 Welcome, everyone. My name is Heather Blicker, and I'm the Program Director for the Community College Consortium for OER with Open Education Global. I'm very pleased to introduce this webinar today, Building an Open Education Research Community. Before we jump into introductions of our presenters, I want to share that CCC OER is a community of practice with over 100 members in 35 states in both the U.S. and Canada. If you're interested in learning about the benefits of your institution becoming a member, including things like community, collaboration, and global perspective, I hope you will join us on Friday for a members and benefits panel at 12 p.m. Eastern. We will post that information later on in the webinar. Our presenters today are Michael Le Magna, the Information Literacy and Library Services Coordinator with Delaware County Community College, as well as a professor of library science. And Amanda Dipetista, Chair of Scholarship and Community with the School of Business at Conestoga College. And with that, I will turn it over to the presenters. Heather, thank you so much, and it's a pleasure being here today. And we're here to talk about the Research and Impact Committee and building an Open Education Research Community and how we can do that. So we want to really talk about the work of the Research and Impact Committee for CCC OER, talk about how we can engage in conversations as it relates to research and really hopefully build a community so that we can start collaborating and collecting some good research articles that have solid methodologies that we can then look to when we want to conduct our own research at our campus, and hopefully build towards building a collaborative research structure so that we can do cross-institutional research which would benefit the entire CCC OER community. And so if you're not familiar with the Research and Impact Committee, our charge really is to share updates on open educational research findings with members and promoting best practices for measuring the impact of open education on institutions and, more importantly, the students that they serve. And so that's really where we spend our time. And to accomplish this goal, we really have some aspirational goals as a committee because we are a new committee here for CCC OER. We're heading into our second year as an official committee with the consortium. And so really we're looking at building that infrastructure through collaboration with members to really look at and find relevant and applicable research. And really we're going to be talking about that today of how we can gather some of these really good research articles to use their methodology to really drive our own research. We're looking to build a more robust web presence on the CCC OER website. And as I keep saying, as it relates to research methodologies, we want to eventually build a dashboard where we're able to collect data from member institutions and organizations. And that's something we're going to be working towards long term. So that's not something we're going to do in the next year or two, but a couple of years out, we're hoping to build that dashboard so that we provide this information to all members to turn to when they're conducting their own research. And again, as we talked about that cross institutional research, and then again, this is a real aspirational goal for our committees, we want to facilitate institutional members with their own research and cross institutional research. So that's really what's driving us as a committee. And my hope is that today, as you're listening to the work that we're doing, that you're thinking about joining the Research and Impact Committee. And so as a new committee, we're really starting off with trying to collect some of those resources about research so that we can put that together and really help drive your own research as it relates to open education at your institution. So each year, we offer a summer conversation as part of that summer conversation. As we come together as a group, we hear about these excellent studies that are out there and methodology. But we also hear from members who say, Hey, I'd love to start conducting research or I've been asked to do some research at my organization. And how do I get started? And so that's why we really believe by gathering some research together, putting together these resources with the methodology really will be helpful. Now, if you're interested in the topic of research and impact as it relates to OER, feel free. And I want to thank Heather for putting the link to join the committee in the chat. Feel free to join the Research and Impact Committee. We hold monthly meetings. Currently, they're set for Monday afternoons, Eastern time. And we get together and we have these conversations to highlight interesting information and really work towards these aspirational goals as a committee. If you've already submitted the form, we will be getting back to you soon. And as we head into the the end of this academic year, and we prepare for the next academic year, we engage all of the committee members to make sure that we find a time to meet that is suitable for everybody, right? So if you're interested in joining and getting involved in this group, we want to make sure that you're able to participate. Now, the big thing that we're working on right now as a committee is really building that kind of collection of seminal research articles that we can use as a group to drive our own research. And so Amanda and I, and I want to thank Amanda for joining me today, have put together two articles to start the conversation. And then we're hoping that we can continue this conversation