 I kept referring to that as the voice of God that was letting us know that things were starting. All right, so you have heard from us and who we are, but we would love to hear who you are. You do have the ability to turn your microphone and video on, you get to choose however you do that or you can simply reply in the chat, that works as well. But we would love to hear your name, your role in organization, what brings you to this session and in particular bridging these two divides or bridging the divide is on your mind because why? So please feel free to popcorn. I won't call on people, but tell us who you are. Hey folks, I can kick us off. Hi, I'm Barbara Soot from just down a little bit south of Christina in Olympia, Washington. I am the open educational resources and instructional materials program manager at our State Department of Education, which has the acronym OSPI. Happy to be with you guys today. So bridging the secondary and post-secondaries on my mind because we've been doing a lot of work with our community college and four-year college colleagues on some bridge courses for both math and ELA to work with students that received a particular score on their smarter balanced assessments. And by taking this course, they could enter higher ed with a course bearing load as opposed to remediation. So I'm curious how we can just continue that collaboration. Great, thank you, Barbara. Thank you, Jennifer, for contributing your introduction in the chat. Jess, for including your introduction. Hi, Jess, I haven't seen you in so long. This is exciting. Who else wants to say hello? Hi, I'll jump in here at Debbie Baker. I'm an instructional designer with Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, Arizona. And I would say bridging the primary and secondary and post-secondary is on my mind because I have a strong background in the K-12 environment, although I work in higher ed now. And so I am always interested in doing whatever is possible to bridge that gap. Great, thanks, Debbie. And Debbie joined our little K-12 or primary and secondary meetup this morning. And I already told her that I was very excited. She's here to represent Arizona, my former home state. And we will talk a little bit about dual or concurrent enrollment. But I was one of those students in high school in Arizona and partnered with Maricopa Community Colleges for the work that they do. And so we have a lot of work to do. Anyone else want to say hello? Good morning, I'm Julie Erickson. I'm a learning specialist at TIE Technology and Innovation and Education. And I've been doing a lot of OER work with K-12 in South Dakota. And I get to work with Joan who introduced herself in the chat. And I actually have a meeting tomorrow with the post-second, with the Regental Schools to discuss OER in South Dakota. So I'm excited about that. So it's been, I just love the concept of OER. So good to be here. Thanks, Julie. Anyone else? I'm DRC Hutchings. I live in functional design librarian slash de facto OER librarian at the university here. And I've been doing this work and building our program at our university for about five years now. And I've been interested in figuring out more about how OER is moving into the K-12 space and also trying to figure out ways that I can partner locally to help it move into the K-12 space locally. As far as I know, there's no conversations or work being done at all at the K-12 level. So it would be me coming in and trying to talk to them about how we could partner, how we could work together. So I thought the session would be helpful. That's great. Thank you, DRC. Can you say again where you're located? It cut out a little bit and I missed that. Alaska, USA. Alaska. Okay, thank you. Fantastic. Anyone else wanna take a little moment to say hello? Yeah, hey everybody. This is James Galapagross Clang from Southern California. Hi, everybody. I'm with a community college in Southern California, as I said, and I'm interested in bridging the divide for all the good reasons we know around OER and all the positive benefits that OER can bring to students and faculty. In addition, in my state, there is a very practical reason to bridge that divide namely that when community colleges engage in partnership with public high schools to provide instruction, college instruction for the high school students, the community colleges are obligated to cover the cost of the instructional materials. So there is a very practical reason for my institution to know more about how to bridge that divide. Thank you, James, but don't steal my thunder. I'll leave now. Oona's like, no, I need a job too. Like job security here. You gotta come to my breakout though, James. We have a couple of other folks who have introduced themselves in the chat. So Karen Thompson works with Common Lit. So excited for you to be here. I talk about Common Lit a lot in K-12. So thank you for being here. Marisol also referenced an instruction librarian at Clark College. Thank you so much for being here. Christine from Brazil. I had the chance to listen to your presentation a couple of days ago. So thank you. And then Shana, who is also going to be leading one of our breakout sessions, as previously mentioned, who works with Ed reports in her full-time job or in her day job, but is also a faculty member and we'll talk more about teacher preparation. And so she can talk a lot about curriculum in all the ways. So we will go ahead and get started. As far as our community agreement, we are here for a short amount of time and I know that we have a lot of things that pull at our attention, but just a couple of things that hopefully we can discuss as instead of saying norms, which I have learned is actually a very kind of authoritarian word to be able to use when we're in spaces like this, we're gonna talk about community agreements. So stay engaged, speak your truth, experience discomfort, equity of voice in making sure that everyone has a chance to speak and then expect and accept a lack of closure because I think we already came to this in the conversation and preparation for all of this saying, we don't have the answers, but we wanna come to you all and talk about some of the things that are