 Good morning, everyone. And now welcome to the first webinar from the Community College Consortium for OER. The first webinar of the fall series on finding open textbooks and fostering faculty adoptions. I'm Una Daley, the Director of the Community College Consortium. And I have three wonderful presenters this morning who are going to have a lot of great information to share with you. So glad you could all make it. For those of you who are new to the Collaborate system, the main portion of the presentation is going to be right there in the center on the slides. To your left, you are going to see a participants list, which you should appear in. And you're going to see a chat window underneath that. And please do use the chat window to send comments or questions to us. For the most part, we'll be holding questions until the end, but we'll answer as we can when we go along. But we'll get back to those at the end as well. And Lisa, close from the Florida virtual campus is also helping me with moderation today. So we'd like to ask you to tell us where you're located. Thanks so much to all of you who've introduced yourself in the chat window. But if you want to pick up one of the little icons under the asterisk in the toolbar right in the middle of the screen, you can grab one of those and show us where you're located. Okay, we've got some folks that looks like in Sotel, Canada on the east coast. Oh, we've got on the Atlantic coast. All right. Looks like most folks are located in North America today. But of course, we are part of the Open Education Consortium. And sometimes we get folks from overseas as well. All right, excellent. Thank you for sharing that. So today, I'm going to give you a brief introduction to our present presenters. Then we're going to get into a very brief overview of the Community College Consortium for those of you who might be new today. And then we're going to get right to the meat of our presentation today, which is our presenter, Amanda Coolidge from BC Campus, Sinkbiner from OpenStacks College, and finally, Catherine Harris from the California OER Council. All right. If you haven't had a chance, please do introduce yourself in the chat window. I know people are coming and going right now. So let us know who you're from, sorry, where you're from, what your institution is, and any other interesting OER information you might have. And now I'm going to turn this over to Amanda Coolidge, who is the Open Education Manager at BC Campus in British Columbia, Canada, so that she can give us a brief introduction of what she does at her day job. Kyle, Amanda? Amanda Coolidge, and I'm based in Victoria, British Columbia. And as Una said, I'm the manager of Open Education with BC Campus. And my main role is to work with faculty across British Columbia institutions to adopt, adapt, and create open textbooks. So doing a lot of project management, but also outreach as well. All right. Thank you very much, Amanda, for joining us today. And next I'd like to introduce Nicole Sinkbiner, who is the Associate Director of Institutional Relations at OpenStacks College. Nicole? Good afternoon and morning, everyone. My name is Nicole Sinkbiner, and I'm with Rice University's OpenStacks College. Nicole, you need to click on your talk button. It might be turned off. Can you hear me? Okay. Hello. Can you hear me? Well, we'll come back to Nicole in a moment. We'll go to Catherine Harris. Catherine Harris is the California OER Council Chair. And she's also an Associate Professor of English at San Jose State University, and we're very pleased to have her this morning. Catherine, can you introduce yourself? Yes. Good morning. I just want to also note that we can hear Nicole. No, maybe you can't hear her. Everybody else can. Una? So, Catherine, hello. Can everyone hear me again? Okay, great. Wonderful. Sorry about that. We seem to have had a technical difficulty there. Nicole and Catherine, I'm going to go ahead and email you a phone number that you can use because it looks like we may be having some sound issues. And in the meanwhile, we'll go ahead and move on. And I apologize for that. So, the Community College Consortium for OER was founded to promote adoption of OER to enhance teaching and learning. And one of our key goals is expanding access to education for students. And we do this through a number of strategies. One of them is supporting professional development for faculty. And of course, this webinar series is part of that. And although many folks participate with us, we are including four-year institutions and universities, our goal is around advancing the Community College mission. And the Community College Consortium represents over 250 colleges and 18 states and provinces. And we'd love to have more folks join us as members as well. All right. So, this morning, we're going to be talking about open textbooks and adoption. And of course, our presenters here will have a lot more to tell you about that. And I want to say that this is about a student access and success issue. There's been surveys done over the last few years which have consistently found that students are not purchasing their textbooks. And many times, it's because of cost. And students are concerned about this as well. They know that not having access to a textbook can truly affect their success in the course. And I find as we work with faculty that there's sometimes an awareness issue, not so much about cost, but about how to find OER and open textbooks. And so today, we're going to hear from our presenters on how they can find their, how you can find open textbooks out there in different repositories. And the peer reviews that are occurring, which are really going to help faculty to assess if an open textbook is right for their classroom and what the level of quality of the content and pedagogy are. And finally, faculty adoption is a really key piece. And so that peer review and some of that faculty-to-faculty kind of contact is really key to helping faculty feel comfortable about bringing an open textbook into their classroom. And ultimately, we're trying to save students money. And I'm very happy to tell you about a contest that is being put on by the 20 Million Minds Foundation. This is a student-focused contest. It's called Cover the Cost. And I think it just opened up this week. And they are asking students to enter a video or a written essay answering how do you cover the cost of textbooks each semester? There will be three $2,500 book scholarships awarded to the students' projects that are selected. And there will be more information at thebooklessmovement.org. And once again, this is sponsored by the 20 Million Minds Foundation, which of course funds open textbook efforts nationally. All right. At this point, I am going to go ahead and turn this over to Amanda Coolidge, the open education manager at the BC campus. She's going to talk to us about the project that was started about two years ago at BC campus to initially identify the 40 highest enrolled courses and find open textbooks for those and