through OEG Connect. And I'll post that link to OEG Connect right now in the chat so that we can continue this conversation. And so we've each selected an article to start this kind of drive to organize and collect relevant research with solid methodologies. And so I've chose the first article, the impact of open educational resources on various student success metrics. This is a seminal work. It's typically something that is often cited in other studies. It has a solid methodology. It has a methodology that you can actually use if you were going to perform similar research at your own institution. And this study is a pretty standard study. It's looking at student academic performance. And it's looking at those courses, those large enrolled enrolling courses. And in this case, it's courses in history, psychology and biology. And looking at how students perform prior to the adoption of an open textbook and after the adoption of the open textbook. So it's looking at success, pre-open text, post-open text. And really, it's providing some good information about data sources that can be utilized at the institutional level to find that information. And so as we think about how we are going to conduct our own research at our own institution to measure that impact, this is the article I would like to highlight because I think it does a really good job of showing us, step by step, how we can measure student success in classes with open textbook adoption. And so I want to pass it off to Amanda now to talk about the second article that we've selected today. Thanks, Michael. So I work at Conestoga College, a polytechnic in Ontario, Canada. And I hear from our faculty all the time that they are really interested in implementing OERs in their classroom. And they're always trying to make the case for why they are important, especially in our highly diverse student base. So the article that I chose is called Open Educational Resources as a Tool for Educational Equity. Evidence from an introductory psychology class. And this is another article that looks at large first year classes as a way, as a place where OERs can make a huge impact, but it really takes an equity lens. And it looks at the negative impact of the rising cost of textbooks on students who are first generation college students, or those from ethnic minorities in Washington State. And it really did a really great job of finding a large sample size. So it was 11 sections of an intro to psych class with 774 total participants. And it broke those sections into two and looked at, introduced an OER into six sections and used the conventional textbook in the additional five. So the aim of this work was really to examine both the perceptions and the outcomes of OERs to explore whether they differ for minority and first generation students relative to their non minority continuing generation peers. So the interesting thing for me about this study is that it used two different methodologies because it's really going in two different directions. On the one hand, it's looking at perceptions of quality and perceptions of OER use in the classroom from students. So it used a student survey. And it also looked at students own self reporting around negative behaviors because of the high cost of textbooks. So are they dropping courses or avoiding courses or doing other things that may not be leading to the best student success outcomes because they can't afford textbooks. So on that side, they use surveys. But then to measure student success, they leaned on institutional research to their institutional research department to look at performance based on whether or not whether they were in the OER sample sample group or the course that used commercial textbooks. And what they found was performance was comparable across all sections. The perceptions of quality of OERs versus conventional textbooks was similar in across all groups. And the use of those textbooks was also similar. So it's not that they were using OERs more. They were using their textbooks and their OERs in the same the conventional textbooks in the same sorts of ways. So the the use of OER or the inclusion of OERs in the classroom was not at all impacting. It wasn't negatively impacting student perceptions of quality or their learning in the classroom. But what they did find was that first generation students or those who were both first generation and from ethnic minority groups suffered way more negative outcomes because of the high cost of textbooks. So I'm just going to read you a quote from the study because I loved it class by class book by book marginalized students are more vulnerable to financially driven decisions that can make that can negatively affect their academic progress and outlook decisions that their peers are much less likely to encounter. So the argument for OERs in this classroom in this first year psychology course that the authors the researchers were very strongly for them. Their research really strongly argues for the inclusion from an equity perspective as well. So these accumulations of decisions for those in marginalized groups means that there is lower first year retention and graduation rates and what they call the leaky pipeline of marginalized students from STEM from STEM fields because of the high cost of textbooks and OERs because they are very comparable in quality and perceptions of quality and all of that were an excellent or have a really excellent potential for addressing some of those equity gaps. So I'll leave it there. It sounds like an excellent article. And one of the things that I picked up on as thinking about how we can conduct our own research is making sure that we partner with our