 Good morning everybody. Welcome to a webinar devoted to introducing open educational resources or OER, The Big Picture. My name is James Glob, I'm here with Una Daily and we're very, very excited to be able to speak to you folks from Michigan here on October 22. We're with the Open Coursework Consortium. We'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second. Before we dive in, we want to make you aware of a couple of technical aspects of our interaction today. In the center of the screen, of course, you'll see the slides and information that we want to share with you. We'll be advancing through those as we go. On the left-hand side of the screen, you'll see, in the middle of the left-hand side, you'll see a list of participants. You'll see your name there, hopefully. You will see below that a chat window to which you can type in that your chat message will be displayed for everyone in the room to read. Also, back up where you see the list of participants, just above the list of participants, you'll see a series of emoticons or icons, a little smiley face, a raised hand, a check mark. If everybody out there could do me a favor right now and click on the check mark, that would be very helpful just to know that you can hear me and to know that you can locate that check mark. Click on a little check mark if you can find that. Just above the list of participants, there's a series of emoticons or icons. Can everybody see that? Sherry, I wonder if you can see that, or Collab or Jim, if you can see the icons. Rhonda, let's see. Collab, are you hearing us? Greg can hear us. Sherry can hear us. Collab and Jim, I wonder if you can hear us and indicate that you're hearing us by clicking on the green check mark. Jim does that. Great, thank you. And hopefully Collab, you'll be able to locate that if you could indicate in the chat if you can hear us. Okay, thank you, Luna, for helping us work through that. Okay, then you can uncheck that as well. Okay, we're going to get going then. Again, welcome to Introducing Open Educational Resources, or OER, the big picture. We are your hosts here. You can see my picture on the right-hand side of your screen, James Glap of Growth Clikes. I'm an academic dean with College of the Canyons, which is a community college in Southern California. I was telling Rhonda earlier it's in the 80s out here, and as somebody who grew up in Chicago, I'm very jealous of the snow and the cooling temperatures that you're experiencing there. I'm also, I also have the honor of serving as the president of the advisory board for the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. We are the community college voice within the larger open education movement. And Luna, do you want to introduce yourself? Oh, thank you, James. I was busy mesmerizing about that snow out there in Michigan. So James and I run the Community College Consortium, where we promote the use of open educational resources to create awareness and expand access to education. We have monthly meetings, and we have where we get together and collaborate with other OER leaders, faculty members within the community college system. And we also have monthly webinars, which you are more than welcome to attend. They are free and open to all of our colleagues, and we have community college leaders who speak about topical areas. In particular, we have one next week about open textbook adoption and sustainability, and we're going to have three speakers from statewide efforts. We'll have a speaker from California speaking about the California State University. Affordable Solutions will have another speaker from Florida who is speaking about the Orange Grove OER repository. And finally, we'll have someone from British Columbia who is speaking about their open textbook project up there, where they're creating 40 open textbooks for their highest enrolled courses. So I'm really glad to be here this morning with you, and I hope that you will continue to participate with us. Very good. Thanks, Eun, and the last thing I would like to share with everybody about our background is simply that we understand the work that you do and the value of the work that you do and the difficulty of the work that you do in advancing student learning through distance education. Eun and I are both experienced online instructors and administrators at online programs. So we certainly understand how challenging things can be, and we hope that what we're going to share with you today will help make your job a little bit easier in terms of supporting faculty innovation and expanding access for students. One word about the Open Courseware Consortium, of which we are a part of, this is the global professional organization for open education. We're pleased to say that Michigan is in the process of becoming a member. We're very pleased about that. Thanks to Rhonda Edwards. And also, I should just say thanks to Rhonda for inviting us to be here today with you. The Open Courseware mission is to advance around the world formal and informal learning through the world by sharing and use of free, open, high quality educational materials organized as courses. And you can see indicated on the map where members are located all around the world. So I think we're up to about 300 institutions now in 46 countries. The community college group within the Open Courseware Consortium is devoted to promoting the adoption of OER to enhance teaching and learning, because of course teaching and learning is what we are all about in the community colleges. In the larger open education world there are a lot of member institutions that come from the research perspective. And that's a valuable component of course of the higher education landscape. We are focused specifically on supporting community colleges through using OER to expand access to education. We