 Well, good afternoon everyone or good evening or wherever you are. I hope you all can hear me okay. Yes, excellent. This is get an open head start the OER starter kit for program managers. I'm Stephanie Buck. I'm the director of open educational resources at Oregon State University. Let me pass it on to Abby. Hello, everyone. My name is Abby Elder. I'm the open access and scholarly communication librarian at Iowa State University. Passing it on to a perva. Hello, everybody. My name is a bit of a shock. I'm the director of open education and assistant director at the rebus foundation. And I'm going to drop my land acknowledgement in the chat while I pass it on to Marco. Hi everyone, my name is Marco safely Valencia. I'm the open education librarian at the University of Idaho. I'm the traditional homelands of the NEM APU, also known as the Nes Pierce, and I'm very excited to join you all today and I'll pass it over to Jeff to wrap us up for introductions. Thanks, I'm Jeff Galant. I'm the program director of affordable learning Georgia. I'm here in Athens, Georgia, which is the traditional lands of the Timacoa, Muscogee and Creek Nations. To get started, I would like to read a short equity statement. The presenters on this panel recognize that our mission vision and values are not meaningful unless we account for past and current inequities that have caused generations of harm. These inequities shaped the experience of BIPOC and other marginalized people that live and learn in our states and provinces today. As educators, we must attend to the impact our choices have on our students or motivation behind creating this tech motivation behind this text was to create materials that center diversity equity inclusion and support those who do wish to do the same. We also continue to ask questions and learn together we welcome being held accountable and we will put our email addresses in the chat at the end of presentation. I would like to acknowledge open Oregon educational resources providing the text for the statement to learn more about open educational resources, please go to open Oregon org. So, let me forward the slides here. This is an introduction to our book the OER starter kit for program managers, and the kit was. It's an open peer reviewed and open copy edited textbook that was published this year to help individuals and groups who want to build and manage an open education program. It's created basically for people like us who have fallen into program management kind of by default, or because the way of our work and who want to involve in being a project manager. It contains 22 chapters, eight case studies and it's broken into seven sections and each section has one or more chapters and at least one case study. So we have a quick guide to open education it's not as comprehensive as maybe as some of the other guides that are out there on what we are is but we wanted to kind of make sure everybody was on the same page but we have referred we've referred to other resources in each of the chapters. We have building an OER program program management training and professional development supporting OER adoption, supporting open textbook creation and then we wrap up with collecting and reporting data, and the book is available at the URL you see on your screen press dot community slash OER starter kit PM. So what we're going to do today though is not talk so much about the content of the book. We're going to talk about the process that we went through and creating the book, because we think that you can do something similar when you're creating an open textbook in your context and you can learn from our process. So we'll talk about how we made the book, we talk about the writing process case studies and how we got those what the peer review process was like, what the copy editing process was like and then some other things that we learned along the way that we want to share with you, in case you want to do this yourself, sort of a DIY kind of thing. And then we'll talk a little bit about and have a discussion with you about how you might be able to apply the book in your own situation. So what was the motivation for us writing this book. Well, most of us don't have any training in this area, either we were given OER as a project as a another part of our portfolio. And we were just sort of thrown into it. Some of us came into it. Even though our work is strictly OER without much project management training anyway, most of us just don't have that kind of a background and professional project management. So we have gathered together what we've learned the hard way into this book. We wanted to share what we have learned, because all of us are project managers on some level at different institutions. And we all kind of did this by the seat of our pants and thought it would be really great to have something like this for new people who are getting into this field and want to really start an OER program, not just kind of, I do OER, but have an actual OER program. And so we wanted to share what we had learned and what we, and you can learn from our mistakes and what we did well and what we didn't do well. And then we also wanted to consolidate content that's already out there. Basically, there's a lot of project management material out there. There's a lot of material out there about OERs, etc. And you'll find that what we did is for each section, each chapter has a set of resources included with it so that you can go and dig deeper into any of these topics. So that was our main motivation for writing this text. And I will now pass it on to Marco. Everyone so in talking about the writing. I just want to kind of talk us through briefly sort of how we handled that. I'm sure some of you might be wondering how we dealt with coordinating this many authors and our sort of process. So our five lead authors are here on this call. We were not only chapter authors, but also editors of our chapters at various different stages, though we did engage a peer review process which