 Welcome, everyone, to our Open Ed Week webinar, Students and OER Advocacy. This is Una Daly from CCCOER, and I'm really excited to see all of you out here to come and hear about the power of students and OER Advocacy. I've had the pleasure of attending about 15 webinars this week. There has been close to 100 available all week long during Open Education Week. There's more later on today and tomorrow if you haven't had your fill yet. It's been great information. So today we're going to be talking about the power of students in advocating for OER. And we're going to hear this from several perspectives, from a national organization and a California student OER Advocacy group who has built a toolkit. And also from the ambassador, the student ambassador program that the California State University System runs through their affordable learning solutions. And I think you're going to be really impressed with the work that they're all doing. Next slide. I'd like to now introduce our speakers. Kailin Nagel, who is the Affordable Textbooks Campaign Director at U.S. Pergs. And do you want to say anything, Kailin? Yeah, so just a little bit about U.S. Perg and the work that we do. So we are a national organization that works very closely with the student Pergs, one of our partner groups. And they have nine, they have a presence in nine states with over 30 chapters as a student, direct it, student-funded nonprofit organization working to protect the public from very powerful special interests and have been running an affordable textbook campaign since the early 2000s. So I'm really excited to be here today. Thank you, Kailin. And next up is Jennifer Vang, who is the student ambassador for the Affordable Learning Solutions at the San Jose State University. Hello, everyone. This is Jennifer with Affordable Learning Solutions. I'm one of the first student ambassadors, and I'm really excited to be here to talk to you all today. Thank you, Jennifer. And last but not least, Natalie Miller, who was a part of the California, she was one of the leads of the OER Student Advocate Group. She was also the winner of the 2018 Open Education Consortium Student Award and is a recent graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Thank you, Una. Yeah, I'm excited to be here, everybody, and I'm happy to represent our Student Advocates Group and tell you about our toolkit, which I'll define in a moment, don't worry. Great. All right, Kailin and Jennifer and Natalie, take it away. Great. So I'm going to get started by just saying that students have always been a part of the open textbook movement. They have been a part of it through the student perks, through student governments, through student groups that are on campus. And through their work, they've been able to have significant victories. And here you can just see like a sample of across the country, everything from working on departmental or individual change, all the way up to the center bottom. You can see one of the CalPIRC students members meeting with Senator Dick Durbin talking about the federal open textbooks pilot. So from the hyperlocal to the national level, students have been driving the open textbook movement since the very beginning, and it's resulted in some pretty significant victories. So just to kind of go over the scope of student involvement, students were part of the early research into open textbooks and the problems with the broken textbook market since the early 2000s and 2004, students at University of California Irvine identified the textbook market as a place where powerful special interests were playing a role in the market to the disadvantage of students and the public. And so they started running the open textbooks and affordable textbooks campaign that has continued this very day. And they were a central part of our first report that we put out back in 2004, Ripoff 101. And then when we talk about policy victories, I think a really excellent example of this was at the Rutgers University system. Students were a central part in advocating for the large open textbook grant program that that university system has implemented and has to date saved students over $3 million. The graphic in here is from about a year ago and since then they've even gone on to save even more. The library there has done a fantastic job and has worked with the students every step of the way. And the students there are still involved in not only marketing the program that the university library system runs, but also in continuing to push the envelope on this campus and throughout the country on how do we make textbooks more active and affordable? And then not only are students working to drive adoptions for open textbooks and make sure that open textbook policies and programs are strong, they are also defending students and students as consumers from products that they just don't think give them a fair shot. So whether that is automatic billing programs like the one cited here at UNC Chapel Hill where the student government has been an incredibly loud and active voice in pushing back against a single publisher inclusive access deal in favor of an opt-in multi-publisher automatic billing deal, which they feel is a better deal for them to pushing back against access codes or making sure that they just have the options that they need. So whether it's research advocating for policy or pushing back against bad deals, students have always been central to the open textbook movement as a whole. And to be honest, students get involved for all of the reasons that faculty, librarians, administrators and educators get involved. Whether they care about affordability or equity in the classroom or student success or even