support professional development through webinars such as we're doing now. And as I mentioned before, we have other webinars coming up. And we overall hope to advance the community college mission of access. Here on this next slide you see a visual representation of our membership. We're a bit heavy in the northwest and the west coast. The state of California, actually the community college system in California we're proud to say has recently become a member bringing in 112 community college members. The state of Florida is a member and then you'll see we're slowly filling out the center of the map there trying to get the middle part of the United States on board as well. What we're going to cover today, we're going to spend a couple of minutes talking about true or false in regards to OER. Then we'll underscore the importance of access to education and the role that sharing plays in that. We'll present OER as a solution or one of the solutions to the challenges regarding access to education. We'll be careful to define our terms. So for those of you who are saying what the heck is OER, I think I know what it is, but really tell me what it is. We will tell you exactly what the definition is and provide plenty of examples. We'll talk about who's funding the bigger projects and then we'll give you some tips, some practical tips for adopting open textbooks. And we hope we'll have time at the end for some questions. So moving on, let's dive into some true or false and please go ahead and indicate in the chat window or with the green check mark if you believe the following statement is true. Textbook prices have risen 82% in the last decade. How many of you think that's true? Greg agrees, Ron agrees, Tim agrees, Amy agrees. Okay, and Jim says even more. That's very possible. So yes, certainly that's true. That's the baseline number. So definitely that's true. Thank you for that. Now, how about the next statement? OER or open educational resources are all in the public domain. Or if something is OER, it's the same as saying it's in the public domain. Is that true? Tim says false. Good. Caleb says false. Ron says false. Gloria, excellent. Good, good, good. Most of you are correct. That is false. If something's in the public domain, it means that there is no copyright claim on it. The ownership has either lapsed or the owner has given up its rights, his or her rights to it. So for example, the King James translation of the Bible or Shakespeare. They're in the public domain. There are no ownership rights on that material anymore. OER could be sometimes in the public domain. So if OER, if learning materials carry a particular type of license, which we'll talk about later, a Creative Commons license, then the creator certainly has ownership over that, but the creator is saying, I own it, but please feel free to use it. I want to share it. I reserve my rights as owner, but I want you to share it. We'll talk a little bit more about that legal schema later. How about the next bullet? All open textbooks are peer reviewed. Is that true? Open textbooks are peer reviewed. That's correct, and most of you are correct. All of you who have responded are correct. That is not a true statement. Some open textbooks are peer reviewed and some are not. Some open textbooks are things could be a textbook that I've had sitting in my desk drawer for a decade. I digitize it. I put it out on the web. I say, hey, everybody, please take it and share it. But nobody's peer reviewed it. That's certainly possible. However, as Udi notes in the chat, more and more open textbooks are being peer reviewed. The open education community has, certainly from the very early days, recognized that quality control, quality assurance is key to driving adoption. And there are an increasing number of workflows within the open educational world to provide peer reviews. How about this next one? MOOCs. We couldn't have a webinar on open education without mentioning MOOCs. Are MOOCs the same thing as OER? Who would think MOOCs are the same thing as OER? Not true. Very good. I'm very impressed. Rodney, you've got a great group here. I'm very impressed. You've prepped them. You're disseminating a lot of good, accurate information out there in Michigan. That's true. MOOCs are not necessarily open educational resources. The O, one of the O's in MOOCs, massive open online courses. The O stands for open access in the same sense that a community college is open access. Anyone can take a MOOC. Anyone can register for a MOOC. Typically, they're free. But that does not mean that the content is liberated in the sense of free to move, free to be shared, free to be repurposed. If you look at the terms of use of the larger MOOC projects, Coursera, Udacity, et cetera, if you look at the fine print of their terms of use, you'll see that pretty much you're prohibited from reusing the content. And you're oftentimes prohibited from using that content in connection with one of your courses. So the O, the open in MOOC is not the same as open in open education. And finally, publisher-produced material is better than OER. How many of you think that's true? By default, publisher-produced material is just going to be better than OER. How many would agree? Gloria says no, that's not true. False exceptions exist. Absolutely. Jim says exceptions exist. That's kind of a tough one, isn't it? It's kind of a tough one. What do we mean by better? And what does the publisher-produced material get us? Publisher-produced material gets us oftentimes all the supplements, the test banks and the PowerPoint slides and the links on the website, that whole apparatus. Also, publisher-produced material has a pretty cover and it has four color illustrations. It has pagination. It has indices and so on and so forth. So that's pretty expensive to produce. It's pretty time