Estimated reading time for this article:
31
minutes.
Speakers:
Angelique Carson (Shared Collections Librarian, Washington Research Library Consortium)
Karen Bjork (Head of Digital Libraries and Publishing, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries)
Angelique: There may be many of you who have had experiences with this topic in addition to our guest, and we absolutely invite you to share your experiences and resources. Here are a few housekeeping details. The webinar is being recorded and will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2023 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone signed with our community norms. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. And please remember there is a companion resource for these sessions as well, the Pub101 Canvas curriculum, which you can find here. That link is being dropped by Amanda as well. And now I will hand things over to begin our discussion.
Karen: Thank you so much, Angelique. Let me just share my slides and share my screen, and then I will get started on our topic. So just one second please. All right, so everyone should see my slideshow. If you can nod or give a thumbs up, you can see everything. Perfect, that would be great. One thing I also like to note is, please feel free to interrupt at any time if you have any questions for me while I'm talking. I do have the chat up and running. Sometimes it is hard to see both at the same time, but I do try and I do like questions as I'm discussing the topic.
So as it was mentioned, I'm going to be talking about communicating capacity and expectations using your call for proposal for your open education project. So my name is Karen Bjork and here is my email address if you have any questions or want to contact me after my presentation.
So a little bit about myself. I am currently the head of digital libraries and publishing at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. So at that position, I managed digital collections and digitization, library publishing, our institutional repository services, and our open and affordable coast content programs. Before joining VCU, I worked at Portland State University Library, where I managed the institutional repository and led the university's open access textbook publishing initiative PDXOpen. And I just want to move something over quick. Okay. So as I noted, I am now working at VCU Libraries. I recently transitioned to this position. I started in March 10th. So many of my experiences that I'll be talking about today are coming from my past experience working at Portland State.
So a brief overview of what I'm going to cover during this session. I'm going to be looking at questions you'll want to answer before drafting your call for proposal. I'll be doing an overview of what should be included in your call for proposal, a discussion on what type of level of services and support your program will provide, the importance of including what the final product will look like and timelines, having authors identifying challenges. And finally, the lessons that I have learned running an OER publishing program for the past eight plus years. So as you get started with drafting your call for proposal, here are questions that you will want to answer. So these answers to these questions will help shape and define your program, and will help you draft your call for proposal. The decisions not only provide the framework, but it also informs your selection criteria and your rubric.
So you'll want to answer, do you want to evaluate writing samples as part of the application criteria? Do you want to work with multiple authors or just the lead author? So beyond your written text, what can you support? So for example, will you be able to help with the creation of illustrations? Do you have the ability to support interactive experiences? Can you support streaming videos? Does your library have a recording studio to help with the creation of podcasts? Will you provide tech support for any type of project? So for example, will you help in the creation of a website? Will you provide support with Pressbooks?
You also want to find out, do you want to require peer review? If so what type of peer review? Are you going to have single anonymous peer review, double anonymous peer review, open peer review, or are you going to have the authors decide what level of peer review? Do you want to ensure that someone else and who has reviewed projects before it's published? For example, hiring a copy editor or having designers. And who are your partners and what services can they provide? So will you, for example, partner with the Center for Teaching and Learning to provide consultations on the development and implementation of the project? So course design, curriculum development, pedagogical practices, for example. So answering these questions will help you determine your capacity and the overall goal of your program.
So the call for proposals provides your program the opportunity to set priorities, expectations, and your program's capacity. It is typically how faculty first hear about your publishing program, and provides the opportunity to communicate your programmatic capacity and author's expectations. I always like to describe it as your dating profile. It's sort of that, "I'm putting myself out here, and here's what I expect from you if you want to participate and be a part of our program."
So the call for proposal not only sets that overall tone, but it defines the spirit of the project. So having that spirit of the project really well-defined will be extremely helpful as you move forward and start working with faculty authors. In my experience, it is very important to be clear and provide detailed information on your call for proposal. It is okay for your call for proposal to be quite lengthy, because you really want to make sure that authors know what they're getting into before they get started.
So I'm going to be going through all of these in more detail. But in my mind, your call for proposal is your opportunity to communicate and define the program's priorities, its requirements, the type of grants that you're going to be offering, the funding model, your selection rubric, your services, and the supports, as well as what the end product is going to look like. So it does also inform your author agreements, which will be covered in another session. And there are many, many, many open textbook publishing call for proposals out there. So I always recommend looking at what others have done.
So I for example, just released a call for proposal at Virginia Commonwealth University. And the first thing that I did was I went online and I started looking at what other universities had done recently with their call for proposal. So much has changed in the last couple years, that I really wanted to see where others were landing on what they were supporting, how they were defining certain expectations and criteria. So really, there's no need to reinvent the wheel, and many institutions are always happy to provide additional detail when you reach out.
And it is also really important to draft and revise. Priorities shift, lessons are learned, budgets are always different. And there's always something you missed or a point that needs more clarity or detail. And this is something that I do every time a new call for proposal, I release a new call. I look at what we did in the past. I look at our lessons learned, and I revise based on that.
All right, so as I mentioned in the previous slide, before you release your call for proposal, you'll want to think about and decide what the focus of your grant program will be. This is really important. So you'll need to ask yourself, who will you be encouraging to apply? And does your program have a specific focus? So for example, will you be encouraging faculty who teach first year courses? Is your focus on high enrollment? Will your program focus on a particular discipline or area? Are you looking to work with a department or degree program rather than a single course? Is the focus of your program to support diversity, equity, and inclusion?
So several years ago when I worked at PSU, we wanted to target high enrollment courses. So we designed our call for proposal around this goal. So one of the things we needed to do was defined by what we meant by high enrollment. So this took a bit of work, because we discovered that PSU didn't have a high enrollment course definition. So after a lot of consultations with our registrar's office and other institutional partners, we defined high enrollment courses as one that had approximately 500 students annually. So while this took us time to land on this specific number, it was definitely worth it in the end, and we were able to target those high enrollment courses, which was exactly what we set out to do.
So it's important to know what your program requirements are. So in my experience, your requirements tend to be more specific with each new round. It's important to include what creative commons license the project teams will have to agree to, if the project needs to meet accessibility standards such as all audio and video materials will need to enclose close captioning, that any visual materials will have to have alternative text. Are you going to ensure that charts are not being used as a way to design your book? So you have to make sure that you have all those standards set in place before you put out your call for proposal.
You'll also have to make sure you define if you're going to have regular check-ins with grantees, if you're going to have monthly group meetings or workshops. How will your grantees share their successes or talk about their challenges? This is also really important for community building and ensuring that projects are completed on time. So at VCU, grantees must participate in a summer cohort kickoff meeting, and they also have one-on-one, and we have bimonthly group cohort meetings.
So the kickoff meeting is really important because it gives all of the grantees an opportunity to meet each other, as well as the opportunity to learn about self-publishing, copyright, accessibility, and open pedagogy. If a faculty member cannot participate in the kickoff meeting, they have to have somebody come in their place. Each of the programs need to have somebody there in attendance. We see that if faculty are missing this kickoff meeting, it is problematic because we cover so much really right at the very beginning, and we really build off of all of that. So having that knowledge base before faculty start their program is really key to ensuring the success.
So project scale and funding. When I do my call for proposal, I always know at first, what is my overall budget going to be. I then design my call around that. So I think about, am I going to do adopt, adapt, and create? Will I do a combination of those? It's really about that what type of projects you'll support and at what financial level. So will you do mini grants and only support and adopt grants? Will you be just focused on creation? Will you focus on early stage projects or provide funding for projects that have already been published and need additional support to be updated?
Your overall budget will help you determine this answer. So when my program had limited funding, I designed a call for proposal around adapt and adopt projects only. So even though we had limited funding, it provided the opportunity to support faculty flipping their courses to open. I also wanted to focus on your project scale. So at what level will you fund projects? Are you going to focus on early stage planning projects? These are really designed for limited implementation, and they are at the lowest level of funding.
Or will you do what we call spread projects, which is about expanding on seed projects, but they have a larger implementation? Or will you do the sustained projects? These are the ones that are close to having a completed first draft and having all the resources, but they just need additional funds to help finish, revise, or expand the resources.
