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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.
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Speakers:
Karen: Hello. Hello. Welcome. Welcome to our Zoom Fest. We are currently admitting folks from the waiting room. We're so glad you're here. I'm going to go ahead and get started. I think all of you received a notice that we are recording the session. That's for any of your colleagues who can't make it today. We'll go ahead and put that in a YouTube playlist for you. So away we go. Live transcription is enabled. You should see that. If you don't, please let us know.
And with that, I'm going to start sharing my screen. And with this slide, it is totally official. Welcome to Pub101. We are very glad that you're here. To get started, let's talk about who we are. We are the Open Education Network. We're a community of professionals in higher education who are working to make things more open. And we also are the Pub101 Committee, which includes our co-chairs, Amanda Larson from the Ohio State University and Carla Myers from Miami University. I'd like to take a minute to hand things over to Amanda to welcome you on behalf of the committee as well.
Amanda: Welcome, the committee is so happy to see all of you here, and those of you who'll be watching this recording. I just want to express that as you participate, if you think of feedback that you'd like to share with the committee, we would really appreciate it, because we're really thinking hard about how to make this better now that we're all together. Thanks so much for being here.
Karen: Thank you, Amanda. And to reiterate, this is always in flux. We are always revising the Pub101 experience, and we welcome your feedback as we continue to do that. I will also say that we includes me. I'm Karen Lauritsen. I'm the publishing director with the Open Education Network. We are based at the University of Minnesota, but I work from home in California. In addition to having a job and working in Open Education, I also enjoy wildlife habitat gardening. So that's a little bit about me.
In terms of our time together today, I'm going to spend a few minutes setting the scene, introducing you to Pub101, what to expect, asking a couple questions to see if this is the right place for you. Absolutely all of you are welcome. I just want to say a little bit more about what you can expect in the coming weeks to see if it's going to meet your needs. Talk about what Pub101 is, and then spend some quality time with our guests, Gabby and Sunny about how they got started with their publishing programs. And I'll introduce them in a few minutes.
So setting the scene, I would like to tell you a little bit about the Open Education Network and our guiding principles, which are here on the slide. We are working together towards the common good. We believe in equity and inclusivity and keep those at the heart of our work and our community. We are also a community of action. We are always talking about how to get things done and offering suggestions and guidance on how to. We are committed to recognizing the humanity in all of us. We are more than simply workers doing tasks. We are complete people and we act with integrity.
We also believe in a shared abundance. We believe that higher education has the resources and what it takes within our community to answer one another's questions and support the work that we're going to do. So for those of you who may be newer to the Open Education Network and don't have a firsthand experience with it as of yet, I especially want to welcome you and invite you to get to know us a little bit through this experience. We hope that it's positive for everyone and certainly that we can offer something to everyone regardless of the resources at your institution, regardless of what stage you're at with OER or with publishing. We are very glad again that you're here.
We do have some norms that we would like to share with you. These reflect the guiding principles. I don't think there will be anything of a surprise for you there, just that we act with courtesy towards one another and respect.
So digging a little bit more into publishing and the role of publishing in open education more broadly. So we believe that publishing is integral to open education because it allows for more voices, more perspectives in the resources that students are experiencing and learning from and creating. Publishing allows for instructors and students to localize and indigenize the curriculum so that it reflects the experiences of students who are in the classroom and that they can relate to what's being taught. Publishing means that you can update text to reflect the current moment. As we know, things are always changing, often very quickly. And so with an open license, you can add case studies and stories and interviews and multimedia pretty much in the time it takes you to drop it into your open resource and make that sound a little bit easier than it actually is, but the license does allow for that.
And publishing means that students can create content too. They can be involved in creating resources that are meaningful to them. They can pass it on to future students. There's so much creativity and allowance that is afforded with open licenses and so that is one reason why publishing is so exciting and so integral to open education.
Publishing can mean many things and we absolutely mean it in the most inclusive way. So publishing might mean that you're making something, you're the author who's doing it yourself, first person. You're writing. You're creating. Recently we published the 1,000th record for an open textbook in the open textbook library. And the author of that textbook spent a lot of time and energy creating her own botanical photographs and illustrations. So publishing means that too. It can mean adapting, editing or modifying an existing OER. Publishing can mean posting a link. It can mean posting a file in your institutional repository or archive.
It can mean engaging students in the creation of the work, which is often called open pedagogy and publishing can be undertaken solo. There are many books in the open textbook library, for example, where one author, one faculty member decided that they were going to create this resource. And they did it from A to Z. There are also many in the open textbook library that involved groups of people from A to Z.
So our intentions in Pub101 are to create a friendly informal publishing orientation and we are really going to be talking to and hearing from, and much of what you read is designed for those who are supporting OER authors, who are supporting faculty authors. We want to provide a preview of what's involved in undertaking an OER publishing project, basically help you anticipate some of the things that might come up and to help you think about, well, I definitely don't want to do that, so how can I structure my program to try and avoid it, but still offer some support?
We hope that this will provide an opportunity for you to consider your vision and capacity. And we really just want to highlight adaptable resources that exist that are in the curriculum and elsewhere online so that if you do take this on you don't feel like you're creating resources from scratch. There are a lot of great starting points. And so we'll talk about those in the eight weeks that we have together and just let you know that they're there.
Pub101 is not going to dig deeply into any particular tool. So many of you may have heard of Pressbooks, which is a very popular publishing tool in the open ed community. We won't talk too deeply about that. You'll hear it mentioned throughout these eight weeks. Many of our guests do use it, but there are other publishing tools out there and we hope that the majority of what we share is applicable to any platform or tool. We're really going for a more broad overview rather than the specifics of how to do a particular thing.
Now, if you're newer to open educational resources, you may want to consider focusing your energies, your programs on adoption before thinking about publishing and authoring. I've listed here a few resources that can be useful if you're considering adoption programs. These are in addition to what you can find in unit one. I think you'll hear perhaps from our guests today about how they put adoption before authoring. Again, it's totally up to you how you want to develop your program, but I think many of your colleagues would suggest starting with an adoption program in terms of scaling and in terms of your capacity and support.
Now, I know that you can't obviously click on these links in Zoom and so I will be sharing all of these slides at the conclusion of today so all of those will be available to you. There may be faculty authors who are with us today. You are also absolutely welcome. Here are some resources specifically for you that you may find useful. Again, please feel free to join us throughout Pub101. You may find that you're talked about a little bit more than you're talked to since this program is really designed for librarians and other people supporting your work. And so I just want to make that distinction, although everyone is welcome.
Okay. Ready to dive in. Now I have a quick poll for all of you, since I've done some talking. Hopefully you see something on your screen that says "ready to dive in." Meeting one, poll one. Yes. Okay. I see some results coming in. Please describe the likelihood of launching a publishing program or supporting an open textbook project at your institution or consortium either this year or next year. Your choices are, it's already happening or we're ready to go or maybe one day or probably never. I'll give it a few more seconds. We are at 93% participation. Maybe we can get to a hundred.
Okay, I'm going to go ahead and end the poll because it looks like most of you have responded. Now I think you can see the results and you can see we're almost split into perfect thirds. So a third of you are already involved in publishing and that is so exciting to hear. Please, throughout these eight weeks, feel free to share your knowledge and experience in the chat. This is a collective and we want to know what you have found through your experience. Another third are about ready to go. So this could be great timing for you and maybe one day also, great timing. We'll give you a lot to think about as you consider whether or not you want to move into publishing. Okay.
So what is this Pub101 experience? It's really meant to be an informal, big picture orientation to publishing open textbooks. It's not a class. There will be no grading. Please come when you can. We are making videos if you miss it. We hope to have a little fun. As Amanda mentioned at the start, it is evolving, so please feel free to share your feedback with us regarding the curriculum, regarding these sessions. It's new this year and we have a committee who is guiding the evolution and development of this experience. And so we are very grateful for your feedback. And also Pub101 is meant to be a beginning and not an end. We don't have to say goodbye when it's over. We have opportunities for you to continue working together and supporting one another in the Open Education Publishing Cooperative.
I'd like to talk briefly about our communication center as I call it and that is the orientation document that I think most of you should have access to from the email invitation. But if not, Amanda can put a link in the chat. I really spend a lot of time making this your one stop doc. I will update it weekly by linking to all of the slides. The link to the YouTube channel is there, the link to these Zoom meetings is there. Hopefully everything you need, you can find by going out from this document. For those of you who would like to know right when the videos are posted, which we'll aim to do as soon as possible. We usually get it up by the end of the week. So fingers crossed. If you would like to know when that video is ready, if you subscribe to the YouTube channel, it will tell you when the new video is posted. And again, that link to the YouTube channel is in our orientation, one stop doc. I will not call it a syllabus although some people might think it looks like one.
We also have class notes. This is a document for you. It's totally yours. Feel free to speak to one another, comment to one another. It's great if we run out of time, especially with a larger group. You might not get to all of your questions, so if you want to keep talking about a particular topic, treat it like a discussion board. It is also a place where I will post the chat transcripts from our sessions, which can be helpful.
And so now I would like you to please take a moment. I think Amanda is going to drop the class notes link into the chat, and you'll see starting on page two, there is an empty table. And if you could please enter your name, your institution and what you hope to get out of Pub101 this will be a way for you to see who's here at a glance, get to know one another a little bit. I can't see if you're in there. Can someone give me a, "Hey, this is happening?"
Amanda: It's happening. It's really happening.
Karen: Thank you. Please continue to carry on. I know sometimes when a lot of people are in a document at once, it gets a little hectic and messy. No fear of the mess. Feel free to add your information anytime in the next day or two. I'd like say just a word about the spirit of Pub101, in the spirit of this not being a class, the curriculum really is a compliment to the conversations that we'll have in these weekly sessions. We're not going to lead you through the curriculum unit by unit or module by module, but thematically, we will be talking about what you read in the curriculum or find in the curriculum as we go. There are five units and eight meetings, so sometimes units will cover more than one week of meetings.
Also the Pub101 Spirit that we hope to communicate is that you're not alone. As you take this on, there are many people who can help. There are many resources that can help you and I know often OER librarians and others doing this work are the only ones at their institution. And so it can be kind of isolating and so we hope to offer you a community to counteract that isolation.