broader concepts like democratizing information and education, students get involved for as many reasons as anyone else. And often we focus on the affordability element. But the open movement and the open textbook movement is very broad motivations and you can find students that are motivated by every single one of them. And not only is it important to remember that students are interested in being involved for a broad set of reasons, but it is important students are involved for a broad set of reasons. They are the most impacted stakeholder in the textbook market and they're the ones facing the barrier of cost. So they have the most to gain through open textbook expansion and adoption. They also want to see a more inclusive educational system and be a part of building it. And then student involvement in the open textbook posh really speaks, I think, to the ethics behind open. Whether it's the idea that students can be collaborative partners in the classroom or can participate in the creation of information and knowledge. Students benefit from all of these things and all of these things are reasons why you should include students in the movement and even center students in the movement. So students are involved through all different ways. And if you are a student looking to get involved or you are a person already involved that's looking for students. I would suggest first starting with the student government. The academic affairs committee for most student governments are the ones focusing on affordability. The other place in student governments that tend to focus on these issues is the internal vice president's office. And then it's also possible there might be affordability working groups if a student government senator, for example, ran on a platform of affordability. And then individual student groups like the student purge chapters on campuses are also running campaigns to make textbooks more affordable. But other groups also care about this. So whether it is groups working on affordability concerns overall, maybe they mostly focus on tuition. But this is something they also have to have a say in. Or maybe they come from an academic field where textbooks and materials costs are especially high. These are great points to look for students that are doing good work on this issue. And the last is actually through the university itself, particularly through the library. So a lot of university libraries will have internships, volunteer opportunities, or events that students can hop onto, even if they're not involved in the day-to-day activities of the library. There might be a place to loop them in there. So now that we've talked about where to find students that are involved, or if you're a student, where to find a place to get involved. I want to hand it over to Natalie, she's gonna talk a little bit about the Open Textbook Toolkit that she worked on. Thanks, Caitlin. So I'm gonna back up a little bit, just explain a little of my story, just really briefly. I started off with the opportunity to work at College of Canyons, not even knowing what OER was. And I had the opportunity to create a whole program and pretty much help get it started and rolling from what they had. And they already had textbooks and they had the faculty, but nobody to really get everything organized and get the numbers counted. So I was really enjoying that opportunity. And then I just transferred to Cal Poly and I've still been able to do a little bit of work there. But I wanted to focus on was the goal. The goal I had at College of Canyons and what I continue to have a little bit at Cal Poly, even though I just graduated in December, is how do we get more students involved with OER and more students aware of it. And as Caitlin was talking about, there's a lot of organizations and groups, but overall there's still that barrier of what about the average student that maybe doesn't join clubs and such. So, next slide. So, taking open to the next level, looking at that goal. After I graduated from College of Canyons and got my associates and continued on, I wanted to take open to another level. Cuz I didn't know anybody at Cal Poly yet. And I was like, this is a perfect opportunity to really understand what it's like to bring open to a campus that doesn't have much student involvement. And so, thinking in a bigger picture, I looked at state-wide initiative. And we decided, I propose this to a couple of different individuals, including Barbara, Una, and James, who are all on this call. And I said, hey, why don't we take the state-wide? Like, why aren't all the schools working together? Faculty from other schools are working together. But students aren't working together as much yet, at least in California. And the result was a team of eight students from different universities across California. We had community college students, we had CSU students, and some of them became private students after they transferred. So I'll go next slide, yeah. So what did our eight students do? Our goal was to create a toolkit. So we got a grant, and we just went for it. And so I decided to find what a toolkit is. Cuz, yeah, I can throw this word around, but nobody really understands what it is. So a toolkit is a guide created by students, for students helping to inform and give suggestions on what open educational resources are, and how to incorporate them on campus. So pretty much everything Caitlin said, everything mentioned in this PowerPoint and in this presentation is kind of outlined in our toolkit. And it's really amazing because it helps the student who knows nothing, and it helps the student who knows tons about open it. I learned from just making the toolkit. But as well, then