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Speakers:
Karen: Welcome everybody to Pub101. We are very glad that you're here. Thank you for setting aside time to join us today. On behalf of the Open Education Network team and community, as well as the Pub101 committee, we really appreciate your interest in publishing open educational resources. We have been excited to start this time together with you and we've been working hard to prepare the curriculum and these seven sessions so that they are applicable to your work and your goals and hopefully succinct and respectful of your time. I would like to take a moment to thank the Pub101 committee and the work that they have invested over the last couple of years.
On the next slide, you can see their faces. Many of them have joined us today in the call and you'll get to know many of them as facilitators in upcoming sessions. In addition to lending their experience and expertise to Pub101, they've also been getting in there, into the canvas curriculum which we will share with you shortly, revising content, streamlining content, making sure that what we share with you over these next several weeks is the best it can be. It's a delight to work with them. I think you will find the same. They're also very generous colleagues who I'm sure would be happy to answer any additional questions you might have.
As for me, my name is Karen Lauritsen. I am the publishing director with the Open Education Network. We are based at the University of Minnesota. I was just there last month. It was 30 degrees, but totally doable for someone who lives in California. I've been working remotely here for about eight years in this role, and when I'm not doing things related to open education, I love to maintain a wildlife habitat garden. I've snuck in a few photos of my garden here in this slideshow. I really like planting plants that are native to the area, that were here before humans really developed things. I had no idea I would get so into this 10 years ago, but here we are. That's a little bit about me.
In terms of our time together today. I'll spend about, probably a little under half our hour setting the scene in terms of what to expect with Pub101, provide some guidance or some thoughts on whether you're in the right place. But spoiler alert, the answer is yes. You're all very welcome and we're so glad that you're here.
I'll talk a little bit more about what Pub101 is and then hopefully we can spend a little more than half of our time chatting with Gabby and Sunny about their experience publishing open textbooks. You can hear directly from some colleagues about what their experience has been, particularly as they got their program started. Some of the things that they've thought about and some of the things that they have learned as they've moved along, what can sometimes be an adventurous journey.
Okay, setting the scene. For some of you, this may be your first firsthand experience with the Open Education Network, and that is one of the things that I love about Pub101 and that gets me excited about this every year, is the opportunity to meet more of you. To introduce you a little bit to the Open Education Network community. We are a community of people who are working to advance open education. Our members now represent more than 1,700 institutions in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. All of our work is guided by our guiding principles. They are that we contribute to the common good together, that we center equity and inclusivity in all that we do. That we're a community of action. We're not just talking about good ideas, we're putting them into place. We are humans, first and foremost, and we always try to keep that at the core.
We act with integrity and in the spirit of Pub101 and all of our programs, we really benefit from shared abundance. This is not about the handful of staff who are working at the OEN. This is about the hundreds bordering on thousands of people who are doing this work around the world and who generously support one another in terms of sharing what they've learned, their best practices, their templates, so that you don't have to start from scratch or to feel like you're in it alone.
This can be very isolating work and many of you have a full plate of other responsibilities, or you might be the only person at your institution working in open education. Shared abundance is really critical to supporting the work that we do and continuing the incredible impact that this community has been able to do so far. If you'd like to read a little bit more about our norms, they're available there at the z-link. Amanda Larson, who is the chair of the Pub101 committee is here and will be managing chat and sharing those links with you in the chat as well.
Now I'm going to talk more specifically about publishing within the open education context to continue to set our scene. Publishing is so important and integral to open educational practices because it provides an opportunity to include more voices and more perspectives in the educational experience. It provides opportunity to localize and indigenize content so that it's relevant to students, it's relevant to the communities in which it's taught, and it provides an opportunity to update text to reflect a current moment. Instead of having to wait for a new addition to come out two years from now to reflect the latest and greatest recent history, you can update things much more quickly to include case studies, stories, interviews, multimedia, things that are happening right now. Publishing also includes an opportunity to include students in creating content in open pedagogical practices and really working together to create open textbooks and other OER that reflect a collective intent to share collective knowledge.
Now, in terms of what publishing means, the Pub101 committee and I have joked that we could spend many a salon hour, many a cocktail hour discussing what publishing means, and it's somewhat complicated by the fact that in our minds it can mean like, "Oh, I just pushed this button and suddenly this new content is available online." And absolutely, that is publishing. But publishing can also mean adapting, editing, modifying an already existing resource. It has many synonyms like creation, authoring, writing, making. Publishing can mean having an institutional repository and posting or archiving a document that's available for people to access. It can mean working with a whole suite or a whole team of people, copy editors, proofreaders, designers, co-authors. It can mean working with students. Really, publishing can mean so many things, and we want to work under a large umbrella when we talk about publishing in Pub101. Whatever it means to you, whatever you're capable of, whatever's in your capacity or institution, the answer might be nothing right now, and that's okay too.
We really hope to show you in Pub101 what publishing can involve. Emphasize that you can pick and choose what you have the capacity to do at your institution and to just get you thinking about some of the things to anticipate when publishing open textbooks, but we always mean to be inclusive, and if ever you're thinking about your institution and what you can do there and you're trying to connect what we're talking about in Pub101 with where you're at, let us know and we will try to think about your context more specifically, think about ways that you could modify or adapt the content that we're sharing so that it can work for you.
Okay, continuing to set the scene here. Our intentions with Pub101. We really hope that this is a friendly experience. I think you'll find us to be a friendly accessible folks. We want to hear questions from you. We want to engage in conversation. This is an informal publishing orientation. When we have created this content, we are thinking about those of you who will be supporting faculty authors. Every year I receive questions about, "Oh, can I promote Pub101 to my faculty?" If you are faculty, welcome. We're glad you're here. We only share the caveat that we really are thinking about librarians, instructional designers and others at your team who are typically supporting and working with faculty authors. We have started talking about the potential to design a program specifically for faculty authors. Again, if you're a faculty author and you would like to be here, welcome.
We have been thinking about those who support you in designing this content. With Pub101, we want to provide a preview of what's involved in publishing. We want to offer you an opportunity to consider your vision and your capacity at your institution. We're going to highlight adaptable resources that you can use if you decide to build a publishing program or support a publishing project. And we really want to lay the foundation for any platform or tool. We're not going to talk about how to use Pressbooks, for example, or which tool may be the best. It can get really complicated. It's a broad landscape out there, and we hope to share information with you that can work no matter where you or your faculty may land on the question of technology.
Am I in the right place? Again, the short answer, I hope, is yes. You are in the right place. To give you a little bit more to make that decision, if you are very new to open education, publishing can be an overwhelming place to start. Again, you're very welcome to join us. However, in the past, many of us have recommended starting with adoption programs. If you're just really new to open education, an adoption program can really help you lay the foundation at your institution. Introduce the concept of open educational resources and open licenses, and give you some groundwork before you jump into publishing. If you are very new, you might want to look at the creative common certificate, the OEN certificate and OER librarianship. The introduction to open, the OER starter kit. There are a lot of resources out there if you're new to open education more broadly. This reminds me that this slideshow and the associated links will be posted to our orientation documents at the end of today. If you'd like to access these slides, they will be available to you, and I'll give you the link to that shortly.
We also have gathered some resources if you are an aspiring author. If what you're looking for is more like, "How do I write an open textbook?" Pub101 may not be the right fit for you. We're going to talk about things like memorandums of understanding and developing timelines. Again, you're welcome to be here, but if you are an aspiring author, here are some resources that may be helpful to you, if what you're really wanting to do is jump into writing an open textbook. We also have other programs and infrastructure within the OEN that can help you if you're a faculty at this point in your journey. Okay. That is my setting the scene. Am I in the right place quick overview. I'm going to stop sharing for a moment or maybe I don't need to. I'm going to launch a quiz. I don't think I need to stop sharing.
Hopefully you all have had a poll top up on your screen. Please describe the likelihood of launching a publishing program at your institution or consortium in the coming year. Choose one that you think is the best fit for you. A, it's already happening. We're doing it, we're publishing. B, we're just about ready to go. C, we're thinking about it maybe one day. Hold on. And D, I really don't think there's any way we're going to be in a position to do this, but I want to learn more and develop professionally. I'll give another moment to respond. Currently, at 83% participation. Thank you.
Okay, a couple more seconds and then I'm going to close the poll and reveal our results. Most of you are thinking maybe one day I will set out on this adventurous journey and support the publishing of OER. A good portion of you are already doing this work, which is awesome, and many of you are ready to go. This is another reminder of the shared abundance in the room. If you have already developed things, if you've thought about developing things and decided not to, whatever your experience, please feel welcome to share it in the chat as we begin our discussions and as we move through the weeks, there's a lot of collective knowledge and we invite all of you to share it, not just the facilitators or the people who are talking, but also you as participants. Thank you for jumping in. We shall now carry on.
Okay, more specifically, what is Pub101? When we use the term Pub101, we mean it as both a curriculum and an experience. It's a curriculum and there is the Canvas course. It's three units. And then it's also this experience right now that you're in the middle of having. It's seven sessions of synchronous conversation that you can join in whenever your schedule allows. Again, it's meant to be an informal big picture orientation. It's not a class. There's no grades. There's no certificate at the conclusion, so really come when you can. There will be videos and documentation if you're unable to make a session. We hope to have some fun with you and make this hour together enjoyable. Pub101 continues to evolve. I actually just finished writing a blog post about the history of Pub101 because in preparing for this, I realized that we are now in our fifth year, and it's fun to look back and see how Pub101 has evolved from some collective work that we've done as a group supporting publishing, and once that blog post is published, we'll share it with you if you're interested.
Really it has kept changing because of the feedback we've received from you because of the changes in the open education landscape. We have this Pub101 committee that I introduced to you earlier. We look at all of the feedback. There will be opportunities at the end of each unit in the canvas curriculum to fill out a short feedback form as well as at the end of our seven sessions. Really, truly, we want to know what you think how we can continue to make this better and apply for you and your situation. Finally, Pub101 is meant to be a beginning. We don't have to say goodbye when it's over. You can be a part of the OEN community as you continue on with this work so that you feel less isolated and alone.
