too. I mean it's you know it's so the goal of our presentation was really to talk about a process to, you know, introduce to you the process we went through, you know, pitfalls, things that we learned. And then to leave you with the idea that you can that that you can do this too. And the other thing that I mentioned is that, you know, our the course that we are coordinating it's a it's it's basically it's. It's not basically it is preparing these students for college, it is a college class, but these. These students are still in high school so they're kind of dealing with a college class and a high and in a high school culture. So ours is the way of the future when you know, we first in the theater arts program started our we are one of the main reasons was because of cost. Our students cannot afford a $200 textbook. This is free. And that is it is the right thing to do for the planet for for our students and so there is going to be more and more we are texts coming about. And so what Michelle and I have done with the humanities class is it's another way preparing our students for that, you know, experience so when they get to college they're not like where's my book. So we were really proud of that so you can do this you can you can totally do this and we encourage you to do it and we're excited for you to try it. And we feel free to reach out to us if you have any other questions and thank you for joining us. Thank you and enjoy the conference and we'll see you soon. All right, bye bye.