consuming to produce. So if that's your definition of better, well, that's a tough call. However, if we're talking about the quality of the learning interaction or the quality of scholarship behind the content, the quality of thought that's gone into making the material effective and engaging for teaching and learning. Well, maybe that's not really the case that publisher-produced material is always better. So that can be a toss-up, but it's not clear cut. So thank you for that. I really appreciate that. And with that, I hope we've got you warmed up and that you've got quite a few questions already in your mind. So we're going to dive right in and talk about the relationship of textbook prices to the ecology within which we all work. So let's take a look at this slide. Textbook prices, we agree. Rows 80 have risen to 82% since 2002. On average, a 6% increase per year. We know that's two to three times the inflation rate. And on the average, not sure if this is true. Well, this is with colleges across the country, not necessarily community colleges. On average, a student spends over $1,000 annually on supplies. I apologize that I don't know this. How much would a typical semester or a typical year cost a student in Michigan? Or what's the unit price of a classic three-unit lecture course? What would that unit price be in Michigan? In other words, how does the $1,100 that a student spends on supplies cost of your courses? Do you have any numbers out there that can tell us what a typical course cost a student in Michigan or a year-long course of study? I can tell you that in California, let's see. I understand $750 for your son's books and supplies. So that's getting close. I'm thinking tuition, Jim. Good question. What would tuition cost a student? In California, and I know in California community colleges, we have a notoriously low student fee structure in California. One unit costs a student $46, so a three-unit class costs $108. So if you take an introductory history class or an introductory sociology class or psychology class, that's going to cost a student $108. So if we have a textbook that costs $200, both is twice what the tuition is. So Rhonda is guessing average tuition might be about $3,000, which tells us that the around $3,000 per semester annually. So the cost of supplies could increase the overall cost by up to a third. So that's a pretty big chunk. So what can we do to help reduce that price and that burden? And for that, I'm going to turn it over to Una, who's going to walk us through thinking through the relationship between textbook costs and student success. Una. All right. Thank you, James. Can everyone hear me? Yes. All right. So our friends in Florida at the Florida Virtual Campus who are members of our consortium, they do an annual survey with their faculty and students, and they share this with the community. This survey is about digital textbooks and open textbooks, which open textbooks, of course, are a subset of that digital textbook pie, if you will. And they ask students, how does this affect your ability to take courses? And of course, not too surprisingly, 60% of students report that they don't purchase textbooks at some point due to cost. 35% take fewer courses due to textbook cost. 31% choose not to register for a course due to textbook cost. So what we know is that only our students trying to take courses without the correct instructional materials, which is likely to affect their success, but we know that they're also going slower through the system. So they're taking fewer classes. They're extending their time to graduation and often their completion rate. So the textbooks are a big issue in terms of providing access to our students, which of course is one of our core missions at the community college. And I think overall, it's one of our societal values is providing that access. So I think most of us are faculty or we're administrators, and we know that education is about sharing. And the price of textbooks and instructional materials does definitely interfere with that. If we can't have students have access to those textbooks, they're not going to have a good learning outcome, or they're going to have a much more difficult time. And so faculty have trouble sharing their knowledge freely in this sense. And so what is one of the solutions? I think you know where I'm going with this. One of the solutions is open educational resources. This provides online access to those instructional materials on the first day of class. I think many of us who've taught before know that students don't always turn up with that textbook the first day of class. Sometimes it's money related. Often it's money related. Sometimes it's just that students, their lives are busy and getting over to that bookstore to get the book. It takes a while. And so with an online open textbook, students on day one have access to the link, and they can start using the materials. If they want to purchase a print copy, as we know that still many students do, like having a print copy, most of the open textbook repositories have a low cost print on demand option. Students are also free to print chapters or sections themselves if that makes sense financially for them. So an open textbook allows that. And finally, the quite important one, which I think James was alluding to, is open educational resources can be adapted by faculty for their students. So if there are materials in there that are out of date or perhaps are culturally not appropriate for your students, you can adapt those open textbooks and make those more appropriate for your students. To get to kind of the technical nitty gritty, open educational resources of which open textbooks, which we'll talk about are an example that we're going to talk about in some detail later