I'd also like to talk quickly about the spirit of Pub101, if you will, and that is going back to our guiding principles. We always will keep in mind that you're a human being, you're not a publishing machine. You'll hear a lot of our speakers talk about self-care and tips for looking after yourself in what can be a fairly demanding area of open education. There are many people who want to help so that you do not feel alone, and there are many ways to publish. We're only going to be able to share a few options here. We do not mean to suggest that those options are superior or the way you should go. They're really just stories from the field. Again, we look to you. Please let us know what you need as we move along.
Finally, a little housekeeping. Amanda will be dropping the related links into the chat. The most important perhaps is the what I call one-stop doc because it has a nice ring to it. That's our orientation document. Some of you may have already seen this. It went out with the Pub101 invitations. It will be updated weekly with links to the slides from that week. We also have a YouTube channel. If you want to subscribe to that channel, you'll know immediately once videos are posted. We are aiming to post those videos before the next Pub101 session is held, so within that week, that is our goal. If you have questions about what we're doing or where to find something, try the one-stop doc first. I think you'll probably find your answer there, and if not, let me know.
There is also class notes. Class notes is something that we developed since we're not a formal program here, we're not within a course shell, filling out discussion boards. But there may be times when we run out of time or you can't get your question in the chat and you like to continue the conversation. We develop class notes for that. It's a Google Doc, it's your space. I invite you now to please take a moment and add your information to class notes. You'll see there's a table there just to share your name, your institution, and why you're at Pub101. This is really helpful for us as well to get a sense of who you are and how we can meet your needs while you're in Pub101. I'm going to carry on, but please do drop your information into class notes sometime today.
Okay. I mentioned that Pub101 is two things, a curriculum and an experience. A little bit more about the curriculum. The Pub101 committee recently revised the curriculum. It is now streamlined. Shorter is almost always better, so it's three units instead of a whopping eight. Previously, we were throwing in possibly everything, including the kitchen sink. Now we really are trying to make a more discreet experience so that you're not wading through a lot of different resources. It can be hard to choose. There's a lot of support out there. We've also included more examples. We added some case studies, added some new resources, and just really tried to make sure that it was ready for primetime. A lot of care was taken to make the units as straightforward as possible. These meetings that we'll be holding together in person, they're not teaching to the curriculum. We're not going to go through it step by step. They're really meant to be more complimentary. I encourage you to review the curriculum. I think it will connect. We're not going to lead you through it, we're going to introduce you to it.
Speaking of, unit one really focuses on defining an open textbook, and very briefly, I will say that in Pub101, we talk about publishing open textbooks specifically. You can extrapolate to publishing OER and other resources more broadly. But our focus is on the textbook itself. It connects to the work that we do in the open textbook library. What's unique about open textbooks is that they're free to the end user and they have permissions, usually a Creative Commons license that will allow for editing. As all of you know textbooks have structure. They're different from a monograph and that they have pedagogical elements that recur. The information is hierarchically organized, and all of that structure is really integral to accessibility, which is something that we'll be talking about next week. When we're talking about publishing textbooks, those are the working definitions of what we have in mind when we're talking about that.
Just a short note that the units are really helpful. A lot of what we will talk about, you'll find in the units in terms of templates and resources and other helpful tips. There's also what I hope are somewhat fun quizzes at the end of each unit if you want to test your knowledge. None of that data is kept as just a quiz for you.
Okay. I think that concludes my long preamble. If you have any questions, please drop them in the chat. In the meantime, I'm very excited to introduce the two guests who are joining us today. We have Gabby Hernandez, who is the Open Education Librarian at the University of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. And we have Sunny Pai, who's the Digital Initiatives Librarian and OER at University of Hawaiʻi Community Colleges campus co-lead. She's based at Kapiʻolani Community College.
What we're going to spend the rest of our time doing is chatting with Gabby and Sunny. I've prepared a few questions for them. If as we're going along you think of questions that you'd like to ask them, please drop them in the chat and we'll keep an eye on those. I'm also going to go ahead and close out of the slide sharing so that you can see our faces and we can have a more friendly conversation. All righty. To kick us off, Gabby, how would you describe your publishing experience so far? What was your starting point?
Gabby: We are still a very young publishing institution at UTRGV. In thinking about the broad definition that Karen shared with us earlier, which I really loved about what is publishing or what can it be? We're in that institutional repository, posting, archiving, adaption, editing, modifying. That's where we live right now. We do have some faculty that are interested in dipping their toe into the full-on publishing from scratch. Yeah, that's where we're sitting at the moment. In the last four years of our program, we've really been focused more on the OER adoption portion and just getting the word out and making sure that our faculty know what is OER, what is textbook affordability, what is open publishing, and of course, how does that differentiate between open access publishing, trying to really set these definitions so faculty have a very clear understanding or we're hoping that they have a clear understanding of the differences between all of those things and what could alternative course materials mean.
I have both participated in and highly recommend all those foundational courses that Karen described earlier, these are creative common certificate, the OEN's OER librarianship certification. All of those resources really helped me feel confident in this OER and publishing space coming in as some of us do into maybe a completely brand new role on campus that we could be starting from scratch. We knew from the beginning that we always wanted our library to one day become more of a publishing institution or attain Pressbooks, so we had been scaffolding what that could look like. Then we ended up with a Pressbooks subscription out of nowhere. We were like, "Oh, we're here and we have it and let's go." Thankfully, we had already started that background work preparing for that one eventual day.
We had some structure, but then once we actually were told, yes, we need to go, then we were just able to kick our program into a higher gear so we could get started. In that start, we also wanted to make sure we had an information page out there for faculty to describe our publishing project and our publishing capabilities and we wanted to be very transparent with the services that we could and also could not provide based on our capacity. A year later, here we are with three published titles and a few more in the works. It's coming along.
Karen: Congratulations on those publications, Gabby. That page you mentioned where you're clear about what you can and can't do. Is that something you can share?
Gabby: Yes, I'll share that right now in the chat.
Karen: Okay. Super. Sunny, what about you? How would you describe your publishing experience so far in your starting point?
Sunny: Okay. Well, regarding my starting point, I was part of the spring 2019 cohort. I had some experience with open access and open source content management systems. I brought that with me and working with Plone and DSpace and systems like that. The University of Hawaiʻi system, which has 10 campuses, around that time, had had a Pressbooks instance. We were starting to develop textbooks for Pressbooks. As I had said, we have a 10-campus system, so I'm working with authors here at my college, but it goes into a 10-college supporting Pressbooks system. What I was finding back in 2019, I was having a conversation with an instructor who I was having a difficult time persuading to consider either adopting or developing an OER textbook. He kept saying that he really wanted the support of a commercial publishing process, including editing.
Editing was very important to him and layout. Of course, he was a math instructor. That was very intriguing to me, so I wanted to find out more about what goes into the structure of a textbook. This was around the time that Karen, I think, was advertising. I think it was the second cohort for Pub101? This was at OTNSI. I begged her to let me join the cohort. We started out with that. This combined with my application for sabbatical to develop a textbook, an OER textbook, working with a science instructor. I happened to find a science instructor after my sabbatical had been approved. That was my starting point. That was the test project that I was able to bring to Pub101. I'm not sure these days whether you have to have a textbook project to start with Pub101, but back then we had to have at least one or two. That's how I got started off with the Pub101 project. It was an excellent experience. I learned so much about textbook structure and publishing, and it was just a really great experience. I think that's about where I can contribute at this point. Yeah.
Karen: Thanks, Sunny, and thanks for bringing us back to some reflections on how Pub101 has evolved. Sunny's mentioning some deep history in terms of we used to do a training in a particular editing, they're called Scribe. They're like a back office editing service provider. They do a lot of publishing support. For a while we were learning their techniques for structuring documents. Anyway, it used to start very specifically, and now Pub101 is much more broad. We decided to back out of the very specific book-required model that Sunny described, and now here we are with a more introductory experience in terms of orienting people to larger questions within publishing that can ground them before they move into more specific training around different technology, for example, or different platforms. I will put a link to the sleep textbook... Actually, do you have that up Sunny? Could you drop a link?
Sunny: Sure.
Karen: Yeah. If you can't find it, I think I just have it on my clipboard somewhere. It's a beautiful book that Sunny is discussing and it might be fun to take a look. In the meantime, I will move on to our next question. Gabby, what are your open publishing goals, not only organizationally, but also for you personally or professionally?
Gabby: We outlined our goals pretty clearly. For our program goals, we have three and it's provide affordable educational materials for students. We want to create diverse and inclusive materials, and we also want to engage in works that reflect our student population and allow them to participate in the creation of knowledge through open pedagogical practices. That's really what we would love to have our publishing project achieved. These goals resonate with us both organizationally but also professionally and personally for myself. Organizationally, we are one of the largest Hispanic serving institutions in the United States with a very high rate of Pell Grant recipients. Basically our entire community is an underserved population that can benefit from all of these goals. Personally, as a member of the same community, I want to ensure that our voices are heard and valued within educational materials.
Then as a part of our library publishing project, library guide, we created an inclusion, diversity, equity, and anti-racism and open publishing page. It is our hope that these ideas and conversations will happen throughout the creation process instead of thinking of them as an afterthought. Just ensuring... We have such a unique population here at UTRGV that every voice is a voice that can be and should be amplified, though, we want to make sure that we are utilizing our students and allowing them the ability to have their voices heard in textbook creation.
Karen: Thank you so much. We embrace the same approach. You'll find in unit one, we discuss diversity, equity, inclusion and publishing. How you can think about that throughout the process so that... Again, as Gabby said, it's not something at the end of the project where you think, "Oh, should we do something here?" But really it's motivating, inspiring, guiding the work and helping authors and others working on the project to involve more people so that the resource can reflect more people's experiences. Gabby, I don't know if you have a link to that page as well? I think that would be great to share. What about you, Sunny, in terms of your open publishing goals, both organizationally and for you, Sunny?