there's students who have never even known what open is. And so they could start with chapter one, you know, what is OER? So going on with what is toolkit, I'm gonna talk about our experience in making the toolkit, and just to share about what students had to go through and what the process was. And this kind of new and revolutionary idea, at least for California. So I made it into kind of three steps. I want to talk about my experience of like creating the team, what our team had to go through, what we had to consider when looking for students to get involved in this. Thinking of the essentials, you know, what had to go into the toolkit, how did we have to develop it, what was our goal, and our experience. So then just a little bit more about the pros and cons of what we went through, and just some broad points there. And as you can see, we have a panelist photo with some of our students there as well. There'll be pictures. I'm sorry if I forget to describe them, but they're just kind of more pictures showing off what we did, which we had the opportunity to visit so many conferences and be present in so many things, which as a student who hasn't even graduated was something I couldn't even dream of, you know, especially when starting college. Next slide. So in creating the team, we had to think about what students are involved in OER, like where were they at? What colleges were they at? How are we going to communicate with them? You know, where are we going to see each other in person very often? Our team actually ended up seeing each other in person maybe once or twice as all eight students, but we saw each like maybe two or three of us would see each other at a conference maybe every couple months. So we really didn't see each other in person that much over a full year of work. How can each student contribute? Where were our strengths at? You know, we had students who were strong in government, students who were strong in creating workflows. I was definitely a workflow or an organizational person. We had students who really loved working with faculty and wanted to like share the communication that they had had with there. And then how can each student represent the community? You know, how can they represent OER? What can they contribute? We had students who ended up joining different corporations, including I'm blanking on the name, but we had students who ended up joining different like organizations and open, you know, representing them as a student, which is awesome after our OER applicants group. What can we recently expect out of each student? You know, you have to remember that we're still full-time students. We're still doing these things. I was a computer science major. That was a lot of work on my end, but I wanted to do it that bad. And everybody else had their full loads and jobs even. And so we had to figure out what to expect out of all that. And how can each person complement each other? We had to, we ended up splitting ourselves into groups of about three people per group. And we had to figure out, OK, if you wanted to do editing, let's go put you in this group. If you wanted to do more organizational skills and maybe like writing content, like the first round of content, let's put you in that group. Just all about how to complement each other and who works the best with each other. Next slide. So thinking of the essentials. You actually see a screenshot over here of one of our first pages of the toolkit, which is awesome. So that's just literally what is where we are. So you can feel free to browse that after the PowerPoint, whatever works. So thinking of the essentials, we had to think about what we wanted to go into our projects. So what do we want out of it? You know, as students, what do we want out of it? As the creators, what do we want out of it? Just there's so many things to get out of this toolkit. What is our goal as a team and as a project? So as a team, I decided for us that we really wanted to get to know each other and that we really wanted to have bonding time and I didn't just want it to be a formal process. And getting to know each other actually made our experience much smoother and it made it more fun and we actually looked forward to meetings versus kind of dredging them and saying, I don't know if I really want to go. Is this going to work? So I think that team bonding is what really helped us as students. And then now we're all friends and acquaintances and we don't feel alone in this battle of, not battle, but in this movement of open education. What should meetings consist of? We actually, we started off by having really formal agendas in the beginning and we kind of rotated to less formal agendas but working sessions and then we eventually form a transition straight to pretty much working sessions where we had announced what we're going to do for that day and just go for it. And that worked well for us but it took a little bit of transition to figure out what was the best for our team. What are reasonable due dates, you know, with our full schedules and all our different schedules, what made sense? How else can we benefit those involved? You know, as I said before, it was really important for us to benefit the other students involved and make sure that each one of us could have takeaways from this because half of the reason that we were involved in this toolkit is because we wanted to participate and help our peers and speak in different things and have unique opportunities. And how can we get external individuals involved? So the whole idea of like, we're creating this toolkit is to make sure that other students from other schools can get involved too, may not know anything but they just