As I mentioned, there are existing resources that you can build on. They're adoptable. There are many ways to publish. We're just sharing a few options. Some of the ways you may hear may sound like, "Wow, that's out of our reach now and may never be in our reach," and we never mean to suggest that it's the right way. It's just a way that some in our community are doing the work.
And finally let us know what you need. If there's something that you want covered that you haven't heard yet, please let us know. We will always leave time for your questions in these sessions. And so that's a great time for you to advocate and participate and get what you need and want out of Pub101.
We are going to explore units one through five in our publishing curriculum. They are linked from our orientation doc. We are focusing on open textbooks. Although of course that's only one type of OER, but that is what the open education network has focused a lot of its strategies on so far. However, I think you'll find that it's applicable to all kinds of OER that you may publish. And just to quickly define what an open textbook is, it's free to the end user. It may not be free to make, and it has permissions, typically creative common licenses that allow for editing. Also textbooks as you're all familiar, they have structure, they include pedagogical elements. They don't read ideally like a monograph or a wall of text. They organize information hierarchically. The structure informs accessibility, which we'll be hearing about next week. And so there's a very distinct nature to a textbook. So sometimes you may read or hear things that are very particular to a textbook and it influences how people sometimes structure their programs and the work that they do.
I'll just put in a quick plug to review the units, even though you won't be quizzed, at least formally. There are some fun quizzes at the end to check your comprehension. I will encourage you to review the units because there is a lot of resources in there for you, templates and other helpful tips.
Finally, as I mentioned, Pub101 does not have to be the end. So it is the prerequisite, if you will, for joining the OEN publishing co-op and the publishing co-op is simply a community of people who are interested in publishing open textbooks. We have a Google group. We have a monthly meeting. We call it Tea Time where we talk about what we're facing in our publishing programs, questions that we want to bounce off of one another. And together we're growing open textbook publishing expertise and capacity in higher education. So I hope that all of you will consider joining us at the end of this experience.
Without further ado, I would now like to start a conversation, a Q&A with our two guests. We are joined today by Gabby Hernandez, who is open education librarian at the University of Texas, Rio Grand Valley and Sunny Pai, who is digital initiatives librarian in OER at the University of Hawaii Community Colleges and campus co-lead for Kapiolani Community College.
So Gabby and Sunny, how would you describe your publishing experience so far? What was your starting point with this wild world? And I'm going to stop sharing my slides so that we can see your faces.
Gabby: I guess I can go ahead and start with that conversation. So this is all still very new. As Karen said earlier, we were really focused on that adoption part. That's where we focused our program on making sure faculty are aware that there's an open education librarian on their campus to help them with these things, focusing on adoption grants, focusing on professional development and just letting them know OER is happening and it's great, and it can really help our students. I went through Pub101 last year, and I think I even clicked the "maybe one day" that we were going to be ready for a publishing program. And then all of a sudden we found ourselves with a press books description, like this is happening and we need to go. So we had already started scaffolding our program because we knew that that was something we wanted to do one day, but it definitely kicked our preparations into high gear to launch it at our campus.
So to start, I really wanted to make sure we had information in place. What can we offer? And almost more importantly, what can we not offer? What kind of support did we have? What can faculty expect with this new library publishing program that's coming out and what Pressbooks is, then setting the stage for faculty to understand how the library can help in this process. So that's how we started our publishing. So it happened this semester. So, I'll keep you all informed on how it goes in the near future.
Sunny: Okay. I guess I'll go second. Previous to learning about OER, I had had some experience with open access systems, such as DSpace and open source software. And when I started to learn more about Open Educational Resources, especially working at a community college, it just seemed like such a perfect fit to apply digital initiative skills to this kind of initiative.
My community, interestingly enough, even though they got similar training, our faculty got similar training to faculty at other campuses were pretty fixated on creation, not so much modification or adoption. They were not happy with the materials that I kept presenting to them. And some of them were attending my training sessions and also training sessions at other colleges in our system. So I think my community is a little different. So I just went straight into a creation program.
And I attracted, for example, one team that was doing a co-curricular project for developmental math. OER was the perfect way for them to customize the materials. I wanted to localize the materials. And also I had a physiology instructor who really believed in equity and access and she wanted to put her physiology lab online so that it'd be easier for students to study and they could actually use the book while they were in the lab. And the program attracted another person who needed to teach discrete math and did not want to use the textbook anymore and she was a very skilled programmer. So she was able to... I did show her some materials and she adopted that and basically redid the whole thing. And she put that up into GitHub. And then we had a Chinese language instructor who I pointed in the direction of Lever Text because Pressbooks... I had observed that Pressbooks at the time was not that successful for Japanese in terms of a live set. So even though Lever Text had some problems, that instructor was able to learn the skills necessary to create that textbook.
So unlike the wise people in the room, I just went straight into creation and basically had to learn as I went along.
Karen: Thank you both. And I actually don't think that's all that unusual although a lot of people feel like they're kind of thrown into it and then before you know it, "Oh, I'm publishing a book." Kind of wild. Thank you both. I have a few more questions planned, but I just want to invite all of you who are on the call, if, while Gabby and Sunny are talking, it sparks a question for you, please feel free to put it in the chat and I will work to incorporate it into our conversation. I just have a few more and then I will turn to you for additional questions. So if both of you could please talk about your open publishing goals, not only organizationally, but also perhaps professionally or personally.
Gabby: So our library publishing program has really three main goals that we have stated for faculty. And what we want to do is we want to provide affordable educational materials for students. We want to create diverse and inclusive materials, and we want to engage in works that reflect our student population and allow them to participate in the creation and the knowledge through open pedagogical practices. So that's what we tell faculty. So if they are interested, this is what we're hoping to get out of this project. And the goals really resonate with me both organizationally and personally. Organizationally, we are University of Texas Rio Grande Valley is one of the largest Hispanic serving institutions in the United States. And we have an extremely high rate of PELL grant recipients. So our entire community in our college of about 30,000 students is an underserved population. And we all know that these populations benefit greatly from this type of work.
And so personally, as a member of this same community, I just want to ensure that our voices as a community are heard and valued within educational materials. So as a part of our getting ready and building the scaffolding and laying the foundation for faculty to understand what this project is, we created an inclusion, diversity, equity, and anti-racism in open publishing page on our library guide. And so what we hope is that because it's there, because it's in the forefront of our minds, that these types of things, these conversations will be had throughout the entire creation of a resource instead of a resource being created and then thinking, "Well, how could we make this more inclusive?" Or "How could we make this more accessible to our students?" These conversations are had throughout the entire process instead of an afterthought. So, we have such a great resource that our student population is that since everybody is diverse, we have a really, really great opportunity to have those voices added into whatever open pedagogical practice projects are created on our campus.
Sunny: Okay. So thanks, Gabby, for going first. So organizationally, let's see, I'm still trying to figure out as a single campus the ways to structure and scale this kind of program. It is fairly popular. We've actually scaled it up to the seven community colleges, but I haven't figured out how I'm going to scale it on my own campus because I happen to be the only person working on it on my own campus. So I may need to take a look at that long list of skills that you need to have to support a textbook project and make decisions as to how to set boundaries on the resources that I have available. And so that's what's going. But at the same time, I've also teamed up with a few other campuses where we are together hosting an asynchronous OER course, asynchronous OER course. We're pushing out again the same education out to all the instructors across the seven campuses. And if they pass the course, then they're offered opportunities for modification and creation projects. And so far we have a number of them in the pipeline right now.
So, and we are open with our platforms at this point. Delmar has been wonderful with Lever text and we have Pressbooks and other platforms that might be useful for different people. We're looking at manifold also, which is a whole nother subject. So we're trying to be platform agnostic at this point, but we may have to narrow. One of the difficulties of course is our IT support comes from a system office that sits above all our community colleges and four year universities. And if you have problems with a system adopted platform, they will provide the support needed at the separate campuses. But right now they're not set up to support any of these other platforms. So that's an issue that we're just trying to figure out and work through.
And then organizationally I'm starting to realize that they're two schools of thought in publishing, and this is just really beginning thinking right now, but one school which tends to be instructional designers and course designers, but I'm not saying that that's a fact. They seem to be more supportive of the concept of a fluid book. You pull materials into a learning management system, or you put something up on a website and you change it from day to day. So the presentation of the learning materials is very, very fluid and there's so many advantages to that. Of course faculty are working on their courses at the last minute sometimes the week before they present. So that kind of fluidity is really nice.
On the other end then, which we have people who tend to want a static book that is kind of a timestamp. And it has all the benefits of a timestamp. You know that it's this edition, it was this date. We're not going to touch that in any specific way you know that's going to really alter the change. I mean, alter the the material. And so having had this experience with working with different platforms, I can see the value and the work customs that various people bring, librarians bring that instructional designers bring, that instructors bring and what they're looking for is different. Somebody who really likes Lever Text's flexibility may not do well with a scribe publishing model. So that's been interesting and I'm not sure how that's going to evolve, but right now it just seems to be all encompassing.
Karen: Thank you both. And Sunny, I appreciate you mentioning the tension between these two ideas of a book. The book, that the technology will allow a change at any time. "Oh, I just have to log in and I can add this paragraph," and that's great. But it might not be great. Maybe some students in the class have already read that chapter and they missed that paragraph. And there's so much you have to keep in mind when you're making updates for a resource that's in use, even though the technology and the license allows that kind of quick change, there are other considerations. And so I know that there are many who think about that and some who say, we'll update our open textbooks once a year in the summer, and then it'll be decided if it's the next edition or if it's just correcting some errata.
So I also want to pause and say that we're talking a mile a minute here, and there's a lot of information. And so if we've made assumptions that have perhaps left some of you behind, please call us on it. Lorraine in the chat had a great question about creation. What does creation mean? Does it mean that you wrote it? And it is probably an ambiguous term. I would say that there are many roles in creating OER. Some of them mention the author, a librarian who can help with copyright questions. Perhaps an instructional designer who can help with structuring the material. And so there can be a lot of roles involved in creating OER and we'll talk about some of those as the sessions go by, but please do stop us.
We're also throwing a lot of technology and platforms and tools and again, we don't mean to get too tools specific, maybe just highlight that there are a lot of tools out there, and sometimes faculty can jump in and learn that tool on their own. And you can take on a role that falls within your wheelhouse and sometimes people offer much more hands on assistance.