Sunny: Okay. Well, I'm basically for my college, I'm a one-person shop, and I do this on top of my assigned primary duties, but I've been able to leverage across the 10 campuses. We have OER champions or campus leads, as we say, across the 10 campuses. We leverage what resources we can pull together in our individual institutions, and we help each other out. That's been very helpful. Because I am a one-person shop, I have been focusing a great deal on educating our community and focusing on the seven community colleges about OER, as Gabby was saying, building that enthusiasm about open educational resources. We do have the Pressbooks instance. Sometimes Pressbooks instance is not the solution for our authors. The Scribe solution ended up becoming a good one for the sleep textbook.
I have also facilitated LibreTexts. I've facilitated a textbook in GitHub. There's also quite a large contingent of faculty who want to develop in the learning management system. Maybe it's because I came from a tech background, but it seems like I've had to be very flexible with platforms. In fact, Karen has been involved in the Manifold project, and some of my teammates and I have just come through a Manifold project. We're still trying to come to some decisions about platforms, so we're in that stage. Right now, in order for me to get people to adopt, I've taken a stance of being very flexible with platforms. At this point, it looks like, as a team of 10 campuses, we may need to start extending our developmental support platformwise and also mentoringwise across the 10 campuses. We're getting to a point where I might be helping out Windward Community College and not just Kapi'olani Community College. In a grassroots, very organic way, we're growing our support system. Unfortunately, we have a limited... Not all of our campus leads are very strong in technology, so we're trying to figure that out.
Karen: I appreciate that point, Sunny, that those of you who are thinking about having your own publishing programs may want to consider, and that is, do you want to support faculty working in a variety of platforms and tools? Are you comfortable in that space? Do you want to consider what that support looks like? If so, or would you rather say, if you think that this tool, be it Pressbooks, Manifold, Google Docs, Word, it can be a lot of different things. If you think that this tool can work for your project, we can support you in it. Those are two points along the spectrum as you think about projects and programs and technology. Because it can quickly, as listening to Sunny illustrated, become fairly overwhelming if you have faculty in a variety of different subject areas and tools have different strengths, and we all keep waiting for that one tool that's going to do everything perfectly, but I think it may be a long wait.
Gabby, back over to you. What would you say have been the highlights or the big things that you've learned so far in your work supporting open publishing?
Gabby: Fitting perfectly with everything we've said so far, I'm sure you all know that this process takes time. It has taken us time to both build up the infrastructure for our faculty and to also get the word out about our services. We do have faculty interest, especially those who've already been using OER in their courses. Our faculty really love the idea of being able to create their own OER or engaging students in contact creation, but it's also hard for faculty themselves to find the time to implement these practices. It's really interesting, this last year I've really seen the transition in our faculty thought and interest on campus. I provide a few mini professional development grants for our faculty. I ask them the question, "Do you want the open education librarian to help you find OER for your course?"
Then I also ask the question, are you interested in learning more about modifying, remixing or creating OER? We used to get the majority of them saying, "I just want you to help me find OER." But now our faculty have seemed to have made the shift. Maybe we're at that point where, yes, they finally understand where it's going after all of these years and they're ready to dip their toe more into the other side. I've had more requests for information about Pressbooks than I have about just specific or general, "Find me OER for this topic." It's nice to see that transition because it definitely helps us better plan where we're going in the future or are we on the right track? Like, "Are our faculty actually ready for a publishing program, not just us as a library, but are the faculty ready to take that next step?"
Karen: Yeah, that's so key. I often get swept up in what I think is a great next step and forget that I need to check in with the people who we want to serve and work with and see, "Wait, do they feel that way too?" That's such a good consideration. Sunny, what about you in terms of things you've learned?
Sunny: Well, let's see. Following up on what Gabby had said, that is one of the challenges that we've had with faculty. Our faculty are very shy about sharing their materials and that's what publishing is about. We know that there's a lot of work going on. They tend to keep it in the LMS or hidden. We've developed a professional development program that just basically gives support both in training, for example, $300 overload if you complete a six-module OER 101 course with the strong lesson that the idea of this is to be able to publish something at the end and to share it with others who have so willingly shared their materials with us and enabled us to do this work. We are trying to overcome the shyness aspect of it. I think we're getting some success of the website that I just shared is some of the projects that are in development right now that we're hoping to see the finished products published later on.
That's been a bit of a challenge. Some authors though, interestingly enough, they just jump in and they just go for it. That's the best thing. I get to sit on the sidelines and let them run with it. I want to make mention that the author who put together the sleep textbook, right now is working on a 10-campus author project, a book sprint. That project's gone on for about two or three years. She took the principles that we learned together from Scribe in Pub101 in terms of pedagogy and textbook structure. She used some of those elements in this project. And we're really looking forward to having two of our main AMP courses, textbook zero in fall, and this would be across our 10 campus system. We're very excited about that. In that way, Pub101 has really paid off setting the groundwork for an understanding of what you can do with textbooks and how you can structure them. Did that answer your question?
Karen: There's a lot involved, especially when you're reflecting on the last few years. It is a long and winding road. It does address the question because it raises all of the different competing priorities and considerations involved in publishing and I think open ed more broadly. We only have one question left that I've prepared for Gabby and Sunny. I invite all of you if you have questions that are on your mind, maybe things that we haven't even touched on yet, please do feel free to put them in the chat because we probably will have a couple of minutes to explore those questions too. Please let us know if you have any questions. Then I just have one more question of my own and some closing slides after that. Keeping in mind, the folks who have joined us today, many of them are thinking about starting a publishing program. What would you recommend to people who are just getting started in open publishing?
Gabby: I would recommend creating a process that works for your institutional needs and your departmental capacity. A lot of the times when we look at other open publishing programs and we're trying to figure out which one you'd like to use as a model, remember that we're rarely comparing apples to apples. The other institution that you're looking at may have different funding structures, more or fewer people assigned to work on such projects. I like how Sunny saying she's at a one-man shop. We are have two, with all the other things that come with open education and scholarly communications. It's like just the scholarly communications hat. It's like 100 jobs. It can be really hard. Sometimes I'm like, "Oh man, we only did three." We only have three in our library. But then I have to think, "No, we did three. That's a lot. We were able to get that through."
Keep those things in mind when you're looking at other publishing institutions that are out there. Yeah, there's just a whole host of things to take into consideration before you compare yourself to somebody else. Always take a look at your departmental capacity and the needs and create a program that fits within your parameters. You can always start small and grow the program and start offering more faculty support as you progress. It's hard to shrink once you've gotten somewhere maybe over capacity and then you go, "Oh wait, this is too much. I need to shrink back down." That's also why we outlined like, "This is definitely what we can support you with. That sometimes can be a little bit scary because as librarians, we want to provide all the support. We want to be there all the time, but setting your boundaries also very healthy in your work to make sure that the faculty understand exactly how much support they can have and they can decide themselves whether that's enough support for them or they want to wait a little bit longer or more support when, hopefully, there's the time and the capacity for that.
Karen: Yeah, 100%. Comparison is so difficult and not a good way to enter into anything personally or professionally, even when you see a really inspiring model program. It's a different place. It's a different context. I really appreciate everything that you highlighted, Gabby. We have a lot of questions coming in, so we may be able to make use of class notes here before the end of the day, but we'll try to cover as much as possible. Sunny, anything you want to add about recommendations for people just getting started, and then we'll turn to the chat?
Sunny: Yes, everything that Gabby has said, thumbs up. Everybody in the room, Pub101 is a unique and very supportive learning experience. Karen is absolutely right. You'll learn a lot and you'll feel very supportive. It's a great community. I really highly recommend it. The workload is huge, and you have to work strategically, because you're educating, bringing people on board, selling the concept while you're trying to focus on the output, the textbook at the other end. Go ahead, Karen.
Karen: Yeah, just to add to that, a book is really major. A book is a multiyear project usually, and it can be very, very complex. Jumping into the first question. For faculty that have created content and use it in their course and are eager to convert this content into an open textbook, what do you think is a good way to assist them?
Sunny: I could jump in really quickly. Shall I?
Karen: Sure, yeah.
Sunny: Okay, sorry. Yeah, so the sleep textbook was an example. She was teaching from notes and commercial publishers were asking to publish her work. Then she found out about OER. Fortunately, she was passionate about a diversity and racial equity. After we had a conversation... Oh, do you have the blog post? Okay, you can read in the blog post. Basically, we pulled the material together and Scribe really helped with the editing process. I don't know if that helps. Basically, in that, I played the role of a connector, a networker, and a project manager.
Gabby: I think a part of it also just goes to making sure that you're putting out there what your services are, because we have received at least one faculty who has sent us our stuff and said, "Hey, I'm using this and I think it could be helpful for others." It's just building that name and reputation of like, "Please reach out to us. We're here to support, anything, when it comes to publishing or open anything." With them we are just taking it slow. They just gave us the Word document and we're going through and making sure that everything is actually shareable, making sure the licensing is compatible, ensuring where did they get these documents. It's that process, is how we're doing that at UTRGV.
Sunny: I'm going to throw this in really quickly. There's always the issue of year-to-year budgeting. There's a whole aspect of project management and fiscal management, which we don't have time to get to, but it can be challenging because a book takes longer than a year.
Karen: Yes. We will touch on budgeting in several of the sessions. That's a good thing to highlight. I'd also like to highlight in the chat, thanks to Phoebe who also replied to that question. I think Stephanie, who's also addressing this question in terms of resolving some of the complexities between content that has a different license on it. Thank you all for your conversation in the chat. Christie, I will quickly answer your question about whether there's a list of institutions that have programs going that we can learn from. In the Pub101 curriculum, you will find a selection of institutions that are publishing and a lot of their related documentation, their MOUs, things like that. Absolutely, we share some of that content. I don't know of an exhaustive list. That's an interesting idea that I can take to our advisory group that's constantly developing resources and support for people in open publishing. If you are a member of the Library Publishing Coalition, our friends over there do keep a list of people engaged in publishing more broadly. Let's see. Jennifer asks if you have suggestions for how to work collaboratively with other institutions of higher ed in your state on open publishing?
Gabby: Yeah, I reached out to all of the OER practitioners within my system and just got us all into a group. Now we have a standing meeting that's very low-key, drop in, drop out when you can. That way we, at least, all know each other. We have backgrounds, so when there's things that come out, like federal grants, state grants, we all immediately jump in and say, "Hey, are y'all doing this? Are you working on this?" I can see that growing into other systems, making it larger, but that's how we started, just small and system-wide. It's so beneficial, so don't be shy. Reach out to the other people who are doing the same work as you. I think it definitely helps.