Another option that I have also done is I have reached out to past authors and have said to them, "You wrote your book five years ago. Would you like some funding to revise it and maybe create a new addition?" So when I do this level of funding, I don't do a call for proposal. Instead, it's more internal. But it's an important piece to remember. Because faculty, while they want to try to continuously update their book, they don't always have the time or the money in order to do it. So I do like to be able to provide small amounts to allow faculty over the summer to make the necessary changes or bigger changes if needed.
So for example, I had an author that wrote a book. And one of their chapters was looking at an Apple iOS software. Unfortunately, as we all know, these softwares quickly go out of date, and everything that he wrote in that chapter was out of date. And so he needed to go and revise it. In talking to him, I did suggest that he not focus on the iOS software, and instead, he change the focus of the chapter so that he wouldn't have to continuously update it with each new software. But it is important as a way to try to make sure that it isn't a publish and forget it type of scenario, because that is a question that you do get a lot is, "Once I'm done with my book, what kind of support will I have to continue to have it be updated?" So that is something you'll need to factor into your program as a whole.
All right, I'm going to continue to move on. It doesn't look like I see anything in the chat so far. But if you do have questions on anything that I've covered, please add them to the chat.
So I'm going to focus on budget. So budget is an area that has taken up most of my time as a project manager when I worked at Portland State University. The reason for that is because the library distributed the funds to the authors directly. So it required me to meet weekly with our budget analyst in the library to ensure that we were on track and stayed on budget. We had a number of spreadsheets and documents that guided every single decision we make.
At VCU Libraries, we are able to distribute the money directly to the faculty member's department. So there are no restrictions on how the funding can be spent. They can be used for direct costs for the project, professional, development salary, or any other support related to their projects. I highly recommend this route. If you are able to give the money directly to the departments and then have the departments distribute it, let me tell you, that will save you so much time, and headache, and worry. Unfortunately, at Portland State, we were not able to do that, so I had to focus on and be a part of the budget discussions.
So if your library does need to distribute the funds like we did at PSU, here are some things to consider. So will you be distributing your money in one lump sum? Would it be coming at the beginning, or mid, or end of the project, or a combination? Will, again, the funding be transferred to your department? Then you don't need to worry about the first two questions. And will you be paying the faculty members directly? So if you pay the faculty members directly, who's going to cover payroll expenses? So when we talk about OPE or payroll expenses, we mean the employer paid taxes such as social security and Medicare. So if you're offering a stipend of $2,500, for example, will the faculty member receive the gross wages of 2,500 or will they actually receive 2,000 after taxes and OPE will be taken out? And how will this affect your overall budget?
Will your institution hire and handle contracts? So if the author wanted to work with someone outside the institution, who is going to write up the contract and verify and ensure that there is no HR protocol being violated? Are there any type of expenses that you will not pay for? So there's a lot to consider with the budget. And again, this can be the most complicated area. So I always recommend working with your budget analyst at the time you draft your call for proposal, and really getting a clear indication as to how the money is going to be distributed and who's going to be distributing the money. It can make a huge difference in ensuring the ease of your entire program overall.
So services and supports. So you really must clearly define what services your program is going to offer. Services could include project management, copyright permissions, assistance with locating resources, assisting with selection of peer reviewers, copy editing, and book design, cover design, accessibility compliance, checking, hosting of websites or assistance with the creation of interactive online tools, and verification of citations. Identifying partners outside your library or institution is also really important, and it helps strengthen your program. So do you have instructional designers that you can work with that can assist with the pedagogical questions? Are there any publishing supports or contracts that your university already uses or has?
So here are a few questions that I recommend answering to help you decide on what services your program will offer, and the capacity that you have to support them. So many of these questions are what I began with in the presentation, but I just want to quickly bring them out here as well to really show the relevancy. So will your open textbook authors just write their book, or will they also be responsible for editing and designing the book? Will the authors be responsible for clearing copyrights, or will your program provide assistance with that?
So at Portland State, many of our open textbooks that we supported were in foreign language education and required international copyright clearance. So while we worked closely with the author to draft the copyright clearance letters, we required the authors to request the permissions themselves. We had an author who was writing a book on Russian literature and wanted to specifically use literature that was published in Russia. So thankfully, her parents were still living in Russia, and they were able to assist us with getting the necessary copyright clearance. Because otherwise, we don't know if we would've been able or allowed to put this particular literature as part of this open textbook.
So during the author creation process, will the library assist the author with pedagogical questions, or does your university have instructional designers that you can refer them to? At Portland State, we did not answer pedagogical questions. Those went to our instructional designers. So from the very beginning, faculty knew that they needed to reach out to our instructional designers rather than the library for any type of pedagogical questions.
Do you have any in-house expertise? Is there staff in your library or at your university that could do copy editing or designing? Does that person have the capacity to take on extra work? Is that person able to say no? And would you charge for these services? If you don't have the in-house expertise, will authors be responsible for finding editors and designers themselves, or will this be something that your program will handle? How will you handle textbook peer review? Will your books be double-blind or open peer review, as I asked at the beginning? Will your program pay reviewers or will authors need to pay for reviewers? If you decided to do an open peer review, will the authors need to find the reviewers? If so, how many, and can they be affiliated with your institution or not?
Will the authors be required to set aside a certain amount of funding to be designated for editorial or production services? So this is something that I've done in the past, but I have learned that the length of the book will impact the overall cost of editorial and production services. Honestly, it was something that I didn't even think of. I had a textbook that was 100 pages, and then I had another one that was 250 pages. And I will tell you the cost was significantly different between those two. And I had said, "You have to set aside X number of dollars." Well, unfortunately, that X number of dollars did not cover the 250-page book text. So I needed to go back to my dean and explain that I needed more funding to be able to support this, because we required the textbooks to go through these services. So that was a real lesson learned on my part.
I do think it is important to talk about production services, to talk about design, and to talk about copy editing from the very beginning with faculty editors or faculty authors, because it's not always something they think about. And after they've spent their money out, they sometimes have come to me and said, "It'd be great to have a cover. It would be really nice to be able to have someone come in and do some copy editing." And I've had to say in the past, "I'm so sorry, but we don't have any money to cover that." So now, I make sure that faculty think about the editors, the designers, the copy editors at the very beginning. And I actually have incorporated the requirements that they have to set aside money for that. And it really does depend on if your university has an in-house press, or if there are other contracts. But it is something to really think about and consider.
And the reason I think that that's really important is because having copy editors, having designers really helps make the project look more polished. And that does make a difference. We always say you can't judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, people still judge textbooks by their cover. And I feel like with open textbooks, the first comment we usually get is, "Well, they're not as good as a commercial textbook." And I believe that a lot of that is because they may not look as pretty, that it has really little to do with the content. Well actually, their content is on par, but it's just because they don't always have that design element.
All right, so the next one is the final product and timeline. So final product and timeline, really asking about will authors retain their copyright, or is the copyright going to be sent to the university? What creative commons license will you allow? Are there creative commons license that you will not allow? The other questions to ask is, what will a completed textbook look like?
I didn't think about including this in my call for proposal initially, but I quickly came to the realization after my second round when there was a misunderstanding between what an open textbook was. And I realized that the faculty member created reading packet. And what I was intending for them to create was a textbook. So I had to make sure I went back to the drawing board and included this number of pages. So I had to make sure that number of pages was well-defined, that they had chapters, that each chapter had a set structure, and that the textbooks all had a similar style. So that was something that I needed to make sure that I incorporated into was within the call of proposal, I had to define what a completed project looked like.
The other thing you'll need to think about is the length of time to complete projects. And some of this has to do with your budget. If you have to spend money out by a certain time, is that going to define your timeline? I'm going to be talking about timelines more so in the next couple slides. But one of the things that I think is really important is that what timeline the person sets is not always necessarily the timeline that ends up being the realistic timeline. Timelines shift and change. And so if you have a set timeline, you do need to be very, very clear that authors have to complete their project by a certain date, and the reasons for that. So I think it's one of these things that sometimes can be forgotten in a call for proposal, but I think it's really important.