want to help out and they think it's a really interesting topic. So those are just some of the examples of what we went through and just ideas of what went through the process of thinking what's going to go into this book. Next slide. So the Frozen Con, they just made an intro here so we can keep going. Next slide. Yeah, there we go. Okay, so another screenshot of our book over on the side there and we are activism. So the Frozen was understanding how to work with individuals in different locations. You know, for us as young individuals, we don't do webinars as often. We don't go to conferences and have an opportunity to even speak. If we go to conferences, we usually just listening in the back, just like in a classroom. Practicing and editing and curation skills, just the fact of being able to get involved and make a book was awesome. The opportunity to have students fully control a program with advisement. You know, students don't have many opportunities but they get to control things today and this is slowly changing and I've seen this change so much in the time I've been involved with OPEN. But the opportunity to have students just fully control it but at the same time have somebody that can comfortably ask for advisement. You know, like, hey, is this presentation look okay? Getting to work on something bigger than our university and colleges. A lot of people in OPEN or a lot of students I should say, I think they kind of get the idea that they're confined to their university. You know, like, they'll go talk about their university and it's all about their university but the truth is that the community is one of the hugest parts and nobody's in there alone and everybody's trying to get the same pool so why shouldn't we share our ideas and why shouldn't we collaborate more and go to each other's campuses and like advocate for each other? Getting into it, or I said that one. Collaborating on each other's programs, once again on our calls, there'll be times where one of our students would be like, you know, I really want to do an outreach program but I've never done one before. Does anybody have any ideas for a campus, you know, that has commuting students? And then we'd all picture different ideas and propose what we had and that was like a super neat space because it didn't just like end the conversation on web searches and conversations with ourselves. So having a safe space for students to open up about an issue that may be sensitive around some faculty. So that's the whole idea of sometimes faculty can be sensitive to be like, why aren't you making your textbook? You never want to make it a defensive thing but having students or a group come together and just be able to talk about that openly is just so nice. And then just getting to know other students in OER, you know, as I said before, the community in OER is one of the things that's always attracted me to it and to be able to have other individuals my age especially and that I know can help carry on the legacy has been so revolutionary. So now let's go into the cons. So the cons for time conflict issues with students, that's always a problem. You know, we have classes at different times, different school schedules, as there's semester and quarters that would start confusing sometimes. As far as technicalities go, Google Docs was able to handle a lot of our formatting. So we actually had to reformat our book a lot which took a lot of time and just kind of a waste of it. Having to track down individuals for MIA, you know, students sometimes just kind of get missing and you're like, where'd they go and you can't get in contact with them so you just kind of work with what you have. And not having a program like this exists before and having to model it ourselves. That was a whole process in itself and just kind of trial and error in a lot of different ways. Next slide. So what does this mean for you? For students out there, it means a chance for you to get involved and get your other campus members involved. For faculty and other administrators and staff out there, it's an opportunity for you to hand this to students and say, hey, this is something super cool that you can be a part of and you have no idea how much impact it can make because everything you do matters. Our toolkit helps all levels to gain understanding and it started by making a plan and acting out in acting on their campus. And I just wanted to mention as well, this is the cover of our toolkit over here is really nicely well done by one of our students, Trudy. And we were sponsored by the Michelson 20 Millie Mines Foundation which is a super awesome opportunity. We had a great time working with them. They helped keep us on track and also helped us get the resources we needed right away. So just really quick, some of the chapters of the toolkit that covers are what is OER? How to create an OER? How to market OER? I like marketing. OER activism and just some basic questions. Now all these topics go way more into death. There's everything from student government to just campaigns and even how to write an email. But these are just some of the basic topics I wanted to go over to make sure you guys had a broad overview of what's going on. Next slide. So our final toolkit will be released most likely by April, 2020. That's our plan as of this moment. Right now we're having a professional editor go through it just to make sure. And for more released information, it will be posted on the OER Commons, but you can follow me especially on Twitter that seems to be where all the open stuff is happening at NASA tax. I'll just, you can probably get a copy of this slideshow afterward if you have issues or just take a screenshot. But