Sunny: Same here in Hawaiʻi. For our 10 campuses, we started meeting in 2015, and we haven't missed a meeting yet. We do it once a month. It started off with librarians, we brought in instructional designers, and now we also have faculty and administrators. It's grown and we've also extended the invitation to BYU, which is a private university. We're open to others in the state who would like to join. For example, when we decided to set up a relationship with LibreTexts, everybody was involved. They got to take a look at the platform. Our projects on Pressbooks, we talk about it together.
Karen: Thank you. I think we're doing a pretty good job of making our way through these questions. Thank you all, including those of you participating in the chat. Gabby, there's a request to share a link to the Open Pedagogy Project that you mentioned.
Gabby: Yes, I am putting the link in the chat. Unfortunately, because of our capacity, we haven't been able to do as many Open Pedagogy Projects as we had hoped. That's definitely one of our goals and somewhere we're trying to get. I do have one and I'm getting that link for you in the chat right now.
Karen: Thank you. In the two minutes we have remaining, we can give it a shot and try to address the final question, which is talking a little bit more about the reluctance that you've run into in pursuing buy-in or participation from folks on campus. Was it, as you mentioned, Sunny, the desire to use a more traditional publishing model, or were there any other specific pushbacks that either of you have heard in terms of moving into the open publishing space?
Sunny: Well, I think I had mentioned the shyness. The particular author who said he really wanted editing and layout support is math. Yeah, that is much more challenging. He did end up going with a commercial textbook publisher. He did negotiate a low buying price, so some of the message went across to him. Then right after that, the university, our system passed a policy that faculty cannot use their own textbooks in their classes because it was a conflict of interest. I'm not sure where he is, but that was an interesting story for that particular instance. The other thing about textbook publishing is faculty always want to tweak. They want to edit. They want to tweak. They want an easy interface. Those who chose Pressbooks are enjoying that capability, whereas some people are satisfied in the Scribe textbook, they're happy with that one edition. And then at some later point, we probably would have to start up a whole new process.
Karen: Thank you.
Gabby: I'll answer, if you don't mind, Karen, just a few seconds. The biggest pushback we've seen at UTRGV is departments that have to all adopt the same book and that some want to use OER, but they're not allowed because the department has to. What I'm doing, especially for those faculty, making sure they know that I'm here. That way when it comes time to do this, the textbook selection, they can reach out. I'm always there and open for support, but never push because I do realize there are certain departmental things that I just can't control, like departmental selection.
Karen: Yeah, it's a great reminder. We cannot control everything. We will take a look at the chat to see if there's anything that we missed, and then the Pub101 committee can chime in and engage in further conversation in the chat. I'm just going to wrap up for us in the remaining few seconds and thank our guests. Sorry, I have a very hiccupy system, as you can see, as you now join me in my version history. The short story is that... Drum roll. We are doing this. This is happening, and there is a community and resources here for you. We can and do support the creation of academic content for students. We don't have to rely on commercial vendors. Students, I think, are a critical touchstone throughout the creation process. It can be really easy to forget why you're doing something when you're working on a long-term book project. Thinking about students, putting them at the center of the why, I think, is really motivating and clarifying.
Again, you're not alone. Everyone has something to contribute to this process. Now, in terms of next week, we'll be welcoming Jacqueline Frank. She's going to talk about accessibility. There will be a related activity if you want to try out your hand at making a document more accessible. Your homework if you so choose, is outlined in the orientation documents and here on this slide. Then finally, thank you again for joining us and your commitment to student success. Your willingness to learn more. Your interest in joining us and your engagement in the process. Thank you so much, Gabby and Sunny, for kicking us off and sharing your stories. We look forward to seeing all of you again next week. And in the meantime, please take care. Farewell.
Sunny: Thank you everybody.
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 2023 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, Kapi'olani Community College)
Karen: Welcome everybody to Pub101. We are very glad that you're here. Thank you for setting aside time to join us today. On behalf of the Open Education Network team and community, as well as the Pub101 committee, we really appreciate your interest in publishing open educational resources. We have been excited to start this time together with you and we've been working hard to prepare the curriculum and these seven sessions so that they are applicable to your work and your goals and hopefully succinct and respectful of your time. I would like to take a moment to thank the Pub101 committee and the work that they have invested over the last couple of years.
On the next slide, you can see their faces. Many of them have joined us today in the call and you'll get to know many of them as facilitators in upcoming sessions. In addition to lending their experience and expertise to Pub101, they've also been getting in there, into the canvas curriculum which we will share with you shortly, revising content, streamlining content, making sure that what we share with you over these next several weeks is the best it can be. It's a delight to work with them. I think you will find the same. They're also very generous colleagues who I'm sure would be happy to answer any additional questions you might have.
As for me, my name is Karen Lauritsen. I am the publishing director with the Open Education Network. We are based at the University of Minnesota. I was just there last month. It was 30 degrees, but totally doable for someone who lives in California. I've been working remotely here for about eight years in this role, and when I'm not doing things related to open education, I love to maintain a wildlife habitat garden. I've snuck in a few photos of my garden here in this slideshow. I really like planting plants that are native to the area, that were here before humans really developed things. I had no idea I would get so into this 10 years ago, but here we are. That's a little bit about me.
In terms of our time together today. I'll spend about, probably a little under half our hour setting the scene in terms of what to expect with Pub101, provide some guidance or some thoughts on whether you're in the right place. But spoiler alert, the answer is yes. You're all very welcome and we're so glad that you're here.
I'll talk a little bit more about what Pub101 is and then hopefully we can spend a little more than half of our time chatting with Gabby and Sunny about their experience publishing open textbooks. You can hear directly from some colleagues about what their experience has been, particularly as they got their program started. Some of the things that they've thought about and some of the things that they have learned as they've moved along, what can sometimes be an adventurous journey.
Okay, setting the scene. For some of you, this may be your first firsthand experience with the Open Education Network, and that is one of the things that I love about Pub101 and that gets me excited about this every year, is the opportunity to meet more of you. To introduce you a little bit to the Open Education Network community. We are a community of people who are working to advance open education. Our members now represent more than 1,700 institutions in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. All of our work is guided by our guiding principles. They are that we contribute to the common good together, that we center equity and inclusivity in all that we do. That we're a community of action. We're not just talking about good ideas, we're putting them into place. We are humans, first and foremost, and we always try to keep that at the core.
We act with integrity and in the spirit of Pub101 and all of our programs, we really benefit from shared abundance. This is not about the handful of staff who are working at the OEN. This is about the hundreds bordering on thousands of people who are doing this work around the world and who generously support one another in terms of sharing what they've learned, their best practices, their templates, so that you don't have to start from scratch or to feel like you're in it alone.
This can be very isolating work and many of you have a full plate of other responsibilities, or you might be the only person at your institution working in open education. Shared abundance is really critical to supporting the work that we do and continuing the incredible impact that this community has been able to do so far. If you'd like to read a little bit more about our norms, they're available there at the z-link. Amanda Larson, who is the chair of the Pub101 committee is here and will be managing chat and sharing those links with you in the chat as well.
Now I'm going to talk more specifically about publishing within the open education context to continue to set our scene. Publishing is so important and integral to open educational practices because it provides an opportunity to include more voices and more perspectives in the educational experience. It provides opportunity to localize and indigenize content so that it's relevant to students, it's relevant to the communities in which it's taught, and it provides an opportunity to update text to reflect a current moment. Instead of having to wait for a new addition to come out two years from now to reflect the latest and greatest recent history, you can update things much more quickly to include case studies, stories, interviews, multimedia, things that are happening right now. Publishing also includes an opportunity to include students in creating content in open pedagogical practices and really working together to create open textbooks and other OER that reflect a collective intent to share collective knowledge.
Now, in terms of what publishing means, the Pub101 committee and I have joked that we could spend many a salon hour, many a cocktail hour discussing what publishing means, and it's somewhat complicated by the fact that in our minds it can mean like, "Oh, I just pushed this button and suddenly this new content is available online." And absolutely, that is publishing. But publishing can also mean adapting, editing, modifying an already existing resource. It has many synonyms like creation, authoring, writing, making. Publishing can mean having an institutional repository and posting or archiving a document that's available for people to access. It can mean working with a whole suite or a whole team of people, copy editors, proofreaders, designers, co-authors. It can mean working with students. Really, publishing can mean so many things, and we want to work under a large umbrella when we talk about publishing in Pub101. Whatever it means to you, whatever you're capable of, whatever's in your capacity or institution, the answer might be nothing right now, and that's okay too.
We really hope to show you in Pub101 what publishing can involve. Emphasize that you can pick and choose what you have the capacity to do at your institution and to just get you thinking about some of the things to anticipate when publishing open textbooks, but we always mean to be inclusive, and if ever you're thinking about your institution and what you can do there and you're trying to connect what we're talking about in Pub101 with where you're at, let us know and we will try to think about your context more specifically, think about ways that you could modify or adapt the content that we're sharing so that it can work for you.
Okay, continuing to set the scene here. Our intentions with Pub101. We really hope that this is a friendly experience. I think you'll find us to be a friendly accessible folks. We want to hear questions from you. We want to engage in conversation. This is an informal publishing orientation. When we have created this content, we are thinking about those of you who will be supporting faculty authors. Every year I receive questions about, "Oh, can I promote Pub101 to my faculty?" If you are faculty, welcome. We're glad you're here. We only share the caveat that we really are thinking about librarians, instructional designers and others at your team who are typically supporting and working with faculty authors. We have started talking about the potential to design a program specifically for faculty authors. Again, if you're a faculty author and you would like to be here, welcome.
We have been thinking about those who support you in designing this content. With Pub101, we want to provide a preview of what's involved in publishing. We want to offer you an opportunity to consider your vision and your capacity at your institution. We're going to highlight adaptable resources that you can use if you decide to build a publishing program or support a publishing project. And we really want to lay the foundation for any platform or tool. We're not going to talk about how to use Pressbooks, for example, or which tool may be the best. It can get really complicated. It's a broad landscape out there, and we hope to share information with you that can work no matter where you or your faculty may land on the question of technology.