So please with that, do feel free to interrupt this. I will move on to my next question for Gabby and Sunny. Can you talk a little bit what you have learned so far in publishing OER, especially for an audience that's new or either just thinking about starting a program or are already underway.
Gabby: As I'm sure you can all guess what I've learned thus far is it takes a lot of time, a lot of time. It's taking us time both to build up the infrastructure itself. So building these [inaudible 00:35:42] guides and making sure all the information is there so that way, when they do have questions, we can feel confident and say, "Here's this information that you can look at in yourself," and so building all of that and then getting the word out even about these new services that you are publishing, that that's an even possible through the library. So getting the word out about that has taken time. It's nice that we do have faculty interest, especially the faculty who, like I said, we really focus on adoption. So a lot of those faculty who had already gone through those initial, what is or we are, what are the capabilities? What are the possibilities?
Some of those that I've gone through are redesign grants are the ones who are like, "Yes, this is exciting. I know what OER is. I would love to create my own book or even engage students with open pedagogical practices. So they're really excited as well. But then again, it goes back to time where faculty have a lot on their plate, especially different levels of faculty and where they are in their promotion and tenure status. And if they can truly, even though they really want to, can they engage in this type of work is also, there's a limit to the amount of time to do so.
So if you do decide to... Those of you who are unsure, or you're getting started in this process, just being very upfront, even with the administrators or those who are funding the process that, yes, this is exciting. We do have faculty that are interested, but you may not see any full textbooks created instantaneously. Like this process takes time. And so having those really hard conversations, but just having those expectations laid out, that time is really an aspect, not just our time, but the faculty time as well to dedicate to these types of projects.
Sunny: Yeah. I'd like to agree with Gabby there. It does take a lot more time than expected. One of the books that we worked on, Science of Sleep, the author was convinced that she could... And Karen probably remembers this conversation. She was convinced that she could get the thing in editable format in a summer or six months, because she was so familiar with the material. She'd been teaching it for several years, but it took longer than expected and it was also more complicated. We had to support her with images. And so that was one of those things where we did provide a lot of support with finding and inserting images for her. And then of course COVID happened. So she was a what we call a discipline coordinator. So she had hundreds of students and a number of lecturers and faculty that she was facilitating the teaching of anatomy and physiology. So all of that had to go online.
So basically six months we're lost in the process, but we're finished with the books. So I think all in all, it took longer than we expected, but then you can't predict things like COVID. One thing that some of us might want to think about is budgeting. If you budget something in one year, will you have access to that funds next year? So there's some strategizing to think about too.
Karen: Thank you, Sunny and Gabby and a lot of what you're hearing them talk about today, we will dive more deeply into as the weeks go on. So you're getting a snapshot overview, a preview, if you will, of some of the topics that we'll take on. So this is my last question for the two of them. So I hope that some of you are thinking of your own questions either for Gabby and Sunny or about Pub101 or for one another. So what would you recommend to someone who's just getting started?
Gabby: Being at the beginning of our process, what I would recommend is create a process that works for your institutional needs and your departmental capacity. So when looking at other... I know when I looked at other open publishing programs and figuring out like, "Okay, what do we want ours to look like and how do we want to model ours, we're rarely comparing apples to apples. They may have different funding structures or more or less people assigned to the work itself or even different stages of faculty engagement. Like where are the faculty and where do they want... like with study sheets at her faculty are ready to just dive in and just public. And I think my faculty have really wanted that step ladder process of like, what is OER? How do we get here? Let me adopt it, let me look at it and review it.
They weren't quite ready to just dive into the publishing. So, I would say, just take a look at your departmental capacity and really think about the needs of the program that fit within your parameters. And you can always start small. We started very small. We have a platform, we have the service, but we're not really able to sit side by side with each faculty who wants to adopt a book or who wants to create a book and just take them through the entire process.
So we decided we were going to start very, very small and hope that eventually, maybe we will get funding to fund this type of work and to grow instead of starting big and then realizing we don't have the capacity. And it's a lot. I feel like it's probably a lot harder to shrink than it is. And to take away services that you said you would provide rather than starting very small. And it being a bonus that like, "Oh, now we can have this now and we can help you with this piece. So that would be my two cents.
Sunny: Yeah. I think Gabby hit it right on the nail. That's being very cognizant of your resources, being careful about what you offer and what they say. What do they say? Underpromise and overdeliver. You'll get people to come on board much better with that kind of philosophy. And in some of those books that were developed, fortunately the instructors were basically... They got the platform and they just took off. So I was very lucky that way. And then there was a couple of instructors who needed a little bit more handholding. I had a student assistant who was very helpful because I'm the only staffer involved on my campus. And we worked together filling in whatever skillset was needed. I know we don't want to talk too much about platforms, but because of publishers co-op I was working with Scribe and they did an amazing editing job on the material. And I'm just going to have to... That was very helpful. And the end product, I think, looks very professional. The author's very happy with it.
In fact, she mentioned that their editing work was better than the book that she had published with the commercial publisher. So I thought that was... And OEN helps with the cost of that. So if you do have the funds and you can get some editing support, this was something that my fussy faculty were talking about. They wanted editing support. So if you do have the funds, that's a nice option.
Karen: Thank you, Sunny. I was trying to describe Scribe in the chat. They are a publishing services provider for many companies all over the world, not just to OEN, but we do have a relationship with them in the publishing co-op so for some it's nice if you have a little bit of funding or budget, you can say, "Gosh, I don't have the capacity for this. I can hand this to these professionals," and this can come up if you find, for example that maybe the book would benefit from a copy editor and you don't have copy editing skills. Sometimes those kind of questions could come up. So there are resources for that if you want to pursue it. So I'm thrilled. We have a lot of great questions in the chat. Sunny, I think you answered Jamie's question. It sounds like you're the one person at your institution devoted to OER, but you have some student assistant support and then Gabby.
Gabby: Yes. So at our institution, I am the open education librarian. So it is my job title, my job description. It's full time. Structure wise we have the scholarly communications librarian is above me. So him and I oversee both projects, but I definitely take on more of the open education side. So we decided to split the duties with the projects that are more traditional textbook creation. He said he would take those on and the ones that are more open pedagogy side, I would take those projects. So that's how we decided to split our duties because we have all the other things that come with being a scholarly communications librarian, which is like everything. And then of course still the adoption and course marking and all of those things on my side. So that's how our program... And we do have more people in our department. I do have a graduate assistant who helps with some of the data and things of that nature, but strictly with open education it's myself, part of the Scarlet communications librarian and then a graduate assistant.
Karen: Great. And can you both please talk about how much of your OER publishing program overlaps with other kinds of library publishing for example, journals, if at all?
Gabby: At our institution, it's still two separate things. Our scholarly communications librarian takes care of the open journal publishing on that side. And then him and I are taking care of really this more textbook style, open pedagogy project style publishing.
Sunny: Yeah, we don't publish other materials. We will post and introduce space. We will post certain materials, but it's not really a scholarly publishing program.
Karen: And can you both help me remember? Did you cover... I see I missed Jody's question. What department or departments on your campus are involved in the delivery of OER services?
Gabby: At UTR it's the library. So we have, again, all of it falls under our scholarly communications department, but we do also have a faculty fellow from academic affairs who also helps, but that's because his title is student success and academic innovation. It's a piece of his job, but not the full job. So again, it mostly lays on my desk as the open education librarian, but we work with other departments to ensure everything is settled.
Karen: And I think I see some more information sharing in the chat. Please feel free if you have information you'd like to share about a question posted in the chat, please feel free to add to what Sunny and Gabby are saying. You are all very welcome to share your local context. Okay. The next question is from John. What are some mechanisms that give OER textbooks more legitimacy from a faculty tenure review perspective? Are there structures for front end peer review? If pulling in multiple faculty for a larger project, how would you suggest seeking funding? What organizations do these types of grants, et cetera. A lot of great questions there, John.
Gabby: John, I know these are big topics that are being discussed. I know at the UT system, we have committees that are talking about this. What does it look like for peer review? What does promotion and tenure look like at our system? How can that be looked at? I've even had discussions with our assessment librarian and what is peer review when it comes to what faculty need for promotion and tenure and what is peer review and what does that mean in an OER landscape, which can sometimes mean two different things? So the question is, I guess from our side, I don't know yet, but the conversations are happening and it's something that we really, really want to be able to provide to faculty. So, hence the conversations really at all different kinds of levels from institution to system wide, to just anyone and everyone having these conversations to make sure that the faculty who are dedicating their time to this have it valued in their promotion and tenure file.
Sunny: Promotion and tenure angle is so important, especially if you don't have funding to set up incentive awards for all this work. And at the University of Hawaii system, we have a small task force that's just drafted a promotion and tenure document that we're planning to present to the necessary people at our campuses and the consortium of faculty senates. And we're talking about our faculty union also. But it's a great incentive. We do it informally. If I know one of our faculty members is coming up for promotion, I volunteer to get the data for any of the OER work that they've done and the impact they've had on the students. I pull up the data and I write a letter of appreciation. So we're doing that informally, but we'd like to do it a little bit more structurally.
Karen: Thank you. I'll just say a quick thing about the structures for front end peer review. I see that happening a lot of different ways. And some publishing programs do support authors in finding colleagues who can do that through listservs perhaps, through the Rebus community, which is a community of authors and project managers and others working on open textbooks. So sometimes it does happen, sometimes it doesn't. It just depends on the project. Hailey is following up on Jamie's question. How many of the individuals involved in publishing OER have OER in their actual job description title, and how many are volunteering to take on the work as extra responsibility?
Gabby: For us it would be, I guess, 1.5. So one being me and 0.5 being the scholarly communications librarian, because it's in their department. So that's how many people we have working on it at our campus.
Sunny: For me, I would guess it's 0.5, because I have other responsibilities, which is why it's so great to have a cohort across our 10 campuses. And we all try to fill in when... We help each other, because most of us are doing this part-time.
Gabby: And I think that's also why both of us talked about time and starting small because realizing there's one of us or half of us working on this where all a lot of faculty could be interested. So, ensuring that at least for us making sure that our capacity was to the point that we could actually support faculty and making that very clear in the beginning for those who are taking on these projects.