bubbling up to the top in our work at Open Ed Global and maybe and obviously hear from you about potential intersections for this work and how can we advocate for more of this collaboration with our members. So thank you all again for being here, it really matters a lot to us. So I'm gonna jump into a quick overview of primary and secondary education or K-12 and fully recognizing that the majority of my work has been very US centric for the past four years. After leading the Go Open project at the US Department of Education, I moved to an organization in Washington, DC called New America, where I continued supporting a lot of school districts across the country, providing professional development opportunities, connecting a lot of folks and trying to map out where this work was happening. And we found a lot of things in this process, of course, and I'll get into kind of what procurement of curriculum looks like, but the biggest thing is awareness and this again bridges all areas and there are just so many folks that don't understand or even aware of what OER is. And so a lot of my work has been that, building awareness and talking with folks, again, from leaders, decision makers, kind of at the district level, superintendents that are saying, we have no budget and what can we do instead to folks that are really ready to try something different all the way down to the classroom teacher saying, I am so tired of going to teachers, and Pinterest to find resources. So what are some of my other options? So I wanted to give you kind of an overview of what curriculum adoption looks like. And in my prep conversation with Shana last week, we actually talked about this in her own teacher prep classes. She starts with the question of what is curriculum and everyone has a different definition. So I am a former classroom teacher. I taught early childhood and elementary and in particular English language learners. And I was taught that the curriculum was the textbook that I got from my district. And we know that that's not really the case. I'm gonna make a bold statement, that's not the case, but that everyone has a different understanding of what curriculum is. Some folks refer to it being the standards, which are the targets of what we want kids to know by the end of a school year and at a certain grade level. And sometimes it just encompasses all of the instructional materials that we are using. So that can include tech-based platforms and tools. That can include the paper-based things that we use. That can include the textbooks that we are usually given by districts or by the schools themselves. But I do wanna make sure that people understand since we're at open and global, this varies by contrary. And this varies wildly here in the US in particular. And we know that some countries have a national curriculum where it is set by the Ministry of Education or the Department of Education at the federal or at the country level. Sometimes I wish the US had that as an option. Then we have national standards or standards that are set by at that country level with curriculum decisions that could then be made within the school system itself. Then I was talking with Jean-Bart from the Netherlands this morning who said that they have national assessments or exams that their Ministry of Education sets. And all of the schools get to figure out how to get there and whatever materials they need to use, they will do that. And so that's also another kind of option. And then more specific to the US, I would say, there's also lists of approved textbooks. And this is not in every state by any means, but you have some folks that really wanna control the textbooks or the materials that are being used in classrooms. And so they'll provide a pre-approved or an approved list that folks get to choose from. And so again, this is what I call job security because it varies widely. And so how can we support all of the people in the continuum or the spectrum of where they may be? One thing that I like to go through for folks if they're not familiar with the K-12 procurement process or the adoption process is kind of a typical cycle of what this may look like in a school system here in the US. It is a little bit different for our folks up in Canada. It's at the provincial level, but they still run through a similar process up there from what I understand. So when I was in the classroom, I was never at the district level, but I was always asked, volunteer old again, if I wanted to be part of the curriculum adoption process. And so I know it pretty well. And again, this varies widely. There's no definitive way of doing this, but this is a typical adoption or procurement process. So proprietary English-English Arts textbook series. Every six to eight years, it's kind of on a cycle, depends on the school system. They call up the publishing companies and they say send us your new stuff and they get a preview of all of their new stuff. Typically the teacher edition of the textbook will cost around 600 US dollars. The K6 student edition will cost around 80 US dollars. So I'm just going to look at those two things and not count any of the other supplemental materials, which are the consumable books that kids write in for spelling, grammar, et cetera. When we look at that, in my last school system, we had six elementary buildings, three sections. So three kindergarten classrooms and then on average about 25 students in each of those classrooms. And so if we're looking at purchasing a textbook for K6, we would be looking at 330,000 US dollars. This obviously differs in higher education at the community college level or at the university level where students are responsible for purchasing their own textbooks. The onus falls on the district to be able to pay for these things. And we know not only because of COVID right now, but even for many years in the past, we have not fully funded education in the US. And so budgets continue to shrink down. We know that our friends and colleagues in other countries also face similar issues with budgets. And so that's a lot of money that is being spent on textbooks that may or may not even be used. So as I mentioned, this is typically on a six to eight