on, are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain, or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others. So you can see we're getting back to that original question about, is it the same thing to say public domain and open educational resources? And we know that open educational resources is a super set. And I want to talk to you about that other pieces. So before I do that, though, I want to give you examples of what OER could be. We've talked, of course, a little bit about textbooks because that's something we really understand well from a faculty perspective and our students understand. So it really could be anything that supports access to knowledge. So the Khan Academy videos, the open courseware that's available, could be lesson plans, could be images that you use within your PowerPoints and your lecture materials. So those can all be openly licensed and freely reused. So why open? Why is openly licensed such an important concept for this particular era? Well, I don't think I have to tell anybody that the Internet came and changed our lives about 20 years ago when it started, and it's only accelerated in the last 10 years. So all of our resources today, our educational resources, are born digital. So we use a computer to generate those. We're not sitting with a pencil and paper or a typewriter anymore. And so digital enables this editing capability, which means that if you have an open textbook you're using, you could add chapters, additional chapters that your students need. You could remove chapters. Often as faculty, we find textbooks where we want to use some of the materials that the students end up having to buy the entire textbook. But with an open textbook, you can remove some of those extra chapters that may not apply and kind of get in the way when you're teaching. You can adjust reading level if that's an issue for your students. Perhaps some students come into community college without a real college level readiness. You can adjust reading level in your chapters if you need to. And then copying and distribution are free online. If your students have access to the internet, distributing these materials is free. And this continues to be an issue in rural areas, but there are ways to distribute via PDF and more and more now with mobile devices using EPUB. So we've come to the point where digital is becoming the norm. And so I'd like to ask you if you'd share with us what the cost of textbooks are that you have in your classroom. If you're a faculty and I know a fair number of you are teaching, if you wouldn't mind telling us how much a textbook costs for your students for that class. Or if you're using an open textbook already, please let us know that. Type that in the chat window for us. Do we have any teachers out there? All right. Well, thank you, Amy. So Amy says that the textbook that she uses is 130. And Amy, let us know what subject you're teaching. And Greg says that his anatomy and physiology textbook costs 260. And I'm not surprised. Yeah. Thank you for that, Amy and Greg. And last year somebody from NMC, Northern Michigan College, said that last year their textbook cost 125 and it was a Microsoft Office textbook. Yeah. And Jim says that one particular textbook in January, $237 plus 45 for electronic homework. But all electronic, no print. OK. Thank you. So we know that they're very expensive. And often when you add in the homework systems, they become really quite expensive for our students. And so I thank you for that. For sharing that, I want to talk to you a little bit about an open license and what that means. So what that means is an open license sits between copyright, which you see there, which is the little C in a circle on your far left and public domain. And it means that a material that you use or you create yourself that has this Creative Commons license, which is what we call the open license, is free to access online and it's free to print. And you can redistribute it. And one thing I think that's really important to specify is that Creative Commons sits on top of copyright. And you still as the author, if you're the author of the material, you still retain your full rights. But you were saying, I am releasing this version of my materials, my work, my creative work, with less restrictions so that people can reuse it freely. And to get into a little bit more detail about what that means is essentially there's three conditions that you can specify when you're creating a material. And that means that the license requires anyone who reuses the material to continue to attribute the original author. So you have to continue to give credit to the original author. If you want to look at these three icons that are on the right-hand side. And I'm going to start with the one that's attribute, which is the little person figure within a circle. So you have to continue to give credit to the original author if you take those materials and re-release them. And non-commercial is the next one and that is the dollar sign with the cross-out. You can optionally say you may reuse this material but you may not sell it. You may not sell it for a commercial value. That is something that many educational institutions do specify. And it's a condition that you have to think about whether that makes sense for you. And finally, the last one here, which looks like a little upside down capital G, I guess, in a circle, is the share alike. And with that condition, if it occurs on the license, and it also is an optional condition, says that if you reuse my materials, you must re-release them under the same Creative Commons license as I did. So the only actual required one is the little attribute one. And then the non-commercial and the share alike conditions are optional ones that can be specified by the copyright holder. So if you have any questions about that, please feel free