provide an adoption process for faculty. Great. Thank you, Una. So I'm just going to move the slides along here. Okay. So the first question we often get is where is BC campus? And we currently have two offices. We have one in Victoria and one in Vancouver. And we are, for the south of the border, we are north of Seattle. So just put a couple of arrows there to show you exactly where we are. So what exactly is BC campus? BC campus is a publicly funded organization. And we use information technology to connect expertise programs and resources of British Columbia institutions under a collaborative service framework. And we have three frameworks. We have the group of the curriculum services and applied research, which is what I am a part of. We've got the collaborative programs and shared services and part three is the student services and data exchange. So the area in which open education is under is the curriculum services and applied research. And our goal is to support and promote the development and use of open educational resources as well as to support instructors who would like to use technology and teaching practice. So we do this in a number of ways. We use a database called Solar, which is our shareable online learning resources. We have a group called the educational technology users group, which has two workshops in the fall, one in the fall and one in the spring. And we bring together faculty and various educational technology practitioners from across British Columbia together. We have SCOPE, which is a community organization, online community, which brings together a lot of the faculty members and instructional designers and people in the scholarship of teaching and learning. We actually started out prior to our open textbook initiative, the BC campus curriculum and applied services group started out in 2003 with what we call the online program development fund or OPDF. And there was $9 million invested, 150 grants were awarded and the purpose was to build various learning objects, labs, textbooks, manuals and videos to support open educational resources across British Columbia post secondary institutions. And all of these free resources and open educational resources are available on our database called Solar, which is solar.bccampus.ca. And it's a repository available to anyone. So once the OPDF application process completed and the grants were awarded and the projects were all done, we realized that we still needed to go a few steps further. And there really was a problem. The main problem was that a lot of the work that individuals were doing was behind closed doors or as you would say the closed LMS. The concept of lifelong learning was becoming a bit of a closed system in which many of the student or many of the infrastructures were locking students out after they completed a course. And so really the concept of lifelong learning was a bit quick to the side. So we realized that we needed to continue with the open educational resources in some capacity. And then the second problem was that as an alerted to, students are still having to pay exorbitant amounts for textbooks. And as this cartoon showcases, how often do we actually have to use our textbooks? Well, we're just going to use it for one paragraph. So we wanted to make sure that students could have access to the textbooks in a format that was free, accessible, and open to either be adopted, adapted, or perhaps even created in the cases of some of the books with BC campus. So in 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education did a review of what students think about textbooks. And I won't read through all of this, but it gives you an idea. So there's people who had downloaded legal copies of the PDF version of the books. Some people were actually scanning things, getting them from the library. People, students were finding that the clinical psych book, for example, was over $200. And so it just becomes way too much for students to have to deal with alongside their tuition costs. This is another popular student survey that you may have seen from 2012, which is through the Florida Virtual Campus. And this showcases the direct relationship between textbook costs and student success. You'll notice that over 60% of students actually don't purchase textbooks at some point. So this is extremely high and something that needs to be addressed. You'll also see 35% take fewer courses due to textbook costs. This is something that BC campus as well as a lot of the other Open Education initiatives are trying to see resolved and see the increase in student success. So just to give a little bit of background, what is an open textbook? It's an instructional resource. It can be an e-book. It can be a printed book. It can be an HTML file, an XML file. But ultimately, it uses a Creative Commons license to enable others to further share and modify. And that's really key when we're talking about open textbooks. The British Columbia Open Textbook Project here at BC campus, we started with the 40 top subject areas within first and second year university courses across British Columbia. And we sought to find textbooks that would address the needs of these highly enrolled books. We have recently this year acquired more funding through our ministry to do 20 more textbooks for vocational programs. And these include not only textbooks but also ancillary resources that we continue to work on. And the exciting thing about this project is we're actually the very first province in Canada to do an open textbook project. And we're working with two other provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, to help them initiate a similar project. The main focus of our open textbook project and sort of the fundamental structure that we follow is based on David Wiley's work, which is the five R's of openness. Retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. I won't go into the details of these five R's, but just to take note that this really sort of is the backbone of how we decide how we want the textbooks to be used. So why are we doing this? I sort of alluded to some of these already, but mainly it's to increase the access to higher education by reducing student costs. We want to make sure that faculty have more control over their instructional resources. So the faculty member realizes that a book doesn't contain information that they typically use in the course. Well, why not download, adapt it, and make it available to your students. And we also want to move the open agenda forward in a meaningful and measurable way. So currently the project, as I stated, we currently have 40 textbooks, or sorry, we have 63 textbooks in our collection, but we have 40 which are directed towards the most highly enrolled first and second year courses. We identify 40 of those subject areas and all 63 sort of then go into that category. And then we're working on another 20 in the skills-based programs. What's really nice about our project is it's not just for online delivery and it's not just for print. We offer EPEV