I believe Jeff is going to give you a lot more detail about later. I also just wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge our 10 case study authors across those eight case studies. A lot of these folks are in this room as we speak. I think I saw Amy in the chat, for instance. So just a huge acknowledgement that a big part of what made this book really successful in our opinion are these case study authors. And if you're partly here because you're wondering how to do something like this yourself. It's a great example that you can engage people at all different levels of expertise and then pull in those case study authors to help round out your addition to what you're hoping for. So I definitely am one of the more, if not the absolute most junior person on this team. And so this has been a really great experience as an early open librarian to go ahead and jump into an initiative like this, and just trust and rely on the expertise of my colleagues, which to me includes these case study authors as well. Some of the lessons and challenges that we learned is trying to figure out what content to include what's important. I also want to just jump back a little bit here. Sorry, my screen is not mirroring Steph's screen sharing here so I'm flying blind so to speak. So if you're following along we have this link to the rebus guide to publishing open textbooks. That's a really great resource to check out. We included that in here partly to help folks who might be taking on a project like this. It really is a comprehensive overview of some of the work and recruiting a team. So editing and creating that content, really talking about the sort of nuts and bolts of how to write an open text right because, as Steph has mentioned not all of us have much experience project managers, and certainly not all of us have much experiences open textbook authors necessarily. So this can be a great resource for both creating your own open text like this, but also for skilling up to support your faculty who might be creating open texts. So the challenges in this stuff next slide just if we're not on it. The lessons learned and challenges engaged include what content is important to include so trying to figure out what's in scope and what's out of scope. I think with open that can always feel a little squishy and sort of arbitrary where we set the boundaries. So that kind of lit review to see what else is out there really helps how to make the content applicable for as many people and settings as possible. And then of course we have ourselves to think of people in context that didn't look like the ones that many of us are in which is at large land grant or other state universities. And so trying to think about how to make sure this is maximally impactful for people in other settings. And then of course the things you might expect like trying to create a complimentary voice and style across five different authors, trying to look for that duplication in content. And then having one mega mind who's sort of familiar with the entire text and can say, Oh, Steph and Marco are talking about the same thing in chapter four and seven you know that kind of overarching view. And then same thing with that trying to figure out the standardizing the formatting and presentation style guides really helped us with that. So to embracing an attitude of prioritizing what was important to worry about versus what was not important to worry about. An example of that might be we thought it was important to worry about community colleges or people at other non four year settings and trying to make sure what we're saying was applicable there. We didn't think it was important to go and root out every English versus US spelling of color for instance or something those kind of weird formatting things. So that's my time thank you everyone I will pass it on to our next speaker is going to tell us a little bit more about those case studies I mentioned. Yes, thank you Marco for that really in depth for the amount of time that it took overview of our writing process. One of the nice things about writing together in Google Drive is we were able to sort of keep up to date on how everyone was doing throughout that process and sort of get an idea of what other people were writing about and how it was coming together as we were developing content. And that also came through with our case studies as well so in addition to writing individual chapters within well defined parts about different aspects of the project management program management process. We wanted to have at least one case study for every single part of the book in one case there were two case studies for the same part. But how did we go about doing that. Well, in our case we solicited case studies from specific authors that we knew would be a good fit so thinking about who is someone who can speak to labor and being an open education leader. Well obviously Regina Regina gong, who is doing interesting things with content creation or program management. Let's reach out to the folks at manifold they're doing some cool things. And by sort of thinking through who are good peoples that could be fits for individual parts, we're able to align our different case studies to those people in their projects. The writing process was very similar to our own writing process we said, here's a page in our Google Drive set up just for case studies. So if you want to develop your content here here's the deadline here's our style guide, making sure that everyone was citing things the same way and following the same sort of stylistic overview. And then also thinking about generally regular reminders to stay on track. That was definitely hard because we started all of this in 2019. 