thank you guys so much for your time and I'm gonna pass off to Jennifer. Hello, this is Jennifer. So I first got involved in OER advocacy through my position as the Affordable Learning Solutions Student Ambassador at San Jose State University. And I was also a lead in the OER Student Advocacy Group with the Michelson 20 Million Mines Foundation that now we mentioned. And I played a active role in running the toolkit. What I'm gonna talk about today is some of the events that I'm hosting at San Jose State and how we can get students who replicate that on their campuses even without a program like Affordable Learning Solutions. So Affordable Learning Solutions, also known as ALS, is a CSU-wide initiative to make college more affordable for students. And since the beginning of the program at San Jose State in 2012, the focus has been on encouraging and supporting faculty to make the switch over to using OER or low-cost resources in their courses. My goals as a student ambassador are to first, to gauge student attitude towards textbook costs on campus. Second, to inform students of ALS resources. And third, to get students on board as OER advocates. And why we need students as advocates is because students have a way of reaching faculty that librarians and other faculty usually don't because they take the course with the faculty. They know first hand how the faculty teaches and if they're equipped with the knowledge of finding and using OER, they can become the strongest advocates in getting faculty to make the adoption and switch over. As a student ambassador and over our advocate, like I feel like it's important to get to know the campus and the student body. In the activities and events that we host, we want to make sure that students understand what to understand that textbook costs directly affect them. Students are the ones buying the textbooks and that makes textbook costs strictly a student's burden. So here in this presentation, I'll talk about events and activities that I held at San Jose State University that students can replicate on their campuses to understand the textbook climate on their campus and really gauged in the interest into OER and OER Advocacy. First to gauge student attitude towards textbook costs, we renamed Open Ed Week on our campus to textbook affordability week and shifted the focus towards students. And for each textbook affordability week, we try to hold at least three events for our students. At these events, we ask students about their financial struggles and like in addition to textbook costs and what we get back from students are housing troubles, food insecurity, and these are things that you see on all campuses. And so to help them, we share information on textbook saving resources that can at least cut down on the cost of their textbooks and we finish up by letting them know what ALS is doing and that there are solutions available. Some of the events that we have at these textbook affordability weeks are coffee and snacks while tabling. We had a round table discussion and we also invited guest speakers to talk about their like faculty to talk about their process of adoption and also just librarians who are very passionate about Open. So we try to have three things that are all of our tabling events, laptops, food and librarians. The laptops are to help students to locate savings on the spot. Students come to us with their textbook list and we help them find their textbook for free or we help locate the best savings. Keeping in mind that food insecurity is a big issue on campus and we provide food at all of our events, not whole meals but also just having some snacks so that students can come and grab some on their way to class or on their way to work or on their way home. ALS is housed in the library so we also have programs to make sure that our librarians are up to date with OER resources and are ready to help direct students to those resources. One of the events that helped a lot in understanding the textbook climate and the student body was the round table discussion. It was a facilitated discussion with questions that invited conversation around textbook costs. The students were allowed to talk about anything they wanted to as long as it was around financial struggles and textbook costs and if they strayed too far away from the original topic, I would ask another question to keep the discussion on track. And at the event, there were only students in attendance to create a safe space to discuss how students deal with textbook costs because a lot of them work jobs, you know, one or two jobs. I myself was working three jobs at one time just to pay for my education. And some of them I didn't even know what torrenting was and they really lacked a sense of, like they didn't know what copyright was and they didn't know that torrenting was illegal and all they did was look for the PDF version online and they said, oh, there are free versions online and I just get that. Some of the round table questions were, what are some pressing financial struggles do you have as a student? How do you feel about current textbook costs and have you used some of the textbook saving resources online? And along with the financial struggles and textbook costs, we also talked about learning management systems about students liking everything to be in one place, as well as their frustration with having to pay for homework and supplementary materials as they felt that faculty are just lazy in this aspect of grading that they would have students pay like $9,200 for a homework system. Last semester, we launched a digital storing contest to invite students to share their unique experience with textbook costs. The general theme was