format, MOBI format, PDF, HTML, XML in the format of a basic WordPress XML function, and also what we use as our infrastructure is called press books, and we offer the press books XML back end as well. So as you can see, students have a lot of variety in the way that they can access the books, and also faculty have a fair amount of variety in the way they can download and use them. We try to make sure that at least one format of the book is an editable version so that faculty can download and then adapt or remix the work. So the open textbook project started in 2012 and it was established based on three phases. The first phase is harvest and review. The second phase was adapt and the third phase was create. So I'll walk you through those. Phase one harvest and review. What we decided to do was to see what already existed out there. The great part about an open education system is that everything's open and people are looking to share. So we went through open stacks, college open textbooks, sale them or low, and we decided to take a look at which textbooks were already out there that addressed the needs of our top 40 subject areas. And then we asked faculty to then review the content or the books that were up there that we had harvested. We have a great example of one faculty member who we refer to as our most early adopter, Dr. Tekashi Sato who is a physics professor at Kwantlin Polytechnic University. He has 60 students in his class. In one class, in one term, the student saved $11,200 because he used the open stacks textbook of a physics book. So that was one book that was harvested within our collection and he thought that he could be able to use it which was great. Our second phase was adapt. So based on the reviews that came in, we wanted to make use of what existed, but we also wanted to improve what existed. So a lot of the materials when faculty were reviewing the collections that we had harvested, they noticed that there were some areas that were missing, especially oftentimes from the Canadian context. So sometimes the examples were very U.S. centric. And so the reviews noted that they'd like to see more Canadian or international examples. And then we had faculty submit proposals. We provided funding and support so that they could then adapt the textbook. And these adaptations are still underway, but we did just finish two project management and mastering strategic management. So one of the things that we like to say is doing an adaptation is not that easy. You can download and do your own adaptation, no problem, but in order to maintain the quality, the process of adaptation does require an instructional designer, project manager, editors, illustrators often, and graphic designers. So there are a lot of people involved. We do provide the support, and sometimes we provide the emotional support as well. Phase three, this is an area where we took the opportunity to take a look at the top 40 subject areas, and we saw where there were gaps. For example, we had a gap in the political science field because a lot of the textbooks were geared towards political science in the United States. We had a gap in geography. And so what we decided to do was put a call out for creation of textbooks. So there's a few things that faculty are doing. We have some cases where faculty are collaboratively authoring textbooks. And we have cases which happens with geography back in early June. You may have seen tweets about it. And through our newsletters, we did a book sprint. So we brought together five faculty from across British Columbia who are faculty of geography. And they co-authored a textbook within four days. They created a textbook on British Columbia in a global context, which is our geography textbook. And that was really exciting and something we can talk further about it another time. Another way to actually do the creation is we could go ahead and buy the rights from publishers. We haven't done this yet, but that is a possibility. So the faculty who are doing the creations right now, we have an English book and a Canadian history book, which are in full creation mode. And we have a criminology text that's coming up. So those three have been underway and are really exciting because it's really offering a different perspective on the way we've been doing books. So what about the quality? The first thing is we rely heavily on faculty to conduct reviews. We do offer stipends to faculty who do do reviews for us. And we also have graduate students who are teaching assistants, sometimes who are expertise in their field, who are interested in reviewing for experience as well as to give us a better understanding as to what students are looking for in text. So that's been really helpful. Secondly, we've just instituted a program called the Faculty Fellows Program. So we brought on three faculty members from across British Columbia to be advocates of our open textbook project. So their roles will be to do workshops and presentations, to talk to other faculty across British Columbia about the quality of open textbooks, how to make them better, but also to show them how to search for, how to adopt, how to adapt, and possibly create. So that's really exciting. And they'll also be doing some work with us and the OER Research Hub to do some research on the adoptions and student success. We also do a lot of collaborations. So we talk with a lot of other people across British Columbia who may not be directly related to the project, but who have a subject matter expertise. So that's been really helpful. And we also have a number of supporting players. So we have instructional designers. We have editors. We have graphic artists, multimedia developers. And we have technical assistants in terms of the back end of the project. So everything we do is a major focus on quality. And we do our best to ensure that that happens. So here are our results. We currently have 50 reviews of not 21. That's the error. We just got over 30 text reviews. So I sent these to Una two days ago. And so within two days, we now have 10 new texts that have been reviewed, which is great. We also included one more book in our collection. So we now have 63 books in our collection. Our current adaptions are at eight. So we have sociology, psychology, social psychology, research methods, and psychology, database, design, project management, strategic management, and chemistry. We are currently working on four creations. Canadian history, criminology, English lit, and Canadian geography as of the yesterday was fully completed and is now available on the website. The number of institutions we have that are adopting. So we have eight institutions across British Columbia that are our most adopted institutions, which is really exciting. Now I want to talk a little bit about our adoption process in terms of how we actually find this out. So this is a bit, as I called it to Clint yesterday, it's a bit of a rogue process. So we actually don't have a very efficient way of tracking adoptions. What we end up doing is sending out emails to