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Speakers:
Christina: I'm first to go ahead and get started. Thank you all for coming today. I hope you're looking forward to the session as I am. Just a couple of housekeeping bits to get us started. My name is Christina Trunnell, I am the host for today's session. Our speaker is the wonderful Ms. Amanda Larson, who will be sharing some great things for us today as we go through this session. Just so you know, we will be recording this session, and we will be adding that to our YouTube Pub101 playlist. We also at the OEN are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. If you've never had a chance to review the community norms, I highly recommend you do, they are inspiring. And please join us today as we listen to Amanda's talk and creating a safe and constructive space. I will also be monitoring the chat during the presentation, so if you have questions, I will keep note of those during that time. And then it is my delightful pleasure to introduce you to Amanda Larson today.
Amanda: All right. Now I'm going to reshare my screen. Let's see if I can do that with any sense of grace or aplomb. Can I get a thumbs up, Christina, if you can see it. Awesome.
Hi, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about individual and organizational capacity, so what you need to think about before you start thinking about building a publishing program. I am going to start, oops, by talking a little bit about my background in this area. I'm Amanda Larson, I'm the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at the Ohio State University, but my work in publishing started all the way back in my first master's degree where I was the Editorial Assistant at the Journal of Narrative Theory. I got lots of questions from folks about if their article could be put into institutional repositories, if they had a mandate to make it open access.
That was sort of my first introduction to thinking about publishing in open. Then in my second master's degree, where I decided that I was going to be a librarian, I got a position as the Open Educational Resources Teaching Assistant, and there I helped folks grassroots style think about how they would be publishing open textbooks through Pressbooks. It was my job to do the Pressbooks training and to lead the community of practitioners. We had a monthly meeting where we got together and would chat about how they were using the OER that they created.
My first real librarian job was as the Open Education Librarian at Penn State University, where I was responsible for co-leading a grant program. I think as we go through my slides and presentation you'll see how those two scenarios play out. There I was responsible for collaborating with stakeholders across the university. We had an affordable learning working group that focused on open education and affordable resources and had stakeholders from all over the university unit. We had a grant program that went through two and a half rounds while I was there. I was there for the first selection process for the third round of the Affordable Course Transformation grant program.
Now I'm the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State, and I support the Affordable Learning Exchanges grant program as part of my position there. What that looks like is helping ALX connect grant winners to subject librarians who can help them find course content for their materials. I also do a lot of syllabus review grants where I help curate OER to help bring down the cost of classes. I also support racial justice grants where folks are trying to make their courses more equitable by either decolonizing their syllabus, so looking for BIPOC authors to add to their syllabus or including a racial justice pedagogy to their course materials and thinking through what that is. The other part of my job I spend thinking about how folks can incorporate open pedagogy into their courses. So that's a little bit about me.
Here's our agenda for today. We're going to talk about why a publishing program. We're going to talk about different ways you could approach developing a program at your institution. We're going to figure out who's doing the work, what that might look like at your institution. We're going to talk about building collaborative definitions at your institution around things. We're going to talk about communication, training, and community building and the roles that those might play. And we're also going to talk about self-care. And then I'm going to leave you with some takeaway considerations. I'm hoping that I do this in plenty of time for y'all to ask questions, but please drop questions in the chat as we go through the presentation and I'll be happy to answer them.
The first question that I think if you're at the very beginning of thinking about starting a publishing program is asking yourself why. What's the why for starting your program? And there are a lot of questions you can ask to get at the answer to that question. Is there an underlying institutional need that you're responding to? Do you have a ton of students who are using the food bank and so you see a demonstrated need for some affordability initiatives at your institution? Is there a top-down mandate from your administration? So it's been very popular for both presidents and provosts of institutions to be like, "I care about affordability, and now we're going to figure out how to do it," and that leads to the formation of a grant program. That's what happened to me at Penn State. Is it part of a larger initiative on campus? Are there folks who are already doing affordability work and your publishing program would help with that effort?
Does it support your goals for outreach to instructors? Or does it support your goals for outreach to students? Because there's a lot of student initiatives you could think about too. Will it focus on multiple avenues of participation? So if you're thinking about a publishing program, is it going to be just for people who want to adopt OER? Or in the case of thinking about publishing, are they going to be doing remixing or are they going to be authoring content? And then is it part of your outreach strategy for affordability? So, there's a lot of advocacy that goes into running a grant program and a lot of opportunities to do targeted outreach as part of that strategy. The first thing you need to consider is why are you doing this? And it might even be a reason that I haven't listed.
What I have seen pretty unilaterally across higher education institutions is that it tends to fall into one or two kinds of approaches. There is the do-it-yourself model where it's one person or a very small team of people who are working to move the dial ahead on affordability. They may have different goals, support, expectations, and communications that they need to do in order to be successful. Or there can be a publishing program style where it is a much larger team and it includes stakeholders from across universities. So multiple units who focus on teaching, for example, might be a thing. Identifying support and partners and the roles in that are going to look a little different than it would if it was a smaller team.
The first thing is thinking about support. So what services are you willing or have capacity to support? You need to think through a couple of different things. What does working with authors to create brand new works look like, and how that's different from folks who might be able to adapt and remix works to create a new product? Those are very different workloads. Authors who are authoring new works can sometimes be easier and easier lift because what they're creating is new and they might not necessarily be incorporating other resources into it. Whereas, working with authors to adapt can have a little more heavy lifting on your side as the support person because you have to verify that their OER Creative Commons licenses are playing nicely together and are compatible, that they aren't randomly mixing in copyrighted works, which I've had happen to me in the past.
You might also want to identify at the very beginning of your program if you want to work with authors to make the materials that they're making culturally relevant or incorporate a racial justice curriculum. So that would mean making sure that when faculty and instructors in your program are making sure that they're including images that represent diverse people, not just a bunch of white people and not just a bunch of men necessarily, that you have, mixed groups of people together that represent a broader spectrum. But it also means thinking about the implicit bias the text may already have if they are being remixed. It may also be thinking about whose voices you want to bring into that curriculum and how to do that.
The other thing to think about at the very beginning before you start thinking about what a publishing program will look like is what tools do you have to offer to do this publishing work? Is there anything available to you through your institution? I always proponent starting with institution-wide products. For example, at both University of Wisconsin and Ohio State, I have had access to Pressbooks as a publishing tool. But there are other places that people can publish. There's Manifold, which is another authoring tool. Scribe is a potential option through the publishing cooperative. There are folks who just use their learning management system.
So it's figuring out what tools you have available to you and what you can offer to faculty in order to do that publishing. Okay, if we have a tool to make the thing, you have to figure out where you're going to put the thing that they make. So do you have an institutional repository? Would you be wanting to host it in an OER Commons hub? Is there going to be a website? Will it be hosted just in the LMS, learning management system? So you need to figure out how you're going to make the content and then where is the content going to live?
What can this look like? In the DIY model, it depends. There are a couple different scenarios here, so it could be like... When I was at Wisconsin, it was all grassroots. There was just enough money for an OER teaching assistant, but there weren't grants or anything. These instructors were just doing this because they wanted to. Either they believed in open education as a thing or they had been teaching with their own course materials and just wanted to make it look more polished for a long time. Or it could look like it is supported through administration and there is some money or support coming through administration. That's the next question: is there cash for OER? So if it's a grant program, are you going to be offering stipends? If you're not offering stipends, what support are you offering instructors who go through your publishing program?
Is it just you doing all of this work or do you have a small team? Because you can think about what collaborators do you have. That can still be cross unit, but I've seen that it's usually within the same unit. Do you have money to get student worker? Can you secure a teaching assistantship for a graduate student? These are all ways that you bolster support if you have to do the do-it-yourself model.
Then there's the broader publishing program model where it's a bigger team of people. The support can look different. There could be a lot of administrative support. Which administrators are offering the support? Is it from your provost? Is it the dean of your library? Is it the head of the teaching and learning center? There's something else to consider, though, with that institutional support is, does it come from the top down? So is it the president or the provost and then it trickles down into the unit level? Or does that support sort of bubble up from specific units across your institution? That might change your outreach strategy.
Financial, again, where is the money coming from if there is money to be had? I think that we'll start to see that our institutions start recovering from the COVID denotations here, but it could also have really changed the way that folks are thinking about affordability at your institution. And then, who's on the team? That question is a lot broader than when you doing the do-it-yourself model because they're going to be stakeholders that have to be involved because you're all working together on this. If that's the case, who's going to do that day-to-day work of supporting the publishing program? When somebody reaches out with a question, who does that question go to? It could be you as the person or it could be somebody else on your team who's going to be doing that particular part of the work.