2020 came around and suddenly deadlines became much less important overall. So, as coven 19 led to burnout delays and other work situations becoming more complex for people. We had to sort of push back our deadlines and make sure that both the case study authors and us as lead authors and editors were able to contribute the time we needed to the project, whether that meant pushing it back a little bit further so we could work on other things in the time or just take a little bit of a hiatus. Now luckily we were a team led project we're completely volunteer we just wanted to make this, we weren't on a publisher's deadline and we were able to accommodate those delays pretty well. But there's still some lessons learned from this project. But for example, it really would have been nice. If we'd been more clear in our style guide about, what are we actually looking for in the content of this what are things we want to highlight who is our audience so that we could make sure before final drafts were done that they're important beats that were hit throughout. So it's good to have regular check ins with the case study authors to make sure that they're on track, and that as they're getting their projects together. They feel comfortable with where it's heading and that it matches up with other content in the book. And finally, actually, it would have been nice to do an open call because when we were thinking about who's someone we know that's doing this work in the open sphere who's someone that we think would be a good match for this case study section. We're really overlooking people that we don't know personally that might be doing really excellent work but aren't part of the public opens fear in the same circles that we are. So in the future I think it'd be more interesting to do more of an open call for case studies and see what comes through in that way, rather than saying, Well, I know Regina she's amazing, which is true, but also good to look a little bit past that. Another thing I'd just like to know is that prior to the peer review process we did as lead editors provide feedback on the case studies. So that case study authors had a chance to edit their text and make sure that it does match more closely with the rest of the content we are putting together, so that when the final peer review process happened which Jeff will talk about right after me, then we were able to make sure that things didn't seem very jarring for people as they're going through the book. And the final edits to case studies after copy editing were handled by us, so we wouldn't have to tell those case study authors, go back in and make small edits for readability, we could handle that and they wouldn't have to. Yeah, thank you Amy. All right, so that's the real overview of case study authors but I'm sure there's more that people can add at the end for comments and questions. But for now we're going to move on to the peer review process. This is a superstar author of case study, Amy Hopper says the feedback from the editors and the peer reviewers was really helpful. I think peer review was such an important part of this process, not because we just get to say it was peer reviewed, but because the perspectives from all of these different people really guided how this text books and reads right now. So we started out by us posting a call with a form. We got the usual suspect list serves involved and we also put it on the Rebus community forum, looking for volunteers. We asked some basic stuff name email job title institution affiliation we wanted to make sure that there was good representation outside of just, again the big state universities that a lot of us were a part of. We didn't have any interest in qualifications. We didn't look for a particular thing we send you know list your professional experience or interest that relate to open education program management or we are support services specifically. So, and this is both important and really tough to do. We asked how many chapters would you like to review. We also let them know that each chapter is 1000 to 3000 boards in length and reviewers will be given 45 days to complete their reviews. So, people who didn't have a lot of time and just wanted to review one chapter, could say only one check. People who wanted to review a lot said up to six chapters. Now they also indicated their preferences, the parts that they want to review for. For example, if somebody was really into building an OER program or wanted to help out with just the introduction to open education, they could put that down in the section preferences so we have even though it is an open call for peer reviewers. So we are also starting to dig into what people are specialized in, in order to what they're going to review. So we had 94 respondents we were, we were worried that you know we wouldn't get too many people and we got a lot, and then we looked at it and we said, Who the heck are we going to say no to here. We want to have everybody's perspectives, and there are only a couple where either they wound up not having the time to do it and had to cancel on us, or they just weren't able to quite get to that point and we had 86 reviewers. Now, on the administrative side, you can probably see how bonkers that can get the chapter assignments were done using a color coded. Map of reviewers, six reviewers per chapter, we had the pages per chapter in here to let us know, you know, the differences in assigning one chapter versus another. We classified them into two sections longer chapters had 11 or more pages shorter chapters had six or less. And yeah, so we just were assigning things from there based on their preferences how much they could do how many pages per chapter. It was a lot. Just just that part of it. Now, it's one thing to have very helpful peer reviews in there. And it was amazing that they did it and we were able to get a certificate of completion out to them, and list their names in the book and list their meta data. But when you do peer review, you need to make changes based on those reviews to. So now we are responding to 86 different peer reviewers as the authors, and it was super helpful and also a lot of time. During, in many times, the COVID-19 pandemic. So it was it was a big administrative lift, and too many reviewers are it can