people across British Columbia and finding out if they are using the textbook and if they know of other people who are using the textbook. In that email, we also asked for the number of students who are affected by the textbook and what the previous cost of the textbook was assuming that students were buying a brand new text. So that's how we sort of do our adoption race at this point. We don't ask for email addresses or do a very heavily statistical process. It's a very manual process and one that we do. We would like to see improvement upon, but for now that's how we're doing it. So it's very much word of mouth. Our number one textbooks or our top textbooks that are most commonly adopted include physics, database design, strategic management and social psychology. And since the fall of 2012, we have a known student savings of over $300,000. So that's really exciting for our project. We continue to see excitement among the students as well as faculty and we continue to be inspired by the faculty who are currently adapting and creating a textbook as well as those faculty who are adopting. And some of the adopters, as we mentioned, are adopting on their own without letting us know. So if you're out there and you are adopting and we have a contact, please do let us know. So to find our open textbooks, you're welcome to go to open.bccampus.ca. You simply go to the find a textbook field on the left-hand side and you'll be able to see the 63 texts that are currently available there. We'd love to have you take a look and offer any comments you might have. So open.bccampus.ca. So with that, I'd just like to say thank you very much and I am available by email at acoolidge.bccampus.ca. You can reach me on Twitter at acoolidge. All right. And again, our website is open.bccampus.ca. Thank you very much, Amanda. And that was very helpful. I'd love to hear from you Wednesday to see the process that DCSIGS has gone through and the great progress that you've made in the last couple of years. I'd like to move along now to our next presenter, Nicole Sinkbiner, who is the associate director in charge of institutional relations. And I apologize, Nicole, for cutting you off earlier. I had a little technical issue here. So please go ahead. I apologize, Nicole, for cutting you off earlier. I had a little technical issue here. So please go ahead. All right. No worries. This is Nicole Sinkbiner from Rice University's OpenStacks College. We are the free textbook initiative through Rice University. And just a little background on me. I was originally a chief marketing officer for community college in Battle Creek, Michigan, and then also a community college in Houston, Texas. So definitely come from the community college world, but I'm happy to also work for a university now. I'm having a little trouble advancing the slide. Oh, there we go. There's just a delay. OK. So let me go back one. Perhaps. OK. And you've seen several statistics very similar to this now. But one of the things that I wanted to point out is this is from the US Park Education Fund that 48% of students said that the cost of textbooks impacted how many and which costs they took this semester each semester. And this as well as being just a huge issue for students. So we are under a tremendous amount of pressure as colleges and universities to work on our completion numbers and our graduation rates and our student retention rates. And now we're seeing that textbooks are a barrier to that success. So how is OpenStacks funded? This is a big question that we get. And we're primarily supported by foundation support. And we really thank all of our foundations as you can see on the screen that are very much involved in our work and we appreciate their support. So when we looked at open educational resources, we really wanted to make sure that we were meeting the OER challenge. And so we came up with these four key tenants that would really guide all of our work. The first one is that we ease of use. We want to make it easy to find and use the materials. Faculty and instructional design teams do not have a tremendous amount of time to go looking for these resources nor do librarians. So we want to try to put them into a system that would make it very easy to use. Free is not enough. We need to establish development models to ensure the quality of our textbooks is exactly the same as that out there of the major publishers. Scope and sequence. Again, because so many people do not have time to completely revamp courses and such, we wanted to make sure that our resources support existing curricula. And then we wanted to partner with groups that enhance the content through essential learning resources. And I'll talk more about that in a minute. Okay. So here are our books thus far. And actually PreCalc and Chemistry will publish in just about a month and two months. But a lot of people ask, how are we choosing the books that we are choosing to publish? And it's really a twofold consideration. And it primarily comes down to student impact. So what we have done is chosen the subjects that have the highest enrollment of students, particularly in the U.S. So we know that there are about a million students a year taking economics. We know that there are 300,000, 500,000 students taking physics and biology and anatomy and physiology. The second consideration that we looked at is how expensive were the textbooks that were currently out there? So that's really how we're choosing the books that we're doing. We expect to complete 26 books by the end of 2016. So who is using our resources? Well, we have over 800-plus schools worldwide using OpenStack's college books. And this number just continues to grow every single day. But I put up here some examples, and you can see it's everything from Ivy League universities to private colleges to community colleges. We're really seeing everyone come into this initiative and work with us. And a little bit about our growth. So we have been growing at such a tremendous rapid rate. Faculty and administrators from across the world have really embraced the concept of OpenStack's college. And so just in one year we have increased our number of adoptions 233%. So that's very, very huge for us. So one of the questions that we get quite often when we're out working with institutions is how does this fit with academic freedom? And we're Rice University. We are founded by a Rice University professor. So we believe heavily in academic freedom. And we believe this really enhances it. OER provides faculty with more choices for their courses. It allows for that permission-free editing and adaptation. And it prevents faculty from being walked into a particular platform or system. For example, what we do at OpenStack's college with our books is partner with multiple online homework providers so that the faculty member has the freedom to choose which one will work best for them. So in the marketplace we believe that OER should never be legislated or mandated and that needs to stand on its own vis-a-vis publisher material. So how do