So, the next thing I would say as you're thinking about building a publishing program is to think about your partners. The question I always ask myself is, "Who has a seat at the table?" So if you are in a do-it-yourself situation, I really recommend thinking about that because you could still build a nice small team for yourself, but when you're in that bigger programmatic publishing program, it's definitely going to be a group of stakeholders who are doing that work. So I like to think about who should be there. You'll notice at the top of my list is students. I feel very strongly that students need to have a place at the table. At Penn State we had representatives from student government on our affordable working group, and we would ask them for advice or ask them to reach out to other students for advice around the publishing products that we were making. Inside the library or inside the center for teaching and learning, depending on where the program is starting from, and this could have a different name at your institution.
Faculty, we have faculty representatives. The bookstore. And bookstore relationships may vary the same as if you have a university press or an academic press at your institution. Whether they care about OER or not is up in the air. Different academic units. So at Ohio State, we do a lot of work with the College of Arts and Sciences. And also institutional specific units. That could be instructional design units. At Ohio State, we have the Office of Technology and Distance Education. And at Penn State, it was teaching and learning with technology. They were a centralized hub versus a center for teaching and learning. So there could be really specific units at your institution who you could partner with. Again, this is not a comprehensive list, this is just a list to get you to start thinking about potential partners.
So, you have identified all of your support people and partners and stakeholders, and I think it's important to start thinking through what the expectations are. You've started thinking about how you're going to support your publishing effort and you need to think about two things really explicitly. What are your expectations for faculty authors? And what support can they expect from you? I think it's really important to figure these two things out before you get started. Note the bullet here that says, "It's great to get in writing before you launch, but it can definitely be iterative and grow with your initiative." But I think you should definitely have thought about it to begin with.
So if you know, "Hey, I am just a one-person publishing program here, there's no way I could do hands-on support for every instructor who wants to create in OER. I'm not going to be able to offer them copy editing. I'm not going to be able to work with them explicitly inside whatever tool we've decided on. If you can figure that out before you get started and then communicate those clearly ahead of time, I think it really sets good expectations for the instructors that you're working with. In addition to that, what are your expectations for authors? Do they have to meet a certain criteria in order to be eligible for your grant? At some institutions, adjunct faculty might not be able to author or accept grant money. That's something to figure out. Do you expect that they'll handle all of the copy editing? Do you expect that they will do all of the vetting of the items that they find for their remix?
In the past, I have always set up my instructors like, "Here's a spreadsheet. When you go through and you're looking for OER that you're going to curate for your thing, I want you to write down the title, the author, the source, and where you found it. And then also the license." Because then I can take a look at a spreadsheet and be like, "Okay, these things aren't compatible because of their license, we need to replace those," rather than getting to the end of the project and being like, "Oh my gosh, you have copyrighted images in here and this license doesn't match with that license." If you can set those clear expectations for what you have for them and the workload that they're going to do to create this as part of the program, that is a great place to start out.
It's also really important to define rules in your team. Who's going to do what, and where does it make sense to collaborate? So maybe you have access to instructional designers who can help faculty create learning objectives and goals for their materials or can do some of that curation work. Maybe you have librarians like subject librarians who can help faculty curate OER in their discipline. Maybe you have students who want to advocate with administration to get money for your initiative. And maybe the bookstore can help identify courses or provide copies of OER at no cost... oh, I'm sorry, at cost. So thinking about printing an OER that an instructor created or carrying OpenStax books there would be ways to work with your bookstore. But it's really ideal to figure out who's doing what and where you're going to collaborate at. What are those points of interaction.
Clear communication, this can't be stated enough. Most of your work facilitating as a project manager is going to be about clearly communicating with all of the stakeholders in your publishing initiative. My recommendations are to adopt an ethos of transparency. If you're just upfront about everything, you don't have to worry about people saying, "Oh, I misinterpreted what you said." Create shared language early. How are you defining OER and affordability? How are you defining publishing? What counts? And you'll learn more about creating a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, for authors later on in the publishing cohort here in Pub101, but it's a good idea to be thinking about a memorandum of understanding for authors that clearly details what they are agreeing to do and articulates what you will do to support them. So that ties back to those expectation settings that you were thinking about earlier.
And then I can't overstate this enough, but communicating regularly with stakeholders and commuting regularly with your authors are really important. I've had several situations where I thought I was doing the right thing and I was waiting for another piece of information before I communicated out some information and somebody would get upset that I hadn't told them X, Y, or Z already. So I recommend communicate regularly, communicate often, and just keep everybody in the loop as much as possible. This is really important if you're working with your large team of people doing disparate tasks where maybe you don't necessarily talk to each other all that regularly within the day to day of your work.
With the do-it-yourself model, I think it's really important to rely on the teach the teacher model. It's important to teachers and authors to be self-sufficient and self-starters. So in that model, it's really normal to provide training for tools, licensing, open pedagogy if they're interested in it, and then offer support for follow-up questions. That could look like holding a workshop where, say, you introduce folks to authoring on Pressbooks. So you take them through Pressbooks, you show them a tour of the tool. You make them a sandbox account so that they can get in and play around with it. And then the authoring part is up to them. It could also look like a workshop where you teach people about Creative Commons Licensing. Or after they've been involved, maybe you have some one-on-one consultations where you talk about, "Now you have this OER, how would you use open pedagogy with it or have your students contribute to it in the future as part of an open pedagogy plan?"
But apart from that, getting them together to also teach their peers, which we'll talk about again in a minute, and get them to be willing to be peer helpers for each other is really also very useful. But you want to set that clear expectation upfront. "This is what I can train you in, and this is how I can support you with follow-up questions or troubleshooting." Say they have an issue with their Pressbooks account or something, you could troubleshoot that. But you can't help them with the actual authoring part. They have to go do that on their own.
Let's move on to building a community. It's dangerous to go alone, take this small, adorable kitten with you instead. I find that instructors who start doing this work can often feel like they're alone, that they're the only people who are doing this. So I recommend start really small. If you only have a couple of publishing projects, just get those instructors together to chat about how they're working. This often will bring up areas where you didn't know that they had questions, and it's really important to start your program small too. So say you can only support two publishing projects to start with, that's still a whole lot for doing something brand new, and you can always grow that over time. And then back to about starting a community of practice. I have done this in a couple different ways, and there's really great information from, I think, Minnesota State around faculty learning communities.
I did a community of practice at the University of Wisconsin, and it was really great. It started with just the handful of people that we were working with. And so, what it did was allow us to introduce them to each other. We had them share their projects, so we did a big show and tell, and then we invited them after each session to discuss what was working and then what they were struggling with. This really enables them to not feel so alone in creating OER, because maybe they're the only person in their department who's doing this, but there's somebody else in another department who's doing it and they can feel not alone. That community of practice built up to us leading the initiative, so we did a Pressbooks 101 training and then we did an advanced Pressbooks training to teach them some more cool things that they could do in it. And then we did that showcase where we had them talk about their projects. And then after that, I reached out to them and been like, "Hey, would you like to lead 15 minutes of our community of practice session to talk about how you're using H5P?" which is an interactive HTML5 plugin that you can use in Pressbooks to create interactive formative assessments.
And that person would come in and do that. And then we had another session where a person came in and talked about using Hypothesis, which is a social annotation tool which also can be incorporated into Pressbooks. I sound like a Pressbooks' commercial. I swear I'm not. They came in and chatted about that. And then we had an anatomy instructor who was working on building gifs that showed how the muscle rotation in the arm worked for their nursing book. And we had them talk about that process. It made them...I think they learned from each other and they also started thinking about how they could do those things in their classrooms as well. So I highly recommend, if you have the opportunity in your publishing program to think about building a community of practice.
So, self-care. I think it's really important to acknowledge that this work can be extremely isolating, particularly if you're doing it in the do-it-yourself model where it's just you doing this work. It involves not only a lot of emotional labor, but a lot of invisible labor because you're doing behind the scenes support work. You often have to have tough conversations with faculty about the limitations of your program or new technologies. And sometimes faculty are really scared of new technologies. You might also be scared of learning new technologies, it might seem really scary. And so these are just things that you're going to encounter. The example I like to share here is that when I was at Penn State, my first office was literally in a tower. No one knew where to find me. No one could get to my office because it would require an elevator trip up in an elevator that had a key, and it was like one of those old rickety elevators from the early 1920s or something.
And so, I felt not only literally isolated, but then my work was also very isolated. The emotional labor comes in a couple of different ways. When you become the open affordable person and you're the face of that at your institution, you're often called on to advocate, and that means that sometimes you have to bury your own emotions so that you can get the point across to maybe a hostile audience. And the invisible labor comes in thinking about the production work that you do, all of the outreach connections that you do, but it doesn't have to be dire. This work can be very hard, but it doesn't have to be helpless. What I recommend is build a network so you don't feel so alone. You have all of these lovely people here today who could be your network. And even broader than that, there's the Open Education Network itself as a network. There's all of these lovely people who are doing this work out in the wild who are probably more than happy to answer your questions.