year cycle, especially when there are new standards that come out. We know that there are typically improvements in standards the more that we learn as far as learning sciences go, but we also know things like need to be updated to include 21st century skills, although we're in 2020. So let's hope those are already part of our standards. So we could be using that money, not as a cost savings measure necessarily, but a reallocation of the money back into the school district if we went with OER. And so here are a couple of potential ways that we could use that funding to compensate teachers for coming together to curate and create resources, to potentially cover their classes with substitutes. Something that we're all facing right now is making sure that everyone is connected at home. So that home connectivity, but in general to make sure that we have enough connectivity even in schools that could help pay for devices if we need to have them access things digitally, printing if we want to print those things and give those kind of packets into the hands, especially of younger learners. And then of course we can also pay for additional learning resources because we freed up the funding to be able to do that. And so some folks do a mix of things, like Karen being here from Common Lit is really exciting. I had the chance to help write some English language arts curriculum with the school district in Colorado last year. And we used Common Lit a lot. It is part of, we did an inquiry based structure for sixth or 12th grade English language arts. We pulled materials, we curated, we created, we gave people options and Common Lit was a huge part of that. And so then they were able to reallocate some of that funding to pay for additional resources that still cost money. We were able to purchase more books, more trade books and making sure that we got literature and non-fiction texts into the hands of students. When I was at the Department of Education, we identified a couple of entry points when it came to looking for OER or when we started to have this conversation. Again, this is by no means definitive or exhaustive, but we did notice these three as trends. So when we had items that were due for renewal, that meant that, again, the textbooks were kind of outdated at that point and that we could simply purchase something new. That might be a really good time for people to consider OER. Then we had, oh my gosh, my screen is so big. I can't even see what that says right now. That's really bad. What does that say? I'm gonna keep going back and forth, sorry. Curriculum is lacking. Hey, there we go. All right, let me try that again. Curriculum is lacking. This actually was really helpful and this goes back to Shana being here from Ed Reports because we were able, woop, and then I hit stop screen. There we go, I'm gonna go back to that. We were able to point people to Ed Reports to look at the current series that they had in their school systems to see how it rated with Ed Reports reviews. If you're not familiar with Ed Reports, she can talk more about it and do a much better job than I can. But what I like to say, or she said actually earlier, was the clearinghouse for instructional materials and for full kind of curricula. So started in English language arts and math, expanded into science. They're doing some more kind of foundational skills as well as some assessments and other things that they're looking at now. But a lot of people, including my own former districts, got in there and said, oh, the English Language Arts series that we have doesn't actually, it's not reviewed very well. So when we have those gaps and when we know that there are pieces that are missing, that's also another opportunity for us to talk about OER in particular within primary and secondary. And finally is teacher leadership. When we have strong teacher leaders that are out there, again, we know that I was part of a second grade team and two of us were charged with finding resources for the rest of our teammates. And so instead of going to teachers, pay teachers, or Pinterest, which is all very cute, how can we point them to resources that are openly licensed that they can customize for their local context and making sure that things are culturally relevant so that we can make these materials inclusive and representative and tapping into the funds of knowledge that our students come to us knowing. Okay, I'm done talking. Colleague, take it away. Well, I wondered, would Shauna like to jump in a little bit about Teacher Ed or? Tana, you wanna chime in? Happy to add to this conversation and also realize that I don't wanna take up precious time in our breakouts. I would just simply add to the conversation that we've had so far in bridging both the teacher preparation work I do, which is my moonlighting job, but I love it, and my regular full-time job. I'm really able to see, and then of course, my whole personal world is surrounded by teachers and principals and district administration. I'm really able to see kind of what the impact of materials in general is on students and how to prepare those new teachers and continue to support them through their first five years of teaching so they don't burn out with materials. And I'm actually working on a project right now on curriculum literacy and trying to figure out how to help those pre-service teachers and teacher prep programs loop in the conversation around curriculum. And we'll call curriculum the way we're calling curriculum right now or instructional materials so that teachers are prepared for the real world to navigate what they're handed when they walk in the first day on the job or what they're not handed, which tends to be many of the cases as well on their first day on the job. So I'm excited to talk in the breakout groups about the potential pickup of OER and materials in general in a teacher prep program. And again, thanks for having me. Great, thank you, Shauna, for sharing that. And I haven't looked at the recent research, but I'm gonna say I've looked at research perhaps about five years ago about the fact that teachers, when they come after they've been certified and come in, they use what they've learned in their