 Welcome to everyone. Thank you everyone for taking the time out of your day to join us today for our presentation called embracing open for all initiatives in support of the community. Thank you for your attention and sharing. We're joining you today from Thompson Rivers University. Thompson Rivers University campuses are located on the traditional and unseated territory of to come with us to call within Williams Lake. These are within the traditional and unseated territory of to come with peoples. The region we serve also extends into the territories of the staff him and Clapma, New Hawk, she'll go to him. So one of the purposes of our presentation today is to share the concept of kids alcohol notes. And so this is a short steam term, and the term means that we are all related and interconnected with nature, each other and all things. campus is one of the principles that guides TR use TR use institutional vision statement, and it flows through all that we do including our approach to open education. This has been growing sustaining a culture of open on and off campus for over 40 years. This culture of open includes valuing inclusion transformation sharing and connection. So during this presentation today, we'll share how the open education initiatives at TR you are interconnected. They provide many opportunities for faculty and staff to enter offer collegial support and take on an approach that we hope is sustainable and sustainable. So what we'll do to start off with. Well, we've acknowledged the place that we're at I'm going to next up discuss or introduce the team that will be presenting today. We'll tell you a little bit about TR you. And I know seeing some of these familiar names in the chat you're already familiar with our campus but maybe not everyone is. We'll discuss the evolving nature and scope of open initiatives that to hear you and then talk about the impact and connections of that. So this is our marvelous team with this presentation together for you today, and who are all interconnected with each other, and the campus as well as the wider community. Running our society is Ken Monroe he's a senior instructional designer and open learning. Next up we have Brenda Smith, who's our open education librarian. My name is Catherine I'm the director of the Center for excellence and learning and teaching, and Christine Miller who I'm not sure is quite running from class yet. But she's the open education grant facilitator and also an assistant teaching professor in the university employment preparation program. So the four of us came together to describe some of the exciting activities that we have going on. But the first thing we'd like to do is learn a little bit about all of you. So we're going to pop a link in the chat you can follow. But you can also put the go to menti.com and put the code in in this screen, but you still to pick up that direct link in the chat and that might be the easiest way. Or you can see what Ken's typing on the screen there eight four one nine eight zero one nine. And then answer two questions for us we want you to know, how did you first get involved in open just give us a few words. And then, um, the next question is, we want to know where you're from. What's your location. So give us a couple minutes and I'll pull up the slides so that can can share. So can I just send you the link to the, the live results so you want to pull those up. This is great so this is how we all first got involved in open. Asked to join a committee, lots of us. Oh, and people are putting locations that I should have just waited and like you click next to the next slide but that's okay too. BC campus, oh yeah. There's a lot of trash there can there's lots popping up independent research, wonderful project managing a sustainability project hired at a center. Awesome, developing an open course and that's something we definitely want to support here project managing a sustainability project. This is great. And so our next one is our little map so hopefully you've been able to click forward can you click over to the map of where folk are at. So we've got some good population we've got some folk coming from all over the place here, which is nice to see. We're not all BC based and somebody has a cool location somewhere in France or Germany, but we're seeing we're mostly North American based. Um, so that's, I think, all I've got and I turn it back over to. Okay. Yeah, the sad thing I always see in that picture of our introductions it reminds me that I have to wear glasses now, which is kind of sad. At any rate, about TRU Thompson Rivers University so Thompson Rivers University is a comprehensive learning centered sustainable university that serves its regional national international learners. In the province of British Columbia were located just a little bit some east of Vancouver and we have a satellite campus up here in Williams Lake. The physical campus in can loops has about 14,000 students and then we also have an open learning division which has another 11,000 students enrolled. When we talk about a comprehensive university. You'll learn a little bit more about our history but we do all sorts of different types of programs including adult basic education, trades, traditional academic programs up and into the master's level, as well as some more vocational types of courses like law and nursing and respiratory therapy. Open education, I'm just going to take you to a different H5P timeline that I built, and we'll just take a peek at that and it will give you a history of what the two institutions have done. So, in the 1970s to institutions were created caribou college was founded to serve Kamloops in the region, and then the open learning Institute was created to provide educational educational opportunities through a distance education, and you can see the funky computer logo at the time. In the 80s the Institute institutions both grew separately in Kamloops caribou college became the university college of the caribou, and the open learning Institute became the open learning agency with two core assets knowledge network and B.C. Open University open at the time was defined similarly to the UK's open university which was more to provide access to people who couldn't come to an institution. In 2005 the two institutions were amalgamated to create Thompson Rivers University as we are now. And, and with that the open learning division brought its long history of open education to the full degree granting institution. And the four pillars of open were updated to include accessibility flexibility choice and credibility. When we started in 2012, the open education initiatives began to pick up