lead to an administrative backlog for sure. Jessica says all 86 of them are mentioned in the back matter and the metadata. Jessica says yeah this was this was open peer review, we could see who provided the feedback this was not double blinds the way that a lot of research articles and some academic texts are done. And it also takes a lot of time to edit based on the comments yes absolutely. I can talk about this for a lot but yeah we all handle this in Google Docs with comments and suggestions. Okay, I'm going to pass it on because there's even more than just peer review. You're seeing us go through chronologically the process of creating this book and Stephanie if you go to the next slide I'll tell you more about the copy editing process. We also held an open call for copy editors on the rebus community forum and I might actually drop in a link to that call so you can see what we asked. This was actually a call that we adapted from the open pedagogy approaches. So shout out to Alexis Clifton and all the others behind that we are. We typed include in the copy editing call, just a timeline of when people can expect to do this work, as Abby said, you know this is a volunteer based project so we want to be able to figure out the time commitment that would be involved. We also wanted to flag specific goals that we were hoping to get out of the copy editing portion of this production process, as well as the style guide so we landed on the Chicago manual of a particular project. So perhaps a copy editor who's more familiar with the API style guide or something else could sell select and say you know what I don't have the familiarity I need with this style guide for this project. Given that this was a volunteer based project, we wanted to clarify how copy editors would be recognized in the book so whether their names would be mentioned in the back matter or whether their comments would be visible to authors as as Jeff clarified both peer and copy editor comments were available to the editors and the authors. So as a result of the copy editing call and as a result of lessons learned from having 86 peer reviewers, we decided to just have three people copy edit the book in particular Casey Emmett Lombard and Tina Mullins. So the three of them jumped into Google Docs to edit all of the different sections of the book, using both the suggestions mode and the comments mode. And we found that people would sort of adapt the functionality of Google Docs to suit their style so some of them would jump in and make direct changes others would leave suggestions. Someone else would leave comments. So this was a little bit challenging for us as we return to drafts as the authoring team to either see changes that have been made or to just work through section by section case study by case study through the edits. I have a question around how do we come to a consensus around voice and style using the starter kit. Well, we actually took our author guide that Abby I think had had put together and drafted to guide sort of the initial drafting of the chapters and evolved that into a style guide. And I've linked to that from the slides and I'll drop in a link to the style guide in the chat as well. So you'll see in this style guide we've specified things like the audience and and tone. We've also put in a lot of specific suggestions for the copy editors or things for them to keep in mind around consistent list and image formatting and the best. I think that really helped us resolve those grammar issues, identify inconsistencies around how terms and images would refer to a reference throughout the book, but I think it also helped us see the perspective of both a new reader someone who has no familiarity with open education versus a very experienced sort of open advocate going through the book. So we looked at the style guide and we decided to make some firm decisions on voice as well. You know Marco talked about this earlier when he said we, we decided to be lenient with including a mix of both British and American spelling you can probably tell from my accent that I'm not American I will use the you in the word color and very proudly so and I didn't want that to be changed just because we were writing for an audience that was based in the US but also I think this was important for us to think about how even copy editing and the type of grammar and language we use in the book can help reflect the variety of authorship behind the OER but also the intended audience and use for it because we can see this being applicable to people in the US and Canada but also outside of it as well. Some of the big lessons that we learned though was maybe the timing of copy editing after peer review wasn't the best idea. A lot of our peer reviewers went in 86 peer reviewers went into those chapters and started making corrections to grammar, and so on so they kind of stepped into the copy editing role in some ways. You know we saw peer review as that opportunity to get more subject matter expertise and perspective into the book to help us identify gaps in content and so on what as the goal of the copy edits was to improve the context of the text to think about the tone and inclusivity of the text or the general grammar spelling and punctuation things like citations as well. So, maybe if we had done the copy editing process first it would have given our peer reviewers a chance to focus more closely on the content and less so on all of the grammar and punctuation around it. Copy editing as I said also allowed us to see the book through the eyes of relatively fresher new readers. I think it helped us as an authoring team understand how the OER flowed as a whole, as they were going through all seven parts. And also what type of challenges someone might encounter when engaging with the book so the copy editors were able to identify well you say chapter five here but then you're referring to it in this in this other way later on. Why don't you make sure things are more consistent throughout. So, all in all I