So author challenges. This is something new that I have done in my call for proposal, is that I require every project to think about and discuss any potential roadblocks that they may encounter as they create and develop their projects. And I think that this is a really important exercise, particularly when discussing these realistic timelines, as well as service expectations and potential knowledge gaps.
So challenges could include licensing questions, staffing challenges, skills gap, gaps in knowledge, content availability, and time concerns. It's really about having these conversations before the project starts, and really being able to identify where you might have opportunities to be able to teach faculty in various areas. So I think that it's hard for anyone submitting a proposal to think or acknowledge the challenges, but I do think it's a really important step in ensuring that the projects are completed on time and in the spirit of the project. So I am almost done, but I just wanted to check in again to see if there are any questions. I'm not seeing any questions in the chat so far. So we should be looking at selection rubrics, is the next one.
So I just wanted to give all of you an idea of what my selection rubric looks like. This is really very much based on our call for proposal, and we just have a point system. So our evaluation criteria looks at objectives, the impact, the plan for the timeline. And then we base point on if the proposals objectives are well-defined, the proposal is clear and convincing about how they're going to use OERs, and that the proposal's timelines are developed and implementation is really seen as being feasible. And then the second part of our rubric goes into the plan for assessment. We think it's important that faculty assess their projects. So we want to make sure that faculty have thought through how they're going to make those necessary assessments, and what material are they choosing and why.
Cost savings, always a big one. We like to boast about how much money we're saving. So the larger the project, the higher the cost savings. So that's a good check. And then feasibility. How feasible is this project? So feasibility sometimes can be difficult to judge, but you can typically get within... When you ask faculty to submit their proposals, you can usually get a good feel for how far they are in a project, and how much they've thought about the project. And I think it is really important, because many of these projects are done and completed at the same time faculty are teaching. They're still doing their research and their writing, and they have personal lives.
So it's really about making sure that the project really can be done, and it's not just this much bigger and higher... It's just not something unfortunately that they just can't accomplish. I've had to talk to faculty about scaling down projects, because they really have gone, "I'm going to do this and this," and they get very excited, which is fantastic. But you also need to remind faculty that unless they can afford a buyout, they have all these other commitments at the same time.
Okay. Lessons learned. This is probably one of my favorite parts of all of this. And as I said, I've been doing this for eight plus years, and I'm still learning. There are things that I still am like, "Wow, I never thought of that," or, "That didn't come up." So I think it's really important to acknowledge that we all make mistakes, but this is the best way to ensure that you have a really good and solid program. So it is important to say, "Didn't think of that. Put that as my lesson."
So one of the biggest lessons that I have learned is project management takes a lot of time. I did not realize that when I first came in and I was like, "Yeah sure, I can support 10 projects." Yeah, it was tough. Supporting that many projects while doing my other duties was very hard. Project management takes a lot of time. There's checking in on the one-on-one meetings, answering questions, putting together the workshops, putting together and scheduling the cohort meetings, working with faculty on their budgets. So it's really important to make sure that you have an understanding of what your capacity is and how many projects you can realistically, successfully support.
And as I said, it is okay to only do a handful. If that is all that you can do, that is fantastic. And I don't want anyone to think, "We can only support one or two projects, so I can't do a call for proposal or an open education program." I would say that it doesn't matter. Just doing a couple projects is amazing. You're helping students save money. You're working directly with faculty, and you can grow on that. Timelines and priorities shift, and this is just the nature of universities and academic teaching. While in OER may be a priority for one semester, it may get shifted down because of publishing or because of other grant programs. So you have to acknowledge that the OER project may not be at the top, and this may extend the deadline.
I worked with a faculty member for five years on her project because things just kept shifting, and I just kept at it with her. I just kept supporting her. I kept encouraging her. And when it was done, it was an amazing project, but it took two and a half years longer because of various things just taking top priority. One other thing to keep in mind is developing procedures and policies for no longer supporting projects. While we don't want to pull the plug on a project, sometimes it's necessary. But you have to know what steps you need to take in order to determine if that's necessary and how that will happen.
I've only had to not support one project, and it was a really hard decision to make. And in the end, I actually think it turned out really well, because we put the project on hold and we paused. We then still continued conversation with the faculty, and we were able to bring that faculty back in a year or two years later when they were better suited to move forward with their project.
Another thing to think about is, authors leave institutions. So what happens if your faculty member leaves your institution mid-project? Do you have somebody to pick up the slack? Is the project then done? Or would you be willing to continue to support the project even though they're at a different institution? So these are things that I did not think about initially when I started.
So some other lessons learned is be specific. Again, cannot say this enough. Provide opportunities for feedback and suggestions both from your team and from applicants, throughout your project's run. So not just at the end, but also in the middle. So one of the things that we have at VCU is we have bimonthly cohort meetings. And during these meetings we do check-ins and we say, "How is it going? What can we do better?" So this is our way of being able to have these conversations with our faculty authors, do these check-in. And if we need to change anything, we can do this mid-project rather than waiting till the end.
Set clear selection and eligibility rubric. This is really important, because a lot of the time, you're going to have more proposals than money. So you do need to make sure that you can figure out what you're saying no to and why. So having those clear guidelines can really help you on that. And again, it's okay to reject proposals. It'll actually make your program stronger. And the reason I say that is because when you reject a proposal, I always recommend having the conversation with the faculty to explain why, to really talk to them about it. And see if maybe there's somehow else we could support them.
So I had a faculty member that we rejected their proposal because we honestly didn't have any more funding, but the project worked really well with our online learning community and could be used in their LMS. So I actually shifted them to our instructional designers. The faculty worked with the instructional designers, made some changes. And then a year later, reapplied and actually had a much stronger proposal, and then was part of our project. So it really isn't just about rejecting and then never speaking. It's really about having those ongoing conversations.
And finally, opportunities to create awareness on campus. Really, your call for proposal is, why should faculty participate in care? This is sometimes their first connection to OER, sometimes their first connection to what you're doing in the library. And so you are really trying to demonstrate and show why should they care. It's about what are the benefits of participating beyond just saving students money. I always like to talk a lot about faculties' ability to customize their course material specifically for their classes.
So at Portland State, for example, we have a Spanish 101 textbook. This textbook, it's all for the Spanish 100 level series. So Portland State has terms. So it was the three terms. The book was being developed during 2020. So when the killing of George Floyd and then the protests that were happening in Portland were occurring, my faculty author that I was working with was incorporating what was going on in Portland in her course assignment and in her textbook. She was teaching her students the Spanish vocabulary and how to talk about what was going on in Spanish.
And I asked her to get some feedback from the students after that term. And one of the students talked about how they were having a really hard time being in an online class, that transitioning to learning Spanish in an online environment was difficult. But having that material that was created specifically by their teacher for them made that huge difference. And she felt like she was being seen and heard. And it helped support this student to continue in her class and continue in the class and not drop out. So it's really important to be able to talk about those benefits as well as not just beyond saving money.
And then it's also about what expertise as a program manager you bring to your program and what opportunities are there on campus for partnerships. Partnerships are really going to help you sustain these programs in the long run. It's not just falling on you. You're getting help and support from others. And it creates an amazing awareness of what the library is doing and the services that we offer. And on that note, I'll say thank you. And I am going to open it up to questions, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
Angelique: Wow, thank you so much, Karen, for sharing all this information. You say that you're eight years into this kind of project management for OER. I myself am two and a half months. Our call for proposals at the WRLC was January 31st. And I can say from firsthand experience, the good advice to get granular on that call for proposals is something that I would tout over and over again. You're really setting expectations, and it's just so important that the candidates and their support team know what's going to be required, down to how many meetings you're going to ask them to attend. Will you want to photograph from them? Can you invite them to future panels? All these items. So now, it is a time for questions. I'd like to invite the audience to unmute yourself if you'd like, and raise your hand or put comments in the chat.
Karen: I see there was a question about, are we on the correct page of PowerPoint? So I do hope that you were all able to continue to see my PowerPoint slides. I can share them as well and have them sent out.
Angelique: Thank you, Karen. I actually checked at that time, and you were talking about support and services, so it seemed like we were quite on track.
Karen: Okay. Okay, good. Okay.