teacher ed, which isn't too surprising, their master's programs, the instructional materials they've been exposed to. So if we're not talking to them about open education in their teacher, it's a real disservice to them because this is something that they could be able to use day one. And of course I know different districts have different viewpoints on it, but it's an ideal time to engage the students, the student teachers in OER. So glad that you could share that. Should we move on to the next slide? Oh, yeah, thank you. So I'm not gonna go into really an overview of post-secondary OER and curriculum. I'm just gonna jump in and tell you a little bit about the Community College Consortium for OER. And I know quite a few of you are familiar with it. But we work with community colleges around the country supporting them in their OER programs. You can see our mission here. We focus on expanding awareness and access. We do a lot of professional development, primarily online, in person when we can. And this is all about improving student equity and success and that of course has become, the equity piece has become a much bigger part of the topic I would say in the last three years and certainly has even ratcheted up in the last six months. So more recently we've been focusing on leadership at the state and regional level and how important that is for having impact and sharing different solutions that work. And yeah, so we've been around for over 10 years now. So we've seen this whole area grow in many ways. You know, some of the wonderful things are that there's so much more OER available today than there was 10 years ago. And yet there still are challenges to overcome and working together as a community of practice has been just really productive and so satisfying for myself of course and our members. Next slide. So, thank you. So I just, just a few things to keep in mind and Christina actually touched on these. So instructional materials in higher ed at the college are primarily a faculty choice. Now, there are some exceptions. Sometimes departments choose a textbook together and yeah, so, but we won't go there but primarily it is a faculty choice. So it's very important that faculty buy in to the use of open education and that they feel comfortable and so our community of practices around providing support like that. And obviously we work with the librarians and the instructional designers at many of our member institutions to support them who actually are the boots on the ground with their faculty. So on the flip side, students are responsible for paying for their textbooks in higher ed, you know, which is different than in our school districts where the purchase is done at the school district level. So students are a big part of this conversation and of course our students are actually adults for the most case or they may be dual enrollment high schoolers and we're gonna talk a lot more about that in a minute. So that directly impacts our students and I think you've been able to see a lot of the statistics on college and university students and the food and housing insecurity that is just accelerated. Pre-pandemic it was, there was huge discrepancies and it's been even tougher since then. So the cost of textbooks is a big issue for students and sometimes it's the difference between working, you know, they might have to work a week in order to purchase a textbook, some of these very expensive textbooks. And so yeah, that we know that that is a, there's a hummingbird outside my window, sorry. The other points I wanted to make was about articulation agreements with universities and this comes up a lot. So our college, I'll speak in California but I think other states have similar course agreement definitions in California. We call it the common course ID and it's what a course is defined as in our common system which allows for articulation into our state universities and our University of California, I believe certainly our state universities. And there's an outline of record which has the student learning outcomes for a particular course. It talks a little bit about assessment usually in a fairly theoretical sense and then there's suggested textbooks. And so in the past, those suggested textbooks obviously would be commercial textbooks. And so that hasn't officially changed although we have informal statements in California from both our UC, our University of California and our California State University system saying that they are fine with OER being used in these courses but they do need to cover the course outline of record but this is an issue that comes up frequently and I know one of my colleagues here could speak to that in more detail. So join us in the breakout if you wanna hear more about that. It looks like we might have lost, oh, there we go. And I'm sorry about that. Oh, no worries, Christina. So articulation agreements with universities is one that I think is not insurmountable but there needs to be really a conversation, a dialogue support between all of the higher ed systems and not just the public higher ed, also private because we do have a lot of, I would say there's a certain segment of the population that goes to your community college into a private four year. And finally one of the things that faculty find difficult about adopting OER, depending on discipline is that there may not be the test banks, the online homework systems, slides and things that they are used to having in their courses where they have publisher materials. And so this is an area of growth for us and this is certainly expanding a lot of community of practices. We were gonna talk earlier about OER commons for those of you who were in the earlier K through 12 and OER commons has a number of hubs there for helping faculty to share the different resources that they produce so that there are more of these test banks and homework questions and online homework systems support for folks who wanna move with OER. So next slide, please. So I wanted to talk about an immediate area of intersection between high schools and college. And of course my colleague James referred to this as well. So dual enrollment has been growing enormously. And so let me explain for those who might not be aware of what dual enrollment is. Dual enrollment is a high school student who is enrolled at their local high school but also taking college courses and receiving college credit. And we've seen this grow at community colleges across the country. And in fact, I was able to get this slide from AACC, our American Association of Community Colleges, which is from August of 2019. So it's just a little over a year old. And you can see that many states are at 15% and higher dual enrollment. So that is their credit enrollment. 