steam and we'll just listen to some description by Dr. Erwin DeVries, who was the past associate vice president of open learning and the director of curriculum development. We started with open learning and steeped in open learning back to 1978 with the original open learning Institute. When I started in 2010 the instructional design group in particular was connected to BC campus and was doing a lot of talking and exploring around OER. We started with the OERU in 2012 with a huge international meeting at TRU and as part of that we developed a collaborative course using OER. This kind of got momentum going. We had collaborations with IDs, the video unit, productions, students, the academic departments, the provost's office, library, center for teaching and learning and other universities worldwide. As we got more deeply into that we went for funding from BC campus and got going full on with other open textbooks and more engaged with open educational practices and all this continues to the present day. And so again these are listed below or John Belchon and William Little were a couple of our early adopters or creators of OER. And just to let you know this H5P element is also listed in the presentation document so you'd be able to download the file and have access to the links which I've created in this. So in 2014, I call this sort of contributing to the OERU cause as we grew more open and brought in more people, we did different things recognizing the need to do stuff. And here's a short clip from Brian Lamb, our director of learning technology and innovation. In 2014, 2015, we had Alan Levine at TRU for a fellowship and we were struggling with ways to get more activity on the open web. We knew that tools like WordPress had a steep learning curve and there were also privacy concerns. So Alan as part of his fellowship at TRU ended up building a set of simplified authoring tools that did not require identifiable info and were easier to use. And all I really did was come up with the SPLOT acronym and we never really fully decided what it meant, but it's something like Simplest Possible Learning Online Toolkit. And you can see all the tools that Alan has been building over the years at splot.ca. TRU Open Learning is also one of the founders of the OpenETC, which is a community of educators and technologists who are sharing and collectively supporting open technology beyond the LMS in British Columbia. We're a co-op, not a service. What we ask for among our participants is that you contribute back and that contributing back can be helping others. It can be providing templates, writing tutorials, resources, whatever it is that you can contribute back to the community. As of now, the OpenETC on our WordPress multi-site is supporting, I think, around 3,000 distinct websites and also quite a large growing number of matter most spaces. And you can learn more about the OpenETC at opened.ca. Then we moved into around 2018 and we're sort of upping the ante and making connections. And so we continue to work with our friends at BC campus and numerous administrators and faculty have been recognized by BC campus for their contribution to the open education community in the province. Internally, through our provost office, we created our own OE grants program for the creation of OER by faculty. With a registrar, we began mapping all of the courses for zero textbook costs and have marked them into the university calendar. And then we also created an open education working group to serve as a forum to compile and share open educational initiatives amongst faculty and students. Which brings us close to the 2020 area now. And we're starting to look at more research and into open education and open educational research practices. And we'll just listen to a short clip from Michelle Harrison, Dr. Michelle Harrison who is involved in this. Hi everyone. I'm Michelle Harrison and I'm an instructional designer and assistant professor at Tier U Open Learning. And I've been involved in supporting development of OER for many years. As Tier U continues to expand its OER and OEP initiatives, research is an important aspect as we try to gauge the impact of adopting new practices, including design frameworks, platforms and open pathways and programs. Over the past few years, myself and other colleagues have been working on research projects that consider how OEP impacts the institution at various levels. This includes student uses of OER, student perceptions of OEP and themselves as open practitioners, the role and values of instructional support in advocating, and the development of a tool to assess the impacts of OEP at the institutional level. So the question might be, how do we take a critical approach to OEP that allows us to open up new spaces for learning and teaching while balancing other issues such as privacy and safety. All right. And so that sort of brings us to a close of our 50 year journey of two separate institutions to becoming one institution and a sort of a medium size one at that in terms of how we've addressed open over the course of time. And so we'll just go back to our presentation and carry on. So students are at the center of everything that we do. Our choose to our student union became interested in open textbooks in about 2016, and they have been great collaborators ever since they led the charge for advocating for OER grants, and Ken and I presented with them at every single faculty council, the Budget Committee of Senate, and the Public Planning and Priorities Committee has called to build support for having an OER grant program. They've been active participants in our open education working group, and they've supported the library's open access activities and also helped co really led the co organization of our 2020 Open Ed Week event just before everything locked down. In 2018, Truso established Awards of Excellence, which where they give out up to four awards every year to staff, faculty or administration who demonstrated excellence in different areas and at least one faculty or administrator who is an open supporter has been recognized every year since that time for a total of eight people getting awards from them, which is kind of exciting. Most students are involved in OER creation and adoption, usually as research assistants for professors working on adapting and creating OER, and they do anything from writing actual sections, press work editing, creating images, videos and HIP content. They've also been involved in attending focus groups in OER writing experience that we've held so that they can share their ideas about projects, what they want in a text, what they don't want in a text. Suggestions