 Hi, my name is Dr. Andrea Gehring and I'm an instructor of physics and astronomy at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. And I'm Richard Weigner. I am also an instructor at Lane. And our talk today is about authoring to enable future adopters. We're going to discuss the supplemental materials that we have developed for our astronomy courses aligned with open stacks astronomy and the process of design that we went through to put these materials together. All right, I first want to tell you a little bit about why we started this project and how we decided on its scope. So our original courses were a sequence of three independent topics covering different astronomy areas over three 10-week terms. Our students earned lab credit for this course and originally we used a traditional textbook with an online homework platform which cost students $60 per term. Since there are three sections per term and 24 students per section, this was an estimated total cost per academic year of $13,000. Once we switched to open stacks astronomy and supplemented that with the in-class activities we've developed, now the textbook cost for students is $0. When we started out the project, sort of one of the first things we did was take a look at what resources were currently existing open resources for open stack astronomy. Through searching from some of our known resources as well as some of the information posted previously on OER Commons, there's about 170 or more labs coming from 10 different resources, mostly universities all across the U.S. About 30% of those are OER and then the other 70% were copyrighted or had no specific source referenced. So we've gone through and sort of indexed all of these and aligned them with where they appear in the textbook. We've also used quite often clicker style questions from the University of Nebraska. What's NAAP stand for Andrea? I don't remember. I don't remember that acronym. It's an astronomy education resource program from the University of Nebraska. There are versions of OER lecture slides from various sources, and then of course we had activities labs and slides all coming from our original courses that we wanted to adopt and evolve into an OER version. Awesome. So I also looked into what resources already existed on OER Commons because there was a group for open stacks astronomy. So what I found was about 46 total resources before we published ours. 18 of these were basically link collections by the textbook authors, things like resources related to women in astronomy, people of color in astronomy, resources related to good books, films, and plays about astronomy. So those kinds of link collections are helpful for building activities and homeworks, but they're not themselves ready to go activities, labs, or homeworks. I did find a lot of resources that were individual, but Richard mentioned he found many more of those published in lots of other locations across the web. There aren't so many that were actually on OER Commons ready to use. And there were also two complete courses, but what I found was that the most comprehensive resources were a little bit hard to navigate, somewhat incomplete, and in some cases too comprehensive. So I want to show you a few things here. This is what OER Commons looks like. There's multiple groups and hubs associated with OER Commons. This is the open stacks astronomy group. And as you can see, there's 200 and some members and 50 some affiliated resources within this collection. So this is where I went to look for material specifically aligned with the textbook we chose. When I discussed that some of the existing full courses were a little bit difficult to navigate, this is an example of one. It's organized into modules, but there's no document that sort of links together and tells you what's within each. So you have to open each folder individually, and sometimes even then open each resource individually to know what it's about. There were also some collections published that linked together open stacks astronomy chapter sections with specific lecture tutorials and labs used in astronomy. So this was really helpful to get us started. And this is an example of one of those list collections by one of the textbook authors. This one was free online lab activities for intro astronomy. It wasn't actually published until after we began our project. And as you can see, this is what I mean by maybe a little bit too comprehensive. This is just for chapter one, which is a short chapter, all of the options. So this is a 30 page document with lots of links in it. It's great for finding exactly what you might need, but it's not sort of organized in a plug and play kind of ready to use way. When we moved in to actually start doing things, we had, and by doing things, we mean transitioning to an OER source and making those available. We wanted to make sure that we had easily accessible and digestible materials that were aligned with open stacks. We wanted to have lecture slides where we had built in clicker questions, discussions and activities, engineer both of the sort of persuasion that student active engagement is really important, helping them learn. So having that built in directly into the lecture slides was really important to us. We also wanted to make sure we had at least daily in class activities. Part of that was to make sure the students were getting their lab credit for the course, but also to improve their engagement. We moved toward project-based assessments and de-emphasized quizzes or exams, and then we wanted to make sure we wanted to publish our resources at the end. So those are the goals. We have accomplished those goals