Am I in the right place? Again, the short answer, I hope, is yes. You are in the right place. To give you a little bit more to make that decision, if you are very new to open education, publishing can be an overwhelming place to start. Again, you're very welcome to join us. However, in the past, many of us have recommended starting with adoption programs. If you're just really new to open education, an adoption program can really help you lay the foundation at your institution. Introduce the concept of open educational resources and open licenses, and give you some groundwork before you jump into publishing. If you are very new, you might want to look at the creative common certificate, the OEN certificate and OER librarianship. The introduction to open, the OER starter kit. There are a lot of resources out there if you're new to open education more broadly. This reminds me that this slideshow and the associated links will be posted to our orientation documents at the end of today. If you'd like to access these slides, they will be available to you, and I'll give you the link to that shortly.
We also have gathered some resources if you are an aspiring author. If what you're looking for is more like, "How do I write an open textbook?" Pub101 may not be the right fit for you. We're going to talk about things like memorandums of understanding and developing timelines. Again, you're welcome to be here, but if you are an aspiring author, here are some resources that may be helpful to you, if what you're really wanting to do is jump into writing an open textbook. We also have other programs and infrastructure within the OEN that can help you if you're a faculty at this point in your journey. Okay. That is my setting the scene. Am I in the right place quick overview. I'm going to stop sharing for a moment or maybe I don't need to. I'm going to launch a quiz. I don't think I need to stop sharing.
Hopefully you all have had a poll top up on your screen. Please describe the likelihood of launching a publishing program at your institution or consortium in the coming year. Choose one that you think is the best fit for you. A, it's already happening. We're doing it, we're publishing. B, we're just about ready to go. C, we're thinking about it maybe one day. Hold on. And D, I really don't think there's any way we're going to be in a position to do this, but I want to learn more and develop professionally. I'll give another moment to respond. Currently, at 83% participation. Thank you.
Okay, a couple more seconds and then I'm going to close the poll and reveal our results. Most of you are thinking maybe one day I will set out on this adventurous journey and support the publishing of OER. A good portion of you are already doing this work, which is awesome, and many of you are ready to go. This is another reminder of the shared abundance in the room. If you have already developed things, if you've thought about developing things and decided not to, whatever your experience, please feel welcome to share it in the chat as we begin our discussions and as we move through the weeks, there's a lot of collective knowledge and we invite all of you to share it, not just the facilitators or the people who are talking, but also you as participants. Thank you for jumping in. We shall now carry on.
Okay, more specifically, what is Pub101? When we use the term Pub101, we mean it as both a curriculum and an experience. It's a curriculum and there is the Canvas course. It's three units. And then it's also this experience right now that you're in the middle of having. It's seven sessions of synchronous conversation that you can join in whenever your schedule allows. Again, it's meant to be an informal big picture orientation. It's not a class. There's no grades. There's no certificate at the conclusion, so really come when you can. There will be videos and documentation if you're unable to make a session. We hope to have some fun with you and make this hour together enjoyable. Pub101 continues to evolve. I actually just finished writing a blog post about the history of Pub101 because in preparing for this, I realized that we are now in our fifth year, and it's fun to look back and see how Pub101 has evolved from some collective work that we've done as a group supporting publishing, and once that blog post is published, we'll share it with you if you're interested.
Really it has kept changing because of the feedback we've received from you because of the changes in the open education landscape. We have this Pub101 committee that I introduced to you earlier. We look at all of the feedback. There will be opportunities at the end of each unit in the canvas curriculum to fill out a short feedback form as well as at the end of our seven sessions. Really, truly, we want to know what you think how we can continue to make this better and apply for you and your situation. Finally, Pub101 is meant to be a beginning. We don't have to say goodbye when it's over. You can be a part of the OEN community as you continue on with this work so that you feel less isolated and alone.
I'd also like to talk quickly about the spirit of Pub101, if you will, and that is going back to our guiding principles. We always will keep in mind that you're a human being, you're not a publishing machine. You'll hear a lot of our speakers talk about self-care and tips for looking after yourself in what can be a fairly demanding area of open education. There are many people who want to help so that you do not feel alone, and there are many ways to publish. We're only going to be able to share a few options here. We do not mean to suggest that those options are superior or the way you should go. They're really just stories from the field. Again, we look to you. Please let us know what you need as we move along.
Finally, a little housekeeping. Amanda will be dropping the related links into the chat. The most important perhaps is the what I call one-stop doc because it has a nice ring to it. That's our orientation document. Some of you may have already seen this. It went out with the Pub101 invitations. It will be updated weekly with links to the slides from that week. We also have a YouTube channel. If you want to subscribe to that channel, you'll know immediately once videos are posted. We are aiming to post those videos before the next Pub101 session is held, so within that week, that is our goal. If you have questions about what we're doing or where to find something, try the one-stop doc first. I think you'll probably find your answer there, and if not, let me know.
There is also class notes. Class notes is something that we developed since we're not a formal program here, we're not within a course shell, filling out discussion boards. But there may be times when we run out of time or you can't get your question in the chat and you like to continue the conversation. We develop class notes for that. It's a Google Doc, it's your space. I invite you now to please take a moment and add your information to class notes. You'll see there's a table there just to share your name, your institution, and why you're at Pub101. This is really helpful for us as well to get a sense of who you are and how we can meet your needs while you're in Pub101. I'm going to carry on, but please do drop your information into class notes sometime today.
Okay. I mentioned that Pub101 is two things, a curriculum and an experience. A little bit more about the curriculum. The Pub101 committee recently revised the curriculum. It is now streamlined. Shorter is almost always better, so it's three units instead of a whopping eight. Previously, we were throwing in possibly everything, including the kitchen sink. Now we really are trying to make a more discreet experience so that you're not wading through a lot of different resources. It can be hard to choose. There's a lot of support out there. We've also included more examples. We added some case studies, added some new resources, and just really tried to make sure that it was ready for primetime. A lot of care was taken to make the units as straightforward as possible. These meetings that we'll be holding together in person, they're not teaching to the curriculum. We're not going to go through it step by step. They're really meant to be more complimentary. I encourage you to review the curriculum. I think it will connect. We're not going to lead you through it, we're going to introduce you to it.
Speaking of, unit one really focuses on defining an open textbook, and very briefly, I will say that in Pub101, we talk about publishing open textbooks specifically. You can extrapolate to publishing OER and other resources more broadly. But our focus is on the textbook itself. It connects to the work that we do in the open textbook library. What's unique about open textbooks is that they're free to the end user and they have permissions, usually a Creative Commons license that will allow for editing. As all of you know textbooks have structure. They're different from a monograph and that they have pedagogical elements that recur. The information is hierarchically organized, and all of that structure is really integral to accessibility, which is something that we'll be talking about next week. When we're talking about publishing textbooks, those are the working definitions of what we have in mind when we're talking about that.
Just a short note that the units are really helpful. A lot of what we will talk about, you'll find in the units in terms of templates and resources and other helpful tips. There's also what I hope are somewhat fun quizzes at the end of each unit if you want to test your knowledge. None of that data is kept as just a quiz for you.
Okay. I think that concludes my long preamble. If you have any questions, please drop them in the chat. In the meantime, I'm very excited to introduce the two guests who are joining us today. We have Gabby Hernandez, who is the Open Education Librarian at the University of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. And we have Sunny Pai, who's the Digital Initiatives Librarian and OER at University of Hawaiʻi Community Colleges campus co-lead. She's based at Kapiʻolani Community College.
What we're going to spend the rest of our time doing is chatting with Gabby and Sunny. I've prepared a few questions for them. If as we're going along you think of questions that you'd like to ask them, please drop them in the chat and we'll keep an eye on those. I'm also going to go ahead and close out of the slide sharing so that you can see our faces and we can have a more friendly conversation. All righty. To kick us off, Gabby, how would you describe your publishing experience so far? What was your starting point?
Gabby: We are still a very young publishing institution at UTRGV. In thinking about the broad definition that Karen shared with us earlier, which I really loved about what is publishing or what can it be? We're in that institutional repository, posting, archiving, adaption, editing, modifying. That's where we live right now. We do have some faculty that are interested in dipping their toe into the full-on publishing from scratch. Yeah, that's where we're sitting at the moment. In the last four years of our program, we've really been focused more on the OER adoption portion and just getting the word out and making sure that our faculty know what is OER, what is textbook affordability, what is open publishing, and of course, how does that differentiate between open access publishing, trying to really set these definitions so faculty have a very clear understanding or we're hoping that they have a clear understanding of the differences between all of those things and what could alternative course materials mean.
I have both participated in and highly recommend all those foundational courses that Karen described earlier, these are creative common certificate, the OEN's OER librarianship certification. All of those resources really helped me feel confident in this OER and publishing space coming in as some of us do into maybe a completely brand new role on campus that we could be starting from scratch. We knew from the beginning that we always wanted our library to one day become more of a publishing institution or attain Pressbooks, so we had been scaffolding what that could look like. Then we ended up with a Pressbooks subscription out of nowhere. We were like, "Oh, we're here and we have it and let's go." Thankfully, we had already started that background work preparing for that one eventual day.
We had some structure, but then once we actually were told, yes, we need to go, then we were just able to kick our program into a higher gear so we could get started. In that start, we also wanted to make sure we had an information page out there for faculty to describe our publishing project and our publishing capabilities and we wanted to be very transparent with the services that we could and also could not provide based on our capacity. A year later, here we are with three published titles and a few more in the works. It's coming along.
Karen: Congratulations on those publications, Gabby. That page you mentioned where you're clear about what you can and can't do. Is that something you can share?
Gabby: Yes, I'll share that right now in the chat.
Karen: Okay. Super. Sunny, what about you? How would you describe your publishing experience so far in your starting point?