textbook affordability, but to give students an idea of where to start, we asked them about their background and where they're from, their goals for their future, financial struggles that they might have and like at the start of the semester, when students have to pay for tuition, when they have to pay for rent, groceries and adding up to that textbooks, how do they feel at the beginning of the semester? And also, how does having or not having a textbook affect them in their courses? We also just wrapped up a contest. It was a, what do you mean textbook contest? And it's based off of a card game that's been pretty popular. We launched this contest as a creative and fun way for students to express their textbook struggles with relatable means, that means that students all across campus, all across the nation can, or all across the world can relate to. So this week for Open Ed Week, we actually posted the memes on the King Library's Instagram stories, asking simple questions like, oh, is this relatable or are textbook expensive? And just here are some of the examples of the memes that we created and that students submitted. Buying the textbook after failing the first exam, MFW, and by the way, MFW stands for my face when, I assure you I checked it first to see if they were appropriate before posting. And for this last one, we understand that textbook costs are expensive and can be holding back students from taking another course, graduating on time, taking a break, or going on vacation. It's similar to the question, what would you rather spend money on that students have been giving us answers on wanting to go on vacation, transportation issues, paying for rent, I knew clothes and things like that. So our textbook cost is holding students back from doing things, like hanging out with friends, participating in extracurricular activities. We wanna make this relatable to students because know that because of that extra cost, students have to give up something else. Now that we've gotten some student feedback and assessed the textbook climate on campus, we wanted to spread awareness of ALS efforts and resources on campus. And we did this through partnering with other students with other resources and programs on campus, like the Student Success Center and the Educational Opportunity Program. And we gave workshops to those student mentors, to the students who thought I would help, the first generation students and students who choose not to buy textbooks. And the reason why we targeted the Student Success Center and the EOP program students were, because they are the students who we know are struggling in their classes and are struggling financially, first generation students as well, even if they have a job, even if they work, they still have to spend money to help their family. So not all of that is going towards textbook costs. Next slide. So the two workshops that we gave were, how to save money on textbooks, titled Saving Sparkling's Money on Textbooks, and how to navigate e-textbooks. Some students haven't heard of, some students know about resources on campus, but they don't know how exactly to get to those resources. And that was what was addressed in the, how to save money on textbooks workshop. The other workshop, how to navigate e-textbooks, was created to help students build up their skills in digital literacy and get comfortable using e-textbooks. As a handful of students still prefer print over digital, but we know that with digital, with OER, a lot of the content is digital, and digital offerings are also cheaper considering that they don't have to go through production and delivery and distribution. And so we also had, sorry, we also gave a handout of textbook saving resources and tips were handed out at each workshop. And in the future, we hope to create a workshop to help students on how to advocate for OER and how to advocate OER to faculty to accomplish having students as release OER advocates. So to conclude my part of this webinar, I wanna make sure that students understand they don't need to be associated with a program to hold events on campus and to bring attention to textbook costs. The events that I mentioned here can be carried out on any campus and to get more ideas on what you can do on campus, think about the events that students that you would go to as a student, what events are popular on your campus. If you can't hold a contest, host an event with a student award or can create means for fun. By the way, we also have a section in the toolkit that describes how to hold events and what events you can hold on campus and it will be mentioned there too. So look forward to that. And also just one last tip, just be creative and have fun. Students are also, you know, they have, they're taking classes, they're going to, they're going to, they have jobs, they want a job in the professional field, but they also just need a break and just need to relax and have fun. So when you think about your events, instead of adding more stuff for them to learn, make it fun and make it enjoyable. And I'll give it over back to you, Caitlin. Yeah, so I think one of the really cool things about the toolkit that both of them worked on is it's a really great example of some of the principles of open, remixing information and adapting it and adding new information. Back in the early 2010s, the student purgs released a toolkit for student activists that are interested in Open. It's just been so exciting to watch students take the toolkit that we made, add new information, add new chapters, localize it and just like really live up to the potential of these open resources that we created and share with the community and watching the community