students get a hold of the OpenStack's college books? And what formats are they in? Well, we have a variety of formats that we provide to students to use the books. So they go to our website, which is OpenStack's college.org. And they will click on the books that they are looking for. And they will come up with a screen like this with just a wide variety of choices. So PDF, the students have a free PDF that they can download. It never expires. They can print it if they want. There's also a web view that students can use. And a lot of students use that often when they're working on a tablet or away from home on their cell phones. There's an e-pub. There's Bookshare for accessibility. And then we also have, so all of those are completely free. And then we also have two additional options. We do find that some students still want a printed copy of our books. So we do offer printed copies. We sell them basically at cost. So they're typically between $30 and $53, depending on the size of the book and the number of pages. And then we are also very excited to have a partnership with Apple where we have our books on the Apple iBook Store as premium versions. And those cost $4.99 for students. And they're completely free for faculty. Now, one of the great things about how open sex colleges set up is there are no passwords and no registration for students. They can go on our website and immediately begin accessing the book with no issues for registration. The only time that we require passwords and registration is for the faculty resources, of course, to do the faculty verification process. But the students do not have to do any of that. And so a lot of faculty members like using this as an additional resource for their students because they can say, you know, if you're somewhere and you need to study for your upcoming biology exam and you don't have your textbook with you, you can always very easily go online and access the open sex college book. But we also understand that learning these days requires a lot more than a textbook. So what we do is we develop essential learning resources as well as we partner with additional partners to provide additional resources surrounding our books. We have online homework available from many of our partners, including Sapling, WebAssign, Expert TA, and many more. We have online labs, components. We have online practice from partners. We provide PowerPoint slides, pronunciation guides, solution manuals, and textbooks depending on the different books. Different resources are available. Okay. So how do people use the open sex college textbooks? They do one of two things. A lot of faculty outright adopt an open sex college textbook as their main textbook. And so it is replacing the traditional textbook for them completely. The other option is to recommend an open sex college book as an option for studying and affordability. So like I said, that faculty member that I know that the biology book is not his primary book, but he still recommends it as an additional resource for his students. So I also wanted to share a little bit about how we're seeing institutions, particularly in the U.S., implement open educational resources as an institution. And the first thing that we're seeing quite often is what we like to turn textbook heroes. And you might have seen some of our ads and public relations around that. And these are people like Takashi Soto who are out there really championing the OER movement and talking to other faculty members and sharing resources with them. We also find that a lot of institutions, as was mentioned earlier, require that faculty support. So we typically work with a lot of instructional designers and librarians to really work with them to provide that support that faculty need to be able to use open educational resources. And we see the use of incentives, again, not mandates. We want to protect academic freedom. But we do see institutions offering grants to switch to open educational resources. And one thing I'm starting to see is student organizations from across the country, like the Student Government Association's offering textbook affordability grants. So I think that's really neat. One of the things I've noticed is absolutely essential to OER adoption at a grander scale, at an institutional scale, is expressed support from administration. Really having your upper level administration say, yes, this is something that we support and we want you to look into is very, very helpful. And then having open educational resource training days and webinars. We do these quite often where we will go or webinar into a training day for faculty members and work with them on adopting and adapting OER. OK, so real quick, some quick FAQs that we get all the time. The first one, of course, is what's the catch or obligation? You can't have everything for free. Well, these really are for free. We ask two things. Number one, we do not have a sales force. So we really rely on dedicated faculty, those textbook heroes, and word of mouth to really help us spread the word about this. The second thing that we ask is because we don't require passwords or registration, we do not know typically who is using our books unless they let us know. So if you know of someone who is using our books or is even recommending our books, you can send me an email or there's a quick adoption survey form that I can send you and we just need that filled out. That really helps us with our grant reporting back to the different funding partners. Do we plan on switching to a fee model? No, we do not. We have no intentions of doing so. I don't like X or you don't have Y, that's okay. We have a sister site, as was mentioned earlier, called OpenStack CNX, and it has a textbook editing tool in there. So you are free to edit our textbooks as much as you see fit down to the word. Do you have single sign-on? No, we do not, but at the same time, it's not needed because there is no sign-on. We have a lot of different ways to do that. So what I see a lot of faculty members doing, for example, in their learning management system, is they will say, read this chapter in the section of your OpenStack book, and they will just hyperlink that directly to that section of the WebView of our books. You can absolutely adapt and distribute without permission. We really encourage you to do so. Comp copies. So we're a nonprofit, and we have very limited funds. And one of the things that publishers have to cover in their cost that drives up textbook cost is sending out a tremendous amount of comp copies. So we typically do not send out complimentary copies. We really try to encourage people to review the book on the Web site and review the PDF. However, if you're really in a situation where you think a comp copy is really the last thing standing between a faculty member adopting one of these books and saving students a tremendous amount of money, feel free to contact me and I will see what I can do. With no sales reps, how does the faculty and you all get service? We'll have my email address now. But