Sunny: Okay. Well, regarding my starting point, I was part of the spring 2019 cohort. I had some experience with open access and open source content management systems. I brought that with me and working with Plone and DSpace and systems like that. The University of Hawaiʻi system, which has 10 campuses, around that time, had had a Pressbooks instance. We were starting to develop textbooks for Pressbooks. As I had said, we have a 10-campus system, so I'm working with authors here at my college, but it goes into a 10-college supporting Pressbooks system. What I was finding back in 2019, I was having a conversation with an instructor who I was having a difficult time persuading to consider either adopting or developing an OER textbook. He kept saying that he really wanted the support of a commercial publishing process, including editing.
Editing was very important to him and layout. Of course, he was a math instructor. That was very intriguing to me, so I wanted to find out more about what goes into the structure of a textbook. This was around the time that Karen, I think, was advertising. I think it was the second cohort for Pub101? This was at OTNSI. I begged her to let me join the cohort. We started out with that. This combined with my application for sabbatical to develop a textbook, an OER textbook, working with a science instructor. I happened to find a science instructor after my sabbatical had been approved. That was my starting point. That was the test project that I was able to bring to Pub101. I'm not sure these days whether you have to have a textbook project to start with Pub101, but back then we had to have at least one or two. That's how I got started off with the Pub101 project. It was an excellent experience. I learned so much about textbook structure and publishing, and it was just a really great experience. I think that's about where I can contribute at this point. Yeah.
Karen: Thanks, Sunny, and thanks for bringing us back to some reflections on how Pub101 has evolved. Sunny's mentioning some deep history in terms of we used to do a training in a particular editing, they're called Scribe. They're like a back office editing service provider. They do a lot of publishing support. For a while we were learning their techniques for structuring documents. Anyway, it used to start very specifically, and now Pub101 is much more broad. We decided to back out of the very specific book-required model that Sunny described, and now here we are with a more introductory experience in terms of orienting people to larger questions within publishing that can ground them before they move into more specific training around different technology, for example, or different platforms. I will put a link to the sleep textbook... Actually, do you have that up Sunny? Could you drop a link?
Sunny: Sure.
Karen: Yeah. If you can't find it, I think I just have it on my clipboard somewhere. It's a beautiful book that Sunny is discussing and it might be fun to take a look. In the meantime, I will move on to our next question. Gabby, what are your open publishing goals, not only organizationally, but also for you personally or professionally?
Gabby: We outlined our goals pretty clearly. For our program goals, we have three and it's provide affordable educational materials for students. We want to create diverse and inclusive materials, and we also want to engage in works that reflect our student population and allow them to participate in the creation of knowledge through open pedagogical practices. That's really what we would love to have our publishing project achieved. These goals resonate with us both organizationally but also professionally and personally for myself. Organizationally, we are one of the largest Hispanic serving institutions in the United States with a very high rate of Pell Grant recipients. Basically our entire community is an underserved population that can benefit from all of these goals. Personally, as a member of the same community, I want to ensure that our voices are heard and valued within educational materials.
Then as a part of our library publishing project, library guide, we created an inclusion, diversity, equity, and anti-racism and open publishing page. It is our hope that these ideas and conversations will happen throughout the creation process instead of thinking of them as an afterthought. Just ensuring... We have such a unique population here at UTRGV that every voice is a voice that can be and should be amplified, though, we want to make sure that we are utilizing our students and allowing them the ability to have their voices heard in textbook creation.
Karen: Thank you so much. We embrace the same approach. You'll find in unit one, we discuss diversity, equity, inclusion and publishing. How you can think about that throughout the process so that... Again, as Gabby said, it's not something at the end of the project where you think, "Oh, should we do something here?" But really it's motivating, inspiring, guiding the work and helping authors and others working on the project to involve more people so that the resource can reflect more people's experiences. Gabby, I don't know if you have a link to that page as well? I think that would be great to share. What about you, Sunny, in terms of your open publishing goals, both organizationally and for you, Sunny?
Sunny: Okay. Well, I'm basically for my college, I'm a one-person shop, and I do this on top of my assigned primary duties, but I've been able to leverage across the 10 campuses. We have OER champions or campus leads, as we say, across the 10 campuses. We leverage what resources we can pull together in our individual institutions, and we help each other out. That's been very helpful. Because I am a one-person shop, I have been focusing a great deal on educating our community and focusing on the seven community colleges about OER, as Gabby was saying, building that enthusiasm about open educational resources. We do have the Pressbooks instance. Sometimes Pressbooks instance is not the solution for our authors. The Scribe solution ended up becoming a good one for the sleep textbook.
I have also facilitated LibreTexts. I've facilitated a textbook in GitHub. There's also quite a large contingent of faculty who want to develop in the learning management system. Maybe it's because I came from a tech background, but it seems like I've had to be very flexible with platforms. In fact, Karen has been involved in the Manifold project, and some of my teammates and I have just come through a Manifold project. We're still trying to come to some decisions about platforms, so we're in that stage. Right now, in order for me to get people to adopt, I've taken a stance of being very flexible with platforms. At this point, it looks like, as a team of 10 campuses, we may need to start extending our developmental support platformwise and also mentoringwise across the 10 campuses. We're getting to a point where I might be helping out Windward Community College and not just Kapi'olani Community College. In a grassroots, very organic way, we're growing our support system. Unfortunately, we have a limited... Not all of our campus leads are very strong in technology, so we're trying to figure that out.
Karen: I appreciate that point, Sunny, that those of you who are thinking about having your own publishing programs may want to consider, and that is, do you want to support faculty working in a variety of platforms and tools? Are you comfortable in that space? Do you want to consider what that support looks like? If so, or would you rather say, if you think that this tool, be it Pressbooks, Manifold, Google Docs, Word, it can be a lot of different things. If you think that this tool can work for your project, we can support you in it. Those are two points along the spectrum as you think about projects and programs and technology. Because it can quickly, as listening to Sunny illustrated, become fairly overwhelming if you have faculty in a variety of different subject areas and tools have different strengths, and we all keep waiting for that one tool that's going to do everything perfectly, but I think it may be a long wait.
Gabby, back over to you. What would you say have been the highlights or the big things that you've learned so far in your work supporting open publishing?
Gabby: Fitting perfectly with everything we've said so far, I'm sure you all know that this process takes time. It has taken us time to both build up the infrastructure for our faculty and to also get the word out about our services. We do have faculty interest, especially those who've already been using OER in their courses. Our faculty really love the idea of being able to create their own OER or engaging students in contact creation, but it's also hard for faculty themselves to find the time to implement these practices. It's really interesting, this last year I've really seen the transition in our faculty thought and interest on campus. I provide a few mini professional development grants for our faculty. I ask them the question, "Do you want the open education librarian to help you find OER for your course?"
Then I also ask the question, are you interested in learning more about modifying, remixing or creating OER? We used to get the majority of them saying, "I just want you to help me find OER." But now our faculty have seemed to have made the shift. Maybe we're at that point where, yes, they finally understand where it's going after all of these years and they're ready to dip their toe more into the other side. I've had more requests for information about Pressbooks than I have about just specific or general, "Find me OER for this topic." It's nice to see that transition because it definitely helps us better plan where we're going in the future or are we on the right track? Like, "Are our faculty actually ready for a publishing program, not just us as a library, but are the faculty ready to take that next step?"
Karen: Yeah, that's so key. I often get swept up in what I think is a great next step and forget that I need to check in with the people who we want to serve and work with and see, "Wait, do they feel that way too?" That's such a good consideration. Sunny, what about you in terms of things you've learned?
Sunny: Well, let's see. Following up on what Gabby had said, that is one of the challenges that we've had with faculty. Our faculty are very shy about sharing their materials and that's what publishing is about. We know that there's a lot of work going on. They tend to keep it in the LMS or hidden. We've developed a professional development program that just basically gives support both in training, for example, $300 overload if you complete a six-module OER 101 course with the strong lesson that the idea of this is to be able to publish something at the end and to share it with others who have so willingly shared their materials with us and enabled us to do this work. We are trying to overcome the shyness aspect of it. I think we're getting some success of the website that I just shared is some of the projects that are in development right now that we're hoping to see the finished products published later on.
That's been a bit of a challenge. Some authors though, interestingly enough, they just jump in and they just go for it. That's the best thing. I get to sit on the sidelines and let them run with it. I want to make mention that the author who put together the sleep textbook, right now is working on a 10-campus author project, a book sprint. That project's gone on for about two or three years. She took the principles that we learned together from Scribe in Pub101 in terms of pedagogy and textbook structure. She used some of those elements in this project. And we're really looking forward to having two of our main AMP courses, textbook zero in fall, and this would be across our 10 campus system. We're very excited about that. In that way, Pub101 has really paid off setting the groundwork for an understanding of what you can do with textbooks and how you can structure them. Did that answer your question?
Karen: There's a lot involved, especially when you're reflecting on the last few years. It is a long and winding road. It does address the question because it raises all of the different competing priorities and considerations involved in publishing and I think open ed more broadly. We only have one question left that I've prepared for Gabby and Sunny. I invite all of you if you have questions that are on your mind, maybe things that we haven't even touched on yet, please do feel free to put them in the chat because we probably will have a couple of minutes to explore those questions too. Please let us know if you have any questions. Then I just have one more question of my own and some closing slides after that. Keeping in mind, the folks who have joined us today, many of them are thinking about starting a publishing program. What would you recommend to people who are just getting started in open publishing?
Gabby: I would recommend creating a process that works for your institutional needs and your departmental capacity. A lot of the times when we look at other open publishing programs and we're trying to figure out which one you'd like to use as a model, remember that we're rarely comparing apples to apples. The other institution that you're looking at may have different funding structures, more or fewer people assigned to work on such projects. I like how Sunny saying she's at a one-man shop. We are have two, with all the other things that come with open education and scholarly communications. It's like just the scholarly communications hat. It's like 100 jobs. It can be really hard. Sometimes I'm like, "Oh man, we only did three." We only have three in our library. But then I have to think, "No, we did three. That's a lot. We were able to get that through."