Karen: Thank you. Julia is curious about how OER programs handled the development or creation of OER materials or textbooks that are built in the LMS. This approach seems to be in contrast to OER objectives and you're absolutely right, Julia. I know that this is actually something that's on Sunny's mind because depending on the LMS, it may or may not be openly available. And then how is that open? So I think usually when we're talking about OER publishing, we're talking about it outside of the LMS or we're talking about a different type of platform or tool. Let's see. Phoebe, yes to funding for editing. I think this is an earlier discussion. We are noticing that the workload for faculty authoring is high so any funding that can be put towards reducing the load around editing formatting to the published format can be really helpful. Thank you for sharing that, Phoebe.
I see some other replies in addition to the conversation in the chat. Thank you so much. Phoebe, Cheryl, Amanda, Michelle is asking for suggestions if you do not have a repository. Where do you store resources for others to use? Such a great question?
Sunny: I'm not sure whether this is going to work for everybody, but when I was first starting out, I noticed that... I want to say it's Kent State University or something like that, but they were putting their materials on Google Drive and then they were marketing them through OER commons and other sites. So I thought that was a pretty interesting way of handling it. If you don't have a repository, there might be other ways of doing it. There could be websites too. It doesn't have to be a really fancy platform if you're just starting out. There are ways to get materials out. And in reference to what Karen was referring to our default LMS for the university system is [Syiki 00:54:30] and it keeps everything behind a locked door. So one of the things we're looking at is trying to bring some of the materials out on a more public platform.
Gabby: Yeah. And also look at OER commons is great and I know some states are also having the micro sites that are built to look just like OER comments. So I know OER, we have OER tech. So if anybody from Texas, they have the same thing and those same capabilities of being able to write it in and upload it through the state repository. So can go either national or state, whatever you prefer. There's quite a few states that have their own microsite.
Karen: Thanks for those suggestions. We definitely know this is an issue Michelle and the OEN has been investigating ways that we can help support institutions that don't have institutional repositories. And that's one of the reasons we're undertaking a manifold pilot right now. So offering manifold to the community, seeing how they use it and then exploring how we may be able to offer it longer term to address these types of needs. So thank you for that question. Thank you all for the questions and conversations in the chat. I know this has been a fast and furious session and I'm just delighted to have all of you here.
With that and as the chat continues to go to chat, I'm just going to share my screen again briefly to give you a preview of what's coming up next week. So please join me in thanking Sunny and Gabby for sharing their experiences and their recommendations. Thank you both for being here. It's so great to learn from you and your programs and I'm excited to see how they continue to evolve.
Sunny: Thank you very much.
Gabby: Thank you all for your time.
Karen: Okay. So this is my closing comments and that is that we are doing this. Higher education can and does create academic content for students. You may know that the open textbook library is celebrating its 10th birthday next week, actually. And in the time that I've been overseeing the library, which is about seven years, it's grown from a couple hundred to now more than a thousand open textbooks. And that is just... I actually get a little choked up thinking about just how it's a moving reflection of all of the work being done across the country and around the world, creating this content to make higher education more equitable. So thank you for your work and your engagement in that. Throughout it's really easy to get bogged down in all of the things involved in publishing proofreading platforms. And so I think it helps for all of us to remind one another, that students are our touchstone throughout the development process. And as much as we can keep them at the heart of these questions, the better.
Again, you've heard us say it a lot today and you'll hear it throughout Pub101. You're really not alone. You're among a community of people who are doing this work and we want to support you. And also that everyone has something to contribute. No matter your experience or your context, there is something that we can learn from one another. And so I look forward to learning from all of you as we continue on.
Next week, we will be joined by Jacqueline Frank, who is the Instruction & Accessibility Librarian at Montana State University. That session will be hosted by Amanda Hurford, who is Scholarly Communications Director for the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana, otherwise known as PALNI and so the two of them will be engaging with all of you in the conversation. And your homework, if you so choose, if you would like some feedback from Jacqueline is you can go to our one stop doc, that Pub101 orientation document. Look for the homework link under week one. Click on that link and it's going to take you to an open textbook in a Google Doc format, and they'll find instructions there to post alt tags as comments.
So give it a go. Do your best and create some alt tags for some images that you find in that Google Doc and then we'll talk about it and Jacquelyn will take a look at them in the coming week and that is it from me. So thank you all for joining us. And I hope that your Pub101 kickoff was a great experience and we see all of you in the coming weeks. Thanks again to Gabby and Sunny and all of you for your engagement. See you soon. Bye-bye.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. You’ll hear from your OEN colleagues who have worked on open textbook publishing projects and what they’ve learned. In this 2022 initial session, OEN Publishing Director Karen Lauritsen provides foundation setting and facilitates discussion with guests Gabby Hernandez and Sunyeen Pai on how to get started with publishing.
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:
- Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)
- Gabby Hernandez (Open Education Librarian, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley)
- Sunyeen "Sunny" Pai (Digital Initiatives Librarian, OER University of Hawai'i Community Colleges and Campus Co-lead, Kapiolani Community College)
- Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, Ohio State University)
Karen: Hello. Hello. Welcome. Welcome to our Zoom Fest. We are currently admitting folks from the waiting room. We're so glad you're here. I'm going to go ahead and get started. I think all of you received a notice that we are recording the session. That's for any of your colleagues who can't make it today. We'll go ahead and put that in a YouTube playlist for you. So away we go. Live transcription is enabled. You should see that. If you don't, please let us know.
And with that, I'm going to start sharing my screen. And with this slide, it is totally official. Welcome to Pub101. We are very glad that you're here. To get started, let's talk about who we are. We are the Open Education Network. We're a community of professionals in higher education who are working to make things more open. And we also are the Pub101 Committee, which includes our co-chairs, Amanda Larson from the Ohio State University and Carla Myers from Miami University. I'd like to take a minute to hand things over to Amanda to welcome you on behalf of the committee as well.
Amanda: Welcome, the committee is so happy to see all of you here, and those of you who'll be watching this recording. I just want to express that as you participate, if you think of feedback that you'd like to share with the committee, we would really appreciate it, because we're really thinking hard about how to make this better now that we're all together. Thanks so much for being here.
Karen: Thank you, Amanda. And to reiterate, this is always in flux. We are always revising the Pub101 experience, and we welcome your feedback as we continue to do that. I will also say that we includes me. I'm Karen Lauritsen. I'm the publishing director with the Open Education Network. We are based at the University of Minnesota, but I work from home in California. In addition to having a job and working in Open Education, I also enjoy wildlife habitat gardening. So that's a little bit about me.
In terms of our time together today, I'm going to spend a few minutes setting the scene, introducing you to Pub101, what to expect, asking a couple questions to see if this is the right place for you. Absolutely all of you are welcome. I just want to say a little bit more about what you can expect in the coming weeks to see if it's going to meet your needs. Talk about what Pub101 is, and then spend some quality time with our guests, Gabby and Sunny about how they got started with their publishing programs. And I'll introduce them in a few minutes.
So setting the scene, I would like to tell you a little bit about the Open Education Network and our guiding principles, which are here on the slide. We are working together towards the common good. We believe in equity and inclusivity and keep those at the heart of our work and our community. We are also a community of action. We are always talking about how to get things done and offering suggestions and guidance on how to. We are committed to recognizing the humanity in all of us. We are more than simply workers doing tasks. We are complete people and we act with integrity.
We also believe in a shared abundance. We believe that higher education has the resources and what it takes within our community to answer one another's questions and support the work that we're going to do. So for those of you who may be newer to the Open Education Network and don't have a firsthand experience with it as of yet, I especially want to welcome you and invite you to get to know us a little bit through this experience. We hope that it's positive for everyone and certainly that we can offer something to everyone regardless of the resources at your institution, regardless of what stage you're at with OER or with publishing. We are very glad again that you're here.
We do have some norms that we would like to share with you. These reflect the guiding principles. I don't think there will be anything of a surprise for you there, just that we act with courtesy towards one another and respect.
So digging a little bit more into publishing and the role of publishing in open education more broadly. So we believe that publishing is integral to open education because it allows for more voices, more perspectives in the resources that students are experiencing and learning from and creating. Publishing allows for instructors and students to localize and indigenize the curriculum so that it reflects the experiences of students who are in the classroom and that they can relate to what's being taught. Publishing means that you can update text to reflect the current moment. As we know, things are always changing, often very quickly. And so with an open license, you can add case studies and stories and interviews and multimedia pretty much in the time it takes you to drop it into your open resource and make that sound a little bit easier than it actually is, but the license does allow for that.
And publishing means that students can create content too. They can be involved in creating resources that are meaningful to them. They can pass it on to future students. There's so much creativity and allowance that is afforded with open licenses and so that is one reason why publishing is so exciting and so integral to open education.
Publishing can mean many things and we absolutely mean it in the most inclusive way. So publishing might mean that you're making something, you're the author who's doing it yourself, first person. You're writing. You're creating. Recently we published the 1,000th record for an open textbook in the open textbook library. And the author of that textbook spent a lot of time and energy creating her own botanical photographs and illustrations. So publishing means that too. It can mean adapting, editing or modifying an existing OER. Publishing can mean posting a link. It can mean posting a file in your institutional repository or archive.
It can mean engaging students in the creation of the work, which is often called open pedagogy and publishing can be undertaken solo. There are many books in the open textbook library, for example, where one author, one faculty member decided that they were going to create this resource. And they did it from A to Z. There are also many in the open textbook library that involved groups of people from A to Z.
So our intentions in Pub101 are to create a friendly informal publishing orientation and we are really going to be talking to and hearing from, and much of what you read is designed for those who are supporting OER authors, who are supporting faculty authors. We want to provide a preview of what's involved in undertaking an OER publishing project, basically help you anticipate some of the things that might come up and to help you think about, well, I definitely don't want to do that, so how can I structure my program to try and avoid it, but still offer some support?
We hope that this will provide an opportunity for you to consider your vision and capacity. And we really just want to highlight adaptable resources that exist that are in the curriculum and elsewhere online so that if you do take this on you don't feel like you're creating resources from scratch. There are a lot of great starting points. And so we'll talk about those in the eight weeks that we have together and just let you know that they're there.
Pub101 is not going to dig deeply into any particular tool. So many of you may have heard of Pressbooks, which is a very popular publishing tool in the open ed community. We won't talk too deeply about that. You'll hear it mentioned throughout these eight weeks. Many of our guests do use it, but there are other publishing tools out there and we hope that the majority of what we share is applicable to any platform or tool. We're really going for a more broad overview rather than the specifics of how to do a particular thing.