now. All of the chapters from the open sector time of the textbook, we have produced active learning slide decks. We've also had, since we sort of divided up the book into three independent courses where students taking the second winter term course, there's no expectation they took the course in the fall. So that means all of the introductory material and ideas that we have to introduce to start building on, we have to teach each term. So we wanted to make sure that introductory material that we had specific versions aligned with each general topic. So the students that are taking the course studying the solar system, they're going to get a different version of the introduction than the students who are going to take the course when they're learning about stars because they have to know different concepts and have to emphasize different ideas for those. We also have gone through and tried to make these slides as accessible as possible with accessible colors, as well as image alt text for our students who may be using screen readers to look at our electric slides or off faculty who are trying to adopt them that would like those screen reader resources. We ended up just creating or adapting 126 activities that are released on our OAR comments currently. Those are a mixture of labs, article analysis where they're reading and investigating scientific publications, tutorial activities, quantitative work, as well as student jigsaws where they're teaching each other. We published 16 different project prompts and some of those ideas came out of those longer resources where they're looking at sideline impacts or scientific spotlight where they're looking at diversity in science. And then in July, we have released all of these resources as Google Suite documents with sort of large overarching Google, what's the word, Google Sheets list indexing of all the material to make it accessible and we'll see that here in a little bit. All right, next we want to discuss how we supported this project. So some of our earliest introductions to OAR came from the online course design introduction workshops that LCC's Center for Teaching and Learning were putting together early in the pandemic to transition us to remote teaching. In particular, this was really helpful on learning more about accessibility and universal design for learning. This was really important when it came to making our presentations accessible in this project. It also just introduced us to the idea that there's OAR out there and that you can also contribute as an author. This kind of sparked my interest in OAR more and so I continued my learning journey with Open Oregon Educational Resources in their equity and open education faculty cohort where I learned more about the move toward open education and using OAR as an opportunity to weave more representation into course materials, make them more representative of a broader diversity of participants. We also participated in training through the library at Lane Community College. So over the past two summers, I think they were maybe the past, I don't know, two summers we were involved in. There was a three four-week hybrid workshop where faculty investigated existing OAR resources, looked at backward design in order to intentionally restructure one of their courses coming up for the fall term, developed new resources with an eye focusing on that accessibility that we found important, as well as ultimately cleaning up those resources they developed in order to share. This is a funded project by the library, which is really important for both Andrea and I are not permanent faculty at LCC. So having that funding resources for even adjunct faculty to do course development was very nice because most places aren't going to pay adjuncts to re-develop their courses. But this is one wrap we took it. Andrea, I think three summers ago now participated at one level where she was just investigating those existing resources. And then two summers ago, we both did a full adoption and development method for the workshop to totally re-develop our first fall term astronomy course. So as Richard mentioned, I did the OER summer camp investigation in summer 2020. And then in summer 2021, both of us did the OER summer camp adopt and develop a new course where we redesigned astronomy 121. In order to continue and redesign astronomy 122 and 123, we wanted to apply for a grant from open Oregon educational resources. Unfortunately, we did not receive that grant, but the OER librarian at LCC came to the rescue and was able to support us in adopting and developing the OER astronomy textbook for 122 and 123. All right. So now we've scoped out our project. We have scared support and we want to now talk about how we develop the project and in particular how we went about collaborating. So after the OER investigation summer camp, I decided that I liked the open stacks astronomy textbook, that there were also sufficient resources out there to develop new materials related to the textbook. And so Richard and I made the decision to switch to the open textbook about two weeks prior to the start of fall term. This worked out pretty well for us actually, even though it seems like it might be a risky move. We were able to quickly get the course in shape. And then over the next year, we developed materials primarily with an eye toward using them internally. So we decided on the chapters and topics to include for each course based on our original course learning objectives. We drafted a lot of new materials, including slides, activities and projects. A lot of these used existing course material that we had used in the past, but we made many new