also, there's an email info at opensuckscollege.org. We respond to pretty much every email on that in less than 24 hours. Revision. So because we're not tied to the used textbook market, we only need to revise our books when it's pedagogically necessary to do so. So in some cases, that might be quite often. In some cases, it may not be for a couple of years or more. But if a faculty member has developed a customized version of our textbook, they will never be forced into a revision. Who do you call if you find an error in one of our books? We do appreciate faculty contributing by reporting Arata. And we have an online reporting tool for that. And then, yes, absolutely, your bookstore can order physical copies. We have a wonderful partnership with the National Association of College Stores. And bookstores find it very easy to go into the system and go ahead and order OpenStacks College books, as well as all the other textbooks that they need. So how are we doing? Well, we have been doing this for just about two years. And we have saved students $10.5 million. So we're very excited about that. So that's what I have for you today. And I will also put the email and website in the chat window. But I will pass this back to Una. All right. Thank you so much, Nicole. I know that everyone was excited to see the textbooks you have today and also the new ones that are coming out, the Pre-Calc and Chemistry this fall. Those are going to make a big difference. And now I'd like to introduce Catherine Harris, who is the California OER Council Chair, which she chairs a council composed of faculty from all three higher-end segments. And Catherine probably already told you this. I excused my technical issues earlier. She's also an associate professor of English at San Jose State University. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. And I want to thank our two previous presenters as well for demonstrating that there are OER materials already out there and in play and in use and adopted by faculty. One of the things that makes us different on this OER Council for California is that we are partially funded by the state of California, the state legislature. We're also funded by the Hewlett and Gates Foundation to work towards helping faculty to adopt OER materials. And one of the primary things that we found out in surveys that we've done over the past six months is that faculty are both to adopt OER materials because of the peer review process. And so our primary goal in this phase has been to identify courses that transfer across all three segments of the California Community Colleges, University of California, as well as the California State University. Those three segments service over 300,000 students and have 48,000 faculty. So it was a tall order and I'll get started here and try to get it done in about 12 minutes that we've got remaining. So the goal is for this phase is to really increase faculty adoption of high quality, affordable, or free course material to save students money. So we have a little bit of an inverse in terms of that we are focusing on what the faculty need rather than what the students are demanding. The students are part of what we're doing, but we have to start with the faculty. We'd like to increase affordability because the UC schools, the UCSUs, and the community colleges are always concerned about what it is that our students need. And we are the three largest institutional segments in a single state doing this project that nobody else has tried across the United States. SUNY and CUNY are comparable to what we're trying to do, but they haven't been talking to each other in order to try this kind of project. So we are funded by two state bills that were passed in 2012 and the funding came through in January 2014. And then two weeks later the council was put together from all three segments and we were off and running. As I said, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided 500,000 initial start-up just for phase one and the Gates Foundation as well in phase one. So we are managing a larger budget than that as we go through the phases. The first thing we did was select 50 courses that transfer across all three institutional segments. That work has been done and then we selected textbooks that would go with those 50 courses. We spent the summer doing peer review panels for five of the courses to beta test peer review rubrics. We also are promoting the production access and use of OER materials across all of the segments. And it's been a hard sell to faculty because they're so busy and they have so many different choices to make that a lot of times in their teaching loads it doesn't allow them to go back and look at new stuff. So the peer review process was really integral to what we're doing. We brought students on board but that's been very slow. So I show this slide to you not so that you have to read it. In fact, it's just about the sheer volume of what it is that we need to do. We are on this council, we are to fulfill state bill 1052. State bill 1053 is on the digital library side which Una Daily is also involved with as well as Leslie Kennedy. And we also are governed by what's called ICIS, the Intersegmental Council of Academic Senate. So there are two representatives from the community college, the UCs and the CSUs on ICIS itself. And so we report to them so we're not freewheeling and just making decisions as we see fit. And the digital library also interacts with us greatly in order to not only demonstrate that there are OER materials but get these peer reviews out there so other faculty can see. So we are governed in this particular structure as the project coordinator, I handle, we're unfortunately called COERS right now. We are rebranding and trying to get out from underneath that particular title. Oversight is through ICIS and the principal and investigator is Jerry Hanley from the CSU Chancellor's Office. The funding from the state of California and Hewlett and the Gates Foundation. Our membership just on this particular council since January 2014 is spread across several different disciplines. And we've got a great mix including the hard sciences, the soft sciences, the professional fields and the humanities and the creative arts. We had deliverables that we needed to meet with the Hewlett Foundation grant by May through by August, which we've met by now. And our final thing was the established faculty review panels and we just finished the debrief with those five faculty review panels on Friday. We haven't had some time to put some slides together but I have some things to tell you about how the peer review process went. We had criteria for selecting five courses. There actually is a central area where there's course identification numbering system that tells you what courses transfer among the three segments. And there were a lot of people in the state legislature as well as all of the colleges and universities who got together to talk about how we can do these transfers seamlessly for our students. It's still a work in