of organization, things that they want included, general plan sharing and the planning of it. And the other way that they're becoming more and more involved is through open pedagogy projects. So this is starting to grow across campus while there are some larger projects such as the UN SDG Open Pedagogy Fellowship, which we'll talk about later. There are many individual faculty who are undertaking open pedagogy projects so students can actively engage in open and there seems to be a few more every single year and it's starting to build. Next slide, Ken. Thanks. I'd like to highlight some of the support initiatives that Tier U has developed that we have to promote opportunities to the community to get involved and to find ways that they can bring open practices into their own teaching and learning. The key of all this is outreach. It's getting the message out to new people. It's reminding people who've heard the message before, and then welcoming those people into the community wherever they're at. Because when you build awareness, everything starts to grow. It's adopting OER, which leads to adapting or creating it, which leads to open pedagogy and other open practices. It's the outreach is what you need to start to build that snowball. So look for opportunities to promote open institutions. Our new faculty orientation sessions have a section on open education to get people that are new to the institution to know right up front that open is supported and valued here. We have booths at campus open houses and in non pandemic times at the student barbecues. And then we'll take teaching practices club in the bed where faculty share their teaching ideas and there are open related sessions at it every single year for open and open access week. We've given up cupcakes. We've had online and in person sessions. We've had full multi day events. It totally depends on our capacity from year to year, but we always try to do something that's local. We try to present at faculty councils. Our goal is to do it once a year and we'll see how that happens. But as the outreach build things start to snowball and that's when things lead to change. Our former provost was explicit that she wanted all tenure and promotion standards documents to include a statement of support for work in the open in that particular discipline when they come up for revision. So far 17 of the 33 standards documents have now include statements of open and the remaining 14 are in the process of being revised. The other big changes as open education library and I did inventory of every single campus course in the fall of 2020 and the winter 2021 semesters to identify all of the courses that were either zero textbook costs and or using OER. And I reviewed data from the banner registration system our bookstore and what had been self identified to BC campus and when I compiled it all. I thought it was very little overlapping information and it also missed courses that I knew for a fact where we are or ZTC. So I shared my findings the university librarian the provost and can I include it in our presentations to the faculty councils in winter 2021. And that led to a meeting with me the university librarian open learning the registrar's office and bookstore where we all agreed that the information should be centralized accessible transparent and highlighted. So the registrar's office agreed to create a formal structure to obtain this information, and then mark courses in the banner system, so students could identify their ZTC courses at the point of registration, and then share all of that confound information out to the bookstore and to the library. So, but we wanted to get support. So then we presented our plan to three standing Senate committees, our student success teaching and learning international committee. For all the outreach to have any traction, you need to have supports to provide ways to connect with each other to share ideas frustrations and build that capacity and community. And it's all about providing links so that people know who they can reach out to, and to find out what support is available so we have set up, we have set up all of our support connections to be related and interconnected. We want to provide mentorship advocacy library support communities of practice and collaboration opportunities and through our grants to provide course release or monetary compensation for the development. But as open education librarian the bulk of my job is to support open at TRU. Mostly it's finding only are navigating creative commons, but I'm also part of all of the other supports that are listed on this page and I actively look for ways to connect with people who are interested in open and then supporting them. But I'm not really unique. Most of the various support connections have some overlapping members so that many people are involved in various different arms of open support it's just that my job is in particularly devoted to it. So I'm going to let the rest of our team share more about our open education working grants, our communities of practice and our development grant. Right. And so, we'll start with just our open education working group. You know, as you may have surmised over the course of doing things. A lot of it was just organically done and people developing things and and it got to a point in time where we had to really rationalize and try to grow everything by collecting all of that together. So we developed our open education working group, which was again to foster and support a culture of inclusive open education initiatives. And through that group, we have meetings, the chair and the vice chair are elected by the membership on a, on a on a yearly basis, or actually a bi we buy yearly basis so there's always some turnover, and also some continuity. It's inspired by some of the faculty council presentations which Brenda and I made we came up with our been education at him so the nucleus being open education and the four electrons circle circling the the nucleus are. We are textbooks, we are resources, including open textbooks, open publishing, open research practices and open pedagogy. And so we found that we've moved beyond just textbooks and those sorts of things. There's many accesses to open publishing. There's really good adoption of open research practices which are now being required by shirk grants and those sorts of things. And like Brenda said open pedagogy and open practices, people were doing these things on campus but there wasn't a format to share all of those activities. So through these communities of practices we've started in each of the electrons, we have faculty again coming together, learning and