continue to add resources back in. That's the whole idea. So what I wanna talk about is bringing these concepts to your campus and I've broken this in to three different steps. So the first is you gotta figure out what it is that you wanna change or add to the conversation or the policies where you are. The second is figuring out who has the power to make the decision here. And then the last thing that you should spend time thinking about is what does that person or sometimes a group of people need to see in order to make that change? So the first step is really deciding what it is you want to advocate for. Now, whether this is the creation of an open textbook grant system or making sure that textbook costs are included on the registration page of your school, you should check to see what already exists. And a great way to do that is to set up a meeting with your campus' library or their OER working group to kind of see what the lay of the land is before you jump in. So let's talk about deciding what it is you wanna change. So this is goal setting. You should set a goal. And then this is a really helpful acronym to see if your goal really measures up and it's going to be helpful and useful. So what this means is you should choose something tangible. You want it to be something specific. So next thing is you want it to be measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. So for example, I would say that raising awareness is usually not a strong goal to work towards because when do you know when the awareness has been raised? When do you know when you've met your goal and can move on to the next step? You can't because there's not a timeline. There's no measurable amounts and it's not really specific. Now, the reverse of that would be we wanna get the STEM department's introductory classes to be using open at a 30% rate by the year 2024. So you know exactly who you're targeting, the STEM department's introductory level classes. You want 30% of those introductory classes to be using an open textbook, which is pretty realistic. And then also you have a timeline by 2024, which allows you to make a plan. But you can't do this on your own. You're gonna have to find the people who can make this decision. And then you're also gonna need people to help you make your case. So the first is you have to figure out who it is that can decide that goal that you're working towards. Now for some goals, it's going to be a department chair or a departmental working group. So for that STEM example, you might be working with the department chair for the chemistry, biology, computer science, department in order to hit your goal. For some other goals, it will be something higher. So let's say you wanna create an open textbook grant program at your university. You might be working with the vice chancellor or even the chancellor or president of your school. And then some of the goals that people have around these issues tend to be more technical. So think creatively about who ultimately makes the decision. So if you're trying to get textbook prices included on the registration page, so students can make informed financial decisions, that might actually be the technology officer or dean or I might go through the registrar and that's gonna depend on the school. And then let's say you're trying to make some really big system wide changes, something like the Rutgers open textbook grant system. Then you might have to go to the board of trustees or the regents. So you have to decide who it is and it's gonna give you that final yes or check off for the goal that you've set. But also you can't do this alone. So you're gonna have to find some friends along the way to help you. I would suggest reaching out to the library. They tend to be one of the best groups when it comes to working on open and advocating on open, they're experts on information. Student governments are often very impacted by this but think outside the box when it comes to student governments. Don't just go to the president of the SGA, they're often very busy and they might have different goals. Then you do. So they might be focused on campus safety or food insecurity. You might be wanting to work instead with the vice president of internal affairs. And then also reach out to students who are most impacted whether that's through your own social network or through student groups on campus. And then faculty and administrators, we gotta work with them too. Faculty are the ones using open. So I would suggest looking for faculty that are currently already working to use an open textbook, have written one or care about affordability issues in general. For example, some faculty don't use an open textbook but they make all of their readings available on line rather than making students by the book. And those faculty are gonna be a great ally as well. So once you've found your people, once you know who it is, you're gonna have to ask. You're gonna need to take some actions to make the case. So the first step is you should meet with that decision maker, ask them because there's a possibility that just might say yes. But there's a good chance they're gonna have some concerns and not say yes right away. So you should set up activities, actions and events that answer the concerns that your decision maker has raised. So I've given some really common concerns that we've run into with decision makers. The chief among them being, are faculty gonna be okay with this? Are faculty gonna be upset when we try to advocate for these issues? I would suggest the best way to answer that is to build faculty support and be able to show it. You can do this as simply as getting faculty to sign on to a letter of support or passing