Keep those things in mind when you're looking at other publishing institutions that are out there. Yeah, there's just a whole host of things to take into consideration before you compare yourself to somebody else. Always take a look at your departmental capacity and the needs and create a program that fits within your parameters. You can always start small and grow the program and start offering more faculty support as you progress. It's hard to shrink once you've gotten somewhere maybe over capacity and then you go, "Oh wait, this is too much. I need to shrink back down." That's also why we outlined like, "This is definitely what we can support you with. That sometimes can be a little bit scary because as librarians, we want to provide all the support. We want to be there all the time, but setting your boundaries also very healthy in your work to make sure that the faculty understand exactly how much support they can have and they can decide themselves whether that's enough support for them or they want to wait a little bit longer or more support when, hopefully, there's the time and the capacity for that.
Karen: Yeah, 100%. Comparison is so difficult and not a good way to enter into anything personally or professionally, even when you see a really inspiring model program. It's a different place. It's a different context. I really appreciate everything that you highlighted, Gabby. We have a lot of questions coming in, so we may be able to make use of class notes here before the end of the day, but we'll try to cover as much as possible. Sunny, anything you want to add about recommendations for people just getting started, and then we'll turn to the chat?
Sunny: Yes, everything that Gabby has said, thumbs up. Everybody in the room, Pub101 is a unique and very supportive learning experience. Karen is absolutely right. You'll learn a lot and you'll feel very supportive. It's a great community. I really highly recommend it. The workload is huge, and you have to work strategically, because you're educating, bringing people on board, selling the concept while you're trying to focus on the output, the textbook at the other end. Go ahead, Karen.
Karen: Yeah, just to add to that, a book is really major. A book is a multiyear project usually, and it can be very, very complex. Jumping into the first question. For faculty that have created content and use it in their course and are eager to convert this content into an open textbook, what do you think is a good way to assist them?
Sunny: I could jump in really quickly. Shall I?
Karen: Sure, yeah.
Sunny: Okay, sorry. Yeah, so the sleep textbook was an example. She was teaching from notes and commercial publishers were asking to publish her work. Then she found out about OER. Fortunately, she was passionate about a diversity and racial equity. After we had a conversation... Oh, do you have the blog post? Okay, you can read in the blog post. Basically, we pulled the material together and Scribe really helped with the editing process. I don't know if that helps. Basically, in that, I played the role of a connector, a networker, and a project manager.
Gabby: I think a part of it also just goes to making sure that you're putting out there what your services are, because we have received at least one faculty who has sent us our stuff and said, "Hey, I'm using this and I think it could be helpful for others." It's just building that name and reputation of like, "Please reach out to us. We're here to support, anything, when it comes to publishing or open anything." With them we are just taking it slow. They just gave us the Word document and we're going through and making sure that everything is actually shareable, making sure the licensing is compatible, ensuring where did they get these documents. It's that process, is how we're doing that at UTRGV.
Sunny: I'm going to throw this in really quickly. There's always the issue of year-to-year budgeting. There's a whole aspect of project management and fiscal management, which we don't have time to get to, but it can be challenging because a book takes longer than a year.
Karen: Yes. We will touch on budgeting in several of the sessions. That's a good thing to highlight. I'd also like to highlight in the chat, thanks to Phoebe who also replied to that question. I think Stephanie, who's also addressing this question in terms of resolving some of the complexities between content that has a different license on it. Thank you all for your conversation in the chat. Christie, I will quickly answer your question about whether there's a list of institutions that have programs going that we can learn from. In the Pub101 curriculum, you will find a selection of institutions that are publishing and a lot of their related documentation, their MOUs, things like that. Absolutely, we share some of that content. I don't know of an exhaustive list. That's an interesting idea that I can take to our advisory group that's constantly developing resources and support for people in open publishing. If you are a member of the Library Publishing Coalition, our friends over there do keep a list of people engaged in publishing more broadly. Let's see. Jennifer asks if you have suggestions for how to work collaboratively with other institutions of higher ed in your state on open publishing?
Gabby: Yeah, I reached out to all of the OER practitioners within my system and just got us all into a group. Now we have a standing meeting that's very low-key, drop in, drop out when you can. That way we, at least, all know each other. We have backgrounds, so when there's things that come out, like federal grants, state grants, we all immediately jump in and say, "Hey, are y'all doing this? Are you working on this?" I can see that growing into other systems, making it larger, but that's how we started, just small and system-wide. It's so beneficial, so don't be shy. Reach out to the other people who are doing the same work as you. I think it definitely helps.
Sunny: Same here in Hawaiʻi. For our 10 campuses, we started meeting in 2015, and we haven't missed a meeting yet. We do it once a month. It started off with librarians, we brought in instructional designers, and now we also have faculty and administrators. It's grown and we've also extended the invitation to BYU, which is a private university. We're open to others in the state who would like to join. For example, when we decided to set up a relationship with LibreTexts, everybody was involved. They got to take a look at the platform. Our projects on Pressbooks, we talk about it together.
Karen: Thank you. I think we're doing a pretty good job of making our way through these questions. Thank you all, including those of you participating in the chat. Gabby, there's a request to share a link to the Open Pedagogy Project that you mentioned.
Gabby: Yes, I am putting the link in the chat. Unfortunately, because of our capacity, we haven't been able to do as many Open Pedagogy Projects as we had hoped. That's definitely one of our goals and somewhere we're trying to get. I do have one and I'm getting that link for you in the chat right now.
Karen: Thank you. In the two minutes we have remaining, we can give it a shot and try to address the final question, which is talking a little bit more about the reluctance that you've run into in pursuing buy-in or participation from folks on campus. Was it, as you mentioned, Sunny, the desire to use a more traditional publishing model, or were there any other specific pushbacks that either of you have heard in terms of moving into the open publishing space?
Sunny: Well, I think I had mentioned the shyness. The particular author who said he really wanted editing and layout support is math. Yeah, that is much more challenging. He did end up going with a commercial textbook publisher. He did negotiate a low buying price, so some of the message went across to him. Then right after that, the university, our system passed a policy that faculty cannot use their own textbooks in their classes because it was a conflict of interest. I'm not sure where he is, but that was an interesting story for that particular instance. The other thing about textbook publishing is faculty always want to tweak. They want to edit. They want to tweak. They want an easy interface. Those who chose Pressbooks are enjoying that capability, whereas some people are satisfied in the Scribe textbook, they're happy with that one edition. And then at some later point, we probably would have to start up a whole new process.
Karen: Thank you.
Gabby: I'll answer, if you don't mind, Karen, just a few seconds. The biggest pushback we've seen at UTRGV is departments that have to all adopt the same book and that some want to use OER, but they're not allowed because the department has to. What I'm doing, especially for those faculty, making sure they know that I'm here. That way when it comes time to do this, the textbook selection, they can reach out. I'm always there and open for support, but never push because I do realize there are certain departmental things that I just can't control, like departmental selection.
Karen: Yeah, it's a great reminder. We cannot control everything. We will take a look at the chat to see if there's anything that we missed, and then the Pub101 committee can chime in and engage in further conversation in the chat. I'm just going to wrap up for us in the remaining few seconds and thank our guests. Sorry, I have a very hiccupy system, as you can see, as you now join me in my version history. The short story is that... Drum roll. We are doing this. This is happening, and there is a community and resources here for you. We can and do support the creation of academic content for students. We don't have to rely on commercial vendors. Students, I think, are a critical touchstone throughout the creation process. It can be really easy to forget why you're doing something when you're working on a long-term book project. Thinking about students, putting them at the center of the why, I think, is really motivating and clarifying.
Again, you're not alone. Everyone has something to contribute to this process. Now, in terms of next week, we'll be welcoming Jacqueline Frank. She's going to talk about accessibility. There will be a related activity if you want to try out your hand at making a document more accessible. Your homework if you so choose, is outlined in the orientation documents and here on this slide. Then finally, thank you again for joining us and your commitment to student success. Your willingness to learn more. Your interest in joining us and your engagement in the process. Thank you so much, Gabby and Sunny, for kicking us off and sharing your stories. We look forward to seeing all of you again next week. And in the meantime, please take care. Farewell.
Sunny: Thank you everybody.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:18:15 Amanda Larson: https://open.umn.edu/oen/publishing
00:18:23 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "Hello!" with 👋
00:18:33 Ryan Wilcox: Reacted to "https://open.umn.edu..." with 👍
00:20:28 Phoebe Daurio: A beautiful picture of flowers!
00:20:48 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "https://open.umn.edu..." with 👍
00:20:54 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "A beautiful picture ..." with 🌻
00:21:43 Amanda Larson: OEN Guiding Principles https://open.umn.edu/oen/about
00:23:19 Amanda Larson: Pub101 Community Norms: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:23:37 Amanda Larson: Hello new friends! :)
00:24:18 Margaret Hoogland: Reacted to "A beautiful picture ..." with 🌻
00:31:18 Ryan Wilcox: Reacted to "Hello new friends! :..." with 👋
00:36:12 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "Hello new friends! :..." with 👋
00:36:33 Jennifer Jordan: Self-care?? What's that?? 😉
00:36:38 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RVYw2ace_L42x8vxo0nGlJC6rHVvLDzYKeBR4RMdbi4/edit
00:37:15 Ryan Wilcox: Reacted to "Self-care?? What's t..." with 😂
00:37:26 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "https://docs.google...." with 🎉
00:37:29 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:37:37 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "https://docs.google...." with 🤩
00:38:31 Amanda Larson: Love to see you all in the document! <3
00:38:43 Amanda Larson: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:42:06 Christina Trunnell: Reacted to "Love to see you all ..." with 👏
00:46:23 Gabby Hernandez: UTRGV Library Publishing Project - https://utrgv.libguides.com/lpp
00:49:54 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "Love to see you all ..." with 👏
00:51:05 Sunyeen Pai: Science of Sleep textbook: https://dspace.lib.hawaii.edu/handle/10790/6879 Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Sleep-Sheryl-Shook-Ph-D/dp/B0BCD848SX
00:53:43 Gabby Hernandez: https://utrgv.libguides.com/LPP/IDEA
01:00:09 Sunyeen Pai: https://sites.google.com/hawaii.edu/uhccoer/home
01:03:33 Karen Lauritsen: More about the making of the sleep textbook: https://open.umn.edu/oen/blog-and-events/creating-an-open-textbook-the-science-of-sleep
01:05:20 Apurva Mehta: For faculty that have created content and use it in their course … and are eager to convert this into an OER textbook … how best would one assist?