I also think it's really important to set boundaries about the work that you're doing, and that involves also interactions with instructors and faculty. And not only set them, but stick to those boundaries. If you don't answer emails after five, don't answer that email from that instructor who's having a panic. I know that's very hard, but it's really important to set those boundaries and stick to them.
For tough questions, I have given a lot of talks about the benefits of OER and why I think instructors should adapt and adopt and [inaudible 00:31:53] OER. And there's always one curmudgeonly old professor who's there with a million tough questions that can make it feel like, "Oh my gosh, I'm under attack all the time." What I find helps with this is to think about all of the really hard questions that someone is going to ask you and pre-plan some answers to that. So if you have an instructor who you know is going to question the quality of OER, you can pre-plan an answer to that and identify a couple of research articles that might support your position.
We had a really great instance where we were giving a presentation at a big teaching and learning conference for across the whole institution. We had a student government representative on the panel, and he volunteered to answer the question about quality and just started citing all of these benefits of OER and how they had been found to be of same or equal quality to other traditional textbook materials. It was really nice to see a student be that well-versed in the ways to shut down a question like that very respectfully with answers.
And then the other thing I would recommend is that you remember that you don't have to master everything. It's okay if you are not a master copy editor right now. You don't have to become a master copy editor. You just put that in the list of things that you can't support, that the library or instructional design unit can't support. There are lots of training materials that you can find to help you learn the tools that you do need to support for your institution. There are plenty of people to ask questions to, and I'm one of them. Please ask me questions, I'm happy to answer them. You can reach out to me anytime about anything. You can throw a consultation on my calendar. I have an open calendar that I let people make appointments on. I'm happy to answer questions about any of this at any time.
So wrapping this up and then we move into questions. But these are things that I think that you should take away with you. The first one is, are there differences between your capacity as an individual and your organization's capacity, and what does that mean for you? So, in your capacity, in your role, what do you have the ability to do and what does your organization have to do? And then I would also think about where do those things intersect? Does your capacity point at a particular publishing approach? So maybe you're sitting here in this presentation, you're thinking, "Okay, so my institution doesn't have money to do this right now, but I'm being asked to spin up a publishing program, so I'm going to be in this do-it-yourself model." Or it could be the opposite where your institution has lots of ability to support and you're going to be in a more broader publishing program and you need to think through that capacity.
And then I like to think about publishing programs as phased approaches. So, what are you prepared to support right now? That could be starting simple with OER adoptions and building into a publishing program. Or you might be ready to start a publishing program but you can only take on one or two projects. Or you could be like, "I already know that my provost wants me to have seven projects, I have to give out seven grants. How will I scale that up in the future?" But thinking about it as a phased approach and what you can support right this second and what you could support later if that's successful.
I also would think through in this question is, in addition to what are you prepared to support right now, what do you need in order to be able to support it at that level right now? Do you need to get tool training so that you understand how to use the tools that are available at your institution? Do you need to identify a tool and make a recommendation that the university purchases it? Think through not only when are you prepared to support, but what do you have access to support? What training do you need to do that support work? And that can be part of that phased approach of where are you going to start now, where will you be a year from now, and thinking through what you might want to do later.
What conversations do you need to have in your organization to better answer these questions? If you don't have the answer to that question right now, that is 100% fine. But if you are thinking about a publishing program, who do you need to talk to in your organization so that you can answer those questions. And then think really broadly about partnerships and what partnerships across your organization could help this work, what organizations could or stakeholders could be problematic. Sometimes I hear that the bookstore, the university press is really hostile to the idea of open publishing. I have been lucky to be in the instance where I had a very good partnership with the bookstore. And then I had a very tepid relationship with a bookstore. They're not trying to hinder the work that I'm doing, but they're also not trying to help forward that conversation.
But I think it's really important to realize you don't have to do everything today. You don't need to look at all of these grant programs because one of the things you might decide to do is environmental scan and look at all of these established grant programs and then be like, "Oh my gosh, how am I ever going to do any of that?" Well, they didn't start there, and that's really important to remember, that they grew that over time. So thinking through your capacity, thinking through the questions that you need to answer in order to be ready to say yes or no to a publishing program at your institution is going to be really helpful.
I think this is my last slide and we can move into question. I'm right on time, which is a miracle, I swear. Yes, this is the last slide. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I'm going to pull a chat so I can see it. Christina, were there any questions that popped through that you are already aware of that I need to answer?
Christina: Thank you. Really great things. There was a request early on to share that spreadsheet that you used with the group if you wouldn't mind.
Amanda: Yeah, I will hunt it down and I will add it into the class notes for this session.
Christina: Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. There was some good comments. Daniella made a comment that it would be really helpful to have a peer review group especially when you were talking about the communities of practice. I think there's some really great resources about creating communities of practice. I don't know if you want to talk about that any more.
Amanda: Yeah, give me just half second. The first thing I'm going to plug is the Rebus Community for a peer review. What you can do there is you can set up your project there and you can do a call for peer reviewers. I have peer reviewed for several textbooks that way personally, and I've also pointed other instructors to that as an opportunity. I will grab that link and put that in the chat. But I do think that's also a really great use of a community of practice, particularly if you're working with folks in the same discipline or college. Here we go. Here's Rebus Community.
Thank you for sharing, Cheryl, Karen Pikula, stuff on faculty learning circles and your own Pressbooks of learning communities.
Christina: So Carla had a question: "What are your recommendations for library staff helping administration understand the scaling of these programs?"
Amanda: That's a good question. I'm in a position where I'm a staff member and I have been pulled into executive level discussions around affordability several times in my position so far, I've been at Ohio State for two years. One of them was very specifically about what do we need to scale up these initiatives? My recommendation is to put it in as plain language as possible if you're providing a document and definitely executive level summary and bullet points of very distinct and concrete, explicit items that you need, and try to get that to them before you meet in person to talk about it, if you're going to meet in person. And then in person reiterate everything that was in the document that you sent them and ask them for specific questions that they might have. Because I find when they are thinking, they're thinking at a much different level than what I as the person on the ground doing the work am thinking about.
For example, my dean is thinking about how can he relay the information I have given him to the provost to have a conversation with the provost about affordability. Those bullet points need to look a little different, and so a lot of times he will take the information that I have given him and he will retranslate it into administration speak. But I think it's important to be transparent in that communication and also to try and be concise. If you aren't already thinking about it in your program through a phased approach like I mentioned, starting to have conversations either with yourself through brainstorming or with your team, maybe as a brainstorming activity though, about what your program needs to scale up and to be sustainable should probably be baked in from the beginning, which is why I recommend taking a phased approach.
But they respond really well to the metric of, if we transform this many courses, it will save X many dollars for students. They love money language and number language. In fact, we had had a conversation about moving away from that kind of language of we say student cost savings because those numbers are never real. You're always deciding some weird metric where you're going to do that, so where you're like, "We've decided that all textbooks cost $100, and so we're going to multiply that by the number of students, and then we're going to get our cost saving number." So long as you do that consistently across your program, that's fine. But those aren't real numbers about like what students are actually spending. But we are going to get away from that language and start talking about the number of courses transformed. We got really heavy pushback against that because donors and upper level institution administration, so provost/president still all respond really well only to those dollars saving numbers. So that's something to keep in mind, is figuring out the language that they're using to tell the stories that you want to tell.
I hope that was a really rambling but okay answer to that question.
Christina: Thank you. Melissa had a follow-up question regarding standards for interactive OER like H5P learning options. "Is there a resource out there that you know of that lists standards for evaluating these interactives? I'd like to think it would cover things like accessibility, graphic design, best practices, et cetera."
Amanda: I'm not aware of a one, single evaluation tool that would allow you to holistically at a an interactive resource like that, but there are separate evaluations that you can do. I have a list of spreadsheets that I link people to when they do OER evaluation, and then I have a separate list for accessibility, but I haven't seen anything that is geared specifically towards an H5P learning object. My recommendation would be, first of all, to see if that H5P in this specific example is one of the types that is accessible. H5P has a list of what they consider to be accessible. And then do your own accessibility evaluation of the resources. And remember that it's not a checklist, nothing is ever going to be perfectly accessible. You're working towards the best version of accessibility that you can get. Because I find that as you have conversations with your instructors in your publishing program, they're going to demand that you give them an accessibility checklist and you say no to that. And you reframe that as, "We're working towards as best as we can get with accessibility." You can't just check these boxes up and be like, "Hey, I'm good to go," because things can continue to change and we can always do better.
But that would be my goal. I would start with accessibility for learning objects. That's where I would start is, are these accessible, are they the best accessible version that we can get, and then do a cost benefit analysis of if they aren't perfectly accessible, does that take enough away that they aren't valuable as the learning object that you intend them to be.
Christina: Great. Great answer, thank you, Amanda. If you have more questions, feel free to either raise your hand or put them in the chat. We have a little bit more time.