Angelique: I do have a question to get things started. One experience we had at the WRLC was in an effort to remove the threshold of all the meetings our instructors are being asked to attend, we removed a mandatory requirement of attending a meeting, a webinar before the candidate applied for the grant. And I got to tell you, I don't really know if it accelerated the number of grants we had. And in the end, the grants that we received from faculty who attended the meeting were very different from those who just read the information and submitted.
There was such a difference, not in quality or in feasibility, but in the candidate's understanding of the project itself. And that's one thing that we're going to definitely go back and revise. And I love that you said at least one person has to attend. Whether it's a talk representative, someone from their support team. I think that's one item we already know we're going to go back and revisit.
Karen: Yeah. And one of the things that I do... So when I do the call for proposals, I actually have a caveat that says I will be reaching out to them to discuss their proposal in more depth before a decision is made. And I do that as well just to make sure that the faculty are all on the same page with us before we even select their proposal. So I don't have a requirement of attending a meeting before they submit, but I do reach out to them and say, "I would like to talk to you about this before the selection happens." Because we've had in the past, faculty decline after being accepted when they've realized that their material's going to be published openly, and they're not going to be making royalties off of the material. And so I just really want to make sure that faculty are really clear in the requirements that we have laid out.
And that's why with the summer kickoff, we do require everyone to attend or to have somebody take their place, because of the level of information that we provide, as well as we want to make sure faculty can hit the ground running, and that they have an understanding of copyright, and self-publishing, and online learning, and pedagogical, because of experiences in the past where faculty have run through a project and then we've realized that they're violating copyright, and we have to set back. And it's going to delay us for two months as we try to find creative commons licensed material that they could use. So it is really important.
So Amanda said that when she managed a grant program, she switched to mandatory consultations with folks beforehand after a wild first call. So many projects that weren't viable. Yeah. I always hope that faculty will reach out to me before they put in their call for proposals to talk about the projects, but that doesn't always happen. So I always try to talk to them before we make a selection. And sometimes, it's a tight turnaround and it's difficult when faculty are off contract, but it's just something that I've seen as important.
Angelique: Thank you. And that goes again to just being very granular. While we wait for some hands to raise or some items in the chat, I also want to say that when it comes to these mandatory requirements, or at least expectations, one thing that stood out was a misunderstanding between OA and access, affordable learning content, OER, and why we wanted you to understand the difference and know that your material would have the most generous CC license. And I think faculty assume an understanding and they're just like, "Yeah, we got this," and then go forward. But we had to decide, it is our pilot year. Were we going to stand firmly with textbook savings, which OA would be fine, or do we really want to pursue the OER ethos of the grant? And we decided that we were going to stand firm in this first year, but leave consideration for a following year. And that was a big gap in understanding with more than one proposal.
Karen: Yeah. I shouldn't be, but I am still surprised in the gap of understanding between OER and affordable course content material. So I have stood firm on... It depends on the type of grants that I offer. So this most recent call for proposals, we are just doing adopt and creation grants. So because we're not doing the adapt grants, we decided we are standing firm. They have to be open educational resources, they have to be published openly, they have to make sure there's a creative Commons license.
When I've done call for proposals with adopting grants, then I am much more flexible in can the material be put into the faculty member's LMS? Is it really just focused on saving money? So in my decision making, I've been really clear about when we are more flexible about the cost saving and the type of material versus when we are not. And so that it really is, I think, part of your decision making process. Creation grants are more expensive and time-consuming, which is why in my mind, it's very important to make sure that they have resources that are licensed so that they can be free distributed and are what we would refer to as an OER.
Angelique: Very good. Exactly. You might have seen me just nodding my head over and over while you were speaking. I'm just like, "Yes. Excellent point." I don't see the hands raised just yet. So I'd like to highlight another topic you discussed, is when you have to say no. And we have a consultant from UMSD, we also look heavily at VIVA's very excellent historic project. And we bless all the librarians who so freely shared their information with us to help us get our own program off the ground.
Those that you have to reject for next year or say just not yet, those are your OER allies. And we're currently trying to figure out a way to fold them into this so we don't lose that interest that hopefully we've sparked. And especially when it comes to adjunct faculty who are sometimes more open to it, but can't always predict if they're going to be teaching what exact course next semester. So that's what we're thinking of right now, because the drafts that weren't completed... We got a partial partial program proposals. And those that we rejected, what can we do to bring them into the fold and find more opportunities?
Karen: So one of the ways that we did it at Portland State was that I worked really closely with our subject liaisons, had the subject liaisons create those connections, and be able to work with the faculty about how they could just start to bring in some free course materials. Even if it's an ebook with unlimited license, or if it's helping to better select open educational resources for their classroom. So our subject liaisons found it as a great way to connect with adjuncts and faculty that they may not have otherwise spoken to. I really liked it because it provided and continued to allow the faculty to engage with the library and really look at the services that were offered, but I just didn't have the capacity to be able to support our projects as well as the ones that we had to reject for whatever reason.
And that was actually very successful because our liaisons were part of the faculty, had already had the connections. The liaisons were part of the selection process, so they knew which ones we were rejecting and why. And so they would reach out and say, "Hey, I was part of this. I want to talk to you about how we can continue to support, and maybe find innovative ways that we can work together. We're not going to be able to provide you with funding, but maybe we could look at just even starting the process of flipping your course." So that's how we've been able to do it. I also had a running list of everyone that had applied. So when we had new grants coming, I emailed them directly and said, "Hey, we've got a new round. Are you interested? I know that you've had some material." So we've done that as well.
And Amanda and I, as well as some of our other colleagues, have actually done presentations talking about how to say no, and looking at your capacity, and the benefits that it can offer. And it is really difficult. As librarians, we like to say yes to everything. We like to please. We like to try to make it all work. But it's not good for our health to be honest. And I think you can really build some strong relationships by being forthcoming and saying, "Your project is strong, but we just don't have the money to support this. And we have a project that is going to support 1,800 students. We need to support that this round." Amanda put in our Power of Now.
Angelique: I love it.
Karen: I do recommend checking it out. It's a fun presentation to do, and it really challenged all of us to think about how we say no and what tools in our toolbox we have to be able to do that.
Angelique: Thank you so much, Karen. I'm looking for raised hands. I know-
Karen: I covered everything.
Angelique: You really did.
Karen: So well.
Angelique: I have a laundry list here, so I know for sure that you did. I want to highlight one more point. Please do not underestimate the time project management will demand. Our project was much larger. We're doing adopt now, but it was create and adapt and adopt. We were advised by VIVA, we were advised by UMSD, who they both have two big programs. They've been running for several years. They said, "Even if you get someone part-time," and even with it scaled all the way back, and I'm finding it's at least 15 to 10 hours a week just getting it off the ground. So find your help and lean into your allies and your partners.
Karen: That is the best advice ever, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. I completely underestimated when I first started how much time it was going to take. I wanted to support the faculty that were writing these books at all costs, and it was a struggle because I didn't have the ability or the time to be able to do it. I figured it out, but I felt bad because I really should have accepted less, I should have realized. And I just didn't, I was so new to it all. And so I agree so much with that statement.
Angelique: Well, Karen Bjork, I want to thank you again for all of your highly excellent, relevant, golden information. As a fledgling myself, I can share with everyone how very relevant the information is. And thank you all for joining us today as we continue to learn more about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, one of your key takeaways is a sense that you're not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors. You certainly are, we're all allies, and I have really appreciated all the information you share today. Thank you so much for joining us, Karen.
Karen: Thank you so much for having me. And if anyone has any questions, please feel free to email me or reach out.
Angelique: Wonderful. And with that, everyone, have a great afternoon and thank you so much.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This May 4, 2023, session is the fifth in our series this year. Host Angelique Carson of Washington Research Library Consortium is joined by guest speaker Karen Bjork of Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries for a discussion of the call for proposals.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
Angelique Carson (Shared Collections Librarian, Washington Research Library Consortium)
Karen Bjork (Head of Digital Libraries and Publishing, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries)
Angelique: There may be many of you who have had experiences with this topic in addition to our guest, and we absolutely invite you to share your experiences and resources. Here are a few housekeeping details. The webinar is being recorded and will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2023 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone signed with our community norms. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. And please remember there is a companion resource for these sessions as well, the Pub101 Canvas curriculum, which you can find here. That link is being dropped by Amanda as well. And now I will hand things over to begin our discussion.