to pop those in the chat window. And James and I will do our best to answer those. But if you go to the creativecommons.org, which is the URL here at the bottom, you'll get a lot more details about that and exactly how things work. So here, for example, is a textbook. It's an online textbook introduction to climate dynamics and climate modeling. It actually comes from Belgium. And it is a Creative Commons license. If you look at the bottom left, you'll see the Creative Commons license there. You'll see the little CC, you'll see the little attribute person there. And you'll see the dollar sign crossed out. So this is a Creative Commons license, attribution, and non-commercial. So you may reuse this freely. You still have to give credit to these folks here in Belgium that created the textbook. So their names need to reappear on whatever you re-release. And you may not sell it because they specify that. I hope that helps a little bit in understanding what a Creative Commons license is. And Creative Commons licenses are unique because not only do they have this human readable piece, which is what we talked about earlier and that's the one in green here. But it also has a machine readable portion, which allows this to be read over the internet through your browser. So that provides searching. And then finally at the bottom, it has legal code. And so within the United States, we have a set of legal code that works with the Creative Commons licenses. It does vary from country to country because copyright code is different in each country. I mentioned a little bit about search and discoverability. Because Creative Commons licenses have this embedded code, you can go to your web browser and you can either use Google Advanced Search and you can search for materials that way. This is particularly useful for searching for images if you want to use openly licensed images in your PowerPoint. Or you can go directly to the Creative Commons site and use their search capability, which is search.creativecommons.org. And it allows you to go to about 10 different image and video sites and search for openly licensed materials. That can make it quite easy if you're trying to bring those into your classroom. Translations and accessibility. What an open license allows is the ability to translate these materials. And this has actually been happening for quite a long time with the open courseware materials. They have been transferred about 25% of the open courseware courses that started within North America have been translated into Chinese and Spanish. And some of the ones in Spain have been translated into English. So that is an open license allows that ability to really share worldwide. And also, as we know, accessibility for our students is very important, too. Expanding access to education will not be well served if our open educational materials don't support all our students. And so Merlot, who the open courseware, they're a partner of ours at the open courseware consortium, they have created a teaching commons around OER and accessibility. And we welcome you to use this resource. You can see the URL is at the bottom there to find out about what it takes to make materials accessible. And finally, customization and affordability. An open license allows you as a faculty member to customize open materials that are out there and make them available for your students freely. And here we have an example of a collaborative statistics open text book by the community college consortium back in 2008. And it's in a repository called Connections at Rice University. That's a very large OER repository. And there's many versions of collaborative statistics in there because it's been very widely adopted, both in the United States and throughout the world. And cost savings, once again, is probably the overwhelming reasons why faculty and administrators look at open text books to start with. Here we see an example of collaborative statistics here, which is available at the Connections repository. Digital access is free. A soft bound version is available for $26.20 plus shipping and handling. An equivalent introductory statistics textbook from Amazon is $171.25. That's a huge difference. And I thank you all for sharing your numbers in the chat window. The Anatomy Enthusiology textbook was a particularly good example of that. And James, back over to you. Yeah, thank you. And speaking of the Anatomy Enthusiology book, Greg, I popped a link into the chat window and it will take you to an either no cost or low cost A&P textbook that has been produced with four color illustrations and pagination and so on and so forth. It's a recent production from OpenStacks College, which is connected to the Rice University Connections repository. There are so many different players out there. It can kind of get confusing. You need to score cards sometimes. But suffice it to say, it's a very legitimate, very highly respected organization. And the A&P textbook is available as digital access for $0 and a soft bound book is available for a low cost. I'm not sure if it's $26.20, but it's a low cost. So check that out and it will give you a good sense of what's out there in your discipline. I just wanted to add one thing, James. I think we'll be coming back to talk with you next month about the OER repositories. Connections is a large one. So today we're kind of going over those lightly, but we'll go over those in a lot more detail next month. That's right. Thank you for that reminder. Good. And also while you have a chance, if you could share in the chat the extent to which you're using any open educational resources already or if you're familiar with any OER projects at your institutions. And we also understand you might not be sure whether what you're using counts as OER or not. But we'd love to learn more about what you