To build off of your answer, Amanda, one of the practices that I do is give faculty a list and links to tutorials on like a Hypothesis or H5P. I don't actually ever ask them to create those types of resources because I personally don't have the capacity to support them in their learning process. I find that the faculty that are interested and willing to go out there and learn and engage with the community and find the help they need are the ones that are going to utilize it. The others that put it perfunctorily, that's a terrible pronunciation, sorry, into their textbook, it's not really utilized and not as beneficial to students.
Amanda: Yeah, I would say that there's a huge instructional design component that I as a person walk through people when they do interactive learning objects as part of their OER that I would never expect anyone else to do because it's in my weird specific skillset. But that's a great example of a teach the teacher moment where you gave them, "Here's the guide to the tool. Here's a great tutorial on how to do it. That's the best I can do for you." That is a perfectly fine standard to have when you are looking through the capacity for what you have to support.
Christina: Yeah.
Amanda: In your program.
Christina: Lauren shared a great resource to H5P accessibility, and that covers, I think, your question, Melissa, as well as someone's comment about embedding in the LMS. This documentation shows accessibility options for LMS and then the other platform. Elizabeth's asked, "What are the top three H5P resources asked for or created?"
Amanda:
Oh, okay. I think that varies by discipline. I have seen a growing amount of people who are just fascinated by the branching scenarios. I'm guilty of that as well. I used it in the course that I developed to walk people through OER searching. But I would say oftentimes it is the video tool where you can basically gatekeep how students go through the presentation. You can put in quizzes and stuff throughout the video to make sure that they're actually watching and engaging with the material.
And then... I have to go look at my examples of H5P. So interactive video is what that's called. I have also seen a lot of use of basically any of the fill in the blank. So there's a fill in the blank word. You can ask questions and they have to drop the word into that. There's also a version for multiple choice. I've seen those used a lot. And then it's just about, as a multiple choice question, are they building good distractors the way that they should be, is a question I often ask them.
And then I saw Melissa's follow up about H5P. If I was doing a publishing program where I was responsible for instructors who were thinking about using interactive learning objects like H5P, that would be part of their checklist before they could make the book live, or if their book was already alive, it would be before they could incorporate that learning objective, they would need to complete a checklist for it. And that would include them going into a student view and testing the branching scenario and maybe even getting some peers to look over it to make sure the instructions are solid, that sort of thing.
But I think you can build parameters into the list of things that they're going to do on their end as the instructors who are building the thing and set that as an expectation. At Penn State for our publishing program, before we would make their books public to the world, they would need to have gone through the Pressbooks checklist. That would include things like making sure that they had accessible chapters, so they were structured properly, that their images were licensed correctly and captioned correctly and in all text. So we had a checklist of what they would do, and then they would turn that checklist into us. We were lucky to have two production specialists, and we would have them make sure that that was true, that they did do all of those things. And so, I think that you can build in a check and balance there for that.
Christina:
Wonderful. Well, we are coming to the end of our time. Thank you again, Amanda, for sharing. We appreciate all your experience and the information you gave us today. And thank you to everyone who came. Thank you for joining us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share resources one of your key takeaways is the knowledge and affirmation that you're not doing this work alone, that you do have this entire community to support you. If you have more questions about today's sessions or would like to chat with others about this, please use the Class Notes. You can put links that you shared today. We will put links to the slide in the Class Notes and use that as a way to talk through this topic. So please use those. That ends our session today. Thank you so much, Amanda.
Amanda:
Thank you all for having me, as always.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This April 27, 2022, session is hosted by hosted by Christina Trunnell from Montana State University. Christina is joined by guest speaker Amanda Larson of Ohio State University who shares her insights on publishing program development approaches and much more.
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:
- Christina Trunnell (TRAILS OER Statewide Coordinator, Montana University System)
- Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, Ohio State University)
Christina: I'm first to go ahead and get started. Thank you all for coming today. I hope you're looking forward to the session as I am. Just a couple of housekeeping bits to get us started. My name is Christina Trunnell, I am the host for today's session. Our speaker is the wonderful Ms. Amanda Larson, who will be sharing some great things for us today as we go through this session. Just so you know, we will be recording this session, and we will be adding that to our YouTube Pub101 playlist. We also at the OEN are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. If you've never had a chance to review the community norms, I highly recommend you do, they are inspiring. And please join us today as we listen to Amanda's talk and creating a safe and constructive space. I will also be monitoring the chat during the presentation, so if you have questions, I will keep note of those during that time. And then it is my delightful pleasure to introduce you to Amanda Larson today.
Amanda: All right. Now I'm going to reshare my screen. Let's see if I can do that with any sense of grace or aplomb. Can I get a thumbs up, Christina, if you can see it. Awesome.
Hi, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about individual and organizational capacity, so what you need to think about before you start thinking about building a publishing program. I am going to start, oops, by talking a little bit about my background in this area. I'm Amanda Larson, I'm the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at the Ohio State University, but my work in publishing started all the way back in my first master's degree where I was the Editorial Assistant at the Journal of Narrative Theory. I got lots of questions from folks about if their article could be put into institutional repositories, if they had a mandate to make it open access.
That was sort of my first introduction to thinking about publishing in open. Then in my second master's degree, where I decided that I was going to be a librarian, I got a position as the Open Educational Resources Teaching Assistant, and there I helped folks grassroots style think about how they would be publishing open textbooks through Pressbooks. It was my job to do the Pressbooks training and to lead the community of practitioners. We had a monthly meeting where we got together and would chat about how they were using the OER that they created.
My first real librarian job was as the Open Education Librarian at Penn State University, where I was responsible for co-leading a grant program. I think as we go through my slides and presentation you'll see how those two scenarios play out. There I was responsible for collaborating with stakeholders across the university. We had an affordable learning working group that focused on open education and affordable resources and had stakeholders from all over the university unit. We had a grant program that went through two and a half rounds while I was there. I was there for the first selection process for the third round of the Affordable Course Transformation grant program.
Now I'm the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State, and I support the Affordable Learning Exchanges grant program as part of my position there. What that looks like is helping ALX connect grant winners to subject librarians who can help them find course content for their materials. I also do a lot of syllabus review grants where I help curate OER to help bring down the cost of classes. I also support racial justice grants where folks are trying to make their courses more equitable by either decolonizing their syllabus, so looking for BIPOC authors to add to their syllabus or including a racial justice pedagogy to their course materials and thinking through what that is. The other part of my job I spend thinking about how folks can incorporate open pedagogy into their courses. So that's a little bit about me.
Here's our agenda for today. We're going to talk about why a publishing program. We're going to talk about different ways you could approach developing a program at your institution. We're going to figure out who's doing the work, what that might look like at your institution. We're going to talk about building collaborative definitions at your institution around things. We're going to talk about communication, training, and community building and the roles that those might play. And we're also going to talk about self-care. And then I'm going to leave you with some takeaway considerations. I'm hoping that I do this in plenty of time for y'all to ask questions, but please drop questions in the chat as we go through the presentation and I'll be happy to answer them.
The first question that I think if you're at the very beginning of thinking about starting a publishing program is asking yourself why. What's the why for starting your program? And there are a lot of questions you can ask to get at the answer to that question. Is there an underlying institutional need that you're responding to? Do you have a ton of students who are using the food bank and so you see a demonstrated need for some affordability initiatives at your institution? Is there a top-down mandate from your administration? So it's been very popular for both presidents and provosts of institutions to be like, "I care about affordability, and now we're going to figure out how to do it," and that leads to the formation of a grant program. That's what happened to me at Penn State. Is it part of a larger initiative on campus? Are there folks who are already doing affordability work and your publishing program would help with that effort?
Does it support your goals for outreach to instructors? Or does it support your goals for outreach to students? Because there's a lot of student initiatives you could think about too. Will it focus on multiple avenues of participation? So if you're thinking about a publishing program, is it going to be just for people who want to adopt OER? Or in the case of thinking about publishing, are they going to be doing remixing or are they going to be authoring content? And then is it part of your outreach strategy for affordability? So, there's a lot of advocacy that goes into running a grant program and a lot of opportunities to do targeted outreach as part of that strategy. The first thing you need to consider is why are you doing this? And it might even be a reason that I haven't listed.
What I have seen pretty unilaterally across higher education institutions is that it tends to fall into one or two kinds of approaches. There is the do-it-yourself model where it's one person or a very small team of people who are working to move the dial ahead on affordability. They may have different goals, support, expectations, and communications that they need to do in order to be successful. Or there can be a publishing program style where it is a much larger team and it includes stakeholders from across universities. So multiple units who focus on teaching, for example, might be a thing. Identifying support and partners and the roles in that are going to look a little different than it would if it was a smaller team.