activities that were better integrated with the new textbook. We also did a lot of quiz bank development during this time. And our collaboration process was to meet weekly to assign tasks for the upcoming weeks. So it was not so different from what you might do for your normal course prep, except that we were drafting specifically for the new textbook. As we developed new activities, there were very specific things we needed to keep in mind as we sort of developed them. We wanted to try to scaffold complex ideas for students as much as possible, rather than sort of throwing just ideas at them in lecture and then trying to get them to apply them, sort of building that groundwork to help them build up to a conclusion or make a discovery on their own was really important. We wanted to focus and ground all of our work, both the activities as well as our lectures, our discussions, our homeworks on the observational evidence that Ashama has actually used to make these determinations and how we learned things about Ashama was really important. We wanted our activities to be lab like and quantitative when possible, since our students are earning lab credit for all three of our courses. We'd like the idea of using online resources when it was available. It allows, we draw lots of pictures in our slides. We use pictures from NASA, since that's a really good resource that we have available to get astronomy images. But there's lots of simulations and videos that exist that students can use and engage with and interact with. We wanted our students to research astronomy topics independently. That's partially in the project as well as some of their jigsaw activities where they're researching an idea and then coming back to the class and sharing those ideas with their classmates. It's important for us and certainly for my background in scientific education is that students are able to understand popular science articles on astronomy topics. The James Webb was really convenient to launch right at the end of our project because we got to talk a lot about that opportunity to learn astronomy that way. We like our students to collaborate with classmates, so most of the activities are designed for students to talk and discuss and come up with ideas together. They can certainly complete most of the activities on their own, but it's far easier when they can collaborate. And of course we want the activities to be fun rather than have our students just not enjoying their experiences in our classroom. Awesome. A couple other things I wanted to add here was that this idea of scaffolding up complex ideas using multiple representations, all this is also informed by what we learned about universal design for learning. So that was really important for us to try to make these activities as approachable as possible so that our students enjoy them. All right. So for the entire collection of the activities as well as the projects and slides, we wanted them to really work seamlessly together so that students had sort of a unified experience the same way they would in say the original situation where we had a textbook plus homework platform that were linked perfectly. We also wanted these to be modular and easily remixable since we're on a three-term system, but most other universities and colleges are on semester systems. So we wanted it to be easy for instructors to go in and choose the pieces that they needed for their courses. We wanted to organize our resource collection intuitively and make sure that it was searchable. And we also wanted all the materials to feel inviting and engaging. Now it came time to release the project, which we have now done. So we needed to edit the stuff that we had developed during the previous academic year. So summer 2021, we got involved with the OER adoption summer camp that was through the library again. We needed to rewrite our course learning outcomes to make sure they're aligning with all of these new activities or make sure the activities are aligning with what we want the students to learn. We needed to choose what sort of materials we're actually going to release. And then we had to go through and make everything OER accessible as well as update any material that we could use for the fall. This was just during the summer. So I would like to do a little bit of review, recall some of your knowledge, which of these types of materials have we released in the OER Commons? I'm going to give you just a short bit of time to type your selected answers. You can just type the numbers in the chat. This type of question will show up commonly. It's a multiple choice question, of course. And rather than use letters to do multiple choices, more common, we use numbers. I encourage my students to hold up their hand and show me the number of fingers that they like for the answers, rather than use actually like clickers that they have to invest $40 into use over the course of a term. That's of course freely available. So you guys selected most of the correct answers in the chat. We released lecture slides as well as the in-class activities. And we of course also released student project prompts. So these other resources, we kept internal to ourselves, which I think Andrea wanted to talk a little bit about. Yeah, one of the considerations was that we didn't necessarily want to publish our entire question bank for our homework and exams. So some of our homeworks actually are published as in-class activities in our resource collection. But the exam question bank in particular, we thought that needed to be really mapped onto our own learning objectives. And it was the same with the video recordings of lecture, even