might be using, what you think you're using, whether it qualifies as OER. So take a second and type that in the chat. We'll check that out and talk about that in a sec. And while you're considering that, let me share with you some of the background of the OER movement. Who is funding OER is an important question that comes up again and again because you have to think, holy cow, for individual professors to contribute a chapter or two out of the goodness of their hearts. That's one thing, but for large scale projects to produce large scale open courseware or high quality textbooks, that's a whole different set of resources that need to be involved there. Jim shares that their library is developing a database for faculty to support OER initiatives. Excellent. That's a great first step, making sure that people are aware of what's going on out there, creating that community of interest on your campus or throughout your institution or even throughout the state. So here you'll see on our slide, going back to our slide, you'll see that over the past decade, private foundations have supported OER to the tune of $100 million. That's not only $100 million going into writing textbooks or producing textbooks, but that's also an awful lot of support for local databases as Jim is describing for professional development. Much of the work that Una and I do is supported by the Hewlett Foundation. We should say that we really want to acknowledge that the Hewlett Foundation has been a real leader in the open educational resources movement, the open education generally. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has more recently become interested in open education. The U.S. Department of Education as well as the U.S. Department of Labor have become very interested in open education. Some of you might know that the outgoing Undersecretary of Education, Dr. Martha Cantor, was a former community college chancellor here in California. She is a great champion of open education and she in fact founded the Community College Consortium for OER before going to D.C. So she's taken that interest and commitment to Washington with her. In fact, that interest has become apparent through the tax grants, the Trade Adjustment Act, or big Department of Labor and Department of Ed grants. I think many of you are familiar with these grants. The federal government has committed to investing $2 billion over four years into economic development, workforce development, projects at community colleges through committed grants. The exciting and really, really historic aspect of these grants is that a requirement of all the grantees is that any content or curriculum created with the grant money must carry a Creative Commons license. In other words, the federal government is saying if you're creating something using taxpayer money, guess what? The taxpayers have a right to use it. It's a wonderful and really significant example for the rest of the world and for many states around the country. Again, saying that if the taxpayers are paying for something, guess what? The taxpayers should be able to use it. So that's creating an entire ecology of content related to workforce development that is available to all of us to use and adapt in our own institutions. Here are some examples of tax-funded projects. There's the National STEM Consortium that is being led by Anne Rundle Community College. Rhonda knows that we have a good friend there who really is leading the charge in a lot of interesting areas at Anne Rundle, including this National STEM Consortium project. There's a Help to Professions Pathways project that's taking place in Ohio. Missouri has a large-scale health project called MoHealthWinds, MissouriHealthWinds.org. The examples go on and on and on. I hope that you're all familiar with the tax projects. I can see there's some chat going on about the repository for the tax rents. That's kind of a never-ending story, I have to say. Originally, we all believed that there would be a centralized repository for the tax projects, to my knowledge, and I think Moon is confirming that. That has not come to fruition. That's certainly one of the big challenges I think the open movement faces generally. Once we create all this stuff, how do we make sure that we're not recreating the wheels so that we're all leveraging the work that's already been done? We want to point to a wonderful example of work that has been done. We want to point this out so you don't have to go out and recreate the wheel. In the state of Michigan, in the state of Washington, their community and technical college system said, hey, guess what? We're spending a boatload of money every year with our state aid to students being used to buy textbooks over and over and over again. What if we invested in building the best darn courses for our students that we could, and we slapped the Creative Commons license on them so that they could be updated, reused, remixed over and over and over again? Would that help learning and would that help the taxpayers? Would we no longer have to invest state aid year after year after year after year into paying for an English One textbook? With the support of state tax money and the Gates Foundation, the state of Washington undertook to produce the 81 highest enrolled lower division courses. They're peer reviewed. They very, very carefully designed their project. They have had librarians involved, instructional designers involved, content experts involved, and they created actual courses. So the courses have syllabi, calendars, lectures, as well as equivalents of textbooks. Not necessarily all the textbooks, but enough content to add up to the equivalent of a textbook. And the highest enrolled lower division courses in Washington, I bet you they're pretty similar to the highest enrolled lower division courses in