Karen: Thank you so much, Angelique. Let me just share my slides and share my screen, and then I will get started on our topic. So just one second please. All right, so everyone should see my slideshow. If you can nod or give a thumbs up, you can see everything. Perfect, that would be great. One thing I also like to note is, please feel free to interrupt at any time if you have any questions for me while I'm talking. I do have the chat up and running. Sometimes it is hard to see both at the same time, but I do try and I do like questions as I'm discussing the topic.
So as it was mentioned, I'm going to be talking about communicating capacity and expectations using your call for proposal for your open education project. So my name is Karen Bjork and here is my email address if you have any questions or want to contact me after my presentation.
So a little bit about myself. I am currently the head of digital libraries and publishing at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. So at that position, I managed digital collections and digitization, library publishing, our institutional repository services, and our open and affordable coast content programs. Before joining VCU, I worked at Portland State University Library, where I managed the institutional repository and led the university's open access textbook publishing initiative PDXOpen. And I just want to move something over quick. Okay. So as I noted, I am now working at VCU Libraries. I recently transitioned to this position. I started in March 10th. So many of my experiences that I'll be talking about today are coming from my past experience working at Portland State.
So a brief overview of what I'm going to cover during this session. I'm going to be looking at questions you'll want to answer before drafting your call for proposal. I'll be doing an overview of what should be included in your call for proposal, a discussion on what type of level of services and support your program will provide, the importance of including what the final product will look like and timelines, having authors identifying challenges. And finally, the lessons that I have learned running an OER publishing program for the past eight plus years. So as you get started with drafting your call for proposal, here are questions that you will want to answer. So these answers to these questions will help shape and define your program, and will help you draft your call for proposal. The decisions not only provide the framework, but it also informs your selection criteria and your rubric.
So you'll want to answer, do you want to evaluate writing samples as part of the application criteria? Do you want to work with multiple authors or just the lead author? So beyond your written text, what can you support? So for example, will you be able to help with the creation of illustrations? Do you have the ability to support interactive experiences? Can you support streaming videos? Does your library have a recording studio to help with the creation of podcasts? Will you provide tech support for any type of project? So for example, will you help in the creation of a website? Will you provide support with Pressbooks?
You also want to find out, do you want to require peer review? If so what type of peer review? Are you going to have single anonymous peer review, double anonymous peer review, open peer review, or are you going to have the authors decide what level of peer review? Do you want to ensure that someone else and who has reviewed projects before it's published? For example, hiring a copy editor or having designers. And who are your partners and what services can they provide? So will you, for example, partner with the Center for Teaching and Learning to provide consultations on the development and implementation of the project? So course design, curriculum development, pedagogical practices, for example. So answering these questions will help you determine your capacity and the overall goal of your program.
So the call for proposals provides your program the opportunity to set priorities, expectations, and your program's capacity. It is typically how faculty first hear about your publishing program, and provides the opportunity to communicate your programmatic capacity and author's expectations. I always like to describe it as your dating profile. It's sort of that, "I'm putting myself out here, and here's what I expect from you if you want to participate and be a part of our program."
So the call for proposal not only sets that overall tone, but it defines the spirit of the project. So having that spirit of the project really well-defined will be extremely helpful as you move forward and start working with faculty authors. In my experience, it is very important to be clear and provide detailed information on your call for proposal. It is okay for your call for proposal to be quite lengthy, because you really want to make sure that authors know what they're getting into before they get started.
So I'm going to be going through all of these in more detail. But in my mind, your call for proposal is your opportunity to communicate and define the program's priorities, its requirements, the type of grants that you're going to be offering, the funding model, your selection rubric, your services, and the supports, as well as what the end product is going to look like. So it does also inform your author agreements, which will be covered in another session. And there are many, many, many open textbook publishing call for proposals out there. So I always recommend looking at what others have done.
So I for example, just released a call for proposal at Virginia Commonwealth University. And the first thing that I did was I went online and I started looking at what other universities had done recently with their call for proposal. So much has changed in the last couple years, that I really wanted to see where others were landing on what they were supporting, how they were defining certain expectations and criteria. So really, there's no need to reinvent the wheel, and many institutions are always happy to provide additional detail when you reach out.
And it is also really important to draft and revise. Priorities shift, lessons are learned, budgets are always different. And there's always something you missed or a point that needs more clarity or detail. And this is something that I do every time a new call for proposal, I release a new call. I look at what we did in the past. I look at our lessons learned, and I revise based on that.
All right, so as I mentioned in the previous slide, before you release your call for proposal, you'll want to think about and decide what the focus of your grant program will be. This is really important. So you'll need to ask yourself, who will you be encouraging to apply? And does your program have a specific focus? So for example, will you be encouraging faculty who teach first year courses? Is your focus on high enrollment? Will your program focus on a particular discipline or area? Are you looking to work with a department or degree program rather than a single course? Is the focus of your program to support diversity, equity, and inclusion?
So several years ago when I worked at PSU, we wanted to target high enrollment courses. So we designed our call for proposal around this goal. So one of the things we needed to do was defined by what we meant by high enrollment. So this took a bit of work, because we discovered that PSU didn't have a high enrollment course definition. So after a lot of consultations with our registrar's office and other institutional partners, we defined high enrollment courses as one that had approximately 500 students annually. So while this took us time to land on this specific number, it was definitely worth it in the end, and we were able to target those high enrollment courses, which was exactly what we set out to do.
So it's important to know what your program requirements are. So in my experience, your requirements tend to be more specific with each new round. It's important to include what creative commons license the project teams will have to agree to, if the project needs to meet accessibility standards such as all audio and video materials will need to enclose close captioning, that any visual materials will have to have alternative text. Are you going to ensure that charts are not being used as a way to design your book? So you have to make sure that you have all those standards set in place before you put out your call for proposal.
You'll also have to make sure you define if you're going to have regular check-ins with grantees, if you're going to have monthly group meetings or workshops. How will your grantees share their successes or talk about their challenges? This is also really important for community building and ensuring that projects are completed on time. So at VCU, grantees must participate in a summer cohort kickoff meeting, and they also have one-on-one, and we have bimonthly group cohort meetings.
So the kickoff meeting is really important because it gives all of the grantees an opportunity to meet each other, as well as the opportunity to learn about self-publishing, copyright, accessibility, and open pedagogy. If a faculty member cannot participate in the kickoff meeting, they have to have somebody come in their place. Each of the programs need to have somebody there in attendance. We see that if faculty are missing this kickoff meeting, it is problematic because we cover so much really right at the very beginning, and we really build off of all of that. So having that knowledge base before faculty start their program is really key to ensuring the success.
So project scale and funding. When I do my call for proposal, I always know at first, what is my overall budget going to be. I then design my call around that. So I think about, am I going to do adopt, adapt, and create? Will I do a combination of those? It's really about that what type of projects you'll support and at what financial level. So will you do mini grants and only support and adopt grants? Will you be just focused on creation? Will you focus on early stage projects or provide funding for projects that have already been published and need additional support to be updated?
Your overall budget will help you determine this answer. So when my program had limited funding, I designed a call for proposal around adapt and adopt projects only. So even though we had limited funding, it provided the opportunity to support faculty flipping their courses to open. I also wanted to focus on your project scale. So at what level will you fund projects? Are you going to focus on early stage planning projects? These are really designed for limited implementation, and they are at the lowest level of funding.
Or will you do what we call spread projects, which is about expanding on seed projects, but they have a larger implementation? Or will you do the sustained projects? These are the ones that are close to having a completed first draft and having all the resources, but they just need additional funds to help finish, revise, or expand the resources.
Another option that I have also done is I have reached out to past authors and have said to them, "You wrote your book five years ago. Would you like some funding to revise it and maybe create a new addition?" So when I do this level of funding, I don't do a call for proposal. Instead, it's more internal. But it's an important piece to remember. Because faculty, while they want to try to continuously update their book, they don't always have the time or the money in order to do it. So I do like to be able to provide small amounts to allow faculty over the summer to make the necessary changes or bigger changes if needed.