The first thing is thinking about support. So what services are you willing or have capacity to support? You need to think through a couple of different things. What does working with authors to create brand new works look like, and how that's different from folks who might be able to adapt and remix works to create a new product? Those are very different workloads. Authors who are authoring new works can sometimes be easier and easier lift because what they're creating is new and they might not necessarily be incorporating other resources into it. Whereas, working with authors to adapt can have a little more heavy lifting on your side as the support person because you have to verify that their OER Creative Commons licenses are playing nicely together and are compatible, that they aren't randomly mixing in copyrighted works, which I've had happen to me in the past.
You might also want to identify at the very beginning of your program if you want to work with authors to make the materials that they're making culturally relevant or incorporate a racial justice curriculum. So that would mean making sure that when faculty and instructors in your program are making sure that they're including images that represent diverse people, not just a bunch of white people and not just a bunch of men necessarily, that you have, mixed groups of people together that represent a broader spectrum. But it also means thinking about the implicit bias the text may already have if they are being remixed. It may also be thinking about whose voices you want to bring into that curriculum and how to do that.
The other thing to think about at the very beginning before you start thinking about what a publishing program will look like is what tools do you have to offer to do this publishing work? Is there anything available to you through your institution? I always proponent starting with institution-wide products. For example, at both University of Wisconsin and Ohio State, I have had access to Pressbooks as a publishing tool. But there are other places that people can publish. There's Manifold, which is another authoring tool. Scribe is a potential option through the publishing cooperative. There are folks who just use their learning management system.
So it's figuring out what tools you have available to you and what you can offer to faculty in order to do that publishing. Okay, if we have a tool to make the thing, you have to figure out where you're going to put the thing that they make. So do you have an institutional repository? Would you be wanting to host it in an OER Commons hub? Is there going to be a website? Will it be hosted just in the LMS, learning management system? So you need to figure out how you're going to make the content and then where is the content going to live?
What can this look like? In the DIY model, it depends. There are a couple different scenarios here, so it could be like... When I was at Wisconsin, it was all grassroots. There was just enough money for an OER teaching assistant, but there weren't grants or anything. These instructors were just doing this because they wanted to. Either they believed in open education as a thing or they had been teaching with their own course materials and just wanted to make it look more polished for a long time. Or it could look like it is supported through administration and there is some money or support coming through administration. That's the next question: is there cash for OER? So if it's a grant program, are you going to be offering stipends? If you're not offering stipends, what support are you offering instructors who go through your publishing program?
Is it just you doing all of this work or do you have a small team? Because you can think about what collaborators do you have. That can still be cross unit, but I've seen that it's usually within the same unit. Do you have money to get student worker? Can you secure a teaching assistantship for a graduate student? These are all ways that you bolster support if you have to do the do-it-yourself model.
Then there's the broader publishing program model where it's a bigger team of people. The support can look different. There could be a lot of administrative support. Which administrators are offering the support? Is it from your provost? Is it the dean of your library? Is it the head of the teaching and learning center? There's something else to consider, though, with that institutional support is, does it come from the top down? So is it the president or the provost and then it trickles down into the unit level? Or does that support sort of bubble up from specific units across your institution? That might change your outreach strategy.
Financial, again, where is the money coming from if there is money to be had? I think that we'll start to see that our institutions start recovering from the COVID denotations here, but it could also have really changed the way that folks are thinking about affordability at your institution. And then, who's on the team? That question is a lot broader than when you doing the do-it-yourself model because they're going to be stakeholders that have to be involved because you're all working together on this. If that's the case, who's going to do that day-to-day work of supporting the publishing program? When somebody reaches out with a question, who does that question go to? It could be you as the person or it could be somebody else on your team who's going to be doing that particular part of the work.
So, the next thing I would say as you're thinking about building a publishing program is to think about your partners. The question I always ask myself is, "Who has a seat at the table?" So if you are in a do-it-yourself situation, I really recommend thinking about that because you could still build a nice small team for yourself, but when you're in that bigger programmatic publishing program, it's definitely going to be a group of stakeholders who are doing that work. So I like to think about who should be there. You'll notice at the top of my list is students. I feel very strongly that students need to have a place at the table. At Penn State we had representatives from student government on our affordable working group, and we would ask them for advice or ask them to reach out to other students for advice around the publishing products that we were making. Inside the library or inside the center for teaching and learning, depending on where the program is starting from, and this could have a different name at your institution.
Faculty, we have faculty representatives. The bookstore. And bookstore relationships may vary the same as if you have a university press or an academic press at your institution. Whether they care about OER or not is up in the air. Different academic units. So at Ohio State, we do a lot of work with the College of Arts and Sciences. And also institutional specific units. That could be instructional design units. At Ohio State, we have the Office of Technology and Distance Education. And at Penn State, it was teaching and learning with technology. They were a centralized hub versus a center for teaching and learning. So there could be really specific units at your institution who you could partner with. Again, this is not a comprehensive list, this is just a list to get you to start thinking about potential partners.
So, you have identified all of your support people and partners and stakeholders, and I think it's important to start thinking through what the expectations are. You've started thinking about how you're going to support your publishing effort and you need to think about two things really explicitly. What are your expectations for faculty authors? And what support can they expect from you? I think it's really important to figure these two things out before you get started. Note the bullet here that says, "It's great to get in writing before you launch, but it can definitely be iterative and grow with your initiative." But I think you should definitely have thought about it to begin with.
So if you know, "Hey, I am just a one-person publishing program here, there's no way I could do hands-on support for every instructor who wants to create in OER. I'm not going to be able to offer them copy editing. I'm not going to be able to work with them explicitly inside whatever tool we've decided on. If you can figure that out before you get started and then communicate those clearly ahead of time, I think it really sets good expectations for the instructors that you're working with. In addition to that, what are your expectations for authors? Do they have to meet a certain criteria in order to be eligible for your grant? At some institutions, adjunct faculty might not be able to author or accept grant money. That's something to figure out. Do you expect that they'll handle all of the copy editing? Do you expect that they will do all of the vetting of the items that they find for their remix?
In the past, I have always set up my instructors like, "Here's a spreadsheet. When you go through and you're looking for OER that you're going to curate for your thing, I want you to write down the title, the author, the source, and where you found it. And then also the license." Because then I can take a look at a spreadsheet and be like, "Okay, these things aren't compatible because of their license, we need to replace those," rather than getting to the end of the project and being like, "Oh my gosh, you have copyrighted images in here and this license doesn't match with that license." If you can set those clear expectations for what you have for them and the workload that they're going to do to create this as part of the program, that is a great place to start out.
It's also really important to define rules in your team. Who's going to do what, and where does it make sense to collaborate? So maybe you have access to instructional designers who can help faculty create learning objectives and goals for their materials or can do some of that curation work. Maybe you have librarians like subject librarians who can help faculty curate OER in their discipline. Maybe you have students who want to advocate with administration to get money for your initiative. And maybe the bookstore can help identify courses or provide copies of OER at no cost... oh, I'm sorry, at cost. So thinking about printing an OER that an instructor created or carrying OpenStax books there would be ways to work with your bookstore. But it's really ideal to figure out who's doing what and where you're going to collaborate at. What are those points of interaction.
Clear communication, this can't be stated enough. Most of your work facilitating as a project manager is going to be about clearly communicating with all of the stakeholders in your publishing initiative. My recommendations are to adopt an ethos of transparency. If you're just upfront about everything, you don't have to worry about people saying, "Oh, I misinterpreted what you said." Create shared language early. How are you defining OER and affordability? How are you defining publishing? What counts? And you'll learn more about creating a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, for authors later on in the publishing cohort here in Pub101, but it's a good idea to be thinking about a memorandum of understanding for authors that clearly details what they are agreeing to do and articulates what you will do to support them. So that ties back to those expectation settings that you were thinking about earlier.
And then I can't overstate this enough, but communicating regularly with stakeholders and commuting regularly with your authors are really important. I've had several situations where I thought I was doing the right thing and I was waiting for another piece of information before I communicated out some information and somebody would get upset that I hadn't told them X, Y, or Z already. So I recommend communicate regularly, communicate often, and just keep everybody in the loop as much as possible. This is really important if you're working with your large team of people doing disparate tasks where maybe you don't necessarily talk to each other all that regularly within the day to day of your work.
With the do-it-yourself model, I think it's really important to rely on the teach the teacher model. It's important to teachers and authors to be self-sufficient and self-starters. So in that model, it's really normal to provide training for tools, licensing, open pedagogy if they're interested in it, and then offer support for follow-up questions. That could look like holding a workshop where, say, you introduce folks to authoring on Pressbooks. So you take them through Pressbooks, you show them a tour of the tool. You make them a sandbox account so that they can get in and play around with it. And then the authoring part is up to them. It could also look like a workshop where you teach people about Creative Commons Licensing. Or after they've been involved, maybe you have some one-on-one consultations where you talk about, "Now you have this OER, how would you use open pedagogy with it or have your students contribute to it in the future as part of an open pedagogy plan?"