Michigan. Let's take a guess. It's English One, History One, Social One, Psych One, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So those courses already exist. You can go out there right now and grab those courses, pull them into your learning management system, and rebuild them, pull them apart, add to them, subtract from them, and you've got a pretty good start on free content that can be localized to your context. On the next slide, you'll see the argument that was made in Washington State for the taxpayers. Washington figured that there are 55,000 enrollments a year in English One. On average, the English One textbook cost $175. The great majority of students in Washington State were using state aid to pay for those textbooks. That came up to almost $10 million every year that the state was giving an aid to students that the students were turning around and paying to the publishers. They said, whoa, let's see what we could do with that much money. They didn't even invest $10 million, but for much less than that, they were able to produce the 81 high enrolled courses. It's a great project. The last company had 40 plus courses done. I don't think they've released their second round yet. I know UNA will correct me if they have released their second round yet. UNA is telling me the original grant was $1.5 million. So I know that they earned back in savings for students who earned that money back in the first year of having those courses up. But again, the important thing I think for you is today, tomorrow, you and your faculty members can go into the open course library and start pulling out courses that are complete. And you can remix them as well. And again, in the chat, if you're familiar with any other OER projects besides what you might be doing in your courses that are going on at your institution, please share with us in the chat window. We're very interested in hearing about those projects. And with that, I'm going to turn this back to UNA who's going to bring us across the finish line. All righty. Thank you, James. And watching the chat window, I know a fair amount of you are aware of the tax grants. And of course, every state has received those. And some of you may be working in consortiums. Gloria, for instance, quite correctly pointed out that there is no tax repository as of now. In talking with folks who are involved with that tax grant, there is a plan to have an identified OER repository by the end of the grant, which is the first wave. Whether they will build their own or use one that's available, it will be interesting to see. But if you are working on any of the tax grants, we'd love to hear about that. You can type it in the chat window for us. I just want to do a quick overview of the OER adoption process. And we'll go into a lot more detail on this in our November webinar. But we kind of identify four steps to OER adoption for those of you who might be new to this process and haven't gone through this before. So, of course, finding and selecting the highest quality OERs that align with the learning outcomes for your course is critical. OER reviews is a big part of that. And all of the OER repositories that we'll talk about next month have some method of peer review, either a rating system or actual peer reviews. Or sometimes it's an endorsement lens, which so a discipline specific professional organization will endorse certain text books or OER modules. Next, there's the adoption process. And, of course, this includes the adoption process that exists at your college, your institution. But in addition, open licensing adds some other twists and turns to that. One is that you can customize your materials. And finally, feedback and research is really important with open materials because your students, faculty, and staff are always going to provide you with wonderful feedback. And because the materials are openly licensed, you can actually act on that. And step number four, of course, is that because revisions are going to be necessary and you're able to do them, you should plan that in when you start your adoption process and not be surprised at the end that that's a piece of it. So here are a number of really good OER repositories to visit. And, of course, we've got the Orange Grove Text Plus, which is Florida's up there in the top left. BC Campus has, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, is working on 40 open textbooks for their highest enrolled lower division courses. And many of the textbooks that they develop may be applicable to your courses. And, of course, you can modify them if they aren't. So a good place to look, Minnesota, not too far from you guys, the University of Minnesota is running a website on open textbooks. And they're really encouraging faculty peer reviews. So check out their site. The OpenStacks College, I'm kind of going around here in a circle kind of clockwise. OpenStacks, we talked about, has released five very high quality textbooks over the last two years, which I recommend you take a look at. It is at the Connections Repository, which means you can actually customize those using the authoring tools at Connections. Merlot, of course, I assume many of you have heard of Merlot. You can use Merlot there. Use Merlot before. You can in the little checkbox if you have a little green check mark. Merlot is another wonderful repository. Thank you, Greg and Rhonda. They have over 2,000 open textbooks listed there. As you know, Merlot is more of a listing site. But some of those are peer reviewed and they also have accessibility reviews. So do take a look at that as well. There are additional repositories, which I don't have the time to discuss right now. We'll go into those in more detail in November. We'll go visit some of these online so that you can take a look at them directly. And once again, as I