So for example, I had an author that wrote a book. And one of their chapters was looking at an Apple iOS software. Unfortunately, as we all know, these softwares quickly go out of date, and everything that he wrote in that chapter was out of date. And so he needed to go and revise it. In talking to him, I did suggest that he not focus on the iOS software, and instead, he change the focus of the chapter so that he wouldn't have to continuously update it with each new software. But it is important as a way to try to make sure that it isn't a publish and forget it type of scenario, because that is a question that you do get a lot is, "Once I'm done with my book, what kind of support will I have to continue to have it be updated?" So that is something you'll need to factor into your program as a whole.
All right, I'm going to continue to move on. It doesn't look like I see anything in the chat so far. But if you do have questions on anything that I've covered, please add them to the chat.
So I'm going to focus on budget. So budget is an area that has taken up most of my time as a project manager when I worked at Portland State University. The reason for that is because the library distributed the funds to the authors directly. So it required me to meet weekly with our budget analyst in the library to ensure that we were on track and stayed on budget. We had a number of spreadsheets and documents that guided every single decision we make.
At VCU Libraries, we are able to distribute the money directly to the faculty member's department. So there are no restrictions on how the funding can be spent. They can be used for direct costs for the project, professional, development salary, or any other support related to their projects. I highly recommend this route. If you are able to give the money directly to the departments and then have the departments distribute it, let me tell you, that will save you so much time, and headache, and worry. Unfortunately, at Portland State, we were not able to do that, so I had to focus on and be a part of the budget discussions.
So if your library does need to distribute the funds like we did at PSU, here are some things to consider. So will you be distributing your money in one lump sum? Would it be coming at the beginning, or mid, or end of the project, or a combination? Will, again, the funding be transferred to your department? Then you don't need to worry about the first two questions. And will you be paying the faculty members directly? So if you pay the faculty members directly, who's going to cover payroll expenses? So when we talk about OPE or payroll expenses, we mean the employer paid taxes such as social security and Medicare. So if you're offering a stipend of $2,500, for example, will the faculty member receive the gross wages of 2,500 or will they actually receive 2,000 after taxes and OPE will be taken out? And how will this affect your overall budget?
Will your institution hire and handle contracts? So if the author wanted to work with someone outside the institution, who is going to write up the contract and verify and ensure that there is no HR protocol being violated? Are there any type of expenses that you will not pay for? So there's a lot to consider with the budget. And again, this can be the most complicated area. So I always recommend working with your budget analyst at the time you draft your call for proposal, and really getting a clear indication as to how the money is going to be distributed and who's going to be distributing the money. It can make a huge difference in ensuring the ease of your entire program overall.
So services and supports. So you really must clearly define what services your program is going to offer. Services could include project management, copyright permissions, assistance with locating resources, assisting with selection of peer reviewers, copy editing, and book design, cover design, accessibility compliance, checking, hosting of websites or assistance with the creation of interactive online tools, and verification of citations. Identifying partners outside your library or institution is also really important, and it helps strengthen your program. So do you have instructional designers that you can work with that can assist with the pedagogical questions? Are there any publishing supports or contracts that your university already uses or has?
So here are a few questions that I recommend answering to help you decide on what services your program will offer, and the capacity that you have to support them. So many of these questions are what I began with in the presentation, but I just want to quickly bring them out here as well to really show the relevancy. So will your open textbook authors just write their book, or will they also be responsible for editing and designing the book? Will the authors be responsible for clearing copyrights, or will your program provide assistance with that?
So at Portland State, many of our open textbooks that we supported were in foreign language education and required international copyright clearance. So while we worked closely with the author to draft the copyright clearance letters, we required the authors to request the permissions themselves. We had an author who was writing a book on Russian literature and wanted to specifically use literature that was published in Russia. So thankfully, her parents were still living in Russia, and they were able to assist us with getting the necessary copyright clearance. Because otherwise, we don't know if we would've been able or allowed to put this particular literature as part of this open textbook.
So during the author creation process, will the library assist the author with pedagogical questions, or does your university have instructional designers that you can refer them to? At Portland State, we did not answer pedagogical questions. Those went to our instructional designers. So from the very beginning, faculty knew that they needed to reach out to our instructional designers rather than the library for any type of pedagogical questions.
Do you have any in-house expertise? Is there staff in your library or at your university that could do copy editing or designing? Does that person have the capacity to take on extra work? Is that person able to say no? And would you charge for these services? If you don't have the in-house expertise, will authors be responsible for finding editors and designers themselves, or will this be something that your program will handle? How will you handle textbook peer review? Will your books be double-blind or open peer review, as I asked at the beginning? Will your program pay reviewers or will authors need to pay for reviewers? If you decided to do an open peer review, will the authors need to find the reviewers? If so, how many, and can they be affiliated with your institution or not?
Will the authors be required to set aside a certain amount of funding to be designated for editorial or production services? So this is something that I've done in the past, but I have learned that the length of the book will impact the overall cost of editorial and production services. Honestly, it was something that I didn't even think of. I had a textbook that was 100 pages, and then I had another one that was 250 pages. And I will tell you the cost was significantly different between those two. And I had said, "You have to set aside X number of dollars." Well, unfortunately, that X number of dollars did not cover the 250-page book text. So I needed to go back to my dean and explain that I needed more funding to be able to support this, because we required the textbooks to go through these services. So that was a real lesson learned on my part.
I do think it is important to talk about production services, to talk about design, and to talk about copy editing from the very beginning with faculty editors or faculty authors, because it's not always something they think about. And after they've spent their money out, they sometimes have come to me and said, "It'd be great to have a cover. It would be really nice to be able to have someone come in and do some copy editing." And I've had to say in the past, "I'm so sorry, but we don't have any money to cover that." So now, I make sure that faculty think about the editors, the designers, the copy editors at the very beginning. And I actually have incorporated the requirements that they have to set aside money for that. And it really does depend on if your university has an in-house press, or if there are other contracts. But it is something to really think about and consider.
And the reason I think that that's really important is because having copy editors, having designers really helps make the project look more polished. And that does make a difference. We always say you can't judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, people still judge textbooks by their cover. And I feel like with open textbooks, the first comment we usually get is, "Well, they're not as good as a commercial textbook." And I believe that a lot of that is because they may not look as pretty, that it has really little to do with the content. Well actually, their content is on par, but it's just because they don't always have that design element.
All right, so the next one is the final product and timeline. So final product and timeline, really asking about will authors retain their copyright, or is the copyright going to be sent to the university? What creative commons license will you allow? Are there creative commons license that you will not allow? The other questions to ask is, what will a completed textbook look like?
I didn't think about including this in my call for proposal initially, but I quickly came to the realization after my second round when there was a misunderstanding between what an open textbook was. And I realized that the faculty member created reading packet. And what I was intending for them to create was a textbook. So I had to make sure I went back to the drawing board and included this number of pages. So I had to make sure that number of pages was well-defined, that they had chapters, that each chapter had a set structure, and that the textbooks all had a similar style. So that was something that I needed to make sure that I incorporated into was within the call of proposal, I had to define what a completed project looked like.
The other thing you'll need to think about is the length of time to complete projects. And some of this has to do with your budget. If you have to spend money out by a certain time, is that going to define your timeline? I'm going to be talking about timelines more so in the next couple slides. But one of the things that I think is really important is that what timeline the person sets is not always necessarily the timeline that ends up being the realistic timeline. Timelines shift and change. And so if you have a set timeline, you do need to be very, very clear that authors have to complete their project by a certain date, and the reasons for that. So I think it's one of these things that sometimes can be forgotten in a call for proposal, but I think it's really important.
So author challenges. This is something new that I have done in my call for proposal, is that I require every project to think about and discuss any potential roadblocks that they may encounter as they create and develop their projects. And I think that this is a really important exercise, particularly when discussing these realistic timelines, as well as service expectations and potential knowledge gaps.