think we would definitely stick with the three but maybe move copy editing further along, further ahead of the process rather than sticking it after peer review. And I'm going to pass it back to Jeff actually because there are a lot of other things that went into the production of this OER that we did want to share with you. So back to you Jeff. Oh, and it's, I like Veronica's comments in the chat to as a regular peer reviewer. I assure you that focusing on copy editing first would likely have no influence on whether or not peer reviewers gave feedback on grammar and structure. So, a couple of other things to know. First of all, if you're interested in publishing open textbooks there is a rebus guide to publishing open textbooks, and we worked together and learned as a team on some of these things on how to format stuff and press books Okay. Apoorva was our like maven of press books she knew a lot more about it than the rest of us and when we were looking around so who was going to put the stuff in press books I was like, I might as well help because I need to learn how press books works I don't have it at So I learned by doing and a purple basically gave me a crash course on how everything worked through press books and what we were going to be looking for. We took the things that were marked as call out boxes and made them into call out boxes but there's also ones for key takeaways there's also another one for examples. So it was really neat at first I was just like, I'm going to make a blue box because that's cool. And wait, hold on, there's a real template for these here they are. Link consistency across chapters. So we often refer people who are reading one chapter to go somewhere else. And if we are going to do that. So we need to have that chapter up in the first place. So it's really tough for us because we're writing this thing and then we're going, I'm going to put this in brackets and say, you know, read Marcos chapter on getting to know your campus and hope that we have a link for it later so we had to make sure that we went back and got all those links together references and metadata there are some some things in there that are native to press books and just kind of figuring out how that all worked was a thing. And then yeah we were able to put the back matter into it to which includes all of our peer reviewers and copy editors and stuff like that. So if you are taking something else and pasting it over into press books, be sure to check the HTML there's there's the viewer of the what you see is what you get. And then there's the source code viewer. The HTML that's in there often will bring in some classes and some weird stuff that if you're going to export it to an epoch later, it's going to look really weird. So you just get rid of most of that and make it just clear nice HTML at that point. So that was a lot of cleanup that we were doing these kind of class tags. Of course you want to check your stuff over for accessibility. There are a lot of different web tools that you can use to do so but making sure that everything is structured that it has the right headings that all of the media that you bring in have appropriate alt text and or if you got video or audio captioning, making sure that that stuff works is good yeah Ryan says Google Docs really loves to hide that kind of secret styling code yep. And then we also had a book launch so we needed to make it official so we had book cover that we had to decide on. Abby I think spun that whole thing up herself and we were just kind of like I like that one I like that one. And then she's like okay here's 15 different versions of that one and we're like okay I like these five and that was really nice of her to do that. We had a webinar and events quite like this to announce it. And of course we had to get the word out. It's nice that we built this this text but we wanted to make sure that it got out there. Abby says the accessibility assessment back matter from the Revis guide was a great help during the last push to. Yeah so be sure to use that Revis guide that's really big dances control shift V to paste without formatting. Yes, absolutely. The tough thing about pasting stuff without formatting when it was these documents was that we had a lot of structured text we wanted to keep the headings and things like that, but we didn't want to keep all the classes so for us in this particular case, it was better for us to go through and delete the bad text that it was to control shift the all of the raw text and then format it for structure texts and accessibility. Yeah but in most cases, absolutely. And a poor was giving applause for that. And yeah, special shout out to her for the on the publishing side of this she was excellent in leading this process. And I think you're muted, but hopefully you can unmute and tell us how we can all take things away from the book. Sorry about that. So that's a little bit about our process and some of the things that lessons that we learned. How do you use the book well we hope it has something for everyone we developed this primarily as a reference source we don't anticipate that people will read this from cover to cover. So I'm definitely welcome to do so if you decide want to do that. And we hope that it also addresses different levels of content for people at different stages in their roles. So we did not assume that you had all of the bells and whistles that we that everybody else has that everybody could be at a different space at that particular time. Now, some, some of us were told that the text may feel a little exclusive because we talk about leveraging your team, and not everybody has a team some of you are solo out there in the wild and that's not really what we meant, what we meant was that you can build your team your team can be anyone, you can build and support engagement in many ways. So you may not have a staff or that's okay and that's and that's fine and and we try to address that as well. We hope that people can leverage this book to get funding