Now, if you're newer to open educational resources, you may want to consider focusing your energies, your programs on adoption before thinking about publishing and authoring. I've listed here a few resources that can be useful if you're considering adoption programs. These are in addition to what you can find in unit one. I think you'll hear perhaps from our guests today about how they put adoption before authoring. Again, it's totally up to you how you want to develop your program, but I think many of your colleagues would suggest starting with an adoption program in terms of scaling and in terms of your capacity and support.
Now, I know that you can't obviously click on these links in Zoom and so I will be sharing all of these slides at the conclusion of today so all of those will be available to you. There may be faculty authors who are with us today. You are also absolutely welcome. Here are some resources specifically for you that you may find useful. Again, please feel free to join us throughout Pub101. You may find that you're talked about a little bit more than you're talked to since this program is really designed for librarians and other people supporting your work. And so I just want to make that distinction, although everyone is welcome.
Okay. Ready to dive in. Now I have a quick poll for all of you, since I've done some talking. Hopefully you see something on your screen that says "ready to dive in." Meeting one, poll one. Yes. Okay. I see some results coming in. Please describe the likelihood of launching a publishing program or supporting an open textbook project at your institution or consortium either this year or next year. Your choices are, it's already happening or we're ready to go or maybe one day or probably never. I'll give it a few more seconds. We are at 93% participation. Maybe we can get to a hundred.
Okay, I'm going to go ahead and end the poll because it looks like most of you have responded. Now I think you can see the results and you can see we're almost split into perfect thirds. So a third of you are already involved in publishing and that is so exciting to hear. Please, throughout these eight weeks, feel free to share your knowledge and experience in the chat. This is a collective and we want to know what you have found through your experience. Another third are about ready to go. So this could be great timing for you and maybe one day also, great timing. We'll give you a lot to think about as you consider whether or not you want to move into publishing. Okay.
So what is this Pub101 experience? It's really meant to be an informal, big picture orientation to publishing open textbooks. It's not a class. There will be no grading. Please come when you can. We are making videos if you miss it. We hope to have a little fun. As Amanda mentioned at the start, it is evolving, so please feel free to share your feedback with us regarding the curriculum, regarding these sessions. It's new this year and we have a committee who is guiding the evolution and development of this experience. And so we are very grateful for your feedback. And also Pub101 is meant to be a beginning and not an end. We don't have to say goodbye when it's over. We have opportunities for you to continue working together and supporting one another in the Open Education Publishing Cooperative.
I'd like to talk briefly about our communication center as I call it and that is the orientation document that I think most of you should have access to from the email invitation. But if not, Amanda can put a link in the chat. I really spend a lot of time making this your one stop doc. I will update it weekly by linking to all of the slides. The link to the YouTube channel is there, the link to these Zoom meetings is there. Hopefully everything you need, you can find by going out from this document. For those of you who would like to know right when the videos are posted, which we'll aim to do as soon as possible. We usually get it up by the end of the week. So fingers crossed. If you would like to know when that video is ready, if you subscribe to the YouTube channel, it will tell you when the new video is posted. And again, that link to the YouTube channel is in our orientation, one stop doc. I will not call it a syllabus although some people might think it looks like one.
We also have class notes. This is a document for you. It's totally yours. Feel free to speak to one another, comment to one another. It's great if we run out of time, especially with a larger group. You might not get to all of your questions, so if you want to keep talking about a particular topic, treat it like a discussion board. It is also a place where I will post the chat transcripts from our sessions, which can be helpful.
And so now I would like you to please take a moment. I think Amanda is going to drop the class notes link into the chat, and you'll see starting on page two, there is an empty table. And if you could please enter your name, your institution and what you hope to get out of Pub101 this will be a way for you to see who's here at a glance, get to know one another a little bit. I can't see if you're in there. Can someone give me a, "Hey, this is happening?"
Amanda: It's happening. It's really happening.
Karen: Thank you. Please continue to carry on. I know sometimes when a lot of people are in a document at once, it gets a little hectic and messy. No fear of the mess. Feel free to add your information anytime in the next day or two. I'd like say just a word about the spirit of Pub101, in the spirit of this not being a class, the curriculum really is a compliment to the conversations that we'll have in these weekly sessions. We're not going to lead you through the curriculum unit by unit or module by module, but thematically, we will be talking about what you read in the curriculum or find in the curriculum as we go. There are five units and eight meetings, so sometimes units will cover more than one week of meetings.
Also the Pub101 Spirit that we hope to communicate is that you're not alone. As you take this on, there are many people who can help. There are many resources that can help you and I know often OER librarians and others doing this work are the only ones at their institution. And so it can be kind of isolating and so we hope to offer you a community to counteract that isolation.
As I mentioned, there are existing resources that you can build on. They're adoptable. There are many ways to publish. We're just sharing a few options. Some of the ways you may hear may sound like, "Wow, that's out of our reach now and may never be in our reach," and we never mean to suggest that it's the right way. It's just a way that some in our community are doing the work.
And finally let us know what you need. If there's something that you want covered that you haven't heard yet, please let us know. We will always leave time for your questions in these sessions. And so that's a great time for you to advocate and participate and get what you need and want out of Pub101.
We are going to explore units one through five in our publishing curriculum. They are linked from our orientation doc. We are focusing on open textbooks. Although of course that's only one type of OER, but that is what the open education network has focused a lot of its strategies on so far. However, I think you'll find that it's applicable to all kinds of OER that you may publish. And just to quickly define what an open textbook is, it's free to the end user. It may not be free to make, and it has permissions, typically creative common licenses that allow for editing. Also textbooks as you're all familiar, they have structure, they include pedagogical elements. They don't read ideally like a monograph or a wall of text. They organize information hierarchically. The structure informs accessibility, which we'll be hearing about next week. And so there's a very distinct nature to a textbook. So sometimes you may read or hear things that are very particular to a textbook and it influences how people sometimes structure their programs and the work that they do.
I'll just put in a quick plug to review the units, even though you won't be quizzed, at least formally. There are some fun quizzes at the end to check your comprehension. I will encourage you to review the units because there is a lot of resources in there for you, templates and other helpful tips.
Finally, as I mentioned, Pub101 does not have to be the end. So it is the prerequisite, if you will, for joining the OEN publishing co-op and the publishing co-op is simply a community of people who are interested in publishing open textbooks. We have a Google group. We have a monthly meeting. We call it Tea Time where we talk about what we're facing in our publishing programs, questions that we want to bounce off of one another. And together we're growing open textbook publishing expertise and capacity in higher education. So I hope that all of you will consider joining us at the end of this experience.
Without further ado, I would now like to start a conversation, a Q&A with our two guests. We are joined today by Gabby Hernandez, who is open education librarian at the University of Texas, Rio Grand Valley and Sunny Pai, who is digital initiatives librarian in OER at the University of Hawaii Community Colleges and campus co-lead for Kapiolani Community College.
So Gabby and Sunny, how would you describe your publishing experience so far? What was your starting point with this wild world? And I'm going to stop sharing my slides so that we can see your faces.
Gabby: I guess I can go ahead and start with that conversation. So this is all still very new. As Karen said earlier, we were really focused on that adoption part. That's where we focused our program on making sure faculty are aware that there's an open education librarian on their campus to help them with these things, focusing on adoption grants, focusing on professional development and just letting them know OER is happening and it's great, and it can really help our students. I went through Pub101 last year, and I think I even clicked the "maybe one day" that we were going to be ready for a publishing program. And then all of a sudden we found ourselves with a press books description, like this is happening and we need to go. So we had already started scaffolding our program because we knew that that was something we wanted to do one day, but it definitely kicked our preparations into high gear to launch it at our campus.
So to start, I really wanted to make sure we had information in place. What can we offer? And almost more importantly, what can we not offer? What kind of support did we have? What can faculty expect with this new library publishing program that's coming out and what Pressbooks is, then setting the stage for faculty to understand how the library can help in this process. So that's how we started our publishing. So it happened this semester. So, I'll keep you all informed on how it goes in the near future.
Sunny: Okay. I guess I'll go second. Previous to learning about OER, I had had some experience with open access systems, such as DSpace and open source software. And when I started to learn more about Open Educational Resources, especially working at a community college, it just seemed like such a perfect fit to apply digital initiative skills to this kind of initiative.
My community, interestingly enough, even though they got similar training, our faculty got similar training to faculty at other campuses were pretty fixated on creation, not so much modification or adoption. They were not happy with the materials that I kept presenting to them. And some of them were attending my training sessions and also training sessions at other colleges in our system. So I think my community is a little different. So I just went straight into a creation program.
And I attracted, for example, one team that was doing a co-curricular project for developmental math. OER was the perfect way for them to customize the materials. I wanted to localize the materials. And also I had a physiology instructor who really believed in equity and access and she wanted to put her physiology lab online so that it'd be easier for students to study and they could actually use the book while they were in the lab. And the program attracted another person who needed to teach discrete math and did not want to use the textbook anymore and she was a very skilled programmer. So she was able to... I did show her some materials and she adopted that and basically redid the whole thing. And she put that up into GitHub. And then we had a Chinese language instructor who I pointed in the direction of Lever Text because Pressbooks... I had observed that Pressbooks at the time was not that successful for Japanese in terms of a live set. So even though Lever Text had some problems, that instructor was able to learn the skills necessary to create that textbook.
So unlike the wise people in the room, I just went straight into creation and basically had to learn as I went along.
Karen: Thank you both. And I actually don't think that's all that unusual although a lot of people feel like they're kind of thrown into it and then before you know it, "Oh, I'm publishing a book." Kind of wild. Thank you both. I have a few more questions planned, but I just want to invite all of you who are on the call, if, while Gabby and Sunny are talking, it sparks a question for you, please feel free to put it in the chat and I will work to incorporate it into our conversation. I just have a few more and then I will turn to you for additional questions. So if both of you could please talk about your open publishing goals, not only organizationally, but also perhaps professionally or personally.