01:05:56 Jennifer Jordan: Do you have suggestions for how to work collaboratively with other Institutions of Higher Ed in your state on the topic of publishing?
01:06:52 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Could you talk about the kind of reluctance y'all ran into in pursuing buy-in/participation from folks on campus? Was it as was mentioned, the desire to utilize more "traditional" publishing models, or did you run into other issues/perspectives/opinions/etc.?
01:06:56 Angelique Carson: For Gabby, could you share a link to the Open Pedagogy projects your faculty have developed?
01:07:14 Stephanie Walker: One of the biggest questions I have gotten lately has been what to do if faculty are trying to combine multiple open resources with different Creative Commons licenses. The initial answer is usually that you need to follow the most restrictive of the licenses, but I'd also recommend that people check with their campus legal counsel, if they can …
01:07:14 Christy Wrenn: Is there a list of institutions that have programs already going that we can learn from?
01:09:01 Phoebe Daurio: @Apurva, the person who has OER already as part of their course has a great start! I would look at Open Pub 1010 Unit 1 textbook structure pages to get an idea of translating that into a textbook.
01:12:15 Apurva Mehta: Replying to "@Apurva, the person ..."
Thank you @Phoebe. Will look into the resource.
01:12:39 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Do you have suggesti..."
There are a lot of different ways to do this. I find that it often helps to follow channels that already exist? Are there already groups that meet across institutions that might want to include OER as part of their purview? E.g. librarians, community college distance learning, etc.
01:13:18 Jennifer Jordan: Thank you!
01:14:14 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Faculty buy in was usually easy because they understand the burden of textbook affordability. Participation is harder! We offer a stipend for reviewing OER (after attending a one-hour workshop) and we have found that is a great way to get folks started.
01:14:15 Jennifer Jordan: Thanks Sunny =0)
01:14:43 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Sometimes faculty really like their online homework software that is connected to the commercial text, and that can be seen as a barrier initially.
01:14:44 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@phoebe - did you grant funding for the stipends?
01:14:46 Gabby Hernandez: Replying to "For Gabby, could you..."
Hello Angelique here I the link https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/openpedagogyapproaches/chapter/whose-history-expanding-place-based-initiatives-through-open-collaboration/
01:15:11 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@Phoebe Daurio Gotcha, thank you!
01:15:18 Gabby Hernandez: Replying to "For Gabby, could you..."
https://www.utrgv.edu/textbook-affordability-project/resources-and-support/teaching-with-open-pedagogy/index.htm and here is our information page about Teaching with Open Pedagogy
01:15:24 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@Margaret Hoogland Great question, Margaret, I'm also curious about this.
01:16:08 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@logan@phoebe...I forgot to type "have/get" grant funding. Or did you use departmental or employer funds?
01:16:08 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@Margaret Hoogland We have different categories of funding. So we have grant funding where we do a request for proposals. But the funding for reviews is from a fund we label as professional development. Is that what you mean?
01:16:27 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Yes - I appreciate it.
01:16:28 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Ah, I see Margaret. We are a statewide organization so a little different - we have state funding.
01:16:47 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Reacted to "@Margaret Hoogland W..." with 👍
01:16:59 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Gotcha - thank you! I know we will have to do "something" to encourage it at my university.
01:17:03 Margaret Hoogland: Reacted to "@Margaret Hoogland W..." with 👍
01:18:22 Angelique Carson: What a great conversation and so much useful knowledge sharing expertise- thank you!
01:18:53 Natalia Bowdoin: Thank you all. Really helpful and inspiring!
01:18:55 Shannon Dew: Thank you!
01:18:59 Jane Wu: Where to find the slides?
01:19:01 Julie Feighery: Thank you!
01:19:01 Tammy Palmier: Thank you!
01:19:03 Jennifer Jordan: Thank you!
01:19:07 Margaret Hoogland: This was very useful- thank you
00:18:23 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "Hello!" with 👋
00:18:33 Ryan Wilcox: Reacted to "https://open.umn.edu..." with 👍
00:20:28 Phoebe Daurio: A beautiful picture of flowers!
00:20:48 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "https://open.umn.edu..." with 👍
00:20:54 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "A beautiful picture ..." with 🌻
00:21:43 Amanda Larson: OEN Guiding Principles https://open.umn.edu/oen/about
00:23:19 Amanda Larson: Pub101 Community Norms: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:23:37 Amanda Larson: Hello new friends! :)
00:24:18 Margaret Hoogland: Reacted to "A beautiful picture ..." with 🌻
00:31:18 Ryan Wilcox: Reacted to "Hello new friends! :..." with 👋
00:36:12 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "Hello new friends! :..." with 👋
00:36:33 Jennifer Jordan: Self-care?? What's that?? 😉
00:36:38 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RVYw2ace_L42x8vxo0nGlJC6rHVvLDzYKeBR4RMdbi4/edit
00:37:15 Ryan Wilcox: Reacted to "Self-care?? What's t..." with 😂
00:37:26 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "https://docs.google...." with 🎉
00:37:29 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:37:37 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "https://docs.google...." with 🤩
00:38:31 Amanda Larson: Love to see you all in the document! <3
00:38:43 Amanda Larson: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:42:06 Christina Trunnell: Reacted to "Love to see you all ..." with 👏
00:46:23 Gabby Hernandez: UTRGV Library Publishing Project - https://utrgv.libguides.com/lpp
00:49:54 Isabelle Antes: Reacted to "Love to see you all ..." with 👏
00:51:05 Sunyeen Pai: Science of Sleep textbook: https://dspace.lib.hawaii.edu/handle/10790/6879 Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Sleep-Sheryl-Shook-Ph-D/dp/B0BCD848SX
00:53:43 Gabby Hernandez: https://utrgv.libguides.com/LPP/IDEA
01:00:09 Sunyeen Pai: https://sites.google.com/hawaii.edu/uhccoer/home
01:03:33 Karen Lauritsen: More about the making of the sleep textbook: https://open.umn.edu/oen/blog-and-events/creating-an-open-textbook-the-science-of-sleep
01:05:20 Apurva Mehta: For faculty that have created content and use it in their course … and are eager to convert this into an OER textbook … how best would one assist?
01:05:56 Jennifer Jordan: Do you have suggestions for how to work collaboratively with other Institutions of Higher Ed in your state on the topic of publishing?
01:06:52 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Could you talk about the kind of reluctance y'all ran into in pursuing buy-in/participation from folks on campus? Was it as was mentioned, the desire to utilize more "traditional" publishing models, or did you run into other issues/perspectives/opinions/etc.?
01:06:56 Angelique Carson: For Gabby, could you share a link to the Open Pedagogy projects your faculty have developed?
01:07:14 Stephanie Walker: One of the biggest questions I have gotten lately has been what to do if faculty are trying to combine multiple open resources with different Creative Commons licenses. The initial answer is usually that you need to follow the most restrictive of the licenses, but I'd also recommend that people check with their campus legal counsel, if they can …
01:07:14 Christy Wrenn: Is there a list of institutions that have programs already going that we can learn from?
01:09:01 Phoebe Daurio: @Apurva, the person who has OER already as part of their course has a great start! I would look at Open Pub 1010 Unit 1 textbook structure pages to get an idea of translating that into a textbook.
01:12:15 Apurva Mehta: Replying to "@Apurva, the person ..."
Thank you @Phoebe. Will look into the resource.
01:12:39 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Do you have suggesti..."
There are a lot of different ways to do this. I find that it often helps to follow channels that already exist? Are there already groups that meet across institutions that might want to include OER as part of their purview? E.g. librarians, community college distance learning, etc.
01:13:18 Jennifer Jordan: Thank you!
01:14:14 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Faculty buy in was usually easy because they understand the burden of textbook affordability. Participation is harder! We offer a stipend for reviewing OER (after attending a one-hour workshop) and we have found that is a great way to get folks started.
01:14:15 Jennifer Jordan: Thanks Sunny =0)
01:14:43 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Sometimes faculty really like their online homework software that is connected to the commercial text, and that can be seen as a barrier initially.
01:14:44 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@phoebe - did you grant funding for the stipends?
01:14:46 Gabby Hernandez: Replying to "For Gabby, could you..."
Hello Angelique here I the link https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/openpedagogyapproaches/chapter/whose-history-expanding-place-based-initiatives-through-open-collaboration/
01:15:11 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@Phoebe Daurio Gotcha, thank you!
01:15:18 Gabby Hernandez: Replying to "For Gabby, could you..."
https://www.utrgv.edu/textbook-affordability-project/resources-and-support/teaching-with-open-pedagogy/index.htm and here is our information page about Teaching with Open Pedagogy
01:15:24 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@Margaret Hoogland Great question, Margaret, I'm also curious about this.
01:16:08 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@logan@phoebe...I forgot to type "have/get" grant funding. Or did you use departmental or employer funds?
01:16:08 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
@Margaret Hoogland We have different categories of funding. So we have grant funding where we do a request for proposals. But the funding for reviews is from a fund we label as professional development. Is that what you mean?
01:16:27 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Yes - I appreciate it.
01:16:28 Phoebe Daurio: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Ah, I see Margaret. We are a statewide organization so a little different - we have state funding.
01:16:47 Logan Cocklin (they/them/theirs): Reacted to "@Margaret Hoogland W..." with 👍
01:16:59 Margaret Hoogland: Replying to "Could you talk about..."
Gotcha - thank you! I know we will have to do "something" to encourage it at my university.
01:17:03 Margaret Hoogland: Reacted to "@Margaret Hoogland W..." with 👍
01:18:22 Angelique Carson: What a great conversation and so much useful knowledge sharing expertise- thank you!
01:18:53 Natalia Bowdoin: Thank you all. Really helpful and inspiring!
01:18:55 Shannon Dew: Thank you!
01:18:59 Jane Wu: Where to find the slides?
01:19:01 Julie Feighery: Thank you!
01:19:01 Tammy Palmier: Thank you!
01:19:03 Jennifer Jordan: Thank you!
01:19:07 Margaret Hoogland: This was very useful- thank you
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