mentioned, all of these sites have some kind of a rating peer review or endorsement mechanism to help faculty to find the best resources. We can't really emphasize enough that collaboration is necessary when you go down this path. If you do adopt an open textbook, of course, you have to talk with your curriculum committee. You should also try and involve your peer faculty within your department if at all possible. They may not choose to go with you on this journey. However, their students may at some point talk to them about that. And the fact that you're using an open textbook and their materials are free. And another faculty member is using a textbook where it's high cost. Don't forget about students. They're a really important piece of this. The college bookstore is another place. Naturally, college bookstores have to know if you change. If you change from a commercial textbook to a digital textbook, but there's options for college bookstores to get involved as well, which around print on demand. And they can even stock some of these softbound open textbooks if that makes sense. Librarians are a really big part of finding OER and making that available to students. And so the list goes on. And finally, OER sustainability. I talked a little bit about revisions. So open is all about revising and continuing to update things as needed as you learn more from other, as you learn from your students about what works and what doesn't work as you learn from other faculty who might be using the same materials as you. So in general, promoting open practices at your college and open policies where faculty feel supported in their use of OER. This might be offering workshops to faculty such as we're doing today about finding OER. And this might be offered by your professional development people at your college. Or it might be offered through the community college consortium. Or your librarians might offer workshops for faculty to find OER, but that's making that easy for faculty to find it. Getting student input in there, students may say, well, I love these open textbooks, but I want them on my mobile device. And so that will help tune the resources that you go after. And as you're creating materials yourself, whether it's PowerPoints for your lectures, et cetera, openly license your own work. It's very simple. You go to CreativeComments.org. You can choose the right license for you. And participate in the open education community as you are doing today. You'll learn so much from each other so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If you need help getting started, we can help. Here are some of the things that we offer at the community college consortium. Finding an adopt open textbook workshop. We're doing that online today. If you're interested, I'm going to just move along here. We have some webinars coming up. We already have one on the second, which is archived and available on YouTube. But it's on our archive page. And we've got another one coming up next week, which I mentioned. And we'll have two additional ones this fall. So we'd love to have you come to those. And so I'm going to leave this up here so we can have questions. If you would like to join our Google group and have announcements of upcoming events such as these webinars. It's a fairly lightly trafficked list. Please do contact me at my email address there. And let me know that you'd like to be added to that list. And it's a list where you can remove yourself at any time or you can ask me to do that. And we should also add to that. Please watch your emails for Rhonda's emails because Rhonda is part of our group. And she gets our announcements. So look for Rhonda to forward those on to you as well. Yes. Thank you. And so once again, I want to thank Rhonda very much for inviting James and me this morning. We're very happy to come. And I think we can stay here online for about five minutes and answer questions if you've got some. So please use the mic. You can click on the talk button. Patty just came in. Patty asked whether this was recorded. We're sorry that you missed the previous part of the session, Patty. Yes, we are recording the session and we will provide Rhonda with a link to the archive. The archive is a recording. It also has captions on it so that it's fully accessible. Yes. Hi, this is Rhonda. I want to thank James and Una and also remind you all of the November 19th webinar that they will be doing for us on open textbooks, how to find, select, and adopt an open textbook. And look for more emails from me on the upcoming OER Commons or not OER Commons. The CCC OER webinars that are coming up in the future that you're all able to access as well. And if any of you will be fortunate enough to travel to the ITC eLearning conference in February, there will be a pre-conference half-day workshop devoted to getting started with open educational resources. And then we know that throughout the conference there will be a number of sessions sharing various projects around the country that are focused on OER. Yes, thank you for that, James. And this webinar will be available in a YouTube format for you within a week. So it takes about a week for us to process that. But yes, so Patty, you'll be able to hear it in its entirety, we hope. And thanks to our captioner for captioning it so that it can be watched with the sound off. Any questions, anybody? Rhonda, you got a good group here. They got most of the true and false right, but they were primed. Yeah, it was hard. We couldn't stump the chumps. Thank you both, James and Una. Thank you. I look forward to our November 19th webinar. All right, Rhonda, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recorder, but we'll be here for a few more minutes if you've got questions. You can just type those in the chat window. And thanks, everyone, for coming.