Gabby: So our library publishing program has really three main goals that we have stated for faculty. And what we want to do is we want to provide affordable educational materials for students. We want to create diverse and inclusive materials, and we want to engage in works that reflect our student population and allow them to participate in the creation and the knowledge through open pedagogical practices. So that's what we tell faculty. So if they are interested, this is what we're hoping to get out of this project. And the goals really resonate with me both organizationally and personally. Organizationally, we are University of Texas Rio Grande Valley is one of the largest Hispanic serving institutions in the United States. And we have an extremely high rate of PELL grant recipients. So our entire community in our college of about 30,000 students is an underserved population. And we all know that these populations benefit greatly from this type of work.
And so personally, as a member of this same community, I just want to ensure that our voices as a community are heard and valued within educational materials. So as a part of our getting ready and building the scaffolding and laying the foundation for faculty to understand what this project is, we created an inclusion, diversity, equity, and anti-racism in open publishing page on our library guide. And so what we hope is that because it's there, because it's in the forefront of our minds, that these types of things, these conversations will be had throughout the entire creation of a resource instead of a resource being created and then thinking, "Well, how could we make this more inclusive?" Or "How could we make this more accessible to our students?" These conversations are had throughout the entire process instead of an afterthought. So, we have such a great resource that our student population is that since everybody is diverse, we have a really, really great opportunity to have those voices added into whatever open pedagogical practice projects are created on our campus.
Sunny: Okay. So thanks, Gabby, for going first. So organizationally, let's see, I'm still trying to figure out as a single campus the ways to structure and scale this kind of program. It is fairly popular. We've actually scaled it up to the seven community colleges, but I haven't figured out how I'm going to scale it on my own campus because I happen to be the only person working on it on my own campus. So I may need to take a look at that long list of skills that you need to have to support a textbook project and make decisions as to how to set boundaries on the resources that I have available. And so that's what's going. But at the same time, I've also teamed up with a few other campuses where we are together hosting an asynchronous OER course, asynchronous OER course. We're pushing out again the same education out to all the instructors across the seven campuses. And if they pass the course, then they're offered opportunities for modification and creation projects. And so far we have a number of them in the pipeline right now.
So, and we are open with our platforms at this point. Delmar has been wonderful with Lever text and we have Pressbooks and other platforms that might be useful for different people. We're looking at manifold also, which is a whole nother subject. So we're trying to be platform agnostic at this point, but we may have to narrow. One of the difficulties of course is our IT support comes from a system office that sits above all our community colleges and four year universities. And if you have problems with a system adopted platform, they will provide the support needed at the separate campuses. But right now they're not set up to support any of these other platforms. So that's an issue that we're just trying to figure out and work through.
And then organizationally I'm starting to realize that they're two schools of thought in publishing, and this is just really beginning thinking right now, but one school which tends to be instructional designers and course designers, but I'm not saying that that's a fact. They seem to be more supportive of the concept of a fluid book. You pull materials into a learning management system, or you put something up on a website and you change it from day to day. So the presentation of the learning materials is very, very fluid and there's so many advantages to that. Of course faculty are working on their courses at the last minute sometimes the week before they present. So that kind of fluidity is really nice.
On the other end then, which we have people who tend to want a static book that is kind of a timestamp. And it has all the benefits of a timestamp. You know that it's this edition, it was this date. We're not going to touch that in any specific way you know that's going to really alter the change. I mean, alter the the material. And so having had this experience with working with different platforms, I can see the value and the work customs that various people bring, librarians bring that instructional designers bring, that instructors bring and what they're looking for is different. Somebody who really likes Lever Text's flexibility may not do well with a scribe publishing model. So that's been interesting and I'm not sure how that's going to evolve, but right now it just seems to be all encompassing.
Karen: Thank you both. And Sunny, I appreciate you mentioning the tension between these two ideas of a book. The book, that the technology will allow a change at any time. "Oh, I just have to log in and I can add this paragraph," and that's great. But it might not be great. Maybe some students in the class have already read that chapter and they missed that paragraph. And there's so much you have to keep in mind when you're making updates for a resource that's in use, even though the technology and the license allows that kind of quick change, there are other considerations. And so I know that there are many who think about that and some who say, we'll update our open textbooks once a year in the summer, and then it'll be decided if it's the next edition or if it's just correcting some errata.
So I also want to pause and say that we're talking a mile a minute here, and there's a lot of information. And so if we've made assumptions that have perhaps left some of you behind, please call us on it. Lorraine in the chat had a great question about creation. What does creation mean? Does it mean that you wrote it? And it is probably an ambiguous term. I would say that there are many roles in creating OER. Some of them mention the author, a librarian who can help with copyright questions. Perhaps an instructional designer who can help with structuring the material. And so there can be a lot of roles involved in creating OER and we'll talk about some of those as the sessions go by, but please do stop us.
We're also throwing a lot of technology and platforms and tools and again, we don't mean to get too tools specific, maybe just highlight that there are a lot of tools out there, and sometimes faculty can jump in and learn that tool on their own. And you can take on a role that falls within your wheelhouse and sometimes people offer much more hands on assistance.
So please with that, do feel free to interrupt this. I will move on to my next question for Gabby and Sunny. Can you talk a little bit what you have learned so far in publishing OER, especially for an audience that's new or either just thinking about starting a program or are already underway.
Gabby: As I'm sure you can all guess what I've learned thus far is it takes a lot of time, a lot of time. It's taking us time both to build up the infrastructure itself. So building these [inaudible 00:35:42] guides and making sure all the information is there so that way, when they do have questions, we can feel confident and say, "Here's this information that you can look at in yourself," and so building all of that and then getting the word out even about these new services that you are publishing, that that's an even possible through the library. So getting the word out about that has taken time. It's nice that we do have faculty interest, especially the faculty who, like I said, we really focus on adoption. So a lot of those faculty who had already gone through those initial, what is or we are, what are the capabilities? What are the possibilities?
Some of those that I've gone through are redesign grants are the ones who are like, "Yes, this is exciting. I know what OER is. I would love to create my own book or even engage students with open pedagogical practices. So they're really excited as well. But then again, it goes back to time where faculty have a lot on their plate, especially different levels of faculty and where they are in their promotion and tenure status. And if they can truly, even though they really want to, can they engage in this type of work is also, there's a limit to the amount of time to do so.
So if you do decide to... Those of you who are unsure, or you're getting started in this process, just being very upfront, even with the administrators or those who are funding the process that, yes, this is exciting. We do have faculty that are interested, but you may not see any full textbooks created instantaneously. Like this process takes time. And so having those really hard conversations, but just having those expectations laid out, that time is really an aspect, not just our time, but the faculty time as well to dedicate to these types of projects.
Sunny: Yeah. I'd like to agree with Gabby there. It does take a lot more time than expected. One of the books that we worked on, Science of Sleep, the author was convinced that she could... And Karen probably remembers this conversation. She was convinced that she could get the thing in editable format in a summer or six months, because she was so familiar with the material. She'd been teaching it for several years, but it took longer than expected and it was also more complicated. We had to support her with images. And so that was one of those things where we did provide a lot of support with finding and inserting images for her. And then of course COVID happened. So she was a what we call a discipline coordinator. So she had hundreds of students and a number of lecturers and faculty that she was facilitating the teaching of anatomy and physiology. So all of that had to go online.
So basically six months we're lost in the process, but we're finished with the books. So I think all in all, it took longer than we expected, but then you can't predict things like COVID. One thing that some of us might want to think about is budgeting. If you budget something in one year, will you have access to that funds next year? So there's some strategizing to think about too.
Karen: Thank you, Sunny and Gabby and a lot of what you're hearing them talk about today, we will dive more deeply into as the weeks go on. So you're getting a snapshot overview, a preview, if you will, of some of the topics that we'll take on. So this is my last question for the two of them. So I hope that some of you are thinking of your own questions either for Gabby and Sunny or about Pub101 or for one another. So what would you recommend to someone who's just getting started?
Gabby: Being at the beginning of our process, what I would recommend is create a process that works for your institutional needs and your departmental capacity. So when looking at other... I know when I looked at other open publishing programs and figuring out like, "Okay, what do we want ours to look like and how do we want to model ours, we're rarely comparing apples to apples. They may have different funding structures or more or less people assigned to the work itself or even different stages of faculty engagement. Like where are the faculty and where do they want... like with study sheets at her faculty are ready to just dive in and just public. And I think my faculty have really wanted that step ladder process of like, what is OER? How do we get here? Let me adopt it, let me look at it and review it.
They weren't quite ready to just dive into the publishing. So, I would say, just take a look at your departmental capacity and really think about the needs of the program that fit within your parameters. And you can always start small. We started very small. We have a platform, we have the service, but we're not really able to sit side by side with each faculty who wants to adopt a book or who wants to create a book and just take them through the entire process.
So we decided we were going to start very, very small and hope that eventually, maybe we will get funding to fund this type of work and to grow instead of starting big and then realizing we don't have the capacity. And it's a lot. I feel like it's probably a lot harder to shrink than it is. And to take away services that you said you would provide rather than starting very small. And it being a bonus that like, "Oh, now we can have this now and we can help you with this piece. So that would be my two cents.
Sunny: Yeah. I think Gabby hit it right on the nail. That's being very cognizant of your resources, being careful about what you offer and what they say. What do they say? Underpromise and overdeliver. You'll get people to come on board much better with that kind of philosophy. And in some of those books that were developed, fortunately the instructors were basically... They got the platform and they just took off. So I was very lucky that way. And then there was a couple of instructors who needed a little bit more handholding. I had a student assistant who was very helpful because I'm the only staffer involved on my campus. And we worked together filling in whatever skillset was needed. I know we don't want to talk too much about platforms, but because of publishers co-op I was working with Scribe and they did an amazing editing job on the material. And I'm just going to have to... That was very helpful. And the end product, I think, looks very professional. The author's very happy with it.
In fact, she mentioned that their editing work was better than the book that she had published with the commercial publisher. So I thought that was... And OEN helps with the cost of that. So if you do have the funds and you can get some editing support, this was something that my fussy faculty were talking about. They wanted editing support. So if you do have the funds, that's a nice option.