So challenges could include licensing questions, staffing challenges, skills gap, gaps in knowledge, content availability, and time concerns. It's really about having these conversations before the project starts, and really being able to identify where you might have opportunities to be able to teach faculty in various areas. So I think that it's hard for anyone submitting a proposal to think or acknowledge the challenges, but I do think it's a really important step in ensuring that the projects are completed on time and in the spirit of the project. So I am almost done, but I just wanted to check in again to see if there are any questions. I'm not seeing any questions in the chat so far. So we should be looking at selection rubrics, is the next one.
So I just wanted to give all of you an idea of what my selection rubric looks like. This is really very much based on our call for proposal, and we just have a point system. So our evaluation criteria looks at objectives, the impact, the plan for the timeline. And then we base point on if the proposals objectives are well-defined, the proposal is clear and convincing about how they're going to use OERs, and that the proposal's timelines are developed and implementation is really seen as being feasible. And then the second part of our rubric goes into the plan for assessment. We think it's important that faculty assess their projects. So we want to make sure that faculty have thought through how they're going to make those necessary assessments, and what material are they choosing and why.
Cost savings, always a big one. We like to boast about how much money we're saving. So the larger the project, the higher the cost savings. So that's a good check. And then feasibility. How feasible is this project? So feasibility sometimes can be difficult to judge, but you can typically get within... When you ask faculty to submit their proposals, you can usually get a good feel for how far they are in a project, and how much they've thought about the project. And I think it is really important, because many of these projects are done and completed at the same time faculty are teaching. They're still doing their research and their writing, and they have personal lives.
So it's really about making sure that the project really can be done, and it's not just this much bigger and higher... It's just not something unfortunately that they just can't accomplish. I've had to talk to faculty about scaling down projects, because they really have gone, "I'm going to do this and this," and they get very excited, which is fantastic. But you also need to remind faculty that unless they can afford a buyout, they have all these other commitments at the same time.
Okay. Lessons learned. This is probably one of my favorite parts of all of this. And as I said, I've been doing this for eight plus years, and I'm still learning. There are things that I still am like, "Wow, I never thought of that," or, "That didn't come up." So I think it's really important to acknowledge that we all make mistakes, but this is the best way to ensure that you have a really good and solid program. So it is important to say, "Didn't think of that. Put that as my lesson."
So one of the biggest lessons that I have learned is project management takes a lot of time. I did not realize that when I first came in and I was like, "Yeah sure, I can support 10 projects." Yeah, it was tough. Supporting that many projects while doing my other duties was very hard. Project management takes a lot of time. There's checking in on the one-on-one meetings, answering questions, putting together the workshops, putting together and scheduling the cohort meetings, working with faculty on their budgets. So it's really important to make sure that you have an understanding of what your capacity is and how many projects you can realistically, successfully support.
And as I said, it is okay to only do a handful. If that is all that you can do, that is fantastic. And I don't want anyone to think, "We can only support one or two projects, so I can't do a call for proposal or an open education program." I would say that it doesn't matter. Just doing a couple projects is amazing. You're helping students save money. You're working directly with faculty, and you can grow on that. Timelines and priorities shift, and this is just the nature of universities and academic teaching. While in OER may be a priority for one semester, it may get shifted down because of publishing or because of other grant programs. So you have to acknowledge that the OER project may not be at the top, and this may extend the deadline.
I worked with a faculty member for five years on her project because things just kept shifting, and I just kept at it with her. I just kept supporting her. I kept encouraging her. And when it was done, it was an amazing project, but it took two and a half years longer because of various things just taking top priority. One other thing to keep in mind is developing procedures and policies for no longer supporting projects. While we don't want to pull the plug on a project, sometimes it's necessary. But you have to know what steps you need to take in order to determine if that's necessary and how that will happen.
I've only had to not support one project, and it was a really hard decision to make. And in the end, I actually think it turned out really well, because we put the project on hold and we paused. We then still continued conversation with the faculty, and we were able to bring that faculty back in a year or two years later when they were better suited to move forward with their project.
Another thing to think about is, authors leave institutions. So what happens if your faculty member leaves your institution mid-project? Do you have somebody to pick up the slack? Is the project then done? Or would you be willing to continue to support the project even though they're at a different institution? So these are things that I did not think about initially when I started.
So some other lessons learned is be specific. Again, cannot say this enough. Provide opportunities for feedback and suggestions both from your team and from applicants, throughout your project's run. So not just at the end, but also in the middle. So one of the things that we have at VCU is we have bimonthly cohort meetings. And during these meetings we do check-ins and we say, "How is it going? What can we do better?" So this is our way of being able to have these conversations with our faculty authors, do these check-in. And if we need to change anything, we can do this mid-project rather than waiting till the end.
Set clear selection and eligibility rubric. This is really important, because a lot of the time, you're going to have more proposals than money. So you do need to make sure that you can figure out what you're saying no to and why. So having those clear guidelines can really help you on that. And again, it's okay to reject proposals. It'll actually make your program stronger. And the reason I say that is because when you reject a proposal, I always recommend having the conversation with the faculty to explain why, to really talk to them about it. And see if maybe there's somehow else we could support them.
So I had a faculty member that we rejected their proposal because we honestly didn't have any more funding, but the project worked really well with our online learning community and could be used in their LMS. So I actually shifted them to our instructional designers. The faculty worked with the instructional designers, made some changes. And then a year later, reapplied and actually had a much stronger proposal, and then was part of our project. So it really isn't just about rejecting and then never speaking. It's really about having those ongoing conversations.
And finally, opportunities to create awareness on campus. Really, your call for proposal is, why should faculty participate in care? This is sometimes their first connection to OER, sometimes their first connection to what you're doing in the library. And so you are really trying to demonstrate and show why should they care. It's about what are the benefits of participating beyond just saving students money. I always like to talk a lot about faculties' ability to customize their course material specifically for their classes.
So at Portland State, for example, we have a Spanish 101 textbook. This textbook, it's all for the Spanish 100 level series. So Portland State has terms. So it was the three terms. The book was being developed during 2020. So when the killing of George Floyd and then the protests that were happening in Portland were occurring, my faculty author that I was working with was incorporating what was going on in Portland in her course assignment and in her textbook. She was teaching her students the Spanish vocabulary and how to talk about what was going on in Spanish.
And I asked her to get some feedback from the students after that term. And one of the students talked about how they were having a really hard time being in an online class, that transitioning to learning Spanish in an online environment was difficult. But having that material that was created specifically by their teacher for them made that huge difference. And she felt like she was being seen and heard. And it helped support this student to continue in her class and continue in the class and not drop out. So it's really important to be able to talk about those benefits as well as not just beyond saving money.
And then it's also about what expertise as a program manager you bring to your program and what opportunities are there on campus for partnerships. Partnerships are really going to help you sustain these programs in the long run. It's not just falling on you. You're getting help and support from others. And it creates an amazing awareness of what the library is doing and the services that we offer. And on that note, I'll say thank you. And I am going to open it up to questions, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
Angelique: Wow, thank you so much, Karen, for sharing all this information. You say that you're eight years into this kind of project management for OER. I myself am two and a half months. Our call for proposals at the WRLC was January 31st. And I can say from firsthand experience, the good advice to get granular on that call for proposals is something that I would tout over and over again. You're really setting expectations, and it's just so important that the candidates and their support team know what's going to be required, down to how many meetings you're going to ask them to attend. Will you want to photograph from them? Can you invite them to future panels? All these items. So now, it is a time for questions. I'd like to invite the audience to unmute yourself if you'd like, and raise your hand or put comments in the chat.
Karen: I see there was a question about, are we on the correct page of PowerPoint? So I do hope that you were all able to continue to see my PowerPoint slides. I can share them as well and have them sent out.
Angelique: Thank you, Karen. I actually checked at that time, and you were talking about support and services, so it seemed like we were quite on track.
Karen: Okay. Okay, good. Okay.
Angelique: I do have a question to get things started. One experience we had at the WRLC was in an effort to remove the threshold of all the meetings our instructors are being asked to attend, we removed a mandatory requirement of attending a meeting, a webinar before the candidate applied for the grant. And I got to tell you, I don't really know if it accelerated the number of grants we had. And in the end, the grants that we received from faculty who attended the meeting were very different from those who just read the information and submitted.