15% of that is represented by high school students taking courses at their college. And it looks different at different colleges. Sometimes the students are actually on site at the college. Sometimes they may be taught by a college faculty member. And sometimes it's a high school faculty member who has a master's in that area who's teaching that college course on site at the high school. But at any rate, what is happening now is it's been growing even further. You can see that about a year ago there was at least several states that were at 20% and above. I've actually talked with folks in some of the technical college systems where it was even higher than that, like 40%. Since the pandemic, these numbers have even jumped more. So there was an article, I think early in the fall or it might have been late summer I'm interviewing a number of community colleges who had said their dual enrollment had gone up 300%. And you think about why that is the school districts were not sure if they were gonna open or what it was gonna look like because they didn't all have that option. And the community colleges have been doing online for a long time, but in the spring they had to move everything well, let's say 90% of their courses online. So that made it possible for them to provide sort of a stable solution for high school students who might be looking to take courses. So it provided a lot of flexibility. Austin Community College also reported a big increase. They were at 22% pre-fall 2020 and we're expecting a huge increase over that. So this is a big part of the community college enrollment which means it's a big part of their funding from the state. So it is a huge piece of that. And I'm trying to catch some of these comments here. Yeah, that's a great question, Christina. If they're, and I'd love to hear about that. If there's dual credit, oh, yep. And Connie says there are dual credit options here in Alberta, Canada. Yeah, we're not counting advanced placement. Connie, here in the US, unless it's changed in the last 10 years, advanced placement requires that a student take a test in order to get that credit. They do take the class at their high school. It's a high school offered course by a high school teacher who's been trained in the AP. But yeah, so... The great thing about that is that OpenStack out of Rice University actually created five openly licensed textbooks and four of them, three of them, four of them are actually can be used for AP classes. Absolutely, I think they're labeled as such, Christina. Yeah, yeah, so they're, yeah. And that has been truly helpful for community colleges who are trying to support this work. Next slide. So I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this, but so why is, why is this, so why is OER such a wonderful fit for this? Well, the motivator for colleges is obviously they really do wanna support this growth in their enrollment. It's becoming a really significant piece of their funding structure. But it varies by college district who pays for these textbooks, these instructional materials. So sometimes it's the high school, sometimes it's the college as James mentioned earlier. I believe he said his college has to pay for that. And sometimes it's the students and their families who are responsible for the textbook cost. So it really, it's a barrier. So what are the motivators for the school districts and their families? Well, obviously this is a wonderful opportunity for students to generally it's tuition free for them. They take those as part of their high school work. And if OER is used then there is no cost for the student. And in that case, not for the school district in general, I think that that's true. Maybe it's some of our K through 12 people can speak to that. Obviously there's a lot of coordination to make this work. So we can't really dismiss that. And once again, the pandemic has really pushed the need for the dual enrollment and the demand much higher. And I think this is really an opportunity to work together. When I was teaching quite a while ago now, a decade ago at a community college, there was a lot of articulation work that went on between high schools and colleges to make sure that students were being prepared and also in some cases so that students could then test into college and get credit for some of their high school courses. And so I really feel that OER could build on that that the use of OER and dual enrollment could really build on that on those articulation groups and agreements and collaborations that were set up to support that work as well. Yeah, that's all I have. Any comments before we, let's see. Looks like Shana said that students and families are responsible for purchasing the college techs in her area and Fresno, which is interesting. My school covered mine. As I mentioned, I was part of the Maricopa Community College kind of cooperation with my school district in Phoenix growing up and in high school. And they covered all of our techs that we had to purchase or use for those classes. So that's really interesting. That was the district? Yep. Yeah, I know in Georgia, the state government was providing the college with, at one point, I think it was either $25 or $50 towards instructional materials per student. That generally didn't cover it for a commercial textbook, but they were providing some money towards that to encourage dual enrollment. So the various methods are just, yeah, amazing. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to drop the link in here again for our working document as we move into our breakout groups or breakout rooms. Okay, let me pause the recording then. Okay, thanks.