though we did take video recordings of our lectures when we were teaching remotely. It was just too specific for our class. And so I decided there were already pre-existing video lectures for that were already released on OER Commons. We didn't need another set. So during our second year of work, we prepared materials for the rest of the world. So we decided what to release and what not to release. We went and prioritized and organized our existing material and put together an internal inventory, which I'll show you what that looks like. We then had to repeat this process for the winter and spring materials. And we met about monthly to check in on what progress we made. So let me see here. So here's one of the examples of the internal inventory that we made. We essentially just made a huge link list of all of our lectures, our activities, et cetera. And we had different kind of status columns. And this was where Richard and I could make notes of what we had done, what still needed to be done. And so we had a chance to also review each other's work, which was especially important when we were both authors of the original activity and we wanted the other editor to come in and make sure that everything looked good. All right. And finally, we published our material just this year. It's organized by topic and by textbook chapter. And the activities give notes on the requirements for the technology and also directions for active learning techniques that might not be commonly used so that instructors know how we intended them to be used. We also created sample syllabi for our 10-week terms. And I think that using Google Docs for this makes the five Rs really easy. It's really easy to remix the materials. So let me go ahead and show you finally our published collection. It's here on OER comments. It is organized into a spreadsheet. And so we've got it organized by class, by slides and activities. And just to give you a little bit of a feel for this, we've got chapters and then we've broken down each lecture collection by topic. So it's really easy to go in here and search for what you might need. The activities are also organized by chapter, but you can also sort these by the type of activity. So if you're looking, for example, for just a quantitative lab, then you can go and find that. So sort of looking back at what we've done and the sort of things we discovered along the way, I think it was important to consider different formats for the activities or for the lectures more carefully or very carefully. We originally started this when we were remote. So all of our resources were developed for the remote environment. Then we went to update it and we moved transition back to in-person. So there was a lot of updating and changing that had to happen to transition from that sort of remote environment where we asked students to use all these online resources and then we get into the classroom and that was much more challenging to use. Switching that format was actually something Andrea's already done that she's taught this with a large course. How did that go? Went great. The lecture slides in particular were really easy to adapt and the in-class activities, I had to make them shorter to suit my shorter class time, but that worked as well. Coming out of this, the other courses I've taught, I've had an increased effort to sort of build in OER materials in the courses, use open-sourced images rather than things I just steal from the internet from, you know, complicated sources. I've also found this has been really helpful beyond just this astronomy course, the material, actually parts of the lectures, as well as the style that we developed for lectures has filtered into other courses that I've taught and I've also found it was really important to keep track of sources, particularly the first fall. I was not very good at keeping track of sources, so when we went back to redevelop that material or clean it up for OER publication, I spent a lot of time trying to retract down images that I had used because I didn't save the source. But we did learn Google reverse image search is really helpful. Some of my reflections are that planning for accessibility up front, I think we should have done a little bit more of. We ended up retrofitting material that we had already been using, adding things like image alt text and like Richard said, it was just kind of difficult to do that for every image in a large pre-existing lecture slide set. We also had to go back and change colors at one point because there were some non-colorblind friendly and colors that didn't have good enough contrast in our slide themes. If we had known that up front, then we would have built that in from the very beginning. Something that we did do was ask for permission. There were several times where there were materials that we wanted to use, but those were published online and didn't have a Creative Commons license attached to them, so we just emailed people and asked if we could use their materials and explain what we were doing and most people were really happy to let us do so. I found that this was really important to support curriculum development work that needed to be done for this sequence anyway. Having this supported was kind of a different way than we would have had support to do curriculum development from the college. Now, I as well as Richard find that the style of lecture and the materials themselves, they filter into the rest of my work, and in fact this is the exact same slide style that we use in our entire collection. All right, so hopefully we have a little bit of time for Q&A. Thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.