There was such a difference, not in quality or in feasibility, but in the candidate's understanding of the project itself. And that's one thing that we're going to definitely go back and revise. And I love that you said at least one person has to attend. Whether it's a talk representative, someone from their support team. I think that's one item we already know we're going to go back and revisit.
Karen: Yeah. And one of the things that I do... So when I do the call for proposals, I actually have a caveat that says I will be reaching out to them to discuss their proposal in more depth before a decision is made. And I do that as well just to make sure that the faculty are all on the same page with us before we even select their proposal. So I don't have a requirement of attending a meeting before they submit, but I do reach out to them and say, "I would like to talk to you about this before the selection happens." Because we've had in the past, faculty decline after being accepted when they've realized that their material's going to be published openly, and they're not going to be making royalties off of the material. And so I just really want to make sure that faculty are really clear in the requirements that we have laid out.
And that's why with the summer kickoff, we do require everyone to attend or to have somebody take their place, because of the level of information that we provide, as well as we want to make sure faculty can hit the ground running, and that they have an understanding of copyright, and self-publishing, and online learning, and pedagogical, because of experiences in the past where faculty have run through a project and then we've realized that they're violating copyright, and we have to set back. And it's going to delay us for two months as we try to find creative commons licensed material that they could use. So it is really important.
So Amanda said that when she managed a grant program, she switched to mandatory consultations with folks beforehand after a wild first call. So many projects that weren't viable. Yeah. I always hope that faculty will reach out to me before they put in their call for proposals to talk about the projects, but that doesn't always happen. So I always try to talk to them before we make a selection. And sometimes, it's a tight turnaround and it's difficult when faculty are off contract, but it's just something that I've seen as important.
Angelique: Thank you. And that goes again to just being very granular. While we wait for some hands to raise or some items in the chat, I also want to say that when it comes to these mandatory requirements, or at least expectations, one thing that stood out was a misunderstanding between OA and access, affordable learning content, OER, and why we wanted you to understand the difference and know that your material would have the most generous CC license. And I think faculty assume an understanding and they're just like, "Yeah, we got this," and then go forward. But we had to decide, it is our pilot year. Were we going to stand firmly with textbook savings, which OA would be fine, or do we really want to pursue the OER ethos of the grant? And we decided that we were going to stand firm in this first year, but leave consideration for a following year. And that was a big gap in understanding with more than one proposal.
Karen: Yeah. I shouldn't be, but I am still surprised in the gap of understanding between OER and affordable course content material. So I have stood firm on... It depends on the type of grants that I offer. So this most recent call for proposals, we are just doing adopt and creation grants. So because we're not doing the adapt grants, we decided we are standing firm. They have to be open educational resources, they have to be published openly, they have to make sure there's a creative Commons license.
When I've done call for proposals with adopting grants, then I am much more flexible in can the material be put into the faculty member's LMS? Is it really just focused on saving money? So in my decision making, I've been really clear about when we are more flexible about the cost saving and the type of material versus when we are not. And so that it really is, I think, part of your decision making process. Creation grants are more expensive and time-consuming, which is why in my mind, it's very important to make sure that they have resources that are licensed so that they can be free distributed and are what we would refer to as an OER.
Angelique: Very good. Exactly. You might have seen me just nodding my head over and over while you were speaking. I'm just like, "Yes. Excellent point." I don't see the hands raised just yet. So I'd like to highlight another topic you discussed, is when you have to say no. And we have a consultant from UMSD, we also look heavily at VIVA's very excellent historic project. And we bless all the librarians who so freely shared their information with us to help us get our own program off the ground.
Those that you have to reject for next year or say just not yet, those are your OER allies. And we're currently trying to figure out a way to fold them into this so we don't lose that interest that hopefully we've sparked. And especially when it comes to adjunct faculty who are sometimes more open to it, but can't always predict if they're going to be teaching what exact course next semester. So that's what we're thinking of right now, because the drafts that weren't completed... We got a partial partial program proposals. And those that we rejected, what can we do to bring them into the fold and find more opportunities?
Karen: So one of the ways that we did it at Portland State was that I worked really closely with our subject liaisons, had the subject liaisons create those connections, and be able to work with the faculty about how they could just start to bring in some free course materials. Even if it's an ebook with unlimited license, or if it's helping to better select open educational resources for their classroom. So our subject liaisons found it as a great way to connect with adjuncts and faculty that they may not have otherwise spoken to. I really liked it because it provided and continued to allow the faculty to engage with the library and really look at the services that were offered, but I just didn't have the capacity to be able to support our projects as well as the ones that we had to reject for whatever reason.
And that was actually very successful because our liaisons were part of the faculty, had already had the connections. The liaisons were part of the selection process, so they knew which ones we were rejecting and why. And so they would reach out and say, "Hey, I was part of this. I want to talk to you about how we can continue to support, and maybe find innovative ways that we can work together. We're not going to be able to provide you with funding, but maybe we could look at just even starting the process of flipping your course." So that's how we've been able to do it. I also had a running list of everyone that had applied. So when we had new grants coming, I emailed them directly and said, "Hey, we've got a new round. Are you interested? I know that you've had some material." So we've done that as well.
And Amanda and I, as well as some of our other colleagues, have actually done presentations talking about how to say no, and looking at your capacity, and the benefits that it can offer. And it is really difficult. As librarians, we like to say yes to everything. We like to please. We like to try to make it all work. But it's not good for our health to be honest. And I think you can really build some strong relationships by being forthcoming and saying, "Your project is strong, but we just don't have the money to support this. And we have a project that is going to support 1,800 students. We need to support that this round." Amanda put in our Power of Now.
Angelique: I love it.
Karen: I do recommend checking it out. It's a fun presentation to do, and it really challenged all of us to think about how we say no and what tools in our toolbox we have to be able to do that.
Angelique: Thank you so much, Karen. I'm looking for raised hands. I know-
Karen: I covered everything.
Angelique: You really did.
Karen: So well.
Angelique: I have a laundry list here, so I know for sure that you did. I want to highlight one more point. Please do not underestimate the time project management will demand. Our project was much larger. We're doing adopt now, but it was create and adapt and adopt. We were advised by VIVA, we were advised by UMSD, who they both have two big programs. They've been running for several years. They said, "Even if you get someone part-time," and even with it scaled all the way back, and I'm finding it's at least 15 to 10 hours a week just getting it off the ground. So find your help and lean into your allies and your partners.
Karen: That is the best advice ever, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. I completely underestimated when I first started how much time it was going to take. I wanted to support the faculty that were writing these books at all costs, and it was a struggle because I didn't have the ability or the time to be able to do it. I figured it out, but I felt bad because I really should have accepted less, I should have realized. And I just didn't, I was so new to it all. And so I agree so much with that statement.
Angelique: Well, Karen Bjork, I want to thank you again for all of your highly excellent, relevant, golden information. As a fledgling myself, I can share with everyone how very relevant the information is. And thank you all for joining us today as we continue to learn more about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, one of your key takeaways is a sense that you're not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors. You certainly are, we're all allies, and I have really appreciated all the information you share today. Thank you so much for joining us, Karen.
Karen: Thank you so much for having me. And if anyone has any questions, please feel free to email me or reach out.
Angelique: Wonderful. And with that, everyone, have a great afternoon and thank you so much.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:18:03 Amanda Larson: Playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWRE6ioG4vdYaAD97KKJiu-XZ08NpN6oq
00:18:12 Amanda Larson: Norms: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:18:32 Amanda Larson: Course: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:40:09 Christy Wrenn: Are we on the correct page of PPT?
01:00:32 Christy Wrenn: That will be great.
01:03:06 Amanda Larson: When I managed a grant program - I switched to mandatory consultations with folks before hand after a wild first call. So many projects that weren't viable.
01:10:49 Amanda Larson: The Power of No: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg6jAB1UdUY&t=1s
00:18:12 Amanda Larson: Norms: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:18:32 Amanda Larson: Course: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:40:09 Christy Wrenn: Are we on the correct page of PPT?
01:00:32 Christy Wrenn: That will be great.
01:03:06 Amanda Larson: When I managed a grant program - I switched to mandatory consultations with folks before hand after a wild first call. So many projects that weren't viable.
01:10:49 Amanda Larson: The Power of No: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg6jAB1UdUY&t=1s
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