a Senate resolution through the faculty Senate. That tends to be kind of intensive and take some time. So plan out what you think is gonna answer that concern. In some cases, all they need is a faculty letter of support. In some cases, they're gonna need to see the whole Senate voting on this. And then if they're really close and just you think they need to see the visibility, you can reach out to one of those faculty allies already using Open who already cares about affordability issues and ask them to write an opinion editorial for the campus paper. We've had faculty do this across the country and we think it's so helpful, not only to show the decision maker that this is something faculty value, but we know that faculty listen to other faculty when making decisions about their courses. Sometimes decision makers are worried that do students even care about this? And this one I think is a little bit easier to put aside because passing a student government resolution often takes a lot less time than a faculty Senate resolution. But also you can hold a textbook broke table. And if you just put into Twitter or Google tech hashtag textbook broke, you can see some excellent examples of schools and students around the country holding these tables and putting out their effort into the public. Sometimes the faculty or administrators or the decision maker may not even realize that this is a big problem. Textbook prices have gone down in price a little bit over the past couple of years and they're not near, then they're way more expensive than they would have been 20, 30, maybe even more years ago when that decision maker was in college. So for these you can just show student data. You can hold a student survey on campus to show how much they're buying, what it's holding them back from. You can host student panels and invite the decision maker, faculty, administrators to come or students can share their personalized stories or more directly have students submit letters to the editor to the campus paper talking about the struggles they've had buying textbooks and that really illustrates the student need. One of the most common ones though, above all else is there are competing priorities in running a university or college and making sure that faculty or the decision maker are prioritizing this over the many other things they have to prioritize can be a challenge. And you can do this and you can kind of answer that concern by showing media covering student savings, investing in open textbooks. It's a really big bang for your buck when it comes to student savings. And if you can show that, it really lifts this up when it comes to priorities. You can also show that faculty want this by holding faculty panels. And then this one I think is really fun. Well, this program be used and students are really excellent at marketing. They can get the message out to faculty whether it is through direct conversations, creating posters, posting events, sending emails that are campus-wide to faculty. There are all sorts of opportunities to make sure that this program will be used and well used. So that way not only do you get that initial support, whether it is to create a grant program or to create a working group or any of the other things that you could be working towards, you can make sure that once you have them, people are actually using them. So once again, figure out what it is you wanna do and change. Figure out who it is that can give you that yes or no. And then figure out what it is that can convince that person to say yes to you and create the program and change that you wanna see. So something I run into a lot is when I'm talking with students, student governments, faculty, administrators, librarians, is there's a desire to wanna wait until you have all your ducks in a row to start doing things. I always like to close things with a Fred Ross senior quote. He was a community organizer in California in the 1950s. But if you wait until you have all the time, people and resources to go ahead, you may still never get there because you didn't fill the interval with action needed to get you there. So don't wait until you have every single thing that you need to create something that's perfect. Start taking action as soon as possible to get you even closer, so that when you have the things that you need, you're just ready to launch. So don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So I wanna open it up to questions from the audience. And I put my contact information up there as well. One of the things that I do is I do consulting calls with student groups, student governments, faculty, librarians, even administrators to help them come up with a plan to build support for open textbook and campus textbook affordability initiatives on their campus. But I wanna open it up to the audience to ask questions that they may have. Does Jennifer or Natalie have anything they wanna add just to wrap up? I know I think everything that we said was awesome. I really appreciate everybody who tuned into the call saying that there was 25 people on the call. At one point it was awesome. I really appreciate all your guys' time as a student. And even though I just graduated, I still have the mentality as a student, I can't thank the community enough for everybody's time. I don't have much to add on my part either. Again, I'm just gonna shout out to Natalie there. Thank you for those who attend. If you have any questions, please let us know. Contact Kaylynn, me or Natalie or even Nuna. And they will get to us. They'll get your questions to us. All right, big thank you to Jennifer, Natalie and Kaylynn for their work today and in the future. Thank you so much for having us.