progress but we want all of our students to be able to go from one institution to the other as they see fit and as it fits their specific needs. These are the five criteria that we really thought were most important. And we also based it on GE qualifications, critical thinking, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, and written communication. Five courses that were selected that had at least three textbooks that we selected were reviewed this summer. Public speaking, they had six. They took it on very generously. Microeconomics, US history, just the first part of the US history course. Intro to Chemistry and Introduction to Statistics. We had to actually define what is a textbook. We had a few sites like Kim Wiki that are distributed in terms of how the textbook is put together. And so we had to be very particular about what we wanted our reviewers to do a peer review on. We also needed to create a comments licensing for all of the textbooks. And quite frankly, there's not enough textbooks out there now. So we had to resort to using some textbooks that were proprietary and we'll post those reviews as well as an option. They are low cost instead of being completely free. We distributed a survey to the faculty and as of May 30th, we received only 1,000 responses. We've tried every avenue and we're still researching a lot of avenues and going and making personal appearances because we need more of a critical mass. You can see some of the questions that we asked. How familiar are you with open textbooks in the distribution? We were quite pleased that I have heard of open textbooks but never looked for any. It was a 40% return rate for us. So people know about open textbooks in OER but don't quite know everything about it or how to adopt it. Another question we asked is do you want this to be peer reviewed? And it's very important to 35% of the faculty, important to 32% of the faculty. How about support from the administration? If a textbook makes some money and it takes a lot of time and we had to go back and let the state legislators know that it does take time to create a textbook if it doesn't happen overnight. So this was very important to the faculty when they came back to us and said we want stipends and as well as we want professional support in terms of the technical aspects of it. But we also want professional development credit for it which is important for faculty to take on this kind of big project. And I have to say that when I went to visit one of the student organizations, one student raised his hand and said won't faculty be upset if we start offering open textbooks? Because then they won't get all of their money from it. And I did see the commentary in the BC campus where one student said a faculty member seems to change a textbook just so she can gain more money. I think we need to re-educate students on this kind of thing. Faculty don't make a lot of money off of textbooks. There are a few who do make a substantial amount. But out of the 48,000 faculty in our three segments, there are not a great many of them. So I think that's important to get that across to our students so that there's not this adversarial aspect to adopting open textbooks versus what the faculty really need. Another thing about desire to reduce student costs overwhelmingly. 67% say it's important, very important. 23% say it's important and only 1%, nine of them say that it's unimportant. One of the things that we were very careful about is where were these faculty coming from who were responding? We had an overwhelming response from the community colleges. The UCs, not as much of a response in the CFUs, a better response. We're working on getting better responses from the UCs and the CFUs so we can gauge their opinions. At the base of the survey, the end of it, we asked if somebody wanted to be a reviewer. And then we put them through basically an interview process for reviewing. And then when we put the peer review panels together, we made sure that they were distributed in a certain way so that it was fair. So the distribution of the faculty who were surveyed overwhelmingly were mathematics and English, biology, history, or in their chemistry and psychology. And we would like to get across the board more faculty from various disciplines. So self-identified reviewers were history, communication, math, biology, statistics, education. You can see that there were a lot of different faculty. And we did not discriminate in terms of who we sent the survey to or who we requested for reviewers. We sent it to everybody who wanted to be part of it. It was open to anybody who got the link. And in fact, it is still open. When we surveyed the students, we got 100 responses. So every time we go to see students, we open up the document in the URL and say, please take this right now. It only takes three minutes. And generally they do. So one of the issues that we have is really distributing the survey. And the survey is the foundation of how we created peer review rubric. It's also the foundation of how we're creating student involvement in what we're doing. So it's important to get more student surveys. Our next steps in identifying and invite faculty reviewers. We've done that over the summer. We created an infrastructure for the reviews. We've managed the review panels over the summer. We've integrated the reviews into the Cool for Ed website for phase one. We've changed that name. We are evaluating that textbook selection and proof of concept. And we will run for the 45 other courses. We will run over the next year and a half or two years, six or seven more panels. It's just a matter of managing everybody who's coming in. We've also paid our faculty. Initially, we paid them $1,000 for doing this review and being our beta testers. And from here on out, we will pay $250 per textbook that is reviewed with a minimum of three textbooks. So we value our faculty time in coming in. And we will also run debrief sessions where the faculty get to speak to each other. When we run the reviews, they are open. The faculty understand that they will certainly have their names attached to the reviews as well as their institutions. So when other faculty go in to take a look at what textbooks are being used by other faculty and who reviewed it, we can see that perhaps the UC faculty who love this one textbook isn't an appropriate textbook for a community college faculty member in his or her courses. And we had those disagreements in the debrief. So we will publish all of the reviews, good, bad, ugly, and attach the names and the institutions to them. That was very important to us to remain open. We also report to the California State Senate coming up in the next few months. And we're resolving the student issues and we've reconvened the council already. We did that on Monday and gave an update. And I'd like to just take us over to the URL for the Cool for Ed to show you what happens. So I see that it's already been published in the chat, but here's Cool for Ed. It's open. We're beta testing it in terms