But apart from that, getting them together to also teach their peers, which we'll talk about again in a minute, and get them to be willing to be peer helpers for each other is really also very useful. But you want to set that clear expectation upfront. "This is what I can train you in, and this is how I can support you with follow-up questions or troubleshooting." Say they have an issue with their Pressbooks account or something, you could troubleshoot that. But you can't help them with the actual authoring part. They have to go do that on their own.
Let's move on to building a community. It's dangerous to go alone, take this small, adorable kitten with you instead. I find that instructors who start doing this work can often feel like they're alone, that they're the only people who are doing this. So I recommend start really small. If you only have a couple of publishing projects, just get those instructors together to chat about how they're working. This often will bring up areas where you didn't know that they had questions, and it's really important to start your program small too. So say you can only support two publishing projects to start with, that's still a whole lot for doing something brand new, and you can always grow that over time. And then back to about starting a community of practice. I have done this in a couple different ways, and there's really great information from, I think, Minnesota State around faculty learning communities.
I did a community of practice at the University of Wisconsin, and it was really great. It started with just the handful of people that we were working with. And so, what it did was allow us to introduce them to each other. We had them share their projects, so we did a big show and tell, and then we invited them after each session to discuss what was working and then what they were struggling with. This really enables them to not feel so alone in creating OER, because maybe they're the only person in their department who's doing this, but there's somebody else in another department who's doing it and they can feel not alone. That community of practice built up to us leading the initiative, so we did a Pressbooks 101 training and then we did an advanced Pressbooks training to teach them some more cool things that they could do in it. And then we did that showcase where we had them talk about their projects. And then after that, I reached out to them and been like, "Hey, would you like to lead 15 minutes of our community of practice session to talk about how you're using H5P?" which is an interactive HTML5 plugin that you can use in Pressbooks to create interactive formative assessments.
And that person would come in and do that. And then we had another session where a person came in and talked about using Hypothesis, which is a social annotation tool which also can be incorporated into Pressbooks. I sound like a Pressbooks' commercial. I swear I'm not. They came in and chatted about that. And then we had an anatomy instructor who was working on building gifs that showed how the muscle rotation in the arm worked for their nursing book. And we had them talk about that process. It made them...I think they learned from each other and they also started thinking about how they could do those things in their classrooms as well. So I highly recommend, if you have the opportunity in your publishing program to think about building a community of practice.
So, self-care. I think it's really important to acknowledge that this work can be extremely isolating, particularly if you're doing it in the do-it-yourself model where it's just you doing this work. It involves not only a lot of emotional labor, but a lot of invisible labor because you're doing behind the scenes support work. You often have to have tough conversations with faculty about the limitations of your program or new technologies. And sometimes faculty are really scared of new technologies. You might also be scared of learning new technologies, it might seem really scary. And so these are just things that you're going to encounter. The example I like to share here is that when I was at Penn State, my first office was literally in a tower. No one knew where to find me. No one could get to my office because it would require an elevator trip up in an elevator that had a key, and it was like one of those old rickety elevators from the early 1920s or something.
And so, I felt not only literally isolated, but then my work was also very isolated. The emotional labor comes in a couple of different ways. When you become the open affordable person and you're the face of that at your institution, you're often called on to advocate, and that means that sometimes you have to bury your own emotions so that you can get the point across to maybe a hostile audience. And the invisible labor comes in thinking about the production work that you do, all of the outreach connections that you do, but it doesn't have to be dire. This work can be very hard, but it doesn't have to be helpless. What I recommend is build a network so you don't feel so alone. You have all of these lovely people here today who could be your network. And even broader than that, there's the Open Education Network itself as a network. There's all of these lovely people who are doing this work out in the wild who are probably more than happy to answer your questions.
I also think it's really important to set boundaries about the work that you're doing, and that involves also interactions with instructors and faculty. And not only set them, but stick to those boundaries. If you don't answer emails after five, don't answer that email from that instructor who's having a panic. I know that's very hard, but it's really important to set those boundaries and stick to them.
For tough questions, I have given a lot of talks about the benefits of OER and why I think instructors should adapt and adopt and [inaudible 00:31:53] OER. And there's always one curmudgeonly old professor who's there with a million tough questions that can make it feel like, "Oh my gosh, I'm under attack all the time." What I find helps with this is to think about all of the really hard questions that someone is going to ask you and pre-plan some answers to that. So if you have an instructor who you know is going to question the quality of OER, you can pre-plan an answer to that and identify a couple of research articles that might support your position.
We had a really great instance where we were giving a presentation at a big teaching and learning conference for across the whole institution. We had a student government representative on the panel, and he volunteered to answer the question about quality and just started citing all of these benefits of OER and how they had been found to be of same or equal quality to other traditional textbook materials. It was really nice to see a student be that well-versed in the ways to shut down a question like that very respectfully with answers.
And then the other thing I would recommend is that you remember that you don't have to master everything. It's okay if you are not a master copy editor right now. You don't have to become a master copy editor. You just put that in the list of things that you can't support, that the library or instructional design unit can't support. There are lots of training materials that you can find to help you learn the tools that you do need to support for your institution. There are plenty of people to ask questions to, and I'm one of them. Please ask me questions, I'm happy to answer them. You can reach out to me anytime about anything. You can throw a consultation on my calendar. I have an open calendar that I let people make appointments on. I'm happy to answer questions about any of this at any time.
So wrapping this up and then we move into questions. But these are things that I think that you should take away with you. The first one is, are there differences between your capacity as an individual and your organization's capacity, and what does that mean for you? So, in your capacity, in your role, what do you have the ability to do and what does your organization have to do? And then I would also think about where do those things intersect? Does your capacity point at a particular publishing approach? So maybe you're sitting here in this presentation, you're thinking, "Okay, so my institution doesn't have money to do this right now, but I'm being asked to spin up a publishing program, so I'm going to be in this do-it-yourself model." Or it could be the opposite where your institution has lots of ability to support and you're going to be in a more broader publishing program and you need to think through that capacity.
And then I like to think about publishing programs as phased approaches. So, what are you prepared to support right now? That could be starting simple with OER adoptions and building into a publishing program. Or you might be ready to start a publishing program but you can only take on one or two projects. Or you could be like, "I already know that my provost wants me to have seven projects, I have to give out seven grants. How will I scale that up in the future?" But thinking about it as a phased approach and what you can support right this second and what you could support later if that's successful.
I also would think through in this question is, in addition to what are you prepared to support right now, what do you need in order to be able to support it at that level right now? Do you need to get tool training so that you understand how to use the tools that are available at your institution? Do you need to identify a tool and make a recommendation that the university purchases it? Think through not only when are you prepared to support, but what do you have access to support? What training do you need to do that support work? And that can be part of that phased approach of where are you going to start now, where will you be a year from now, and thinking through what you might want to do later.
What conversations do you need to have in your organization to better answer these questions? If you don't have the answer to that question right now, that is 100% fine. But if you are thinking about a publishing program, who do you need to talk to in your organization so that you can answer those questions. And then think really broadly about partnerships and what partnerships across your organization could help this work, what organizations could or stakeholders could be problematic. Sometimes I hear that the bookstore, the university press is really hostile to the idea of open publishing. I have been lucky to be in the instance where I had a very good partnership with the bookstore. And then I had a very tepid relationship with a bookstore. They're not trying to hinder the work that I'm doing, but they're also not trying to help forward that conversation.
But I think it's really important to realize you don't have to do everything today. You don't need to look at all of these grant programs because one of the things you might decide to do is environmental scan and look at all of these established grant programs and then be like, "Oh my gosh, how am I ever going to do any of that?" Well, they didn't start there, and that's really important to remember, that they grew that over time. So thinking through your capacity, thinking through the questions that you need to answer in order to be ready to say yes or no to a publishing program at your institution is going to be really helpful.
I think this is my last slide and we can move into question. I'm right on time, which is a miracle, I swear. Yes, this is the last slide. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I'm going to pull a chat so I can see it. Christina, were there any questions that popped through that you are already aware of that I need to answer?
Christina: Thank you. Really great things. There was a request early on to share that spreadsheet that you used with the group if you wouldn't mind.
Amanda: Yeah, I will hunt it down and I will add it into the class notes for this session.
Christina: Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. There was some good comments. Daniella made a comment that it would be really helpful to have a peer review group especially when you were talking about the communities of practice. I think there's some really great resources about creating communities of practice. I don't know if you want to talk about that any more.
Amanda: Yeah, give me just half second. The first thing I'm going to plug is the Rebus Community for a peer review. What you can do there is you can set up your project there and you can do a call for peer reviewers. I have peer reviewed for several textbooks that way personally, and I've also pointed other instructors to that as an opportunity. I will grab that link and put that in the chat. But I do think that's also a really great use of a community of practice, particularly if you're working with folks in the same discipline or college. Here we go. Here's Rebus Community.