to know where their program might be able to grow or need to grow or how it could be grown, how to assess their program to say, how are we doing. Identify new things you can do and build support for your, your particular program at your institution. And I believe we are almost out of time. So we'll open it up for questions and answers. Oh yeah we got seven minutes of Q&A so please do either unmute yourself and ask a question or put a rain in the chat. Amy says a couple of Oregon OER point people flooded the idea of a book group to read this together so yay, go for it. Amy asks are there any unexpected surprises good or bad that folks can watch out for things that we might not have anticipated. Well you may want to keep in mind that your textbook creation process could be disrupted by a global pandemic. That was a tough one. I think that, yeah, there are, I think, less lessons learned here, when it comes to what what I've experienced then there were ways to address things that otherwise would have been overlooked. I really want to send a big thank you to Abby for this, because I, we were sometimes just thrown by many different calls to suddenly do things at our work that took over our, our time. It was a real tough time for us in the pandemic and Abby was someone who she kept us enough on track that we got it done. She did so with a lot of understanding and empathy for what was going on. And that is rare in someone directing a process like this and she was excellent throughout the whole thing. Well thank you Jeff. I'll say, in terms of unexpected things that were good. I think one of the biggest ones was we lost one of our first authors on the book was Elaine, oh goodness, Elaine Thornton, I believe, and she had to leave to work on another project had other things coming up. So we brought on a perva and Marco as additional authors, and it was the best like late early time that came into us because a perva's experience with the textbook authoring in Rebus and Marco's experience, just coming into this new and building out programming and being a leader for the first time brought so many great new perspectives that completely changed how some of the aspects of the book came together and there's some really good stuff in there now that would not have been there without them as authors. I think that's a great kind of view and I will just say that an unexpected benefit slash thing to watch out for is, you know, just having a really great team. Our team has worked really, really well together I absolutely agree with Jeff, if Abby had not been in that leadership role just tracking an incredible amount of deadlines and coordinating a lot of work and encouraging us and keeping us kind of rolling along I think I would have finished anything by now just because of how many distractions are on an early tenure track and so I just feel like we really lucked out with the team that we have and for me this just showed up as a random email invitation in my inbox and I just said yes. I said that sounds like a thing I should do and should try out and I didn't, I didn't even know I was joining a team with like Steph and Jeff and Abby like these established names and then of course like a part of an hour coming on together and so I was just like this is like amazing to have the kind of synergy that we did, and we did it in a very minimalist way so we didn't have a ton of like team building conversations or we don't have like a slack channel where we're all talking about what's happening you know we did it asynchronous over email and I think that can be refreshing to see that something like that can work, and to really just kind of trust a group of strangers so it was extremely rewarding in a sort of a collegial experiment kind of way. And I encourage other folks are doing something like that to embrace that element of it because that's definitely something that was different but really rewarding about this project for me. I do want to answer this question because I saw it come in from Jamie Holmes can you remind me of your timeline. So I pulled it up here. We started in late 2019. So, it took a little bit we started developing and outlining content over the course of 2020 just writing 2021 we did the call for peer reviewers and got that moving, and then finally put it out earlier this spring so quite a bit happening, and over the three years. And I might say if you look at that call for copy editors the anticipated book publication date was January 2022. That did not happen we were about six months delayed but to answer the question about unexpected things a lot of things came up and it, the best surprise I think was the flexibility that the group had. Move timelines around or to say you know what this is a very busy month for me and I might not be able to get to these pieces the project can we give ourselves an extra three weeks for this. So the understanding and sort of compassion that was woven into the team that we also tried to extend without reviewers or case study authors in our copy editors I think is what made made the book what it is. Okay, looks like we have about a minute left we're happy to continue to answer any questions anyone might have and that's looks like. I just saw something in the Paley has created has created an OER for program managers channel in discord, where perhaps we can continue some of this conversation and support, and we would love to do that, I think that would be a great place to continue conversations. So we hope that this has been very helpful to you and given you some ideas and inspirations about how you can yes you can do this as well. Keep in mind that it was a long project so you're in it for the long haul but that's okay. As long as you keep on track you're doing fine and that you know having that that interaction with other folks and being able to work with other people is a really great benefit for for doing this kind of work. I think that's a perfect note to end on thank you so much everyone I'm going to stop the recording now.