of what we want on there. We continually improve it. Una Daily and Leslie Kennedy are in charge of this side. This is the Digital Library for California. We have two things that are really intriguing. The first one is the find button, free and open textbooks. An easy way to search for mathematics, textbooks, science, and technology, or social sciences. And that takes you over to the Merlot collection and makes it easier to search for OER materials. It's also distributed by the Creative Commons license. The other thing that we've done is the course showcase. And this is specific to the courses in the California institutions, not necessarily to all of them across the United States. So what we've done is integrate the CID number as well as the general course description for these courses that have been approved. We have additional course information. We have the textbooks that have been selected to be reviewed. And then very soon we'll actually have the peer reviews up. And we're hoping to have those up by the end of October in a rudimentary way maybe as a PDF. And then we'll deal with IT issues to demonstrate the way that it's shown similar to what BC Campus has with their reviews. We really like the way that that was set up. It was easy to see there's a star system and drop downs instead of doing any sort of scrolling. The next thing that was very integral was to show to faculty, how does this work? How do you adopt this textbook? And what Una and Leslie have been doing is creating these faculty e-portfolios. And so what the faculty do is put in a little bit about the textbook, how they use it, about the course they're using it in. And one of the most important things, student learning goals, the syllabus being available. We're working on this as we go along and collecting the data. And things like how they're being used in sample assignments. The faculty can basically just adopt the assignment. Sometimes you just need the assignment and you don't want to read through everything else. And then third category here is also about the faculty member and the textbook adoption itself. You're free to go on now and take a look at this website. It's up. Again, if you search Cool for Ed, you will find it. I think it comes up in the first hit on the Google search. And just to wrap up what we've been doing, here's the general information for our council, for the OER council, as well as the Gmail. We're also on Twitter. We also have a Facebook page. If you just search COERC, go on and like us. The last student presentation I gave, I told them about the Facebook page. They went on and looked at it and they all went, oh, you only have 14 likes. I think we're up to 24 or 25 likes. And pushing all of our information and all of our announcements through Facebook and Twitter, because it's a very complicated system to go through all of three institutional public relations offices. So this has been the best way to get information out to people right away and right now. And as we're building that infrastructure, yes, Oona just posted our Facebook page for us if you want to go and take a look at that. We're posting about once a week the things that we find that are intriguing and interesting as well as updates about what it is that we're doing. Right now, the most important thing is our faculty review phase and getting all of the 50 courses and the textbooks that accompany them going with it. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate the opportunity to come and talk to you guys about what it is that we're doing out here in California. And I hope you spread the word around. And if you'd like access to the survey or the URL to the survey, please email me directly. We don't want to distribute it to loads of people who are answering it in other states. We want our faculty in California to give us the ideas about what it is they need. And if you have students that you would like to answer the survey, also please email me and I'll send you that link directly. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, Kathy. And of course, our other presenters this morning. Wow, what a webinar. And I thank you, our participants, who came this morning. And I know we're running a little bit over. So I think we're going to allow just a couple more slides and we'll probably have about time for one question. But our presenters will take questions over email as well. Join us again next month on October 8th. We have a great webinar planned for you on open course design and development. And that is featuring Lumen Learning, the University of Maryland University College, and Northern Virginia Community College. And they all three have great stories to tell. And finally, next week, the Open Education Consortium is having their quarterly membership meeting. That will be Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific time. And you can see what there are some very interesting topics. And you can go directly to the website there at oeconforsion.org and register if you'd like to attend. All right, wow. We've had some really great information. I'm looking at the questions that came in. I think most of them got answered. There was a lot of questions about support for faculty. And I know that some who are adopting open textbooks. And I know that Kathy, Nicole, and Amanda all addressed some of the supports that they are providing for faculty and how that's helping. And there was also some questions about for purchasing printed copies of textbooks and how you could do that, particularly with the open stacks books. And there was information in the chat window about working with the National Association of Bookstores on that. So do check the chat window for that. And Katherine, there was a question for you about how colleges in California can do that. So that they can share with their colleges. And thank you for sharing the Facebook page. They can email me directly at that email that we have placed up there if you want the survey link. That's the best way to get hold of SOR. I believe you can post in response on the Facebook page, and we will get back to that. But email is the best way to do it to get all the information we possibly can out to people. OK. Thanks very much, Katherine. And let's see. I'm going to take one last comment here. Somebody asked how they can get the info details for the upcoming October 8th webinar. Go ahead and email me directly. That information is posted on our website, the Community College Conference for OERconversion.org. You can go ahead and link to our blog, and you can get notifications through that. Or if you're a community college member, consider joining our Community College Advice Reboard, and you'll be invited to all of our events. So thanks, everyone, for a wonderful webinar this morning. Once again, I apologize for our technical issues. But I think we had an amazing webinar this morning. A set of presenters here this morning, and a big round of applause for all of them. And we're going to close off this webinar now. Thanks, everybody, and hope to see you next month.