Karen: Thank you, Sunny. I was trying to describe Scribe in the chat. They are a publishing services provider for many companies all over the world, not just to OEN, but we do have a relationship with them in the publishing co-op so for some it's nice if you have a little bit of funding or budget, you can say, "Gosh, I don't have the capacity for this. I can hand this to these professionals," and this can come up if you find, for example that maybe the book would benefit from a copy editor and you don't have copy editing skills. Sometimes those kind of questions could come up. So there are resources for that if you want to pursue it. So I'm thrilled. We have a lot of great questions in the chat. Sunny, I think you answered Jamie's question. It sounds like you're the one person at your institution devoted to OER, but you have some student assistant support and then Gabby.
Gabby: Yes. So at our institution, I am the open education librarian. So it is my job title, my job description. It's full time. Structure wise we have the scholarly communications librarian is above me. So him and I oversee both projects, but I definitely take on more of the open education side. So we decided to split the duties with the projects that are more traditional textbook creation. He said he would take those on and the ones that are more open pedagogy side, I would take those projects. So that's how we decided to split our duties because we have all the other things that come with being a scholarly communications librarian, which is like everything. And then of course still the adoption and course marking and all of those things on my side. So that's how our program... And we do have more people in our department. I do have a graduate assistant who helps with some of the data and things of that nature, but strictly with open education it's myself, part of the Scarlet communications librarian and then a graduate assistant.
Karen: Great. And can you both please talk about how much of your OER publishing program overlaps with other kinds of library publishing for example, journals, if at all?
Gabby: At our institution, it's still two separate things. Our scholarly communications librarian takes care of the open journal publishing on that side. And then him and I are taking care of really this more textbook style, open pedagogy project style publishing.
Sunny: Yeah, we don't publish other materials. We will post and introduce space. We will post certain materials, but it's not really a scholarly publishing program.
Karen: And can you both help me remember? Did you cover... I see I missed Jody's question. What department or departments on your campus are involved in the delivery of OER services?
Gabby: At UTR it's the library. So we have, again, all of it falls under our scholarly communications department, but we do also have a faculty fellow from academic affairs who also helps, but that's because his title is student success and academic innovation. It's a piece of his job, but not the full job. So again, it mostly lays on my desk as the open education librarian, but we work with other departments to ensure everything is settled.
Karen: And I think I see some more information sharing in the chat. Please feel free if you have information you'd like to share about a question posted in the chat, please feel free to add to what Sunny and Gabby are saying. You are all very welcome to share your local context. Okay. The next question is from John. What are some mechanisms that give OER textbooks more legitimacy from a faculty tenure review perspective? Are there structures for front end peer review? If pulling in multiple faculty for a larger project, how would you suggest seeking funding? What organizations do these types of grants, et cetera. A lot of great questions there, John.
Gabby: John, I know these are big topics that are being discussed. I know at the UT system, we have committees that are talking about this. What does it look like for peer review? What does promotion and tenure look like at our system? How can that be looked at? I've even had discussions with our assessment librarian and what is peer review when it comes to what faculty need for promotion and tenure and what is peer review and what does that mean in an OER landscape, which can sometimes mean two different things? So the question is, I guess from our side, I don't know yet, but the conversations are happening and it's something that we really, really want to be able to provide to faculty. So, hence the conversations really at all different kinds of levels from institution to system wide, to just anyone and everyone having these conversations to make sure that the faculty who are dedicating their time to this have it valued in their promotion and tenure file.
Sunny: Promotion and tenure angle is so important, especially if you don't have funding to set up incentive awards for all this work. And at the University of Hawaii system, we have a small task force that's just drafted a promotion and tenure document that we're planning to present to the necessary people at our campuses and the consortium of faculty senates. And we're talking about our faculty union also. But it's a great incentive. We do it informally. If I know one of our faculty members is coming up for promotion, I volunteer to get the data for any of the OER work that they've done and the impact they've had on the students. I pull up the data and I write a letter of appreciation. So we're doing that informally, but we'd like to do it a little bit more structurally.
Karen: Thank you. I'll just say a quick thing about the structures for front end peer review. I see that happening a lot of different ways. And some publishing programs do support authors in finding colleagues who can do that through listservs perhaps, through the Rebus community, which is a community of authors and project managers and others working on open textbooks. So sometimes it does happen, sometimes it doesn't. It just depends on the project. Hailey is following up on Jamie's question. How many of the individuals involved in publishing OER have OER in their actual job description title, and how many are volunteering to take on the work as extra responsibility?
Gabby: For us it would be, I guess, 1.5. So one being me and 0.5 being the scholarly communications librarian, because it's in their department. So that's how many people we have working on it at our campus.
Sunny: For me, I would guess it's 0.5, because I have other responsibilities, which is why it's so great to have a cohort across our 10 campuses. And we all try to fill in when... We help each other, because most of us are doing this part-time.
Gabby: And I think that's also why both of us talked about time and starting small because realizing there's one of us or half of us working on this where all a lot of faculty could be interested. So, ensuring that at least for us making sure that our capacity was to the point that we could actually support faculty and making that very clear in the beginning for those who are taking on these projects.
Karen: Thank you. Julia is curious about how OER programs handled the development or creation of OER materials or textbooks that are built in the LMS. This approach seems to be in contrast to OER objectives and you're absolutely right, Julia. I know that this is actually something that's on Sunny's mind because depending on the LMS, it may or may not be openly available. And then how is that open? So I think usually when we're talking about OER publishing, we're talking about it outside of the LMS or we're talking about a different type of platform or tool. Let's see. Phoebe, yes to funding for editing. I think this is an earlier discussion. We are noticing that the workload for faculty authoring is high so any funding that can be put towards reducing the load around editing formatting to the published format can be really helpful. Thank you for sharing that, Phoebe.
I see some other replies in addition to the conversation in the chat. Thank you so much. Phoebe, Cheryl, Amanda, Michelle is asking for suggestions if you do not have a repository. Where do you store resources for others to use? Such a great question?
Sunny: I'm not sure whether this is going to work for everybody, but when I was first starting out, I noticed that... I want to say it's Kent State University or something like that, but they were putting their materials on Google Drive and then they were marketing them through OER commons and other sites. So I thought that was a pretty interesting way of handling it. If you don't have a repository, there might be other ways of doing it. There could be websites too. It doesn't have to be a really fancy platform if you're just starting out. There are ways to get materials out. And in reference to what Karen was referring to our default LMS for the university system is [Syiki 00:54:30] and it keeps everything behind a locked door. So one of the things we're looking at is trying to bring some of the materials out on a more public platform.
Gabby: Yeah. And also look at OER commons is great and I know some states are also having the micro sites that are built to look just like OER comments. So I know OER, we have OER tech. So if anybody from Texas, they have the same thing and those same capabilities of being able to write it in and upload it through the state repository. So can go either national or state, whatever you prefer. There's quite a few states that have their own microsite.
Karen: Thanks for those suggestions. We definitely know this is an issue Michelle and the OEN has been investigating ways that we can help support institutions that don't have institutional repositories. And that's one of the reasons we're undertaking a manifold pilot right now. So offering manifold to the community, seeing how they use it and then exploring how we may be able to offer it longer term to address these types of needs. So thank you for that question. Thank you all for the questions and conversations in the chat. I know this has been a fast and furious session and I'm just delighted to have all of you here.
With that and as the chat continues to go to chat, I'm just going to share my screen again briefly to give you a preview of what's coming up next week. So please join me in thanking Sunny and Gabby for sharing their experiences and their recommendations. Thank you both for being here. It's so great to learn from you and your programs and I'm excited to see how they continue to evolve.
Sunny: Thank you very much.
Gabby: Thank you all for your time.
Karen: Okay. So this is my closing comments and that is that we are doing this. Higher education can and does create academic content for students. You may know that the open textbook library is celebrating its 10th birthday next week, actually. And in the time that I've been overseeing the library, which is about seven years, it's grown from a couple hundred to now more than a thousand open textbooks. And that is just... I actually get a little choked up thinking about just how it's a moving reflection of all of the work being done across the country and around the world, creating this content to make higher education more equitable. So thank you for your work and your engagement in that. Throughout it's really easy to get bogged down in all of the things involved in publishing proofreading platforms. And so I think it helps for all of us to remind one another, that students are our touchstone throughout the development process. And as much as we can keep them at the heart of these questions, the better.
Again, you've heard us say it a lot today and you'll hear it throughout Pub101. You're really not alone. You're among a community of people who are doing this work and we want to support you. And also that everyone has something to contribute. No matter your experience or your context, there is something that we can learn from one another. And so I look forward to learning from all of you as we continue on.
Next week, we will be joined by Jacqueline Frank, who is the Instruction & Accessibility Librarian at Montana State University. That session will be hosted by Amanda Hurford, who is Scholarly Communications Director for the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana, otherwise known as PALNI and so the two of them will be engaging with all of you in the conversation. And your homework, if you so choose, if you would like some feedback from Jacqueline is you can go to our one stop doc, that Pub101 orientation document. Look for the homework link under week one. Click on that link and it's going to take you to an open textbook in a Google Doc format, and they'll find instructions there to post alt tags as comments.
So give it a go. Do your best and create some alt tags for some images that you find in that Google Doc and then we'll talk about it and Jacquelyn will take a look at them in the coming week and that is it from me. So thank you all for joining us. And I hope that your Pub101 kickoff was a great experience and we see all of you in the coming weeks. Thanks again to Gabby and Sunny and all of you for your engagement. See you soon. Bye-bye.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:14:41 Amanda Larson: https://open.umn.edu/oen/publishing
00:15:07 Alessandro Cesarano: Good afternoon everyone!
00:16:08 Amanda Larson: Welcome all! :)
00:16:38 Amanda Larson: https://open.umn.edu/oen/about
00:15:07 Alessandro Cesarano: Good afternoon everyone!
00:16:08 Amanda Larson: Welcome all! :)
00:16:38 Amanda Larson: https://open.umn.edu/oen/about
00:16:55 Amanda Larson: z.umn.edu/pub101norms
00:23:19 lorraine wochna: thank you
00:26:36 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#heading=h.d89ulxay3q4x
00:27:35 Amanda Larson: Class Notes - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:30:50 Amanda Larson: Curriculum - https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/106630
00:32:30 Alessandro Cesarano: thank you!
00:38:40 Carla Myers: Yes!!!
00:39:06 lorraine wochna: um, by creating --- does this mean you wrote it?
00:40:11 Karen Lauritsen: Lorraine, not necessarily. There are many roles involved in creating OER.