institutional effectiveness or institutional research department. And whether you're new to conducting academic and education research or this is just standard practice for you. That's a great place to turn to. They're able to pull a lot of this data out from from the the internal systems that you're already using to make it very easy. And if you've been to other research and impact committee programs over the years you know that we often talk about course marking and course marking makes it even easier to pull out this data so when you're conducting these kind of studies. Now because we're here today to talk about building an open education research community I do want to talk about OEG Connect and you can see the link that's up on your screen and then I'm going to go ahead and put that link in the chat again. And this is a place where we're going to ask you to start sharing some interesting research articles that you've found as it relates to open educational research as in terms of impact on students impact on communities impact on whatever you'd like to focus in on. And so this is a collaborative space through OEG Connect where we can share our favorite open education research and it allows us to then organize this information in one place because again our goal as a committee is to build this research community as it centers around open education and we want to gather these resources look at the methodologies and then start putting together some resources on the CCCOER website so that when you're interested in conducting studies on your campus you're able to do that and then our hope is that as we build this community of open education researchers we're able to start looking at it from cross institutions because as community colleges thinking about what's happening on our campus it's always beneficial to know what's happening on other campuses and to make those connections and so as I kind of outlined a couple minutes ago our goal as a committee is hopefully to start fostering that kind of research moving forward with the ultimate goal of building out a dashboard where we're going to solicit members information from members so that we can get a clear understanding of what's happening as it relates to open education across community colleges and so that's really our goal and so we're going to encourage you to go to OEG Connect where you can go ahead and start sharing your favorite research articles and that way we'll be able to go in and start building out those resources and this is just an excellent collaborative space where we can all have these conversations because we're here because we enjoy educational research and we enjoy looking at the impact that open textbooks open educational resources have on our students and so if you have any questions feel free to put post them in the chat we can continue this conversation through OEG Connect and then I'd like to pass this off to Liz to talk about some upcoming activities through CCC OER. Thanks Michael so this is the first of four webinars that we're putting on this week and so just just quickly tomorrow at the same time we're very excited to have Nicole Allen from Spark and Leliana Diaz from Wichita share with us updates on the US Department of Education's negotiating rulemaking for automatic billing and thank you for to Heather or who Michael for putting the links in the the chat and then Friday we have two webinars so the first one is 12 p.m. Eastern or 9 a.m. Pacific and we'll be joined by members of our executive council and they'll talk about the benefits of being CCC OER members and how it's helped them in their OER journeys and then Friday I know it's it'll be kind of late for people on the east coast but at 5 30 Eastern time or 2 30 Pacific time the open for anti-racism program which is a grant program that CCC OER manages they'll talk about leveraging open education to support anti-racism in the classroom and we'll have the two co-directors of that program along with one of the coaches who herself was a participant in the program before come share with us and that's it that's all we're doing this week and then looking ahead for spring we've got in April we've got a webinar on AI and OER you know is it redefine education and then in May we'll be exploring open education publishing platforms and we'll be having people we won't have people from the platforms we'll have people who use the platforms come and talk about their experiences and then coming up this summer looking really looking ahead the EDI committee had asked the community to vote on a book for this summer and so academic ableism and so there's a there's a blog post um announcing that um and so looking forward to that and then just wrapping up um oh yeah we have a feedback survey let us know what you thought about this um you know quick little uh quick quick little um sorry I had too many screens a quick little webinar and um yes thank you all for um showing up today I know it's really busy week I know exactly how many um things are going on so yeah stay in the loop you can check out our website join the community email list if you're not already on it and then just um thank you thank you so much everybody uh we hope this got you excited about research and open education uh with open textbooks open educational resources and has you thinking about your favorite research articles that you can share on oeg connect with us uh and so and hopefully if you're interested in the in academic education research please feel free to join the committee and I want to thank uh Liz and Heather uh for having us today and I of course I want to thank Amanda for joining me for this conversation thanks so much Michael thanks everyone