sharing resources. And then we also responded to external events and so we responded to a request for proposal from Kwantlen actually to join the UN Sustainable Development Goals Open Pedagogy Fellowship which links faculty from three BC universities and four US based community colleges in the creating of interdisciplinary and reusable assignments. The project as a whole has 44 faculty covering 14 of the 17 UN SDGs and from TRU we have seven faculties which are including roughly 100 students in all of the courses. So if you're interested in learning more about this partnership you can contact Dr. Michael Mills or there is a website which is available as well. So the next part of our work. Many of you, if you're at Cascadia in the spring you might have heard us talk about the OER DG program. What it is is a funding scheme that we have here at TRU to support faculty who wish to adopt, adopt, create or integrate OER as primary materials within their TRU courses. So this isn't just open textbooks. It also includes supplementary materials, software or revisions of previously created materials. So the funds can be used for course release, hiring research assistants, adding technical expertise or also some faculty take it as a financial incentive. One of the challenges with this project is that it is jointly administered. So it is jointly administered by the Library Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Open Learning Division and the Grant Steering Committee has multiple stakeholders on it. But that challenge is also an opportunity in that it really does represent the way that this is networked and connected across the university and so we're hoping that this project is going to continue forward and we're going to find some funding to continue it because we've had so far 31 funded projects and we'll have 34 by next week. The key part of the open education development grant program is the open education facilitator and we're hoping Christine was going to be here to talk about her role because she's really the navigator of the open process and this is the thing I think that is the most critical component of the success we've had and the overwhelming response we've had to these grant applications. And so that person, the OER facilitator is a faculty member that we've released from two courses to teach or to facilitate the development of the open education grant process and so this person is somebody who's gone through it on their own, and they're able to navigate press books, the range of different options for open and work as a faculty peer to faculty members who have gone over going through this for the first time. So the person offers so Christine who's doing it right now offers support for applicants workshops and connections to other services, but also has a wider understanding of the landscape of other funding opportunities that might be available to often through BC campus or other discipline specific groups. Within that as well we've had a number of really interesting projects that have come forward that have focused on equity diversity inclusion and being responsive to that within open educational resources and open practices. In terms of EDI and OER, equity for us refers to the removal of systematic barriers including the cost and access issues to resources. Diversity is a representation of a diverse range of people perspectives and lived experiences, and inclusion is about ensuring that all people are valued and supported. So for the projects we wanted to highlight are our stock photo collection of Indigenous people in education, implementing truth and reconciliation calls to action, a textbook for the faculty of law, a history textbook on the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and then a biology textbook looking at localization and internationalization. So we do as a adjudication committee look for opportunities to promote OER that go beyond open to also be inclusive. So, providing the different support connections to us demonstrates our commitment to supporting faculty and choosing how they teach to providing representation, currency, localization, student faculty engagement, and to grow our open culture here. And it seems to be working. Roughly 36% of course sections in the past academic year were ZTC or primary inventory that I did. I don't have the fall 2021 members yet. Over the years we've had, we are estimating that there's been over 40 OER created at Tier U, and many more adapted and adopted. So we've had over 60 OER grants on the applications, even though we were only able to fund half of them. And even with our latest round, we have eight people that applied for three grants, which is going to be a difficult decision to have to make. And Tier U faculty have been awarded over the years over 23 BC campus grants to support open and at Tier U we're estimating that over 465 faculty have individually engaged in open in some direct way. So providing the many opportunities and avenues for people to enter the world of open and providing support at the point of need or want in a way that values inclusion, transformation, sharing and connection as it relates to consultant those is our guiding principle at Tier U and how we have sought to grow and sustain a culture of open over the years. So kitchen. So are there any questions. Let's see any questions so far. Terry I like the other, other acronyms for squat I remember many years ago, Brian Alan to the session where they actually had a slide a different meetings for the work for the acronym and it had like 12 different suggestions of what squat could be questions for us I have questions for others around how their grant programs maybe running in a similar different fashion or how their campuses or campuses connected to we are in different ways because I think as much as one of the reasons we wanted to share what we're doing but we also really want to learn from everyone else and find out what we could be doing better to encourage diverse participation. So it was nice to hear their voices of everybody coming in we were happy to be able to include them. I think that was something we missed actually saying at the beginning I miss saying at the beginning and that's my fault is that as much as the four of us and Christine who was able to make it representing this is there you know we could have worked with 50 other people probably on campus and asked them to come and presented of these projects because there is that really level, high level of involvement and engagement, maybe not 50 but probably I mean Ken what would you say like 20 other people would be equally adept at presenting sort of the range of experiences or