00:42:06 Gabby Hernandez: Here is our IDEA in Open Publishing Page. https://utrgv.libguides.com/LPP/IDEA
00:42:46 Gabby Hernandez: If you have any resources you love please feel free to share them with me so we can add them! :)
00:50:56 Karen Lauritsen: It can take years!
00:55:33 Jamey Harris: How many people do you have devoted to OER at your institutions?
00:56:27 Jodie Morin: What department or departments on your campus are involved in the delivery of OER services?
00:56:37 Jessica Dai (she/her): How much of your OER publishing program overlaps with other kinds of library publishing (journals, for instance), if at all?
00:56:54 John Egan: What are some mechanisms that give OER textbooks more legitimacy from a faculty tenure review perspective? Are there structures for front-end peer review? If pulling in multiple faculty for a larger project... how would you suggest seeking funding (what orgs do these type of grants etc.)?
00:57:07 Karen Lauritsen: Scribe is a publishing services provider that OEN Publishing Co-op members can use: https://scribenet.com/
00:57:14 Karen Lauritsen: I mean, others can use them too!
00:57:37 Hayley Battaglia: follow up to Jamey's question, how many of the individuals involved have OER in their job description/title and how many are volunteering to take on the work as extra responsibilities?
00:59:23 Julia Rodriguez: I've always been curious about how OER programs handle the development/creation of OER materials or textbooks that are built in the LMS. This approach seems to be in contrast to OER objectives. Don't need to answer today.
00:59:43 Phoebe Daurio: Yes to funding for editing, etc...We are noticing that the workload for faculty authoring is high, so any funding that can be put toward reducing the load around editing, formatting to the published format, etc. can be really helpful!
01:00:13 Jessica Dai (she/her): Thank you!
01:00:42 Phoebe Daurio: @John, we are also learning from faculty that having a peer review component is really important for getting acknowledgment re: Promotion and Tenure.
01:03:40 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: @John - some good resources for OER and P&T: Open Education in Promotion, Tenure, and Faculty Development (Iowa Open Education Action Team), https://oept.pubpub.org OER in Tenure & Promotion Matrix (DOERS3), https://www.doers3.org/tenure-and-promotion.html
01:03:48 Amanda Larson: I often recommend faculty build in research projects into their work - usually using OER in their discipline is a niche they can fill. If you have incentive $$$ and call it a grant they can report it in their dossier as a grant they won.
01:04:45 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Rebus Community offers a platform for global collaboration on OER creation & peer review, https://about.rebus.community
01:06:27 Michele Pratt: Suggestions if you don't have a repository? Where do you stores resources for others to use?
01:06:57 Amanda Larson: OER Commons is a great place to store resources!
01:07:18 Amanda Larson: https://www.oercommons.org/
01:07:59 Michele Pratt: We have faculty using their personal Google drives and sharing them on OER Commons.
01:09:08 Amanda Larson: Here's an example of a state microsite/hub on OER Commons https://ohiolink.oercommons.org/hubs/OOEC
01:09:14 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: OER Commons also has Hubs (less expensive than Microsites): https://www.oercommons.org/hubs
01:09:35 Raya Samet: So excited to continue this conversation in upcoming weeks! Thanks, all!
01:09:44 Marisa Petrich: Thank you both!
01:09:44 Barbara Lynn: Thank you!
01:09:46 Stephanie Towery: Thank you!
01:09:47 Jodie Morin: Thank you, Sunny & Gabby!
01:09:49 Carla Myers: Thanks for a great discussion today!
01:09:50 Alessandro Cesarano: thank you both!
01:09:51 Bethany Mickel: Many thanks!
01:09:53 Hayley Battaglia: Thank you!
01:09:55 Lauren Ray: Thank you! Nice to see familiar faces ?
01:09:57 Megan Lowe: Thank you!
01:09:58 Arenthia Herren: Thank you both so much!
01:09:58 Debra Carney: Thank you!
01:10:01 Elizabeth Clarage: Thank you!
01:10:01 Mary Ann Cullen: Thank you! I'm looking forward to future sessions.
01:10:02 Amber Olson: Thank you everyone!
01:10:09 Louise Feldmann: Thank you!
01:10:30 Regina Hierholzer: Thank you to Gabby and Sunny for great information!
01:11:35 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Wonderful community! Thank you, Karen, Gabby & Sunny
01:12:05 Carla Harper: Thanks!
01:12:33 Jessica Dai (she/her): Thank you!
01:12:41 Julia Rodriguez: thank you
01:12:45 Cathy Germano: Thank you!
01:12:47 Sherry Serdikoff: Thank you.
01:12:48 Michele Leigh: thank you
01:12:48 Amanda Hurford: Thanks everyone!1
01:12:48 Leanne Urasaki: Thanks, all. See you next week
01:12:49 Edward Mandity: thank you all
01:12:49 Rumyana Hristova: Thank you!
01:12:51 Regina Hierholzer: Thank you Karen
01:12:52 lorraine wochna: thank you, huge task!!!
00:26:36 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#heading=h.d89ulxay3q4x
00:27:35 Amanda Larson: Class Notes - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:30:50 Amanda Larson: Curriculum - https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/106630
00:32:30 Alessandro Cesarano: thank you!
00:38:40 Carla Myers: Yes!!!
00:39:06 lorraine wochna: um, by creating --- does this mean you wrote it?
00:40:11 Karen Lauritsen: Lorraine, not necessarily. There are many roles involved in creating OER.
00:42:06 Gabby Hernandez: Here is our IDEA in Open Publishing Page. https://utrgv.libguides.com/LPP/IDEA
00:42:46 Gabby Hernandez: If you have any resources you love please feel free to share them with me so we can add them! :)
00:50:56 Karen Lauritsen: It can take years!
00:55:33 Jamey Harris: How many people do you have devoted to OER at your institutions?
00:56:27 Jodie Morin: What department or departments on your campus are involved in the delivery of OER services?
00:56:37 Jessica Dai (she/her): How much of your OER publishing program overlaps with other kinds of library publishing (journals, for instance), if at all?
00:56:54 John Egan: What are some mechanisms that give OER textbooks more legitimacy from a faculty tenure review perspective? Are there structures for front-end peer review? If pulling in multiple faculty for a larger project... how would you suggest seeking funding (what orgs do these type of grants etc.)?
00:57:07 Karen Lauritsen: Scribe is a publishing services provider that OEN Publishing Co-op members can use: https://scribenet.com/
00:57:14 Karen Lauritsen: I mean, others can use them too!
00:57:37 Hayley Battaglia: follow up to Jamey's question, how many of the individuals involved have OER in their job description/title and how many are volunteering to take on the work as extra responsibilities?
00:59:23 Julia Rodriguez: I've always been curious about how OER programs handle the development/creation of OER materials or textbooks that are built in the LMS. This approach seems to be in contrast to OER objectives. Don't need to answer today.
00:59:43 Phoebe Daurio: Yes to funding for editing, etc...We are noticing that the workload for faculty authoring is high, so any funding that can be put toward reducing the load around editing, formatting to the published format, etc. can be really helpful!
01:00:13 Jessica Dai (she/her): Thank you!
01:00:42 Phoebe Daurio: @John, we are also learning from faculty that having a peer review component is really important for getting acknowledgment re: Promotion and Tenure.
01:03:40 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: @John - some good resources for OER and P&T: Open Education in Promotion, Tenure, and Faculty Development (Iowa Open Education Action Team), https://oept.pubpub.org OER in Tenure & Promotion Matrix (DOERS3), https://www.doers3.org/tenure-and-promotion.html
01:03:48 Amanda Larson: I often recommend faculty build in research projects into their work - usually using OER in their discipline is a niche they can fill. If you have incentive $$$ and call it a grant they can report it in their dossier as a grant they won.
01:04:45 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Rebus Community offers a platform for global collaboration on OER creation & peer review, https://about.rebus.community
01:06:27 Michele Pratt: Suggestions if you don't have a repository? Where do you stores resources for others to use?
01:06:57 Amanda Larson: OER Commons is a great place to store resources!
01:07:18 Amanda Larson: https://www.oercommons.org/
01:07:59 Michele Pratt: We have faculty using their personal Google drives and sharing them on OER Commons.
01:09:08 Amanda Larson: Here's an example of a state microsite/hub on OER Commons https://ohiolink.oercommons.org/hubs/OOEC
01:09:14 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: OER Commons also has Hubs (less expensive than Microsites): https://www.oercommons.org/hubs
01:09:35 Raya Samet: So excited to continue this conversation in upcoming weeks! Thanks, all!
01:09:44 Marisa Petrich: Thank you both!
01:09:44 Barbara Lynn: Thank you!
01:09:46 Stephanie Towery: Thank you!
01:09:47 Jodie Morin: Thank you, Sunny & Gabby!
01:09:49 Carla Myers: Thanks for a great discussion today!
01:09:50 Alessandro Cesarano: thank you both!
01:09:51 Bethany Mickel: Many thanks!
01:09:53 Hayley Battaglia: Thank you!
01:09:55 Lauren Ray: Thank you! Nice to see familiar faces ?
01:09:57 Megan Lowe: Thank you!
01:09:58 Arenthia Herren: Thank you both so much!
01:09:58 Debra Carney: Thank you!
01:10:01 Elizabeth Clarage: Thank you!
01:10:01 Mary Ann Cullen: Thank you! I'm looking forward to future sessions.
01:10:02 Amber Olson: Thank you everyone!
01:10:09 Louise Feldmann: Thank you!
01:10:30 Regina Hierholzer: Thank you to Gabby and Sunny for great information!
01:11:35 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Wonderful community! Thank you, Karen, Gabby & Sunny
01:12:05 Carla Harper: Thanks!
01:12:33 Jessica Dai (she/her): Thank you!
01:12:41 Julia Rodriguez: thank you
01:12:45 Cathy Germano: Thank you!
01:12:47 Sherry Serdikoff: Thank you.
01:12:48 Michele Leigh: thank you
01:12:48 Amanda Hurford: Thanks everyone!1
01:12:48 Leanne Urasaki: Thanks, all. See you next week
01:12:49 Edward Mandity: thank you all
01:12:49 Rumyana Hristova: Thank you!
01:12:51 Regina Hierholzer: Thank you Karen
01:12:52 lorraine wochna: thank you, huge task!!!
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