Thank you for sharing, Cheryl, Karen Pikula, stuff on faculty learning circles and your own Pressbooks of learning communities.
Christina: So Carla had a question: "What are your recommendations for library staff helping administration understand the scaling of these programs?"
Amanda: That's a good question. I'm in a position where I'm a staff member and I have been pulled into executive level discussions around affordability several times in my position so far, I've been at Ohio State for two years. One of them was very specifically about what do we need to scale up these initiatives? My recommendation is to put it in as plain language as possible if you're providing a document and definitely executive level summary and bullet points of very distinct and concrete, explicit items that you need, and try to get that to them before you meet in person to talk about it, if you're going to meet in person. And then in person reiterate everything that was in the document that you sent them and ask them for specific questions that they might have. Because I find when they are thinking, they're thinking at a much different level than what I as the person on the ground doing the work am thinking about.
For example, my dean is thinking about how can he relay the information I have given him to the provost to have a conversation with the provost about affordability. Those bullet points need to look a little different, and so a lot of times he will take the information that I have given him and he will retranslate it into administration speak. But I think it's important to be transparent in that communication and also to try and be concise. If you aren't already thinking about it in your program through a phased approach like I mentioned, starting to have conversations either with yourself through brainstorming or with your team, maybe as a brainstorming activity though, about what your program needs to scale up and to be sustainable should probably be baked in from the beginning, which is why I recommend taking a phased approach.
But they respond really well to the metric of, if we transform this many courses, it will save X many dollars for students. They love money language and number language. In fact, we had had a conversation about moving away from that kind of language of we say student cost savings because those numbers are never real. You're always deciding some weird metric where you're going to do that, so where you're like, "We've decided that all textbooks cost $100, and so we're going to multiply that by the number of students, and then we're going to get our cost saving number." So long as you do that consistently across your program, that's fine. But those aren't real numbers about like what students are actually spending. But we are going to get away from that language and start talking about the number of courses transformed. We got really heavy pushback against that because donors and upper level institution administration, so provost/president still all respond really well only to those dollars saving numbers. So that's something to keep in mind, is figuring out the language that they're using to tell the stories that you want to tell.
I hope that was a really rambling but okay answer to that question.
Christina: Thank you. Melissa had a follow-up question regarding standards for interactive OER like H5P learning options. "Is there a resource out there that you know of that lists standards for evaluating these interactives? I'd like to think it would cover things like accessibility, graphic design, best practices, et cetera."
Amanda: I'm not aware of a one, single evaluation tool that would allow you to holistically at a an interactive resource like that, but there are separate evaluations that you can do. I have a list of spreadsheets that I link people to when they do OER evaluation, and then I have a separate list for accessibility, but I haven't seen anything that is geared specifically towards an H5P learning object. My recommendation would be, first of all, to see if that H5P in this specific example is one of the types that is accessible. H5P has a list of what they consider to be accessible. And then do your own accessibility evaluation of the resources. And remember that it's not a checklist, nothing is ever going to be perfectly accessible. You're working towards the best version of accessibility that you can get. Because I find that as you have conversations with your instructors in your publishing program, they're going to demand that you give them an accessibility checklist and you say no to that. And you reframe that as, "We're working towards as best as we can get with accessibility." You can't just check these boxes up and be like, "Hey, I'm good to go," because things can continue to change and we can always do better.
But that would be my goal. I would start with accessibility for learning objects. That's where I would start is, are these accessible, are they the best accessible version that we can get, and then do a cost benefit analysis of if they aren't perfectly accessible, does that take enough away that they aren't valuable as the learning object that you intend them to be.
Christina: Great. Great answer, thank you, Amanda. If you have more questions, feel free to either raise your hand or put them in the chat. We have a little bit more time.
To build off of your answer, Amanda, one of the practices that I do is give faculty a list and links to tutorials on like a Hypothesis or H5P. I don't actually ever ask them to create those types of resources because I personally don't have the capacity to support them in their learning process. I find that the faculty that are interested and willing to go out there and learn and engage with the community and find the help they need are the ones that are going to utilize it. The others that put it perfunctorily, that's a terrible pronunciation, sorry, into their textbook, it's not really utilized and not as beneficial to students.
Amanda: Yeah, I would say that there's a huge instructional design component that I as a person walk through people when they do interactive learning objects as part of their OER that I would never expect anyone else to do because it's in my weird specific skillset. But that's a great example of a teach the teacher moment where you gave them, "Here's the guide to the tool. Here's a great tutorial on how to do it. That's the best I can do for you." That is a perfectly fine standard to have when you are looking through the capacity for what you have to support.
Christina: Yeah.
Amanda: In your program.
Christina: Lauren shared a great resource to H5P accessibility, and that covers, I think, your question, Melissa, as well as someone's comment about embedding in the LMS. This documentation shows accessibility options for LMS and then the other platform. Elizabeth's asked, "What are the top three H5P resources asked for or created?"
Amanda:
Oh, okay. I think that varies by discipline. I have seen a growing amount of people who are just fascinated by the branching scenarios. I'm guilty of that as well. I used it in the course that I developed to walk people through OER searching. But I would say oftentimes it is the video tool where you can basically gatekeep how students go through the presentation. You can put in quizzes and stuff throughout the video to make sure that they're actually watching and engaging with the material.
And then... I have to go look at my examples of H5P. So interactive video is what that's called. I have also seen a lot of use of basically any of the fill in the blank. So there's a fill in the blank word. You can ask questions and they have to drop the word into that. There's also a version for multiple choice. I've seen those used a lot. And then it's just about, as a multiple choice question, are they building good distractors the way that they should be, is a question I often ask them.
And then I saw Melissa's follow up about H5P. If I was doing a publishing program where I was responsible for instructors who were thinking about using interactive learning objects like H5P, that would be part of their checklist before they could make the book live, or if their book was already alive, it would be before they could incorporate that learning objective, they would need to complete a checklist for it. And that would include them going into a student view and testing the branching scenario and maybe even getting some peers to look over it to make sure the instructions are solid, that sort of thing.
But I think you can build parameters into the list of things that they're going to do on their end as the instructors who are building the thing and set that as an expectation. At Penn State for our publishing program, before we would make their books public to the world, they would need to have gone through the Pressbooks checklist. That would include things like making sure that they had accessible chapters, so they were structured properly, that their images were licensed correctly and captioned correctly and in all text. So we had a checklist of what they would do, and then they would turn that checklist into us. We were lucky to have two production specialists, and we would have them make sure that that was true, that they did do all of those things. And so, I think that you can build in a check and balance there for that.
Christina:
Wonderful. Well, we are coming to the end of our time. Thank you again, Amanda, for sharing. We appreciate all your experience and the information you gave us today. And thank you to everyone who came. Thank you for joining us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share resources one of your key takeaways is the knowledge and affirmation that you're not doing this work alone, that you do have this entire community to support you. If you have more questions about today's sessions or would like to chat with others about this, please use the Class Notes. You can put links that you shared today. We will put links to the slide in the Class Notes and use that as a way to talk through this topic. So please use those. That ends our session today. Thank you so much, Amanda.
Amanda:
Thank you all for having me, as always.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:32:28 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Does anyone have a document that outlines these expectations? Would love to see an example!
00:33:20 Kelly Smith: I would appreciate that too, Cheryl. Also interested in standards expected for whatever gets submitted.
00:34:18 Kelly Smith: Amanda, can you share that expectation spreadsheet?
00:40:04 Christina Trunnell: The Author Intake gives you a great question list to work through that first meeting and identifying expectations. https://oen.pressbooks.pub/authoropen/chapter/author-intake/
00:40:18 Kelly Smith: Thanks, Christina!!
00:40:52 Daniela Elliott: I think it would be helpful to have a peer review group that could help with that. This was the hardest part for me doing a project alone.
00:42:53 Christina Trunnell: Great suggestion, Daniela.
00:43:37 Kelly Smith: this is such an important slide. Thank you Amanda.
00:44:35 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Resources from University of Arizona’s 2020 Pressbooks Learning Community (feel free to adapt): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wSsmpj7d3KLwunx2YqJG59-G7Rmyge4x?usp=sharing
00:44:48 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: “OER Learning Circles for Instructional Improvement” by Karen Pikula (2020 Open Education Network Summit), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDAzdaF1v3w&list=PLWRE6ioG4vdZbJGUCc0XquZi23EHXXLKM&index=5
00:46:04 Phoebe Daurio: We are currently using this openly licensed sheet to track sources/attributions in our project
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iy_xzg8WAHXsvoyd09dCGqAupEhr5VJ_xuGtRNnoK38/edit?usp=drivesdk
00:46:45 Carla Harper: Thank you for these resources.
00:48:30 Kelly Smith: Phoebe, have faculty been overwhelmed by that Open Attributions doc?
00:49:23 Melissa Williams: That first bullet point is exactly the question I need to be asking myself right now--thank you!