have had some entry point into this where they'd be able to provide their own experiences at a high level. Oh thanks brand. You're more than welcome everybody can get in touch with us if they want our emails are on the front but if you can't remember that you can always email Celtic tier you dot CA CELT and I can feed that out to the rest of the group. So that in the chat. If you want more information about it. I think it's just worth mentioning you know that that the growth has always been supported at an institutional level and and you know right now we're we're in a situation where we're having a search for a new provost and and we are a little concerned that you know the open initiatives that we've started are not going to be as well supported and so you know we're in the midst of a pretty serious lobbying. Movement towards making sure that in that next search questions about the new persons or the candidates expertise and open is going are going to be asked and they're going to be evaluated as part of the job. You know it's never ending, there's always challenges, but that institutional level of support is what we need to see right now in our, where we're at, because the grant funding program has not been institutionalized and, and that's the thing where we can really show some some really good impact locally in terms of our faculty involvement. Like Catherine said you know we've supported about 30 but we've had 60 applications and in this last round, where we're going to be evaluating for three proposals or accepting three proposal we have eight submissions. And it just shows that again like the snowball is getting bigger, like in Brenda's picture and and you know you just always need to be at it there's there's no sitting back and expecting these things to continue to happen on their own. And I also think it helps as you make connections, you can share the load. So it's not just one or two people that are being always the voice and always the connection because you can get tired and burnout. You're having multiple people to share the load it helps you share the load but also it keeps you inspired because you have someone to bounce ideas off of. And so sometimes when you're an institution with some people have commented on that they're just kind of getting started. It's starting to build your community, whether your community is at your institution, but sometimes before your community is at your institution you have to reach out to others at other institutions to help for that support. So that's the making those connections, whether it's internally your institution or it's externally through with other institutions like you want to contact us, we're more than welcome to talk to you about what we've done and what we wish we'd done differently and things like that. But it just that he has a way to really do it is that you really need to have connections and support to do to succeed and move forward. I'm going to throw a link in the chat to you because I think we've developed a good system for the OER grants. And so this is on Brenda's LibCal page but a framework if you're looking for frameworks to develop a grant program, which is again is something that does take resources we do have a budget for that but certainly having really clear instructions we found has made the process streamlined for everyone. And every we've done this six times now so we've worked out, I just, I just organized them this morning and put them out for adjudication so it's a pretty It takes about an hour. Yeah, I just actually I hid the documents that we have to them fill out just because. Okay. So if you're interested in seeing them please let me know and I'm more than happy to share the individual documents for what you're the but creating a budget and a timeline and scoping up the project because we're not doing it right now I just hit it. So if you want to download the presentations and the H5P file there's links in those documents to a variety of the websites that we use both internally and externally and those sorts of things so they're available that way as well. Thanks for linking there to Christine's toolkit and the with the open education resource grants and information with the working group as well so again we try to make it as findable as possible so that people who can catch up on what's been done before they get to see some examples of what's been successful. You know in the spirit of open making sure that what people are creating it you know is open to other applicants and just their students later on so trying to promote that on their behalf to but we're really trying to move in more is that it's that open is not just open textbooks so we want to support or we are going to support open textbooks, but we're increasingly becoming more involved in supporting open pedagogy and other open practices so it's sort of a way that we're sort of moving that we want to continue but we also want to build what we're doing as well and support people who want to become involved in different parts. The grant process is not part of the grant process anymore they were huge supporters in getting it in the first place, but they are not involved in the administration of the grant. At this point they do promote it, and they're big supporters of it, but they aren't actually on the steering committee or anything like that. So what we do in the grant process when we actually are adjudicating is we really look to see that we try to have a broad spectrum of different faculties and schools, different levels from whether it's adult basic education to you know, we try to have it at different, you know, first year, second year, third year we had tried to have that. So we, we try to include new voices so it's not always the same people that are getting the grant we try to. So we try to spare to space it out and to be as inclusive as possible to different projects and voices and disciplines and types of courses as well. The numbers are dwindling and so I'm not sure if we have more time or more questions or comments. Christine will be mortified that she didn't make it. Thank you. Thank you for coming. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Do feel free to reach out. We're very excited to share this with people. We might talk your ear off, but there's lots of exciting things that we have on the go. And then we're always happy to share the resources we've developed to make it easier for everyone else. Thank you to all the presenters. Have a nice day. Yeah, Clint, if I posted it in the area where it said to upload things from my profile. If you don't see it or if you can't pick it up then let me know and I'll just email directly.