00:50:24 Carla Myers: Yes! Starting small and growing the grogram based on the needs and interest of your campus community is the best way to go.
00:53:28 Carla Myers: Amanda...what are your recommendations for library staff helping administration understand scaling of these programs?
00:54:43 Amanda Larson: https://www.rebus.community/
00:55:03 Daniela Elliott: Thant’s really helpful. Thank you!
00:56:05 Melissa Williams: Follow-up: there was a question regarding standards for interactive OER (like H5P learning objects) at another meeting I was attending. Is there a resource out there that lists standards for evaluating these interactives? I'd think it would cover things like accessibility, graphic design best practices, etc. Since these interactives will definitely be part of our project, I'd love to employ any existing standards we can find.
00:56:21 Phoebe Daurio: @Kelly, great question. Maybe? They are using it to different degrees. They do seem to appreciate a place to track this info as they definitely recognize the need once they start searching for content/writing. Giving it to them with a 15 minute tutorial at that moment in their writing seems to work best.
00:56:51 Kelly Smith: Thanks Phoebe!
00:57:41 Christina Trunnell: Jonathan Lashley has some really great input on creating communities of practice. This is overall a great resource to read through as a whole. https://fji.oer4pacific.org/id/eprint/70/1/OER_%20A%20Field%20Guide%20for%20Academic%20Librarians.pdf
01:00:20 Hanwen Dong: Perhaps embed H5P with LMS?
01:02:01 Melissa Williams: Definitely can tackle accessibility, but I'm also really concerned about user experience aspects of H5P learning objects. Like, do all the parts of a branching scenario work? Are the instructions logical? That sort of thing.
01:02:50 Lauren Ray: It’s not perfect, but I show faculty this page that H5P provides about the accessibility of their different content types, when talking about using H5P in OER: https://documentation.h5p.com/content/1290410474004879128
01:03:52 Elizabeth Scarpelli: What are the top three H5P resources asked for or created?
01:04:03 Melissa Williams: Thanks, Lauren! I love that resource to be sure. We're probably most capable in terms of the accessibility of these interactives; I also want to ensure they're functionally navigable, utilize things like Meyer's multimedia principles, and so on.
01:05:03 Beth Daniel Lindsay: Thank you so much for this! I need to leave for my next meeting.
01:06:35 Melissa Williams: Exactly what you just indicated--are the MCQs constructed well? That's a great example of what I'm seeking in the form of a rubric or something.
01:07:50 Lauren Ray: Amanda you are a rockstar
01:08:00 Amanda Larson: thanks Lauren :D
01:08:01 Carla Myers: Thank you so much Amanda!
01:08:01 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: +100
01:08:02 Melissa Williams: Indeed, this has been incredibly helpful today!
01:08:04 Leanne Urasaki: Thank you Amanda
01:08:05 Cathy Germano: Great Job!
01:08:08 Megan Heiman: Thank you, Amanda!
01:08:08 Carla Harper: Yes, Thank you!!!!
01:08:12 Michele Leigh: thanks so much!
01:08:13 Cathy Germano: Thank you Amanda
01:08:14 Sara Dustin: Thank you Amanda- terrific and really useful information!
01:08:15 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Thank you
01:08:17 Stacy Anderson: This was very helpful. Thank you!
01:08:23 Alessandro Cesarano: thank you Amanda!
01:08:23 Elizabeth Scarpelli: Thank you. Very helpful.
01:08:29 Louise Feldmann: Thank you!
01:08:32 lorraine wochna: thank you all!
01:08:54 Arenthia Herren: Thank you!
01:08:57 Iris Fiallos: Thanks! Nice balance.
00:33:20 Kelly Smith: I would appreciate that too, Cheryl. Also interested in standards expected for whatever gets submitted.
00:34:18 Kelly Smith: Amanda, can you share that expectation spreadsheet?
00:40:04 Christina Trunnell: The Author Intake gives you a great question list to work through that first meeting and identifying expectations. https://oen.pressbooks.pub/authoropen/chapter/author-intake/
00:40:18 Kelly Smith: Thanks, Christina!!
00:40:52 Daniela Elliott: I think it would be helpful to have a peer review group that could help with that. This was the hardest part for me doing a project alone.
00:42:53 Christina Trunnell: Great suggestion, Daniela.
00:43:37 Kelly Smith: this is such an important slide. Thank you Amanda.
00:44:35 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Resources from University of Arizona’s 2020 Pressbooks Learning Community (feel free to adapt): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wSsmpj7d3KLwunx2YqJG59-G7Rmyge4x?usp=sharing
00:44:48 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: “OER Learning Circles for Instructional Improvement” by Karen Pikula (2020 Open Education Network Summit), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDAzdaF1v3w&list=PLWRE6ioG4vdZbJGUCc0XquZi23EHXXLKM&index=5
00:46:04 Phoebe Daurio: We are currently using this openly licensed sheet to track sources/attributions in our project
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iy_xzg8WAHXsvoyd09dCGqAupEhr5VJ_xuGtRNnoK38/edit?usp=drivesdk
00:46:45 Carla Harper: Thank you for these resources.
00:48:30 Kelly Smith: Phoebe, have faculty been overwhelmed by that Open Attributions doc?
00:49:23 Melissa Williams: That first bullet point is exactly the question I need to be asking myself right now--thank you!
00:50:24 Carla Myers: Yes! Starting small and growing the grogram based on the needs and interest of your campus community is the best way to go.
00:53:28 Carla Myers: Amanda...what are your recommendations for library staff helping administration understand scaling of these programs?
00:54:43 Amanda Larson: https://www.rebus.community/
00:55:03 Daniela Elliott: Thant’s really helpful. Thank you!
00:56:05 Melissa Williams: Follow-up: there was a question regarding standards for interactive OER (like H5P learning objects) at another meeting I was attending. Is there a resource out there that lists standards for evaluating these interactives? I'd think it would cover things like accessibility, graphic design best practices, etc. Since these interactives will definitely be part of our project, I'd love to employ any existing standards we can find.
00:56:21 Phoebe Daurio: @Kelly, great question. Maybe? They are using it to different degrees. They do seem to appreciate a place to track this info as they definitely recognize the need once they start searching for content/writing. Giving it to them with a 15 minute tutorial at that moment in their writing seems to work best.
00:56:51 Kelly Smith: Thanks Phoebe!
00:57:41 Christina Trunnell: Jonathan Lashley has some really great input on creating communities of practice. This is overall a great resource to read through as a whole. https://fji.oer4pacific.org/id/eprint/70/1/OER_%20A%20Field%20Guide%20for%20Academic%20Librarians.pdf
01:00:20 Hanwen Dong: Perhaps embed H5P with LMS?
01:02:01 Melissa Williams: Definitely can tackle accessibility, but I'm also really concerned about user experience aspects of H5P learning objects. Like, do all the parts of a branching scenario work? Are the instructions logical? That sort of thing.
01:02:50 Lauren Ray: It’s not perfect, but I show faculty this page that H5P provides about the accessibility of their different content types, when talking about using H5P in OER: https://documentation.h5p.com/content/1290410474004879128
01:03:52 Elizabeth Scarpelli: What are the top three H5P resources asked for or created?
01:04:03 Melissa Williams: Thanks, Lauren! I love that resource to be sure. We're probably most capable in terms of the accessibility of these interactives; I also want to ensure they're functionally navigable, utilize things like Meyer's multimedia principles, and so on.
01:05:03 Beth Daniel Lindsay: Thank you so much for this! I need to leave for my next meeting.
01:06:35 Melissa Williams: Exactly what you just indicated--are the MCQs constructed well? That's a great example of what I'm seeking in the form of a rubric or something.
01:07:50 Lauren Ray: Amanda you are a rockstar
01:08:00 Amanda Larson: thanks Lauren :D
01:08:01 Carla Myers: Thank you so much Amanda!
01:08:01 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: +100
01:08:02 Melissa Williams: Indeed, this has been incredibly helpful today!
01:08:04 Leanne Urasaki: Thank you Amanda
01:08:05 Cathy Germano: Great Job!
01:08:08 Megan Heiman: Thank you, Amanda!
01:08:08 Carla Harper: Yes, Thank you!!!!
01:08:12 Michele Leigh: thanks so much!
01:08:13 Cathy Germano: Thank you Amanda
01:08:14 Sara Dustin: Thank you Amanda- terrific and really useful information!
01:08:15 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Thank you
01:08:17 Stacy Anderson: This was very helpful. Thank you!
01:08:23 Alessandro Cesarano: thank you Amanda!
01:08:23 Elizabeth Scarpelli: Thank you. Very helpful.
01:08:29 Louise Feldmann: Thank you!
01:08:32 lorraine wochna: thank you all!
01:08:54 Arenthia Herren: Thank you!
01:08:57 Iris Fiallos: Thanks! Nice balance.
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